Rural idyll…real or imagined?

(… turning the idyll into a playground…)

I can’t quite remember how the conversation came up but I was musing on my feral childhood on a farm and said I’d hoped to give my children a ‘rural idyll’. To which Mum casually says… ‘I think the years of the rural idyll are over.’ 

If some tinkling back ground tune had been playing at the time, a large gong might have sounded or the clash of dustbin lids. I momentarily stopped breathing.

Omg is she right? Was I trying to recreate something that doesn’t exist in the 21st century? Did I forget to question the basics… has a rural idle been replaced with a cocktail of glamping holidays, spring watch and MAMILS?  A pipe dream pre the quick fix, WiFi, fast food, sanitised age. 

People now need bite sized versions of a rustic reality and it can only be swilled down with a good coffee and then fully savoured later via Instagram?

I think she might be right on every level. 

I was bought up without the right clothing… no one wore quick drying waterproofs and if we had wellies they had holes in. Nothing was packaged into manageable chunks. We didn’t go on walks, what a waste of time - if we walked with purpose it was to recover a lost sheep. If we dammed a stream, which we did often, it was because we had almost nothing else to do … until we discovered you can smoke most things, such as beech leaves rolled in A4 paper. 

Oh dear the premise of my new existence has been blown apart. Not helped this morning by Willow at 9 am saying…”Mum there’s nothing to do here, can we go to a playground?”