In England’s green, pleasant and noisy land

Nostalgia can be a great thing, particularly when it’s your own. Harking back to a time when a finger of Fudge really was a treat rather than a thing of evil which might bring a visit from the TV diet-doctor police. A time when a bicycle was a passport to freedom and independence instead of a necessary tool to stop the inevitable onset of age.

Children see things very simply. Ask a child to draw a portrait and they’ll concentrate on the necessities: two legs, two arms and a smiley face. Ask a child to draw a house and you’ll get a square box with a triangular roof, four windows and a door. Ask them to draw a countryside scene and you’ll get a couple of hills, a hedgerow, a gate and maybe a tree or two.

Whilst many of these images gain details over the years, for most people that image of the countryside doesn’t change much. Constable added a cart and stream, and Yeats adds a lake or two, but those hills, hedgerows and trees are still there. We all like to think we can climb a hill somewhere and sit in peaceful solitude at the top with a Thermos of weak coffee. English literature is littered with examples, but sadly the real England is a little more polluted. Not with the physical, but something much more audible. So I’ve written a user’s guide.

The first thing you’ll notice when entering the countryside if the constant chatter of birdsong. Whilst this may appeal to Bill Oddie, gifted as he is to spot a warbling chaffinch from a soprano robin in just 2 seconds, to the untrained ear most of this ornithological treat sounds much more like a car alarm. Or rather a carpark full of paranoid cars with one finger constantly hovering on the panic button and another on a klaxon. Or worse still that Nokia ringtone.

Once you’ve got passed the squeaky gate, you’ll notice the rollings hills are awash with man’s woolly friends. Ask someone to describe what sheep ‘do’, and they’ll be pretty much stumped. In this kind of situation I find myself asking ‘what would Sandy Toksvig do as her mime on ‘What’s my line‘?’ and I could only imagine them munching grass. Except, as anyone who regularly spends time in the countryside will tell you, they seem to be constantly taking some kind of class register. Seriously. There’ll be a menacing bleat, not a cute baa, every 4 seconds from alternating corners of the field. This will then set the cows off mooing and poohing and the birds will sing louder to drown them out.

And all this is before humans get involved. Inevitably farmer Giles will be tearing around on a tractor kitted-out with an engine large enough to run an ocean liner. Ramblers, stomping around in steel-soled boots worthy of any Eastern European army, earn their name filling the landscape with meaningless chatter about garden centres and Mrs Jones’ athlete’s foot, and every person over 40 rides a bicycle which hasn’t seen a drop of oil since Mr Beeching did such a good job of modernising the railways.

Get yourself far above sea-level and you’ll find your ears being bombarded with the trappings of life in a small village. Some part of the locale will have a fete complete with a megaphone powerful enough to send messages to the Hubble telescope giving important messages about found children and lost keys, and as dusk settles you’ll be treated to the local bell-ringers practicing some strange off-key off-tempo creation.

The Campaign for the Protection of Rural England is campaigning tirelessly for the protection of “Its tranquillity – from the remotest, highest hilltop to a woodland walk next to a big town”, but how do you protect something that doesn’t really exist? This great village green preservation society, led by Sir Bill of Bryson is littered with gently undulating sentences about open fells to patchwork copses, but the problem is if the locals from the country houses have been out, it’ll more likely to be a patchwork of corpses – pheasants, rabbits and, one can hope, ramblers most probably.

And that’s just the problem. Nostalgia is great, but it’s only great because we don’t pretend things are still the same. My house has one door and two windows on the front, but my image also has an electricity meter and some weeds intruding from nextdoor’s garden. My portrait still has its legs and arms, but I’d spend a long time agonising over the size of the waistline and the cut of the trousers. And that finger of Fudge has a calorie count, an instruction to only consume as part of a balanced diet and a warning for nut allergists.

Maybe it’s time to admit the countryside’s noisy, muddy and full of moo-pooh so we can all start to enjoy it again.