Urban life versus rural
Jul. 8th, 2004 06:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
triskellianI came to a rather surprising conclusion yesterday.
After work, I went over to my colleague K's house. She's involved in doing hair and makeup for amateur dramatics/opera, and has offered to help me out on the wedding hair and makeup front. All this girlie stuff is taking me a bit by surprise, since I wear makeup maybe twice a year (and only ever eyeshadow and lipstick), and my haircare routine is wash-comb-leave. If only for the sake of the photos ("Won't somebody please think of the photos!"), I need to at least cast a passing thought in that direction for the wedding. So I drove to K's house. Halfway there, I realised I was hungry, so I resolved to stop at her village shop for a chocolate bar or something.
I drove around her village, and it has no shop. I consulted my road atlas, and decided that the next village was bound to have a shop, since it would be madness for two shop-less villages to be next to each other. The next village didn't have a shop either. I found the next village, marked in the atlas in larger text. That would certainly have a shop.
It didn't.
In the end, I showed up at K's house and asked for a piece of toast.
Her house is immense. Her kitchen would fit the entire ground floor of my house, with enough space round the sides, and above it (high ceiling) to fit in the first floor, too, if I could chop it into appropriately-sized bits. Her living room is even larger. There's a den/workroom/playroom-thing which is only slightly smaller than the kitchen, and then a corridor stretching off with more rooms off it. On the front of the house is a tower-like semi-circular protrusion made of glass, and containing a spiral staircase. One end of the kitchen is entirely French windows, leading onto a large lawn and a small lake*, shared with the neighbours.
(*Or a very large pond. I'm going with 'small lake' because it requires no 'very's, so it's clearly more a lake than a pond.)
But there's no shop. No pub either. The buses probably come once a week, if at all.
My house is about the smallest it's possible to be and still squeeze in three bedrooms (you have to turn sideways to walk around our bed). More space would be nice - we could certainly make use of three more rooms - but it's a good house. And it's in the city. Just round the corner, there's a corner shop that stays open really late. Five minutes walk in the other direction is a small shopping centre, selling most of the essentials of life (could do with a better bookshop, though). I can get into town on the bus in half an hour, at most times of the day or night, and most of my friends live within walking distance (some of them in a house whose garden nearly backs onto ours).
So the surprising conclusion is that I think I'd rather live in my tiny urban terrace than in K's immense rural mansion. That's not to say that if you offered me an immense rural mansion I'd refuse it, of course. I'd just sell it, and buy a medium-sized urban mansion instead.
There's an ongoing joke at work, where the other city-dwellers and I tease the village-dwellers about the horrors and lack of civilisation of living in a village, and taunt them with the delights of the city. I've lived all my life in cities and large towns. But I fantasise about houses, and always have. It's clearly crazy to prefer my little terrace to K's mansion, no matter where they each are. But somehow, I do.
After work, I went over to my colleague K's house. She's involved in doing hair and makeup for amateur dramatics/opera, and has offered to help me out on the wedding hair and makeup front. All this girlie stuff is taking me a bit by surprise, since I wear makeup maybe twice a year (and only ever eyeshadow and lipstick), and my haircare routine is wash-comb-leave. If only for the sake of the photos ("Won't somebody please think of the photos!"), I need to at least cast a passing thought in that direction for the wedding. So I drove to K's house. Halfway there, I realised I was hungry, so I resolved to stop at her village shop for a chocolate bar or something.
I drove around her village, and it has no shop. I consulted my road atlas, and decided that the next village was bound to have a shop, since it would be madness for two shop-less villages to be next to each other. The next village didn't have a shop either. I found the next village, marked in the atlas in larger text. That would certainly have a shop.
It didn't.
In the end, I showed up at K's house and asked for a piece of toast.
Her house is immense. Her kitchen would fit the entire ground floor of my house, with enough space round the sides, and above it (high ceiling) to fit in the first floor, too, if I could chop it into appropriately-sized bits. Her living room is even larger. There's a den/workroom/playroom-thing which is only slightly smaller than the kitchen, and then a corridor stretching off with more rooms off it. On the front of the house is a tower-like semi-circular protrusion made of glass, and containing a spiral staircase. One end of the kitchen is entirely French windows, leading onto a large lawn and a small lake*, shared with the neighbours.
(*Or a very large pond. I'm going with 'small lake' because it requires no 'very's, so it's clearly more a lake than a pond.)
But there's no shop. No pub either. The buses probably come once a week, if at all.
My house is about the smallest it's possible to be and still squeeze in three bedrooms (you have to turn sideways to walk around our bed). More space would be nice - we could certainly make use of three more rooms - but it's a good house. And it's in the city. Just round the corner, there's a corner shop that stays open really late. Five minutes walk in the other direction is a small shopping centre, selling most of the essentials of life (could do with a better bookshop, though). I can get into town on the bus in half an hour, at most times of the day or night, and most of my friends live within walking distance (some of them in a house whose garden nearly backs onto ours).
So the surprising conclusion is that I think I'd rather live in my tiny urban terrace than in K's immense rural mansion. That's not to say that if you offered me an immense rural mansion I'd refuse it, of course. I'd just sell it, and buy a medium-sized urban mansion instead.
There's an ongoing joke at work, where the other city-dwellers and I tease the village-dwellers about the horrors and lack of civilisation of living in a village, and taunt them with the delights of the city. I've lived all my life in cities and large towns. But I fantasise about houses, and always have. It's clearly crazy to prefer my little terrace to K's mansion, no matter where they each are. But somehow, I do.
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no subject
Date: 2004-07-08 06:37 pm (UTC)"We just had a herd of cows in the garden," he said.
Foxes, yes; mice, yes; birds, yes; cows, now those we _don't_ get here...
(The gate at the top of their property had come open, probably in the high winds, and the cows in the adjacent field had come to investigate... briefly.)
no subject
Date: 2004-07-08 07:04 pm (UTC)I've come to the conclusion that I like the extremes. I like living somewhere where I can just stroll into countryside. I also like living somewhere where I can just stroll into a 24-hour eatery (or whatever). What I don't like so much is the stuff in the middle.
So I guess I need to chose places with either less than say 3000 people, or more than 3000000 people. Perhaps I just need a city centre apartment and a rural mansion. Cool... now I know what I want for Christmas.
no subject
Date: 2004-07-08 07:06 pm (UTC)BUT -- i can completely understand those who prefer living in "civilazation". i just prefer to not be around that much noise and the sheer numbers of people. i'd miss the convenient shopping, admittedly. >;)
no subject
Date: 2004-07-08 08:35 pm (UTC)This brings me to a question about my new apartment. I've got used to my building's sauna and gym, but when I pop downstairs to go swimming in the heated indoor pool what do I actually *do* to avoid becoming bored within five minutes?
;-)
no subject
Date: 2004-07-08 09:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-07-09 08:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-07-09 03:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-07-09 08:24 am (UTC)I'm personally a bit nervous about moving to Brize - J tells me that the bus trip from Gloucester Green takes an hour as it goes through all the villages.....time to dig out some small cash and hunt me up a tiny tin can on wheels.