Opinion

THE LAST WORD

THE GRASS IS ALWAYS GREENER

It is not hard to see that having fewer options and resources is just a fact of life in the countryside compared to living in the city

The last place I would ever have imag­ined my­self liv­ing is in the coun­try­side, but that’s ex­actly where I’ve ended up. I was born and bred in a city and, hol­i­days aside, urban life was all I knew until 17 years ago when we came to live in a small vil­lage in Penedès. It was largely an ac­ci­dent, as the house we bought was orig­i­nally sup­posed to be­come our hol­i­day home, but un­able to af­ford two houses, we de­cided to take the plunge, move out of Barcelona, and begin a new life in rural Cat­alo­nia.

As you can see from our fea­ture on page 10, this is some­thing that quite a few peo­ple are doing these days, and in some small way com­pen­sat­ing for the de­pop­u­la­tion of rural areas, which is such a prob­lem in Cat­alo­nia. In fact, a re­cent study car­ried out by the Uni­ver­sity of Lleida claimed that around 231 of the coun­try’s 947 mu­nic­i­pal­i­ties are in dan­ger of de­pop­u­la­tion.

It is not hard to see why that may be. Even though we live less than an hour from Barcelona, and we have a mo­tor­way and rail­way nearby, hav­ing fewer op­tions and re­sources is just a fact of life in the coun­try­side com­pared to liv­ing in the city. Peo­ple often tell me how lucky I am to live where I do, in such a priv­i­leged nat­ural en­vi­ron­ment, with clean air and lit­tle noise, beau­ti­ful views and ter­rific walks, the per­fect place to raise a fam­ily. That’s all very true, but there are also plenty of down­sides to liv­ing in the coun­try­side.

One of the biggest prob­lems is mo­bil­ity. There’s not so much as a shop in our vil­lage and there is cer­tainly no pub­lic trans­port, which means that just about every­thing you need to do or get re­quires dri­ving. I used to like dri­ving but 17 years of doing nu­mer­ous trips in the car every day has cured me of that. Of course, you also need mul­ti­ple ve­hi­cles, so that every­one in the fam­ily can get to school or work, go shop­ping or so­cialise.

Last week­end I was vis­it­ing friends in Lon­don. Talk­ing to them about their life there, in­evitably there were com­plaints, about the noise, about the crowds, about the traf­fic. It’s true that those are char­ac­ter­is­tics of urban life that no one likes, but to me their lives seemed amaz­ing. If they need some bread they can just pop round the cor­ner and in two min­utes be back home, job done. They can get just about any­where in the city with­out going near the car. Their kids walk to school. There are loads of bars and restau­rants in the local area, all within walk­ing dis­tance. If they need a plumber or a me­chanic they can choose from among dozens. They even have gas piped right into their houses, for heaven’s sake.

Those city dwellers, they just don’t know how lucky they are.

opin­ion

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