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Falling Down (in the Country)

The English countryside has long been a source of inspiration for countless wonderful books and poems, somewhere most city-dwellers yearn to one day live. Where else could we imagine Lady Chatterley dashing to meet Mellor? Picture in your mind the hills rolling along the horizon with quaint hamlets dotted amongst the greenery, vast apple orchards and vibrant rose gardens behind thatched cottages, people casually meandering down undisturbed pathways, the country pub with its bustling beer garden, the classic red telephone box just visible over yonder brow.

Sadly the truth about the countryside is vastly different to this. It has become a place to be visited on occasion, an over-sized theme park with a plethora of interesting attractions and beautiful scenery, where rich people can buy a weekend home to stay in when it suits them. House prices have been driven beyond the reach of the majority of local people by absentee city-based landlords, forcing whole families towards the cities against their will. The younger generation have had to abandon the villages they call home or else remain in the nest with their parents, meaning up to 75% of rural properties lie empty for most of the year.

The countryside has become less significant to the urban element as we no longer rely on it so heavily for food production; in fact the EU pays farmers not to produce food in order to solve the food surplus which accumulates each year. Sadly the surplus food doesn't pile up within reach of the third-world populous, however that is another issue altogether.

BT recently announced plans to close 10,000 phone boxes across Britain within 2 years, many of them in rural areas where mobile phone signals are unreliable at best. They claim that increased mobile phone ownership has created a reduction in demand for public telephones. There is a cruel sense of irony in the fact that so-called advances in communication are actually alienating people, especially older people who think Heartbeat (ITV Drama Series) is set in the present day.

Added to this the Post Office is closing 3,000 of its outlets, many of which are also located rurally. These closures are breaking up community life, where pensioners traditionally congregate and treat the weekly trip to the Post Office as a social outing. During a recent rural survey 91% of people said the Post Office played an 'extremely important role in their community'. One Postmaster who asked to remain anonymous spoke of how he often visits villagers who don't appear on their regular day as part of his job, in order to ensure they have not been taken ill. This sense of social responsibility is regretfully lost on the profit-obsessed corporations of today.

The Countryside suffers from a distinct lack of public transport, meaning that at least 75% of all journeys are made by car compared to only 50% in a congested city such as London . Parts of rural Britain were better served by rail in the steam age, and many stations have simply closed down and been left to rot. The bus service is best described as intermittent before 6pm and non-existent thereafter. I realise that this is a Catch 22 situation for the bus (and other transport) companies; people don't use the bus as it's unreliable or not available, and equally the companies can't justify major investment in a service that people aren't using.

Imagine you are living in a rural village: you have no mobile phone as there was never any signal so you threw it into the well; your phone has been cut off as you can't pay your bill at the Post Office because it has closed; there is no cash point for you to get some money out to pay for the thrice weekly bus to town; your neighbours are only present at weekends during the summer and are barely capable of broken English; you have used up all your stationery writing letters to your friends who live too far away to visit; you were banned from driving some time ago for having bald tyres by an over-zealous hot shot city-cop (the tyres were only a week old but the road surfaces are so poor in the countryside that you require a new set every time you leave your driveway); you had no alternative transport to attend court so your car was repossessed to cover the costs of your non-attendance; and you simply have not got the energy to walk anywhere as the only food sold at the local 'tourist' shop is novelty local toffee and chocolate figurines of Britney Spears.

In such extreme circumstances the only sensible solution apart from suicide is to visit the local pub (assuming it hasn't already been shut down), set up a bar-tab using the keys to your house as collateral, and drink yourself into a coma in the hope that someone might ring an ambulance to take you to hospital and thus get you back to civilisation. If you're lucky you may even bump into a local farmer drinking his way through a bloated EU subsidy who will buy you one for the road.

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