Rural life out of step with modern world

THERE’LL come a time when 98% of the human race will live in cities and the countryside will be occupied by just a few essential workers, the exceedingly wealthy and a handful of seasonal tourism providers.

Many economists really do believe vast cities will provide the only possible future refuge for that strange and overly fecund beast known as Homo-sapiens. Because it is a lot cheaper and more efficient to house and feed billions of folk in specially built human-warrens.

The truth of this futuristic nightmare sank home this week as I looked out of a bedroom window at two burly young men sitting in a van down on the road. Behind me I could hear the sound of sobbing. That was when I knew our beloved rural existence, which has dominated most of human history, was rapidly coming to an end.

My wife is a tough old bird who is not given to weeping, but the curious fact those two young men were not moving really was causing the tears.

I can see that a sobbing wife and two stationary men in a country lane may seem a long way from predicting the future of the human race, but bear with me…

This column keeps returning to the theme that the modern world increasingly fails to have any comprehension of rural life – and this is another story which bears out the theory. And I rattle on about it because no one else in the media seems interested, despite the fact that more than 15 million people live out in the UK sticks.

My wife had been on the internet looking for a couple of sofa-beds that would turn our largest bedroom into a sort of upstairs sitting room. Having made a choice, she phoned a well-known furniture company to make the order and discuss delivery…

“There’s a narrow lane which the deliverymen will have to negotiate – and once they get here it’s a climb up a footpath to the cottage,” she warned the sales person, who replied…

“No problem. We do special smallvan deliveries – I’ll attach a note. As for the path, our guys are used to delivering to all sorts of difficult places. They’ve even carried sofas up high-rise tower-blocks where the lifts aren’t working.”

Excellent. There was a six-week wait, but that didn’t matter because it gave Sue time to prepare the room – which included me smashing up an old bed and a sofa with a sledgehammer and chainsaw for recycling.

“Are you sure?” I asked. “If I do this, there’s no going back.” A fortnight ago the phone rang… “Sorry, we can’t get to you. The lane is too narrow and we’re in a big lorry. No, there’s no note attached about a smaller van. We’ll go back to base and arrange for one.”

This week the smaller van arrived all the way from The Midlands.

“You must be joking!” grumbled the driver when he saw the path. “We’re not carrying these things up there. It’s damp and steep - against health and safety!”

He shot a video of the path on his phone and sent it to HQ – who duly called the customer-service team (based nearer Simla than Somerset) who phoned my wife and said it was, indeed, a no-go.

“The manager says it’s too dangerous, and that’s that!” crackled the woman from the Indian subcontinent, who undoubtedly had more frightening things to worry about than a damp path 5,000 miles away.

“But we’ve lived here 25 years and no one has ever refused to deliver anything before – a woman in her 60s used to go up and down that path in a wheelchair,” wailed my wife.

But that was, indeed, that. We now have a very empty bedroom with a high vaulted ceiling. A room which has the look and feel of a tiny chapel – where, perhaps, I can kneel and pray for the salvation of the human race.

So much for environmentally friendly shopping on the internet. Two fuel-guzzling journeys from The Midlands which resulted in total failure. So much for the British work ethic. Two blokes sat on their backsides in a van refusing to negotiate a smooth concreted path with no steps but a bit of an incline – one that, in their urban eyes, looked far too rural and hazardous. I carried things twice the weight up that path when I was younger and fitter.

Sorry to go on about my wife’s sobstory. But there must be thousands of rural homes with more difficult access than ours. It’s a bit like the new Government edict that it’s illegal to have damp logs. The realities of country life are never accounted for. Try living in a damp Westcountry and not having wet-ish logs.

Indeed, try living in the rural South Hams when your local council gets in a fleet of recycling lorries which are so big they won’t fit down the narrow lanes that so famously criss-cross the entire area.

At 64 I might not live to see it, but I am convinced that - unless moves are taken to address the situation life in the countryside will soon become a quaint memory reminiscent of a Thomas Hardy novel, most of which ended in tears.

‘Rural life will soon become a memory – like a Thomas Hardy novel... ending in tears’