Corona Virus. I hate to say it. I hate to start a story with those two words. It has taken so much from us, destroyed families, lives, jobs, everything. It has also made me think twice about how I am spending this summer. I don’t think I fit into the writers' stereotype very well: antisocial hours at a desk with a lit cigarette, a mostly empty bottle of gin and the dim glow of a laptop illuminating a bespectacled face in the moonlight hours. That’s not me.
I have spent the last three years living in London, Peckham to be precise, before that Mexico City and before that Bangkok in Thailand. My adult life has been predominantly urban, but this is not a reflection of who I am. In truth, I don’t love the city in the same way Samuel Johnson, or most journalist for that matter, did. I enjoy cities, they’re fun and full of strange people, peculiar places and brilliant stories, but I love the country.
COVID-19 has meant that for the first time since I left school I am living with my mum again and, to be completely honest, I don’t mind it. I have been retracing my teenage self’s footsteps in my sleepy little hometown of Shrewsbury in the heart of Shropshire. Whilst writing and job hunting, I find myself swimming in the river, riding my bike for pleasure, hiking, drinking ale with old friends and reconnecting with nature.
Whilst London talked about being able to hear birdsong, I find myself waking up to it even as “rush hour” traffic trundles past my bedroom window. Whilst London talked about the absence of people and a change in the pace of life, that has become my life even as things slowly return to some semblance of normality. Whilst London stopped, life here was undeterred, it continued as normal. Of course, people stopped going to work, going out and meeting friends but life, the rest of life, continued.
Cities, and those who choose to live in them, excel in pushing life out, it gets squeezed and compressed and pushed into the corners, swept up and shifted out. Life elsewhere is celebrated not whitewashed, it’s talked about not talked over, it is simply part of life. So, now the question of what to do. Put yourself in the shoes of a young struggling writer and journalist. Do we surrender to our urge of living a simpler life away from the ebb and flow of the city or is that giving up?
The desire for bright lights, fast pace and excitement creep up on me. Memories of friends, stupid jokes, drinking and taking things we shouldn’t, busses at 3 am and a feeling of freedom flood in and take over my consciousness. I can smell the smoke, feel the uncomfortable body heat of unwilling travellers on the tube, taste the dust and grit and know the endless opportunities I am faced with every time I wake up in the city.
These are the intrusive thoughts and the feeling of dichotomy that make writers the strange creatures they are. Forever split between a world of literary romanticism and dogmatic reality, in these moments of stillness where words come one after another in a constant stream of consciousness and we forget that the world is moving around us, it inevitably does.
Perhaps this is why I have a fantasy full of country walks, pub lunches and evening pints of local ale. Being in a place like this the world does stop, it is its own microcosm of experience that bends and transcends time, it’s intoxicating until you stick your head above the water again and realise that you have been left behind. As the world passed you by at 1,000 miles per hour you were in the same place.
Being outside of the city has become alien to me in the last few years, despite my childhood of not understanding what it was to live in the city. It has become welcome respite until the next thing comes along and sweeps me up.
It is, in short, lovely to be in the country again and away from the city.
