Moving to the Country

Posted by dave - 22/06/09 at 05:06:24 pm

Apart from one month in a caravan in South Wales, a month living in an attic in Olney in Buckinghamshire and a couple of weeks living in a cave on the island of Minorca (don’t ask) I have always been a town or city dweller.

Urban living is so embedded in me that even my surname ‘Hamilton’ means either ‘treeless hill town’ or ‘mountain town’. Where I was born and raised (Northampton) gets its name from two Saxon words ‘ham’ and ‘ton’ meaning small town or village and town respectively. I spent my formative years in this market town deemed the most demographically average town in the country leading to the strange phenomenon that it is often targeted by companies for product trials (the first place to have chip and pin, extended pub hours and various crisp flavours which never made it to the rest of the country).

So in other words I am David Mountain Town from North Town Town Town the most average town in the UK.

It’s been a while since I lived in Northampton but my other choices of where to live have always been leaning heavily on the urban side of things- Nottingham, London, Oxford and now Bristol.

So when my girlfriend suggested we should move to the countryside I was more than a little anxious. She has applied to do teacher training in Exeter but rather than live in the town she wants to move to the countryside. She was brought up in the countryside and unlike myself, has never really taken to life in a city.

We’re heading down to Exeter this week and when she goes for her interview I shall be exploring the countryside. The idea of the move is causing me to have a slight shift in consciousness and as a result I am now seeing Bristol with new eyes. I have started noticing all the fly tipping, the rats, and the paranoia that accompanies walking past gangs of ‘yoofs’ late at night. I’ve also began to look at the past in a different way and realised that despite being an urbanite I have always found whenever I had any free time I would be off into the green belts or woods of wherever I live. Even the few spells I had in London I would find myself wandering around the large parks or discovering green stretches of land such as Highgate woods or old railway lines long since abandoned and now turned into green corridors.

Does this mean I shall become a fraud, that being involved in the ‘urban guide to near self-sufficiency’ and we should change the tag line to our site? Have I just become another in a long line of people who are giving up the rat race and leaving the big city? Well hardly – I would have had to be in the rat race in the first place! Perhaps I should just stop being such a wimp and start looking forward to a more peaceful life!?

2 Comments »

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1. Exeter is lovely. What you could consider doing is living on one of the edges of it where you have easy access to the centre but also are 5 minutes from the country side. There’s trains that’ll get you to the coast for a few quid. Thoroughly reccomend it! I’m in the St Thomas area down by the river and we have shops, banks and post ofices here so you don’t even have to go into the centre of town too often if you don’t want to.

   Comment by Ruthdigs — July 8, 2009 #

2. I think it might be Totnes we end up now. I wasn’t such a fan of Exeter but we only saw the centre really and if that’s all I knew of Bristol I never would have lived here!

   Comment by dave — July 19, 2009 #

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