Country or city? Which is best to live in?

It depends how old (or honest) you are...

It’s been ten years since we moved to our Glasgow flat. Before that we brought up our family of three kids in the country.

It wasn’t hardcore country. Not ‘our only neighbour is a scary bloke living inside a rusty old biscuit tin’ type country.

I mean, it was normal. In our small South Lanarkshire town there were shops, pubs, a primary and a secondary school. But it was definitely a rural sort of life. You could have your GP peer up your bottom with a torch and then an hour later bump into him by the citrus fruits in the Co-op and it’s all cheery ‘Hello! Hi! Have a nice evening!’

Christ please go away I’m clenching here!!

But even that was okay. I got used to everyone knowing everything about my bodily malfunctions and we lived there happily for fifteen years.

I made good friends who totally saved my bacon in the early parenting years. Our big old house was leaky and bits kept falling off it, but our garden was huge and when we were on top of things Jimmy grew spuds and salads and we felt like Tom and Barbara in The Good Life.

A bit of a stretch, I know, for nurturing a single lettuce to maturity. We were hardly Daylesford Farm Organics.

But tree climbing! Pebble collecting! I loved our kids being able to run wild. My mum had a stone polishing machine - a kind of revolving drum filled with grit - that polished rough stones into gleaming gems if you let it churn away for long enough. i.e., until sea levels rose, species fell into extinction and the Bay City Rollers’ cropped tartan trousers came back into fashion.

On and ON the polisher tumbled, singlehandedly draining the National Grid while my skeleton crumbled waiting for the darn thing to finish.

I think that’s what these stones had been gathered for here.

Get your polisher machine revved up Grandma ❤️

Then our kids grew up, and two of the three left home for university. My elderly mum had lived close to us but eventually moved into a care home.

We didn’t have to be there anymore. As long as I could visit Mum we could be anywhere and suddenly I wanted very much to live in a city again. (Jimmy and I had lived in London when we met). But I was slightly embarrassed to admit it - that I loved the country to visit, and to look at from time to time, but I wanted to live somewhere big and noisy and bustling.

When you’re young you can boast about being county-averse. Me, being a twit, in 1985: ‘Oh I don’t get the POINT of the countryside, I don’t understand it at all - and what are all those green bits on the A-Z?’*

*‘Parks you berk. The clue is in the clearly printed word REGENT’S PARK’ - Ed

What an affected ninny I was. Of course I ‘understood’ the country because I’d grown up in it. But that’s not cool when you’re a young adult, is it? To admit to being a country person? Instead, I pretended to be baffled by it. ‘Fields?’ I bleated. ‘I don’t understand fields!’

I understood fields VERY WELL IN FACT as up until the age of fourteen pretty much all I’d done was either sit in them, trying make a squeaky noisy with a blade of grass or, if they were sloping, roll down them (hopefully avoiding cowpats).

Around our tiny West Yorkshire village there was literally nothing but fields.

In fact if I’m honest - *blushes - I not only understood fields but took a forensic interest in them. I studied grass varieties, mosses, hedgerows, etc, keeping notes in secret notebooks.

No wonder my furry beaver pencil case - not a euphemism - got set on fire by school bullies.

Undeterred I collected wild seeds, made a display case for them out of a shoebox divided into sections and wrote a swotty (and I have to say - *puffs chest - prize winning) school project about seed dispersal.

Ask me anything about the helicopter propulsion of a sycamore seed!

Or a blackbird crapping out an apple pip!

Looking for interesting seeds dropped into the river. And needing a hairbrush

My young adulthood was spent denying that I’d ever even met the countryside - but then obviously, as an older adult, things switch again. You can’t claim to be ‘allergic to nature’ or any twaddle like that. In fact it’s embarrassing to say you don’t absolute love being in the country. Like saying you don’t like flowers or horses or bees. What kind of monster are you?

It implies that you want to concrete over Areas of Natural Beauty to form giant B&Qs. That your favourite fantasy is not to awake from a faint to be confronted by a naked Keanu Reeves - but to flatten the Lake District in order to build a massive meat processing plant.

I’m not like this! I love country walks and even hiking up enormous hills (in unchallenging climactic conditions) and actually we go to rural places all the time!

But I do know my limits. And after trying to traverse the wilds of New Mexico in mules - well, I have to say the countryside is probably better off without me.

Love,

Fiona xx

PS Ever felt there’s no room for you in your own home? If so my new novel, The Full Nest, is for you! It’s out on March 13 and you can pre-order here!