the neighbouring villages

Neighbouring re-Imagine Villages no doubt; our fantasy topography grows ever more complex! Okay, so we've got Ambridge in The Archers, and Ledwardine in Phil Rickman's Merrily Watkins novels and countless other non-existent English villages that are somehow quintessential to the cause in spite of - or maybe because of - the fact that they don't actually exist. So, is the non-existent English Village the only true English Village I wonder? The one we hold in our dreaming hearts as being somehow archetypical of an inner-idyll informed, no doubt, by the subliminal depiction of such things in the ether of our Common Cultural Ambience which is largely defined by Television?

Real villages, in my experience, are hell on earth. I've tried village life on various occasions and whilst I love the countryside, the darkness, the wildlife, the stars, the seasons, the Agas, the real coal fires and the whole rural stench, I'm far happier in towns simply because village people get on my tits; the same faces, day in, day out; the faux sense of community, that deadening sense of entrenched permanence and forever being a newcomer even to the bloke across the road who moved in the year before you did.

No indeed, villages are too much like housing estates; deadening to the human spirit by an altogether unnatural juxtapositioning of territorial home-owners which might only lead to conformity on the one hand or strife on the other. Give me a town by the sea with people I couldn't give a shit about, not yet they me, but in a genuine crisis we will be there for one another.

In towns I find real friendships thrive...