It won’t have escaped your attention that it has been a bit rainy these last few weeks.
Obviously, grim winter weather isn’t particularly newsworthy when it only affects the horny-handed toilers of the rural ‘idyll’; but this year even Paul Daniels had to get his waders out and soon the Daily Mail was salivating with joyous schadenfreude over photos of half-submerged Range Rovers and exceedingly damp Mock-Tudor Mansions.
Because disaster is always so much MUCH more disastrous somehow when you are extremely rich and within an easy commute of London isn’t it?
Don’t get me wrong, I am not here to mock.
(Well, no more than is habitual and unavoidable, for a normal hot-blooded Englishwoman.)
On the contrary – I am here to help! As a reluctant recent* refugee to the countryside, I have plenty of tips for surviving and even enjoying everything that the extremes of winter in the British countryside can throw at you.
So here are Number6’s tips for a countryside winter:
- Always listen to the updated list of all the closed roads on the radio in the morning. All the way to the end, including ‘and Dry Lane is still flooded’. This will remind you that you should never have moved to the countryside in the first place.
- If you do insist on moving to the countryside then don’t move anywhere that is called ‘Brookside’, ‘Lake View’, ‘Snowy Bank’ or ‘I’ve Never Seen the River So High!’
- Or anywhere below sea level.
- When you first move to the country you will spend a morning walking round the nearest market town, marvelling at the shop windows full of dun-coloured country wear and wellies that cost more than a weekend break to Paris and you will say in wondering tones – who BUYS these things? And the answer to this question is all the sensible folk who know what the weather can be like and will be quietly sniggering at you in your Per Una ‘water’’proofs’.
- Make friends with someone with a Land Rover. Not just a 4×4 Chelsea Tractor with personalised number plates and a cartoon of two rhinos shagging on the spare tyre cover, but an actual possibly-green-underneath-all-the-mud farmer-mobile, that looks like it could take a small volley of close-range fire in an emergency (or possibly already has) and may well have Bambi’s mum, skinned and lifeless, stored in the back. You might think these look a bit, well, ugly, probably drink petrol and are a bit tricky to park. All of this will become somewhat irrelevant when 15 miles of snowy roads stands between you and the emergency dentist one January night.
- Ditto someone with a generator. And some water butts. And a boat. Basically you need to move in with a farmer. Offer to help them with some lambing, that will get you on their right side.
- Don’t make any jokes about building an ark. They are probably all building an ark round the back of the lambing barn but you, in your suspiciously clean Joules wellies, are not among the righteous, but rather shall perish on the dry land.
- If you do find yourself in the middle of some floods, just drive straight through them. Otherwise it’s a long way round, and you’ve got all that Waitrose ice cream in the back defrosting. Nice and fast – just put your foot right to the floor. Go on, just do it! Preferably swearing constantly throughout the process. That will help. Overtake this stranded vehicle! Surely the water won’t come up THAT high? I mean the engine is not THAT close to the ground is it? OH GOD WHAT’S THAT BURNING SMELL?
- Make sure you have the phone number of your friend with the Land Rover on speed dial, so s/he can come and tow you out of the flood that you have just driven through and beached your Nissan Micro on a dead sheep. You may have to offer to buy them a new water butt, or to do that lambing thing where you have to skin the dead lamb to persuade the ewe to take on an orphan lamb**. But it will be quicker than getting a garage to come and get it; there are filled with all the other city-idiots who did the same thing.
- Keep a snow shovel in your boot at all times. It can help to move drowned sheep out of flood water, or you can sit on it on sodden bank and think about how nice it would be to live a high-rise flat somewhere on a tube line.
- If you do ignore all of these, because that really is a lovely new house at a bargain price and surely the government wouldn’t let a respectable house building firm build on a flood plain or chop down a whole load of trees that would have probably absorbed quite a bit of this extra water because we don’t need trees and flood plains and well-drained soil – we need houses, right? Well just in case you might start feeling a teeny bit, well, responsible or cross with the government – don’t worry, it’s OK and definitely not your fault. Pop over to the Daily Mail website to learn how it’s all the fault of the bloody foreigners for making a massive fuss about their natural disasters and STEALING our money. All the money that should have been sent to buy Paul Daniels some more inflatable paddling pools, has instead has being frittered away instead on malaria prevention and providing safe drinking water to the 900m people around the world who don’t have access to it. You can even sign a petition about it, if you are a particular fan of the sleight-of-hand-distraction away from the real issues of environmental mismanagement by the injection of some nasty xenophobic prejudice. Now that’s magic, as poor old knee-deep in flood water Paul Daniels might say.
- Don’t move to the countryside.
- Seriously, don’t.
*I have ‘only’ been living in the countryside for 16 short years now. An absolute baby-newcomer. My wellies aren’t even muddy yet.
** I know this is a true thing because I heard Debbie talking about it on The Archers.