There's not mushroom in the city

I was born and raised in a rural market town in Lancashire – the kind of place that was shut on Sunday. Everything. Until the pubs opened. And even they had to close again by 10:30pm. It was, in its way, an idyllic place, with a river winding through it one way and a canal another. The fishing was good. The walks through field and forest kept us fully occupied throughout out childhood years. To be young back then was to rush home from school, change quickly out of the uniform and dash outdoors to enjoy the long summer days, getting up to what no dictionary today would define as mischief. Most of my family still live in that town.
Although I didn’t leave until I was 23yrs old, there is no one – apart from family – that I know there. When I left, I left good and proper. The one friend I kept hold of died years ago. If not for family, it is a place I would never return to.
I left to go to London. And knew immediately that if ever a place on this earth was home it was London. After all these years living and working abroad, it isn’t England that I miss, it is London.
Travelling from the North West of England by train one arrives in Euston Station. As I alighted, I was immediately immersed in more people than lived in my home town. The anonymity was glorious. At home, everybody knew everybody and nobody’s business was their own. Being an extreme introvert in a small rural town in the North West of England was nothing but a painful experience.
I think I am right in saying, my oldest brother has been to London once in his sixty years of life and that was to protest some Government policy that adversely affected his supremely rural lifestyle. It was only for a day and he hated every minute of it. But he is an extreme. My other brother and three sisters have all been to London and, as far as I know, love it – as long as they have the North to escape back to on visit’s end.
So, I am with Angela Schiff, in ‘Field Trip’, when she tells her husband that “running through the woods…for an entire day is not my idea of a good time.” Somehow, things are scarier in the countryside than they are in the city.
Standing at a bus stop in Greenwich, being threatened with a knife by a guy who claimed to have just been released from Belmarsh Prison was nowhere near as scary as being held at gun-point in the Zambian bush by a soldier who didn’t seem to like the idea that I was reading Aldous Huxley’s ‘The Perennial Philosophy’. Walking into a classroom with a cup of tea for a violent criminal who was holding a teacher hostage was nothing compared to being trapped in a hayloft by a bull seeking shelter from the rain.
There are no mushrooms in the city.

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