The Countryside: Classic Or Dud?

Well, you can easily include American senses of the countryside as well, though of course the chief thematic difference is that while the English countryside has been settled for centuries upon centuries, in America it's been even more clearly imported thanks to colonization. And maybe that could explain some differences, or raise some points of discussion...

I grew up in a semi-rural, small town in 'Middle England'. Firstly lets be clear about the fact that the majority of the British countryside isn't so much 'countryside' as it's Farm Land.

But as for any modernisation - well, what there is of it comes to nought when it floods like it did last winter. Then you may as well be living in the 19th century. I have a few friends who live in small villages who were left stranded by it for weeks on end.

Where I grew up wasn't so bad as I had a train station nearby so, as a teenager, I could go to Birmingham or even London for the weekend. But I had a girlfriend who lived in Upton Upon Severn, a tiny town surrounded by miles and miles of countryside and only a pathetically infrequent bus-service as means of escape. Whenever I was there the suffocating sense of isolation amongst the youth, who would idly hang around in the main street by the few shops, was palpable. As soon as they were old enough they would all get cars. But even this didn't seem to ease their frustration - they would race each other up and down the street all night as wont for anything else to do.

Upton is a very pretty town - the type of place 'little England'ers like Peter Hitchens would consider the perfect Englandshire idyl. But to be young there is torture. You just feel so very, very far away from *everything*. The 'countryside' is just a load of wet mud.

It's fine - if you can get away from it.

Replace all references to England and English towns in David's response with "Minnesota" and "Hastings", and you have an almost perfect snapshot of what my life was like growing up. Thank GOD we were within an hour of the Twin Cities, otherwise I might have died on ennui. Still, there's no public transportation to speak of where my folks live; in fact, their road isn't even paved. It's extremely peaceful, much like soliary confinement.

When I lived in Somerset, I had a very similar experience to David. I think a lot of the feeling of isolation comes from the urban-centric (esp. London) media, who seem to ignore that people in the countryside have TV as well. The other massive misconception the media has is that every single person who lives outside cities' life revolves around farming. It's like saying London's economy resolves around cab drivers (though maybe it does). The whole concept of "rural issues" is just insulting romanticising. Most rural villages have exactly the same problems as urban areas.

I love the countryside, living in the city is fun but occasionally you need something *green* around you. I couldn't speak about the political/economic aspects as I know so little apart from what I know from Robin. The only dud things are insular landowners and my hay fever.

Ned: indeed it is interesting because the whole cultural myth of the British countryside rests on the idea that It Has Remained Unchanged For Centuries, an idea which will obviously never apply in the US to anything like the same extent. I'll think more about that later (sporadically analogies occur to me, such as the perceived difference between trad-folk and folk-rock in the UK circa 1969 relative to the perceived difference between trad-country and country-rock in the US around the same time).

Graham says it all, really. Looking back to when *I* felt isolated in my mid-teens, it was more to do with feeling ignored by the media, and as though I couldn't fit into any of their ideas of what people were like, than actually the fact that I lived where I did. I very often feel that way about the media myself, but I think *at last* an understanding is developing of how to treat these issues, and the "insulting romanticising" (as you so rightly put it) is being slowly wiped away. Interestingly, I've even met people who read, say, the Times or the Mail, who would agree with everything you say, which leads me to believe that this is an approach that the media often take because of their own narrow perspective on life, rather than any evidence that their audience want it.

I think what is Classic about the countryside (at least in Britain) is the quiet and the solitude (but simply there being fewer people not the people being cut off from anything), and the sense I have of being clued into music, art, theories, discussion etc. while still being in touch with myself *and* the land, and a sense of the past. The great thing about the countryside is how clearly it brings on "modernity's sustained simultaneity of experience" (my favourite phrase ever picked up from music crit: I'm afraid 'twas Ian MacDonald I stole it from), for example when I'm listening to Ludacris or DMX while reading the Common Ground website, and when I'm at peace with myself, there doesn't seem to be any contradiction.

What is Dud isn't so much the place itself as the attitude people of the right tend to have to it: ie as a fantasy land to shut out the modern world, to escape multi-culturalism entirely, and therefore to make people like me feel as though we *don't belong* (analoguous to the way the National Front wanted to make black and Asian people feel in British cities 25 years ago). While I think we need a more practical approach at the moment, with the necessity to rethink methods of farming etc., I actually don't mind the hippyish Romantic idea of the countryside (the wing that flows from William Morris / John Ruskin through to the Incredible String Band / Fairport Convention), because I don't think that was ever actually about *keeping anything out*. What I hate is the resentment that the whole Tory Party / Countryside Alliance / Telegraph / Mail / Times axis has towards any country resident of progressive politics / cultural affliations, and (to a *much* lesser extent) the way that a vociferous minority on the cultural left then refuse to accept said country residents as being on *their* side.

