Wait, Do I Like the Countryside Now?

I spent this week, like most Brits, being crucified by the many malfunctions of our infrastructure. The heat is not Albion’s friend and don’t we know it. School closed (for the 5-year-old not the 8-year-old even though they’re on the same site), house reaching sauna temps and the rail network imploding. ‘Does nothing work outside London?’ says my inner Natasha. It took me six hours to get from Chiswick to Dorset on a clapped-out old chugger with no air-con, catering or windows that opened. I could have made it to Miami in the same time, where it was unbelievably marginally cooler. We stopped at 27 stations, serving all the stops that cancelled trains had left stranded. Apparently, our rails buckle in the kind of heat we’ve been experiencing, making it more likely for carriages to derail.

Which is somewhat the key fly in the ointment when it comes to my relationship with the countryside. Yes, I have heard you tell me that it’s under 90 minutes from my house to Great Tew, but we all know that *could* also mean three hours. Or even four depending on storms, accidents, large scale events and increasingly, extreme heat. When things work, the relationship between the city and its verdant environs can be wonderful. When they don’t, it’s literal hell on earth. Get me back to a strip-lit grocery store stat.

My experience with the countryside is admittedly limited. About a year after moving down south from university in Edinburgh, I moved to a hamlet called Pinkneys Green in Berkshire - aka commuter belt countryside. My first husband had got a job on a paper in Henley-on-Thames and even though I was working in Wapping, we made the call that a nanny annexe in the middle of nowhere was the ideal address for two journalists in their early 20s. I think we’d found the set up on Gumtree - ridiculously affordable rent in exchange for living in someone’s garden and babysitting their kids from time to time.

The problem - as it remains to be the problem - was that I couldn’t drive. For a year I didn’t bother to get a house key cut because I never left or entered our rental without my ex because he had to ferry me everywhere I went. Back then we were so skint there was no chance of being able to afford lessons - I was part way through two years working full time as an unpaid intern. But as it was a 45 minute walk each way to even get a newspaper, I felt imprisoned. It was just a suffocating, claustrophobic experience even though I was smack bang in the middle of the great outdoors - a good reminder that the rural liberation from the noise and the pace all depends on context. I have never felt more hemmed in.