Village:

‘The notion of the world as a village is becoming a reality’

-        James Wolfenstein

On reflection, I’ve always lived in a village.  I was brought up in Kirkby.  Now, technically this is a village.  Mentioned in The Doomsday Book, it has a Norman church, a weeping stone and more cottages than can you can throw lumps of cob at.  Today, it has several famous sons and daughters, an industrial estate that rises and falls with the tide of industry and a much undeserved reputation for loose morals, crime and general banjo pluckery.  Hence the old Scouse joke:

Q: Why wasn’t Jesus born in Kirkby?

A: Because they couldn’t find three wise men and a virgin. 

Time changes, empires fall, and jobs are left.  Removal vans are packed and books are assembled in alphabetical order.  I now live in Lapford, an archetypal sleepy English village in mid-Devon.  Once upon a time, it was home to the Ambrosia Creamery.  We have one pub, which we’ve still not visited.  We have two ghosts, one of which is Thomas Becket, who comes through the village annually to avenge his murder.  I’ve never heard him, but I have seen several paranormal investigators, lurking about like unicorn hunters. 

These things, I see, coming downhill.  We live at the top of said hill, overlooking Dartmoor.  We drink a lot of tea, so I generally falls to me to get a pint of milk.  The nearest shop, in the broadest sense of the word; is a garage twenty minutes downhill.  This concept, like most things, plucked at the strings of my nervous system.  Not just the journey, but the outlandish, almost alien concept of walking in the road.  I’ve mastered it now, staying to the right on the way down, left on the way up.  Moving in as close as the kerb as I possibly can, when a car, a lorry or the one bus that services the village trundles or rumbles by.

You get used to the gentle, sensuous sloping of the ground beneath your walking boots.  Any other form of footwear is a form of foolery, you could call it Tootsercide. However, you get used to that, take in the landmarks of houses, the church, and the pub.  Occasionally, you notice something just that little bit out of the ordinary, such as the time I saw pheasants hanging from a garden gate.  You don’t get that in Kirkby.

See also: the mere concept of nodding acquaintance.  I had people I saw in Liverpool, but never knew their name.  I have them here too; the people at the bus stop mostly.  I’ve chatted to them about the disadvantages of storage heaters, the redevelopment of Exeter Bus Station and the general lack of public transport.  We generally arrive at some sort of democratic consensus, just as the bus arrives, to take us the fantastical destinations like Crediton or even Exeter itself.

Ultimately, living in a village is like getting a hug.  It’s comforting and secure, slows the pulse and soul down to subsonic levels.  I firmly believe that living in Liverpool would have brought on some sort of collapse, either that of the cardiac or cerebral variety.  It’s affected my writing too.  I usually place myself in the window, cup of tea adding the merest hint of steam across the laptop’s screen.  When I need inspiration, I look out of the window, down the hill and across to Dartmoor.  It was Winter when we arrived and the sky is lightening, imperceptibly.  The birds that hop and skip across our path are changing at much the same rate.  Generally, this gives me the little push of inspiration to start, push or finish that article. 

Which lead me to where I am now.  It’s a late Spring morning in Devon, the sun is determined to poke through the clouds, Winter is determined to have that last word.  Seasons are like old married couples, they live in a form of loose harmony that sparkles with as much love as disgruntlement.  I can see the beginning of that hill and the green triangles that slope upwards towards Dartmoor.  Often, this view has given me that last little push of inspiration to get a piece of writing finished.  Not coffee, or incense or beach walking.  These seem to me now as arcane processes.  Maybe they were things I left behind in Liverpool.

I had visions of being the token Scouser.  I had the vague idea of not fitting in, that maybe fresh air and green fields would be too much for me.  I had visions of people not understanding me, maybe my pronunciation of the phrase ‘purple chicken’, would be too much for people. That I would have been like a Tarbuck 2.0, playing the jolly Scouser for the assembled crowd.  ‘Arr Ey, Werz Me Giro?’, that kind of bullshit.  And slowly, like red and blue insects, I met other Scousers.  Our neighbour. And then: member of staff in a branch of Waterstones in Exeter used to live round the corner from my old flat in Lark Lane.  We’re everywhere.  There’s a song about that. 

Ultimately, village life has calmed me down, infected me, and changed me for the better.  Reality peeps in occasionally, but I now when I get off the bus and walk uphill (every other hour), or get out the car and lock the door, I’m home.  The shopping is packed away, the kettle (or occasionally the Nespresso machine) goes on and I am home.  Liverpool seems a long way away, geographically and mentally.  There is a small ache when I visit, but not enough to move back into that delicious form of madness on a full time basis.

Where you were born, shapes you.  Where you live makes you.  A city makes you hard, on edge, deeply suspicious.  A village makes you calm, relaxed, acceptant.  A village is not a Panglossian system of living, nor is it an Orwellian one.  It’s on a level of something, unlike incest or folk dancing; you should try at least once.