Is the countryside boring?

[British Red]

as a gate latch

as a gate hinge

as a fence repair

to attach a tree to a stake

to attach a stake to a tree

to bundle up newspapers

to hold the bumper on your car with (don't ask)

to hold the wing on your car (look ...really)

to make purse nets with

 

[locum76]

to tie the exhaust back on the van

to catch a goat

to melt and make blobs with

 

[sam_acw]

I did often wonder if the government was trying to turn the countryside into a theme park for city workers on their days off. Banning or torpedoing lots of traditional activities and trying to sanitise it.
The wierd thing is, British countryside isn't that different to the cities compared to over here. When I go out of the city into the countryside it's like going back in time a few hundred years. Polish tax laws encourage lots of small farms so you often seen farm work being done by horse power, a yard with chickens in it and a solitary cow on the verge keeping the grass down. Added to that you can see hares and, in the warmer months, storks in the fields.

 

[British Red]

Can't help with the storks but......

I can offer these as substitute storks

I know what you mean though - I just wish the city folk would stay out - your comments on "sanitising" and "torpedoing" are spot on!

Red

 

[harryhaller]

I want to visit Poland, sam_acw. It sounds great - I've even got some cds to learn a bit of Polish

In Frankfurt (am Main), in Germany, where I lived for about a decade or so, there's a wood bordering on the south of the city with deer, rabbits etc. And even though a city like Munich seems modern and cosmopolitan, there are parts which are very rural - where the countryside creeps in - there are farms in the suburb and you can smell dung in the city centre sometimes!

There is also a policy to save the small farms so in Bavaria you still find small farms. In places like the Black Forest it is a tradition that people worked both the land and in the towns - so a person might work at Daimler-Benz or in an office, but would still have a small bit of land which is farmed.

In other words, the towns and the countryside are better integrated than in the UK. In the UK the big and the rich were always the bosses - look at the absurd stately homes we have. Laws were always passed in their favour - the big landowners.

We have a "tradtion" of driving people off the land - from enclosures, highland clearances to the industrial revolution. Sheep were more valuable than people. many country people, like my grandparents, earned their living serving the high and mighty in their "stately Homes"- my granddad was a stable boy, then a chauffeur. He prefered the horses though!

 

[harryhaller]

your comments on "sanitising" and "torpedoing" are spot on!

It started with the stately homes when our lords and masters decide that they knew better than nature how the countryside should appear and got in "landscape gardeners" - they even had villages moved because they "spoilt" the view!

 

[British Red]

Not sure I agree there HH - these days its more about stupid politicians and urbanites who don't have a clue about living in the country - they just want a shrink wrapped life

 

[harryhaller]

I'm talking about the past, Red. I agree with what you say about the present - the countryside mustn't get in the way of their urban habits. But that really is just a continuation of the past, isn't it? The stately home on a smaller scale I mean they didn't move out to take up farming, did they? Their businesses are not related to the country - the countryside offers cheap housing with a view and leisure activities.

However, to spread the blame, I'm not sure that the communties in the countryside are half as closely knitted as abroad, hence the newcomers don't really have a community into which they can integrate like they do in other countries - this is the result of history, ours and theirs.

And now in France, Brits are buying up old farmhouses there as well!

Prostitutes sell their bodies, others sell their communities.

 

[sandsnakes]

Well that says it some of it, I am still intensly irritated by banana skins and non biodegradable orange peel, also smokers who assume that the packest will break down in a hedge. but...

Sad to say I am soooo boooooring, that I am forced to spend the entire bank holiday weekend in the woods on my own being boring all alone. This is so I do not contaminate others with the boring virus that all bushies must carry.

Sandsnakes

 

[Klenchblaize]

I am still intensly irritated by banana skins and non biodegradable orange peel

Rabbit burrows are good for something then

Cheers

 

[galopede]

The townies don't just complain about farm noise and smell at their weekend cottage.

I've been a canal and narrowboat fan for many years and help a friend with her liveaboard on the Gloucester/Sharpness canal. We frequently go into Gloucester docks which the city council and British Waterways have been ruining for several years by building hideously out of place blocks of blue coloured flats and shops amongst the old warehouses and cobbled docksides.

To one side of one large block of these flats is Tommy Nielsen's dry dock. This place is one of the few places in the world that repairs wooden tall ships. It has been there working well over a hundred years.

The people in these flats have been whinging about the noise and smell from the yard, especially when they've got their big timber steamer going to bend planks to shape for the repairs to the hulls.

They have even demanded that the yard should be forced to close as it has no place in an old dock like Gloucester. Personally I think Tommy's yard has far far more right to be there than they do! He was there when they bought their flats after all, much as the farmer's pig unit was when they bought their weekend cottage.

A few years ago they managed to force a narrowboat builder just outside the docks to close down and move to Sharpness.

So it's not just the countryside townies moan about!

Gareth

 

[jojo]

We had a bloke phoned the rozzers about noise polution at 1am

Had just bought a large cottage as a holiday home

The noise pollution - a combine harvester harvesting by searchlight to get the wheat in before an inbound storm ruined it

"Oh dear" says copper "what time do you need to be up"?

"6am" says the townie - "I have to get back to town"

"Will you have cornflakes for breakfast"? Asks the rozzer....

"Yes...why?" says the townie

"Cos you s****ing won't if he doesn't finish harvesting" said the copper

Next morning, same copper nicked the townie for speeding on his way back to the motorway .

He didn't buy his own beer for weeks

Red

I really hope that is a true story!! Good on him.

 

[British Red]

I promise

 

[drewdunnrespect]

well if its that boring why go and buy a holiday home there why not get one in ibiza were city life is 24/7 bussing of its face and leave us bushy people to our oh so boring country side

 

[East Coaster]

non biodegradable orange peel

ehh??????

please enlighten me

 

[Tengu]

Yes, me too.

`Just` what have I been eating all these years?

 

[BorderReiver]

ehh??????

please enlighten me

Orange peel does not rot down at all well. It tends to dry out and lasts as an orange (naturaly ) eyesore for a long time.

 

[John Fenna]

It makes GREAT fire lighters though if dried out!

 

[He' s left the building]

I wouldn't say that the countryside is 'boring' it's just underdeveloped.

Once they get some Starbucks and kebab shops there it will become much more habitable.

Last time I was in the countryside my day was ruined when it began to rain, there wasn't a shopping mall anywhere in sight. I mean, where do they expect us to go to the loo?

I would have thought the Health and Safety people would have sorted all this out by now, I couldn't even get a signal on my Blackberry to email them?

 

[Iona]

Haha! Blackberry... I've often had trouble recieving signals on them... they taste great though