Town and country

I wouldn't like you to form a mental image of me as some kind of Savage-esque* neurotic with little or nothing to do but carp annoyingly about the inconveniences of country life.

By "Savage" I refer, of course, to the guy who is better known (to me at least) as Lilly Savage, complainig about the brutality of country life on Room 101. Maybe he has a point, but he annoyed me greatly. In my book, anyone who makes reference to a "baaa-lamb" has disqualified themselves from making any kind of comment on rural affairs.

Maybe he does have a point. My student lifestyle is like unto a metastable circuit, verily. I'm on a two-months-on-two-months-off pattern of living in the heart of a sophisticated University town in South-central England, and living fifteen kilometers west of Dartmoor national park. And things are different. For one thing, it's only in the country that you can expect to see complimentary pens from the makers of Drontal(R) Horse Wormer, or pack your belongings in a box proudly labelled "intra-mammry injectors". For another, in Oxford I almost never happen upon what I would term 'faeces' or 'entrails'.  Then again, any city-dweller who owns a cat can experience that for themselves, regardless of postcode.

Far more notable is the issue of socialisation. In Oxford, every day I see someone I'm not related to. Here, that's by no means certain. I can go a week when the most exciting thing to happen is when a Snowy Owl flies from the forestry over a corner of 40-Acre field. I put that at the root of the fact that I've read a Bill Bryson (Neither Here nor There), a Terry Pratchett (The Truth) and pages one to one hundred and thirty three of another Bill Bryson (Notes from a Big Country) in the space of four days- even taking out time for a trip to Mole Avon farmer's department store.

Such Russia-like pace of life is possibly the chief reason I havn't been blogging much. The other reason is that most of my actual activity has been relating to upcoming overseas adventures. Given that I'll be spending three weeks in a tent over a silver mine halfway up Mount Pelvoux* without electricity or running water, I thought it'd be a good idea to avoid getting in to the habit of posting reports to an online electonic journal. On the whole.

*(Yes, really. Isn't Life strange?)

As I say, socialisation is the issue. When it does happen, it involves a fifteen-kilometre bus ride and bacchanal excess such as you read about here last time. And in these parts, it's geography rather than shared interests that is the chief factor in sparking friendships. For example, I'm probably the only person in the Pretoria of a saturday night who thinks in adjectives like "Bacchanal".

Anyway, today is Wednesday. It's quite a while to next Saturday, and I've got some exciting medical funding forms to fill in.

Song in my head: "Stong Enough" by Sheryl Crow