Also Dud (IMHO): intensive farming methods.

Least favorite rural story = agribusiness, which accounts for some very lop-sided and final-feeling proportion of U.S. crop revenues. The family farmer is a genuinely heroic anachronism (to be written about in the Sunday paper every few months) or sometimes a hobby/source of small 2nd income, like a little plot of tobacco or cotton. Weird gross feeling of "the countryside" (the landscape, not the whole place, which would be "the country" to USers) used up and over again sort of like a hackett prostitute. No love there. No love when Monsanto has pushed to market seeds whose FRUIT will PRODUCE ONLY STERILE SEEDS, forcing farmers to ante up each year for new seeds (under absurd guise of "making sure everyone's up to date" a la microsoft.) They backed off - "wait, dave! this is EVIL!" - but that's the farming mindset USA-style. There's a lot of politics around farming subsidies from the gov. but I don't really know the issues. And U.S. corps have been forcing, with some success, "modern" (i.e. dependent on agribusiness prods. and services) on Mexico, Chile, etc. that often upsets the local soil's chemical balance, and takes years to fix. Is this the "intensive farming" you're talking about in the UK, Robin?

As far as growing up in the country goes... well I dunno. I can't imagine growing up in New York or a big city, not having bark chips to race downstream, no 3-wheelers to run straight into barbed-wire fences, no green summers of lush heat and terrifying cicadas, no secret quarries or lame attempts at fishing, no muddy garden days or abandoned church parking lot nights. Always knowing there's another person just beyond the wall. Somehow I've grown used to it. After a year in Boston when I was 14 I kind of knew I was going to dump the country for her nasty sister.

Favorite Rural Story = Winesburg Ohio, followed closely by Cronenberg's eXistenZ

Robin, I'm very glad that someone lives in a rural area and gets a lot out of it. As a refugee from a rural area myself I don't remember many people back home with a shred of intelligence, awareness, or an interest in anything beyond ice hockey. Every time I read about how many of them are being made unemployed by NAFTA I cheer, and fervently hope the whole community succumbs to depression, alcoholism and perhaps suicide. (Not really necessary, since drunk-driving is the main pastime in places like that, helps speed up natural selection process even faster.) Of course, I would have a change of heart if they built a huge stadium named after me and begged me to come back.

a-HA!!! Tarden, you mentioned Ice Hockey and cursed NAFTA in one sentance. You *ARE* Canadian, no matter which continent you might live in now.

I've never lived in the British countryside, in fact, I've never really visited. 10 years of entrapment in the American countryside cured me of all nostalgic rural notions. I was born in suburban London, I live in urban London, and I have a feeling I will die within the M25.

There is no such thing as "unspoiled countryside" in the UK. There just isn't. Even the picturesque Scottish Highlands are a Victorian invention, created by the mass deportation of their native people.

Hey, I never made a secret of that! In fact, Mike Reno of Loverboy went to my school!

No, you strictly denied being Canadian when I asked you on that political thread!

Which I now can't find because the ILM categorisations are so crazy... Nick!!! Find me "I Got Election" or whatever it was called. How do you get so sharp-eyed at finding topics?

Um...First I denied being American (true), then claimed not to live in Canada (also true). Like the shower scene in 'Psycho', you think you see the knife enter the flesh...but you don't!!!

See, I like telling people I'm from North America. "You must be American, then" is the usual response. When I tell them I'm not, people usually get REALLY confused. (I don't usually bring it up, either, it's only since I've been living in the UK that people's tribes count for so much. Whenever English people find out you're from somewhere else they give that little 'Oh, that explains everything then' smile, and never take anything you say seriously ever again).

That's about as much not a lie as "I didn't have *sex* with that woman... uuuhh... define sex, please..." and all that semantic nonsense. Wouldn't stand up in a court of law and I am now no longer going to believe *anything* that you say. Humph!

Hey, 'eatin' ain't cheatin''

I have the opposite problem... all my North American friends in the UK are Canadian, so by the time I meet their British friends, they have been *trained* by said Canadians that they find assumptions offensive, and I am invariably asked "Are you Canadian, too?" AAARRGGGHHHH!!! No I am bloody well not!

I don't really mind being mistaken for some other national, I find it kind of funny sometimes. I never bother to correct people. Canadians demanding to be recognized as such, it's so stupid it reminds me of 6- yr-olds fighting over who's closer to finishing a Rubik cube.

May I assure Tarden that I am English and I do *not* respond that way to people from other countries?

