Country Mouse
I received anecdotal evidence that Britain was full up, jam-packed or ram-packed (like Jeremy Corbyn’s Virgin train) with staycationers.
It came in a telephone conversation with younger brother Pip, who confirmed that he arrived at dawn with his second son to climb the foothills of Snowdon. He had only just squeezed into the last available car-parking space before a fleet of coaches arrived with air brakes hissing as they disgorged cohorts of fellow solitude-seekers from the great conurbations of the north-west.
Pip, unlike his older brother, being a well-adjusted, altruistic, useful member of society, spent a large part of his one day on the mountains with his son, guiding a hysterical woman from Ormskirk in tears and flip-flops along a precipitous, narrow ledge featuring loose rocks to safer pastures below.
The good-shepherd gene seems to have passed me by. When Mary asked me to give a malodorous, bedraggled, millennial, lost walker, currently sheltering in the village telephone box, a lift back to Devizes, I said it would cost him. Especially in a time of corona! ‘It’s important to instil in young people survival skills or you’ll foster dependency culture,’ I mansplained to Mary.
‘My time – even at only labouring rates – is worth £30 an hour, there’s the cost of fuel, and that would be waiving my normal upholstery depreciation and disinfecting charge.’ ‘Are you serious?’ she shuddered. ‘Oh yes, entirely. I believe strongly in self-reliance.’
I was inspired to refuse the request for transportation by no less a personage than the Prime Minister’s sister, whose Exmoor bolthole sits astride a well-worn regional footpath dotted with reassuring wooden fingerposts. These hobbitfriendly posts with babyish lettering give no indication of the potentially wild and forbidding nature of the treacherous abysses unfolding on the moor beyond her garden gate.
So frequently was Rachel Johnson called upon in her downtime by ramblers sporting injuries, varying from minor sprains to mini-strokes, that she considered posting a noticeboard of charges based on a sliding scale for services ranging from provision of Elastoplast, tea and sympathy right up to urgent transportation to A & E.
Seasoned observers of lowland shires like my own have noticed an explosion of visitor footfall at every point on the compass. Time was when the wife and I would train powerful Chinese binoculars onto tiny, nit-like figures in the landscape to see if we recognised them. The wife hates my comparing human beings to headlice, but I’ve always been haunted by Voltaire’s comparison of a city to an ‘anthill teeming with assassins’ ( la petite fourmilière).
But that parlour game is over. ‘It’s like Piccadilly Circus up there now,’ grunted a local terrierman.
‘Yeah. Though them says Piccadilly Circus is not what it was, what with COVID,’ I replied in the thick Wiltshire accent I use to ingratiate myself with terriermen, even though Mary says it can only enrage them as they know perfectly well I’m not a local (after only 32 years here).
According to those in touch with social media, it is commonplace for young people – anyone under 60 – to immediately share details, including GPS references, of desirable locations that they come across. You know this has happened when a cavalcade of strange cars, as in a Renault Clio advert, suddenly arrives in a remote hamlet.
According to Lady Sanderson in the big house, ‘Can I help you?’ used to be the question that sent a shiver down the spines of trespassers. When she posed it the other day to a group exuding entitlement as they wandered through her woodland garden, one replied eagerly, ‘Yeah, please. Can you tell us the way to the AONB?’
Stranger scenes I have witnessed in the village during my short tenure in geological time here. None stranger than a family of grinning picnickers sitting on rugs in the church graveyard while their kids, more used to soft-play areas, clambered over gravestones.
I observed only last week a motley crew parking in a passing place and squinting in the strong sunlight as if they had just been abducted by aliens and returned to Earth. Disorientated, they walked a few yards and then embarked on a lively discussion as to where to go next.
The majority of staycationers head for the hills, where they fan out in all directions in the hope of achieving a wilderness experience – which, according to Marion Shoard in The Theft of the Countryside, downland can no longer deliver.
But this outfit were absolute beginners at orienteering. They quickly settled for a footpath sign and plodded through a hobby farmer’s garden, where they admired an ornamental pond sporting recently purchased garden art, as if our English sylvan scenes needed embellishment.
If ever a humanitarian gesture were called for, this was the moment and I was prompted to forget preaching about self-reliance and tell the clueless troop that all above them was the best walking country in the world, with springy, herb-rich turf propelling them upwards through clouds of azure-blue butterflies, each step revealing a progressively widening horizon.
But just as I emerged from my viewpoint – lurking behind a nut tree in another man’s orchard – I saw these troops had suffered low morale. Like a human centipede, they had squeezed themselves back into a people-carrier, and had already driven away.