Country life and its difference from that of the urban experience was emphasised, yet again this week, as I chatted and socialised with friends. Fern, who has lived in the village all her life (as have many of the others) and who still sees her parents every day, reduced me to tears with the retelling of a day last year. Her two year old daughter wandered in from the garden chewing merrily and determinedly. Upon inspection, she was discovered to be clutching the remains of a slug. Chuckling at my appalled expression, Gill chipped in with the tale of a local mum who had summoned her daughter after spotting two lines on her bottom lip. Mouth prised open, said child was interrupted in her attempts to consume a large house spider. The remains of the slug and the damp, but otherwise uninjured, spider were retrieved and discarded with minimum fuss. Life went on. It is definitely different from London!
Filled with determination to embrace the “have a go at everything and expect almost certain success” attitude I admire so much in my local friends, I decided to purchase and take home a 25kg sack of food pellets for our hens. (It’s a task I usually delegate to the men in my life!) Using a trolley – no mean feat in itself – I wrestled the sack from the floor and conveyed it to the till of the animal feed store. Focussed concentration and dogged determination got the sack from the trolley to the car, but no further. After much contemplation – and a cuppa! – I realised that the answer to everything was our trusty wheelbarrow. Surveying the horizon to check that none of my sensible and eminently respectable neighbours were in view, I dashed into the road with the wheelbarrow and positioned it next to the car door. Muttering and grunting, I hoisted the sack from the vehicle into the wheelbarrow (of course, just as a neighbour appeared from nowhere) and after a smug jig of victory, I drove the sack to the back garden. It wasn’t much in the eyes of the world, but to me it was a giant step in my resolution to live more positively in 2012 than I have ever lived before. How are your resolutions going?
