Picket Fences

I like living in the country. I like the cows on the common. I like the organic bakery. I like the humour of the local butchers, meeting deer whilst out walking, the sense of community, and the fact we have more joggers here than a Sunday afternoon in Central Park. Life is good.

However, I can’t help daydreaming when there’s some glimpse of smalltown America via the telebox. The mere glimpse of a white picket fence can send me off. It’s not even as though I particularly admire America at the moment – G W Gump is hardly making it a harmonious vision of the future. The Postal Service alone has more shootings than Pinewood studios, and coffee is sold in volumes more akin to paint and petrol. Yet I have always had a burning desire to live there.

When I was over there a few years ago, I spent a some months livin down the road from a lovely little town called Bridgton in Maine, where my fantasies of Twin Peaks-esque living accomodation were allowed free reign. I want the mock-roman columns either side of the door, with brilliant white winow frames. I want a little red mailbox at the end of my drive with ‘the cellist’ written on it. I want to buy my newspaper from a little plastic box on the street corner, and to make friends with a local fat guy called Dale who knows someone who works in the Dairy Queen. And I want to have to drive into the city ocassionally, going along a dead straight road towards a skyscape of skyscrapers and metro tracks.

I want to have lived in America in the next twenty or so years, but then that leads me on to everything else. Although I love town and country living, I also want to have spent some time living in hi-tech city apartment. I want to have driven a two-seater convertible. I want to have cycled across at least a sizeable amount of Ireland. I want to go back to Seattle and buy coffee from the first Starbucks again, and cook a fish bought from the market round the corner at the little campsite with Tepees on Vashon Island. I want to visit Texas, although I’m not quite sure why. I want to have decided on a PhD topic, preferably something to do with The Beatles, or The Who’s Tommy. I want to shear a sheep in New Zealand, and walk up to a Japanese family and ask them to take a picture of me on holiday. I want to have a photograph published in a magazine and, just once, have a craving for salad. I want to go for a walk using those sticky-pole thingies that ramblers have, and learn how to ski.

The thing is the list goes on, and if I’m honest I’m not all that sure I have the time. I’d have to start now. A friend at school was once haunted by a dream that he was going to be killed by a bush and although that fate is probably not going to inhibit my dreams, what if I don’t get my three score and ten? I have to prioritise. I guess the skiing should wait til near the end, in case a dodgy chair-lift cuts things short. A similar risk assessment suggests I should wait until I get a Saga discount on that coach tour of Texas, or greet the guy or gal in the blue postal uniform putting deposits in my little red mailbox.

And again I find myself back to that living in America thing. All suggestions of reasons to move to America, or prospective job offers gratefully recieved…