Beware turning a staycation fantasy into reality
AcOUPLE of weeks ago, I took the kids and a few of their friends off for a week in North Devon. After months cooped up in the city, I had an absurd Famous Five fantasy of giving them a week of sun, surf and seafood.
Needless to say it didn’t quite go as planned. The rain was torrential for three days, the social distancing queues were endless and my skateboarding London teens were far keener on catching last orders than any passing waves.
But as the week wore on, the stress of city living receded. By the end, they were getting up at a reasonable hour, going on long walks by choice, fighting less, being nice to the dogs. I slept well for the first time in ages.
There are thousands like me who, unable to fly abroad for a holiday, have rediscovered the joys of the British countryside after months in a grimy town or city.
Inevitably, this has inspired longings for a new life: a cottage at the end of a country lane; sheep baaing bucolically in the evening sunlight; bees buzzing lazily in the meadow. A stroll to the pub for a pint, Sunday morning at the craft market, a slice of local artisan bread, a forest ramble. No sirens, no nitrous oxide canisters glinting in the playground.
In short, a dream. A dream that now, thanks to covid, lockdown and the all-conquering Zoom video link, seems within reach. No wonder estate agents have seen a 125 per cent rise in people looking to relocate from towns to villages. No wonder mortgage applications for second homes are up 30 per cent year on year.
HELPED in no small part by the chancellor’s stamp duty cut, Britain’s homeowners are on the move — and they’re heading, literally, for the hills.
But the question on my mind is this: how unspoilt will your unspoilt dream really be if the entire country has the same idea?
It’s already the case that bits of Oxfordshire, Somerset, Devon and cornwall are barely different from Notting Hill or Hackney, full of precisely the sort of braying highflying types — with their yogatoned blonde wives and precocious children — you went there to escape in the first place.
The kind who think £7 for an hour’s parking is cheap at the price, who refuse to back up on country lanes because they can’t risk scratching the paintwork on the Tesla, who complain that the dust from the combine harvester is irritating little Ophelia’s lungs.
I sometimes imagine buying an old post office in Wales and turning it into a family compound for my parents and children. I have visions of wafting around in organic cotton, effortlessly producing vast salads while rarebreed hens cluck at my feet. But I know it’s a city-dweller’s fantasy.
The countryside is about hard work in all weathers. It’s about intermittent wifi, shops that shut at 5pm and your nearest A&E a 30-mile drive away. It’s about having to get in the car just to buy a pint of milk, and zero chance of a cheeky Nando’s via Deliveroo.
Above all, it’s about country folk. Farmers who have had their livelihoods squeezed, their quotas cut. People who cannot afford to see prices pushed up by city incomes and who don’t want their way of life disrupted. It’s about people who would never dream of moving to a town and telling their new neighbours how to live, but who now face a wave of woke weekenders doing precisely that.
So, by all means, move to the country and live your dream. But don’t try to change it when you get there. It is what it is precisely because of its traditions.
Mess with those and you may as well stay put. In fact, it might be best if you did.