Town Mouse
‘Farmer Pete’s wife would weep copious tears when she returned to Devon’
Are country mice happier than town mice? Or is it the other way round?
Country winters can get people down. A year or two after I moved to the wilds of Exmoor, many moons ago, I would walk into the Costcutter, and locals would ask, ‘Still here, then?’ They reckoned that urbanites in search of the simple life would last no more than two apple blossoms before packing their bags and heading back to mud-free civilisation. The long winters and lack of skinny lattes would just depress them too much.
And this was often the case for longer-standing residents as well. I remember hearing that Farmer Pete’s Northern wife would weep copious tears whenever she returned to her Devon farm from Doncaster, where she’d spend Christmas with her relatives.
Well, we lived more or less happily in our isolated hamlet for thirteen years. Our children grew up there and the mouse family enjoyed freedom from the competitive bustle of the city. We kept chickens and pigs and grew vegetables and put on events in the village hall. We had good friends nearby. And we actually loved the winters: as long as I kept the woodburner going, there was a pleasant sense of being released from labour and toil. We just sat around with books, booze, board games and ukuleles.
But we did eventually return to the city after this long exile. It was the same in the Seventies. There was a trend, led by John Seymour and his book Self Sufficiency, of vaguely bohemian Good Life families, with absolutely no experience of farming, attempting to run a complicated smallholding with livestock, fruit and vegetables.
Imagine hordes of former fops trying to prise skinny parsnips out of the frozen ground with their shiny new tools and attempting to wring the necks of bewildered chickens. That was me.
The Good Life families returned to their bourgeois comforts a few years later, having got sick of living on duck eggs. And do you really want to separate yourself from your own people? In ancient times, one of the most feared punishments was exile from the democratic city state to some godforsaken part of the empire. ‘I hope you like seafood’ was the Mafia-style threat the authorities would make to a troublemaker.
Ovid was banished to a Black Sea outpost called Tomis in Romania when he was fifty and lived there till he died at sixty. He complained that Tomis was perpetually cold and covered in snow and fog. And, worst of all, the locals had never heard of him. ‘Here, I’m the barbarian, understood by nobody.’
Even Epicurus, who believed that city life encouraged vanity and envy, and therefore anxiety, lived in Athens. He just made sure he had a nice big garden, and was surrounded by his mates. That was how he pursued what he called ‘undisturbedness’. Actually, he called it ataraxia, being Greek.
For Epicurus, ataraxia was all about cultivating good friendships. And this can be a problem for the voluntary exiles. Friends who have moved out of London frequently complain that they find their new pals boring. This may be simply because the incomers don’t share the interests of the country folk. When a young ex-urbanite woman complained to Dr Johnson that people in the country only talked about cows, he retorted, ‘Then I would take an interest in cows!’
A comparative study of brain scans of townies and country-dwellers that appeared in 2011 led to headlines declaring, ‘Cities drive you mad’. This was not quite the case: in the tests, the rural types did indeed react to stress with greater equanimity than the urbanites, suggesting that gazing at fields leads to peace of mind. However, researchers also said that cities had better healthcare and schools, both of which could increase your happiness levels.
For my own part, I loved living by the sea and writing books for four hours every day in Orwellian seclusion. I even took an interest in cows and enjoyed meeting a load of new people. It was great for small children because we were blessedly free of the urban yummymummy scene of competitive middleclass parents with their silly 4x4s, cleaners and skiing holidays.
But I am probably happier in the city, despite its woes, simply because I am a hack and there are more hacks and publishers in town. I feel as if I am closer to my fellow guildspeople. Most of my old friends live in London too. And there is something about old friends that new friends, however sympathetic and wonderful, can never quite replace.
As country dweller Mr Hardcastle puts it in Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, in a quote no doubt familiar to readers of The Oldie, ‘I love everything that’s old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine.’
Things may change. There was a piece recently in the American magazine Fortune with the headline ‘Why millennials are about to leave the cities in droves’. And the Office of National Statistics has predicted that the rural population of the UK, currently at just under ten million, which is quite a lot of people when you think about it, will rise by 6 per cent over the next seven years.
Let’s just hope they take some friends with them.