Town and country

As some of you may know, I am taking a sojourn in the country. Well, when I say country I mean not-the-city, not necessarily places where there are paddocks stretching forever.

I’ve been in “the country” for three weeks now. I’m scheduled to be here for three months. I’ve lived in the city for the past 15 years, having escaped the country as soon as I finished school.

As some of you also may know, I read a lot of Beatrix Potter due to the current predilections of my son. Tonight, with some serendipity, it was The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse, which is a riveting read, and quite long by Potter standards.

A mouse by the name of Timmy Willie is accidentally shipped to the "big town" because he was nosy and got himself into a hamper of vegetables destined for some toffs in the city. Once he gets there he is assaulted with noise.

But there was no quiet; there seemed to be hundreds of carts passing. Dogs barked; boys whistled in the street; the cook laughed, the parlour maid ran up and down-stairs; and a canary sang like a steam engine.

(By the way: I would defy anyone to locate a children’s author who uses more semi-colons than Potter.)

Little Timmy Willie manages to get out of the hamper, escape the cook (who calls for Sarah with the poker) and squeezes through a hole in the skirting board, as mice tend to do.

Once through the hole he crashes onto the table during a dinner party being held by Johnny Town-Mouse. Despite his initial loss of composure (”Who in the world is this?”), Johnny takes in the mouse he obviously considers to be somewhat of a hick. Timmy Willie is not au fait with the food they are eating, they are all wearing clothes while Timmy seems to be naked and his tail is obviously mutilated

But they were too well bred to make personal remarks; only one of them asked Timmy Willie if he had ever been in a trap.

Timmy hangs about for a bit, is exposed to the precariousness of living in the big town (the cats, the cooks, the Sarahs with pokers) and he longs for his little patch of grass.

He recounts this longing to Johhny who merely replies: "It sounds rather a dull place? What do you do when it rains?"

Eventually Johnny realises Timmy is serious and tells him the obvious answer is to get back in the empty hamper and go back to the farm when it returns. Timmy is out like a shot.

He gets home and thinks sometimes of Johnny and his friends and although he extended the invitation, doesn’t actually believe they will visit. One day though who should he see but Johnny Town-Mouse coming up the sandy path.

Timmy extends the best the country can offer to Johnny, preparing him a feast of herb pudding and collecting fresh grass cuttings for his bed. He assured Johnny that a few days here and he will wonder why he ever lived in the town. Alas, it is not to be, Johnny is out of there in the first available hamper, citing the "quietness" as being overwhelming.

So, back to the serendipty thing. When I lived in the country I couldn’t help feeling that I was missing out. I lived by the beach in a small town.

I was ambivalent towards the beach. I loathed the leathery boys with their straw hair. Their harpie girlfriends with two inches of black regrowth fringing a further eight inches of orange blonde hair that I couldn’t imagine ever looked good. We all wound our school skirts at the top but they had theirs hemmed to require no winding and it was still a good few inches shorter than the worst of ours. (And whose mother would actually hem a skirt that short?)

I feared the local greasy spoon, run by the family of one of the "top" local surfers, a place where I never imagined they served food. Just drugs. Or attitude. Or something. I detested the fact that you could fire a shotgun down the main drag on a Saturday morning and not hit one of their leathery bodies.

Life was obviously being carried out elsewhere and by hell, I was going there.

For the past 15 years I have lived with this attitude. How could I possibly leave the city and effectively step outside of life, go into touch, cross the deadball line? What would be the point? How would I live with that nagging feeling that I was missing out?

In the time that I have been here I stroll around the town. I talk to people I don’t know. I go to the beach and can not see another person, just a couple of old fags lolling about by the rocks with their maltese terriers, another old bloke with a plastic bag, picking up rubbish, for no apparent reason.

When I drive anywhere I am never held up by traffic lights or traffic. There is no road rage, there are so few other drivers at whom I can vent my rage. The local shopping centre’s most exciting day of the year was last week, when a Best and Less store opened up and held a sale. You could get hankies for 1c. The local FM radio station broadcast live from the front of the store. The lines for the checkouts were twenty deep, mothers and grandmothers wrangling young kids while struggling with armfuls of cheap underwear and kids clothing.

This is a world that I have sheltered myself from for the past 15 years. I have chosen to live in suburbs that reflect me or that promise me things I think I want. You can do that in the city. You can pick and choose. You can pretend that other people don’t exist, even though you are pressed up against them on the bus, when you are assaulted by their smell, when you are appalled by their behaviour. You can walk away.

In a small town you can’t totally forget. You can’t escape. You can’t ignore. If it is only you and one other person on a footpath on an entire street and they say hello, you can not pretend that they are talking to someone else, or are just some loony talking to themselves. The city trains you to do that. It’s pretty easy and one reason that I have always loved the city.

I am enjoying being forced out of this. I am enjoying talking to people I don’t know and not being considered a freak (though, considering my family is known in the area, I am sure my reputation precedes me and I am indeed considered some kind of freak). I am sure at some stage I am going to tire of it but for now it is doing me good.

So right now I am wondering if I am going to be like Johnny Town-Mouse and high-tail it back to the city in the next hamper, or whether I will be convinced by some local Timmy Willie that I don’t need all that noise and stress, whether caused by cats and cooks or overcrowding and high crime rates.