Rural life better? No, it’s sexist, cruel and lonely

IREMEMBER the moment I decided to leave my Georgian townhouse (now worth £3million) on a leafy square in Islington, and move to the country. I was in my marble bathroom, and all I could hear was this hum: an overpowering drone i n my ears. ‘I can’t stand this,’ I said to myself. ‘It must be the traffic. I need peace and quiet.’

I’ve just walked my dogs on the edge of the moor in the Yorkshire Dales, dodging warning signs saying ‘Do not let dogs off the lead! Nesting birds!’ and the deafening hum is still there, accompanied by a crackling. It turns out I have tinnitus. It wasn’t London’s fault at all.

Which sums up why I think the news last week that people who live in cities are 39 per cent more likely to have mood disorders, and 21 per cent more likely to be anxious, is utter nonsense.

I can give you an example of a bad mood. I’ve just stepped over 16 dead rabbits with bullet wounds, seven rabbits with no eyes dying slowly from myxomatosis, and four flattened hedgehogs – one of them, given the Rorschach shape on the tarmac, was only a baby (I erected a 5mph sign on a tree last year, but a farmer took it down in the night).

I’ve walked past 13 sheep so lame they can’t walk, and a barn containing beef cattle – mums and calves – kept in all summer standing on their own faeces. It’s interesting the BBC’s latest slow television hit, All Aboard! The Country Bus – which follows my route home from Richmond to Hawes – fails to show farmers shooting any dog with the temerity to traverse their fields. They’d have more room to run around if I lived in Hampstead.

I’m not surprised at the hedgehog death toll, as drivers in the countryside like to speed at 100mph in the middle of the road, taking off my wing mirror no fewer than six times in the past six months. There are no speed cameras, while the local police are terrified of farmers who careen home drunk late at night.

And don’t get me started on food in the country. I thought pubs cooked their own fare, especially as the blackboards state: ‘Delicious home-cooked food.’ But a friend in the restaurant business, out for lunch with me one day, recognised all the dishes as originating from a caterer on an industrial estate.

There is nowhere to buy decent ingredients: we only have a Co-op in Richmond, which doesn’t even stock tofu. There is nowhere to buy decent shower gel: even my local Boots isn’t upmarket enough to stock Clarins, the poor woman’s Sisley.

Despite local MP Rishi Sunak’s promise to make the Dales a kind of northern Silicon Valley, it takes me longer to load and send this column than it does to write it, so slow is the broadband.

There is no mobile signal. There is no Waitrose. There is no mains water, so my supply is full of lead. Every time I put my head outside my front gate, it’s buzzed by a cyclist doing 30mph.

AFRIEND came to dog-sit the other day, and emailed: ‘Liz. The amazing view of the Swale has disappeared behind all those saplings. You need to get a tree surgeon.’ I hadn’t even noticed. I’m so busy keeping the place going I’ve not had time to look at the view for two years. I need a brain surgeon, more like, or at least to get my head examined.

Whenever a girlfriend tells me she dreams of moving to the country because ‘you get so much for your money. My kids will have room to run about!’, I tell her she will be making the biggest mistake of her life.

I did a shoot for a Sunday supplement. The male make-up artist stood in my front garden gazing up at the moor. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ he said. ‘Yes, but it’s a 500-mile round trip to my office. I’ve fallen asleep at the wheel three times. Even the Sainsbury’s man won’t come up my lane, due to flooding; he leaves it in the [broken] telephone box at the bottom.’

‘Well, yes, but it must be worth it for the lifestyle.’

‘What lifestyle? The hairdresser doesn’t even have an answerphone. The one decent baker 15 miles away shuts at 5pm. If you stop in the middle of the road to pick up a hedgehog, you get verbal abuse.’

It’s the loneliness that gets to me. I go for weeks without talking to a soul. The countryside is so difficult that to survive it you need a family, a husband, pots of money, and high stone walls.

There is this idea that we need to preserve a rural way of life, that it’s our heritage, a refuge: instead, it’s a throwback, it’s sexist and cruel.

I’m off to challenge a couple of young men who’ve just turned up in camouflage gear, for all the world poised to fight Isis, but who have chosen bunny rabbits as their foe. They have shovels, dogs, nets and guns. They really are no match for me. At least the countryside has made me tough.