the times | Monday August 3 2020 1GT 3
times
Decembrist revolt, ambling into
market with a goose under his arm.
And it is a bit like that. Except the
market is the Thursday morning
fishmonger’s delivery to the village,
and I’m not James Norton. I don’t
carry a goose, but I’ve been chasing
sheep around.
Although my dating apps are still in
use — without much success (why
does every girl here have blue hair and
cats or a Young Farmers’ card
and reactionary politics?) — my
Citymapper app has, quite
happily, long since dissolved
into nothing on my phone.
Every month I say will
be the last. But then it’s not.
It’s funny, the closer I get to
the end of War and Peace,
the slower I read.S
o the lockdown’s over. And
I’m still here. Interesting.
By here, I should explain,
I mean Northamptonshire,
where I moved back at the
start of all this to be with my family.
Maybe it’s the price of beer: £3.
for a John Smith’s down the golf club.
You’ve got to dig pretty deep to find
that in Dalston. Maybe it’s because I’d
always planned to make homebrew
during lockdown and got waylaid.
I can’t leave now when there’s half
a keg left. Maybe it’s because I still
haven’t finished War and Peace.I’m happy here —
could it be for ever?
Richard Assheton, 26
I will only abandon my station when
the Frenchies are firmly back across
the Niemen.
Or maybe... I just like it? Maybe it’s
time to start thinking about my new
life in the country. Maybe this is it?
I got here in March. The other day,
the first cart of harvest corn rumbled
by the window. That’s seasons — I’ve
seen change.
Because I’m staying with my
parents I’m an honorary member
of the middle-aged dinner-party
scene. I can report to younger readers
that it’s actually quite fun. And the
next day you’re up for breakfast.
I went to my first one a couple
of weeks ago. Pictures go on the
family Whatsapp. “Entertaining
the fogeys again, is he?” says my
sister, who has fled back to the city.“We’re not fogeys!” says my mother.
“Joke,” says my sister.
So autumn’s next. That’s a thought.
On the one hand, I feel no urge to
tramp about that big city again. I’m
looking out at three consecutive rising
fields. I can hear sheep baa-ing.
On the other hand, I’m still
renting my flat. But for how much
longer? Mates and I talk about them
like they are tumours. “You still got
yours?” “Nahhh, I got rid of it last
week. It hurt, but it’s a weight
off my shoulders.”
For now it’s exile. At the start of
lockdown I read Sophy Roberts’s
travel book The Lost Pianos of Siberia,
in which she describes Sergei
Volkonsky, the inspiration for
Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei, banished
out there for his role in theH
aving raced through life for
a decade at Ferrari speeds, I
discovered a few months
ago that I’m happier
beetling about like a Fiat
Panda. Or a combine harvester, you
might say. Having left the capital for
Somerset in early April because of
Covid, I’m waiting to break it to the
’rents I don’t (yet) pay rent to, that I
may never leave. When people ask if
I’m house-hunting in the city I called
mine for seven years post-university,
it’s a firm: “You must be joking.”
Back to London,
where people in their
twenties have been
mashing their minds
on late shifts, late
nights and even later
love until Corona hit?
No, I’m not house-
hunting in the city I
couldn’t afford to buy
a shed in when I could
stay in the countryside
and watch deer getting
drunk on grapevines in
fields 100m away. The
idea of living on a farm
is more appealing.
In Somerset my new
life post-exodus is far from the
maddening commute. I binge on
courgette cake and spend weekends at
National Trust properties, where we
flash our membership card for VIP
parking as a Kardashian would flash
flesh. At the American Museum in
Bath we walk around flowerbeds and
pop up behind plants to do mellifluous
Monty Don impressions. “Hello, and
welcome to the garden,” we drone,
trying not to tread on the gourds.
I’m not the only one. Every other
week since April it feels as though
another friend texts to tell me that
they are swapping city life for
something slower-paced. Matt and
Alex are putting their west London
flat on the market and moving to
Scotland; Bex is shedding north
London for Wales; Hannah is getting
ready to finally make the jump from
south London and head back North.We’re 28 to 33 in age, and the
restrictions that kept us stuck inside,
with housemates we didn’t like, paying
extortionate rent and unable to enjoy
any of the reasons we came to London
in the first place (restaurants, bars,
theatres, galleries, gigs) have pushed
us out. It has accelerated the desire for
something quieter, calmer and closer
to the families we’d left and worried
about immensely during Covid.
Recently my aunt Kate said to me,
“Life is a marathon, not a sprint, so
enjoy the scenery,” and I realised,
finally, that this is what you’re not
doing when you race through life. Life
in London and other big cities is so
collectively hectic, the rush carries you
along in a daze until you stop, and
only then realise what a blur it’s been.
Most of us have been forced to stop
or slow down recently,
and I’m sure I’m not
the only one who, at
the start, felt as though
they had been thrown
off one of those fast-
moving airport
walkways and
forgotten how to walk
on normal ground. I
found I needed to
learn to just “be”. “But
what do people do
when they do...
‘being’?” I ask my
(virtual) therapist.
“Anything!” he said.
“Like watch Match of
the Day?” I ask. “Whatever you find
calming,” he said. It was an epiphany.
I’m more used to just “being” now.
In my old life I’d often be out
cruising bars with friends until 2am,
but I’m in bed by 10pm these days
with my phone off.
I still have nightmares about my
previous life. My exes visit me in my
dreams and don’t let me share their
Deliveroos. I kiss a girl I haven’t
spoken to since Year 11 at a bar full of
obnoxious lawyers. I’m on motorbikes
that don’t stop at red lights. My
therapist thinks I have PTSD from a
previous relationship, but I think I also
have it from seven years in the big city.
Maybe my early thirties wouldn’t
have looked dissimilar from my wild
twenties if the brakes hadn’t screeched
hard in the past few months, but now
that they have, I’m quite determined
that the future be different.expensive city lives? No thanks
COVER AND BELOW: KATIE LEE FOR THE TIMES; AMIT LENNON FOR THE TIMESI don’t miss the
pressure or pace
Lucy Holden, 30
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Warwicker
in Old
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Village,
Gateshead