The simple life requires technology

The central heating broke down on Sunday - the traditional day for heating failure. We rang the engineer recommended by the dirty dentists, and he told us this was the first time the boiler had ever broken down. Was he accusing us? It’s possible that we had overworked the boiler, leaving it on all day where true country folk would only run it for 30 minutes a day in midwinter, leaving all the windows open and huddling round the Aga to tell stories of the time Old Seth tried to mend his boiler himself and was last spotted eight degrees South of the International Space Station.

It turned out - of course - to be something simple I could have done myself. “How much do I owe you?” I asked hoarsely. I braced myself for the £50 call out charge plus some other expensive items I wasn’t expecting.“Oh, don’t worry, I won’t charge for this - I was coming this way anyway.” Yes - this is why we moved to the country, for a simple world of decent people with comedy accents. 

The following day we called in a decorator to quote for obliterating the dirty dentists’ legacy of magnolia paint in every room. As a seasoned Londoner, I was expecting him to record every fine detail on an iPad, then take two weeks to concoct a quotation calculated to the last drop of paint. Instead he followed us around, hands in pockets, nodding. At the end of the tour, he said, “Right, shouldn’t be too difficult. Let me know when you want it doing”. And he didn’t suck through his teeth once.

"Need any decorating done? I only take cash"

Are we, like so many London expats, guilty of romanticising the country life, of seeing simplicity where it isn’t? Apologies for mentioning the Aga again, but it is a case in point. I thought Agas were stoves invented in Yorkshire in the 18^th century, and the point of the “warm oven” was so you could put a weak and frail lamb in there - not, before some wag suggests it, for your Sunday lunch, but to warm it up and send it on its way, gamboling out of the kitchen and pooping its way through the parlour. 

But the Aga was invented by a Swedish Nobel physicist in 1922. He was blind after a previous experiment had gone wrong, and his intention was to design a stove which his wife would enjoy using. Far from being the staple stove of the poor, it became popular in the country houses of the wealthy - presumably because they were the only people who could afford the energy bills of a device left burning twenty four hours a day.

And then there’s the garden. The simple garden. Which needs a petrol mower to tame its lawn and a Strimmer for the invasive weeds. And a lithium ion battery for the strimmer (battery not included). And a charger for the lithium ion battery (charger not included). And a pressure washer for blasting things. And an adaptor to link the pressure washer to a normal hose (not included). And an extension cable to extend the pitifully short mains lead. Apparently Jeff Bezos has a bell that plays “We’re In The Money” every time I log on. Meanwhile the Farrow & Ball parcels arrive daily for Mrs L, with so many paint samples our walls look like a migraine attack. 

"You'll need a Maserati to go with that."

While I waited for the pressure washer hose adaptor and the strimmer battery charger to arrive, I went to the vegetable patch and planted some raspberry canes and a blueberry bush. My vegetables still haven’t come up, so I gazed at the canes and the bush and pretended they had appeared from beneath the earth. In an attempt to resemble a real gardener, I mulched them.

That evening, I mentally surveyed the work that needed doing in the garden. We had taken on something rather sizeable, and that was before building the Ikea shelving, taking all the cardboard to the tip and replacing the toilet seats (If it needed six days to clean the kitchen after the dirty dentists had used it, just imagine… Actually, don’t). I caught myself getting anxious about how everything would get done. The apparent simplicity of country life eluded me. I should be rising and retiring with the sun, dealing with what is only in front of my face. But then, I’m a still a Londoner, awash with twitchy tensions. Will I ever be able to adapt?

Our initial idyll is coming to an end. Helen returns to school next Monday so until the end of May we will be weekenders, like so many other middle class couples, watching Stonehenge from a traffic jam. Back to London for now.