Yes, Tracer, I was thinking of pretty much *exactly* the same sort of "intensive farming" we have in the US. Hopefully, in the wake of foot and mouth, philosophies and practices will change, though the current government has been slower to accept this than I might have hoped.

Kate gets it right on the "unspoiled" myth, as she often nails myths on the head.

Yeah i often wondered - "Britain" has had urban areas dating back thousands of years, no? After X many generations I'd imagine you guys just filling the whole island up, how come not?

I realy value growing up in the midde of nowhere at this point in my life, but I didn't then at all. Motivated by sheer boredom we made our own fun. Cliche as it may be.

Yeah i often wondered - "Britain" has had urban areas dating back thousands of years, no? After X many generations I'd imagine you guys just filling the whole island up, how come not?

Off the top of my head I think population density is one of the highest in Europe (certainly if you remove Scotland and Wales from the calculation). At a guess only the Benelux countries have higher densities.

What is definitely a problem is migration to SE England. A lot of countryside *is* being filled in as a result of this.

I don't know about the UK but one thing I remember about my rural homeland is that it was oppressively, militantly monocultural. The town I am from was about 99.999999% white, with the one Caribbean family known to everybody as "the niggers." There was a small number of Asians, who were generally abused - everyone thought it was the funniest thing in the world to paint a bindi on their forehead and talk like Apu to them. Three people I knew who were SUSPECTED of homosexuality were beaten severely and forced to leave town. Whenever I start to become angry and frustrated over urban living I try and remind myself of these things.

Kate gets it right on the "unspoiled" myth, as she often nails myths on the head.

What are saying? That I am a great myth despoiler? Oh no! That's terrible! I *like* myths, I think they're great! Myths almost always tell more about the people who believe them than they do about the facts that they are supposed to explain.

Elephant and Castle myth = Londoners obsessed with their past, far more willing to believe fanciful legends about foreign queens than simply a souvenier of their own craftsmanship.

Scottish Highlands and Unspoiled Countryside myth = Britons obsessed with idea of rural past and Romantica noble savage idea of mankind and Beautiful Nature, despite the fact that most Britons live in cities and are obsessed with their own over-civil-isation.

I really, really don't think you're right about Londoners being obsessed with their own past, Kate. Probably some older people, who still cling to a hazy vision of the working class All In Together, but not the people of modern London as a whole.

My point is that I love the countryside *without* buying into the same old myths. The myth of the Scottish Highlands etc. says a lot about a certain type of ruralist, yes, but it says nothing about me.

Of course much of the rural south-east was filled in during the 50s and 60s with the new suburbia: this was obviously closely linked with the depopulation of inner London.

I should have said "a lot of the remaining countryside".

I really, really don't think you're right about Londoners being obsessed with their own past, Kate.

OK, then I'll take the other route, and say that it's class snobbery, that they'd rather believe it's about some royalty than about the hard-labouring working class that slaved in the factories that made the knives that gave its crest to the area... cause everything in England's about class, idnit? ;-)

And why do *you* think that you are obsessed with the countryside, then Robin? What do you see in it? (I'm not asking that in a snide "what could you possibly see in it?" way, I'm genuinely interested about what "country" as opposed to "London" signifies to you.)

Never mind, sorry, I'm not awake yet- just read your lengthy and comprehensive post back up at the beginning of this thread. D'oh.

David: exactly, the countryside in the SE that *didn't* disappear under the vast expanse of suburbia (though of course my "50s and 60s" line is a simplification because it is an ongoing process, very extensive in, say, north Kent within the 13-year period of 1981 to 1994 alone, but the *height* of development was 50s / 60s, and more to the point, that was the period when that development genuinely *excited* people).

Kate: I feel the same way about that explanation as I did about the previous one, that it *was* very resonant to many older Londoners, those brought up in a more class-conscious and more deferent age. I don't doubt the authenticity of people believing in such a myth up to - say - 1970. But I don't think anyone in the Elephant and Castle *today* under the age of 50, or so, would buy into that *for any reason*, except in an "ironic" tongue-in-cheek way.

Apropos to nothing: one of the more interesting things for me when I've visited the UK was seeing or noticing the namesakes for places I knew. I grew up in Hillsborough, in Somerset County, New Jersey -- it was interesting and a little disorienting to visit the places after which all of the foregoing were mentioned. Esp. since where I grew up they have a bit of a "history thing" (e.g., this house was where George Washington slept, that church is pre-Revolutionary War, etc.), and to realize that the original Somerset has been around a lot longer and is way more historical than the clod of American soil after which it was named.

Same goes with places like Gloucester, Monmouth, Essex and Salem (all also counties in NJ); Plymouth; practically everything in Wales, esp. anything with "Bala" as part of its name (the suburbs of Philadelphia have lots of Welsh names or are named after places in Wales).