Skip to main content

City withdrawal symptoms

Ten major problems with the Cornish countryside in Autumn:

1. Trees and fields are all very well, but after a few days the thrill most certainly wears off. Especially when there's nothing else to do and you're limited to admiring nature from indoors, because...
2. It rains. All the bloody time.
3. The food around these parts is terrible. Wall to wall Tesco and not a Waitrose for 20 miles, let alone shops selling local produce. It's easier to get hold of a proper muddy carrot in central London than it is in the countryside when you're surrounded by fields jammed full of vegetables.
4. Dining options are limited to the Cornish pasty shop, the fish and chip shop, the Chicken Lickin' takeaway, and a pub filled with grumpy old bastards. All the food is beige (except for the mushy peas at the chippie).
5. The locals are most definitely not friendly.
6. The best clothes shop in town is crowded with oldies stocking up on nylon knickers and support hose.
7. The local swimming pool is packed with teenage mothers.
8. The local bus stop is packed with soon-to-be teenage mothers snogging their spotty knights in shining Nikes.
9. Local tradition has it that on Friday and Saturday nights young men must down ten pints at their local pub before converging on the streets to kick the sh*t out of each other.
10. The liveliest place in town is the newsagent immediately after the announcement of a lottery rollover week.

I miss London.

If Alpha Male suggests that we move to the country ever again, as he is wont to do after a few glasses of wine and a lengthy session of online brick-kicking, I can't be held responsible for the mayhem that will surely follow.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Apologies for being incommunicado this week and hope none of you out there are too distraught not to be receiving the usual almost-daily MotV missives. The reason for the silence is that I'm up to my neck, metaphorically-speaking, in research papers for my first grad course assessment. This experience has made me realise how rigorously un-academic I am in my thinking. It has also illuminated how reliant I am on red wine in order to get through endless evenings typing furiously on my laptop, not to mention the fueling of increasingly colorful curses that I feel obliged to aim at the University's online library system which consistently refuses to spit out any of the journals I'm desperate for (I refuse to believe this is 100% due to my technical incompetence...) Oh well, if this is the price one has to pay in order to realize a long-cherished dream then it's not all that bad... No one ever said a mid-life career change would be easy. Wish me luck!

A thought

Perhaps sometimes a gift can be delivered in the guise of a tragedy. It's just a matter of perception, after all. I suspect that the talent lies in looking beyond the surface to what lies beneath and beyond. And, of course, being able to make sense of it all and going on to apply that knowledge to building a productive way forward. Here's hoping.

It's my party and I'll cry if I want to

A friend recently emailed me to say that her big memory of her stay with us last year is that she had a great birthday, one of the few where she didn't 'act like a spoiled grumpy princess'. She tried to give me all the credit but as I explained to her, it was all down to having a fellow female organising the birthday fun rather than leaving it to her partner. Her email got me thinking about birthdays and how very different men and women are in their attitudes to celebrating special occasions. It also had me thinking about my birthday two years ago when I threw a major tantrum in the Carrefour car-park after being told that we were off to do the weekly shop, kids in tow, which was simply the final straw at the end of a very uninspiring day. In contrast, my birthday last year was rather lovely (a morning on my own in a spa with no mobile coverage, pure selfish bliss). This year - in a few short months, eek! - I'll be hitting the grand old age of 38. This will be my las...