April 17, 2008

I am not a rural person.

To me, there is nothing about a large grassy knoll or meandering country lane full of bustling sheep and friendly farmers that a great big slab of concrete couldn't improve.

I like shiny things; solid things; made things.

I like Canary Wharf, the Gherkin, Lloyd's. And I like Liverpool's St George's Hall, and it's marvellous Anglican Cathedral. I like Anthony Gormley's eerie Another Place sculptures staring out to sea at Crosby - but Christ, the beach itself is bloody freezing.

Natural vistas? Great - but that's what postcards are for.

Give me glass, metal, wires, tubes, pipes, plugs, lights, roofs, doors, floors.

Don't get me wrong - I do enjoy the outdoors. But only the kind of outdoors that has azure sea at my toe-tips and the sand so hot the soles of my feet glow like cinders.

Pitter-patter rain, muddy verges, sweet-smelling hedgerows, not-so-sweet smelling cow shit, rape seed choking half the population every summer - Nuh. Oh. Thanks. Keep it. It's crap. Cold, blustery, difficult, impossible-to-keep-your-hair-straight crap.

And it's not just our "ambient" weather that I dislike: It's all the absolute bollocks that goes with it.

Like our fabled obsession with the weather, for instance.

When was the last time you sat through one of those interminable weather forecasts at the end of the news and at the end had even the remotest clue if it was going to rain tomorrow?

And then, straight after, the teeth-splinteringly bad local weather, where a nervous presenter with bad teeth tells you the same guff that the national one just told you, only on a supposedly local level (like the weather in Carlisle means much to me, for instance, a mere 150 or so miles away) and much more badly.

And there are the other bits, the bits we forget when we yearn for summer in "ambient" days like these.

Like bluebottles, plump and hairy and waiting to puke on your food. And wasps. And those horrible clouds of midges that swirl like dust beneath trees, and which you only notice when you've got half of them in your mouth. And fruit flies, buzzing around your drink, making you flail your arms around like an epileptic in the executioner's chair (and you never do get the little bastards, do you?)

Picnics? Rubbish. Someone else's dog will always come sniffing at your basket (ooer). Boat trips? The water stinks. Country walks? Two words. Sheep. Shit.

No. You can take your English countryside and shove it up your Daily Mail.

Stop recycling now. Burn some more coal. Feed the penguins to the polar bears.

Let's the heat the place up, order the vodka tonics, sit back and apply the sun cream.

Oh, and let's shoot the bastard wood pigeon that woke me up and kept me up at six sodding o'clock this morning.