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A best friend of mine is so envious of my rural idyll that she has built a house for herself a mile from where I live. Last week I went to her house-warming party - and left it bitterly wishing that she had stayed in London.
I used to be able to conduct my affairs in secret, but, as we stood sipping orange juice flanking a picture framer from Tetbury, I felt as bored as an 11-year-old at my parents' cocktail parties.
No longer can I exaggerate the delights of living in the country (this is where the real men live, I used to fib; they all look like Orlando Bloom and are as courteous as Stephen Fry). She has rumbled the sad truth most of them are eking out a living on £8,000 a year and never change their socks.
There was an intimacy created by our protracted Sunday-morning phone calls which now seems to be
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Country Matters
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When you move to the countryside, says letty wheeler, make sure your friends don’t follow you |
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under threat. Because we can see each other all the time we seem to only actually hook up about once a month, and even then we circle each other like cats, trying to ascertain who is having the better time.
Equally, her gossip is much less interesting than it was and I've usually already heard it. Who cares that a couple of neighbours are arguing about a bonfire or that some horrid little houses are about to ruin the landscape? Give me the shenanigans of Notting Hill divorcees or the tale of a good corporate bonking any day.
Still, at the party was the owner of a dating agency and an ex-girlfriend of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. The dating agency woman told me that half the people on her books were over 70 and desperate for sex, and the old girlfriend that HF-W was an irrepressible kisser. Not Class A gossip but not bad for the country. 
FIRST POSTED AUGUST 25, 2006
Previously: if you go down to the woods |
