Utterly bored and frustrated by living in a small town

[saltnpepa]

We live in a small town and I am so bored and frustrated by the mundaneness of it. I'm from inner London and here I am in the middle of effing nowhere and all the families are white and middle class and wear Boden. There is no crime and no bad behaviour from anyone at anytime. Nobody swears or cracks jokes, there's no vibrancy or creativity, everyone is the bloody same. The mothers are polite and very decent and the husbands are all doing the right things and I only know of one single mum. I stick out like a sore thumb and am sick of rubbing people up the wrong way unintentionally just because I'm different. My kids love it here as does my rather conservative husband, I feel like running down the street naked covered in talcum powder and jam just to cause a stir. It is a 'nice' life but unstimulating and I worry that my kids will grow up to be just like the locals.

I am bored and frustrated with my area and I LIVE in London.

My little corner has become extremely gentrified with its Artisan bakeries and local breweries and is overrun with 4x4 driving Jocastas sending their dc to school with a bento box full of quinoa for lunch, wearing Jigsaw, Whistles, Hobbs etc. We are now too posh for Boden.

I feel very out of place, most out of sorts and, yes, the For Sale sign will be going up shortly.

I used to know your area I think mintyy, is there a park gate there and a 'tavern'?

yes it does depend who you know / meet but that is my experience...
That was exactly my point! We could argue 'yes but this is my experience/yes but that's not MY experience' all day.

It's Boden-tastic in the town near our village. The post office does a roaring trade in returns .

I shit you not, on the high street is The White Compny, Fat Face, White Stuff, Mint Velvet....no Argos, Iceland or Poundstretcher!

The monthly 'farmers market' is full of stalls selling chutney for £8 a jar and boar sausage baps!

I don't think you are thinking of my area Sunny.

IPity, I think the OP was deploying shorthand to get her point across. She probably doesn't think 'a woman in a burka is 'just a bit of scenery.'

While I get some of the points PPs have made, this is precisely why I could never live in a small town or village. DP would quite like to but I would go insane. I could handle total rural isolation better than a small town.

When we visit MIL it's like that. We drive around and she says things like "I see the Penningtons still haven't removed those bricks from their front garden" and I just get The Fear that DP will want me to go and live there. Ugh.

I totally understand about everyone being nice and polite and decent. Of course it's not awful, of course it's preferable to horrendous crime-ridden streets, but still, it can make you feel like you're in the Stepford Wives. You need someone who can swear and have strong opinions and make you laugh. Or I do.

Um, OP isn't talking about having a second home, pricing out the locals, having moved for good schools, being frightened to be anywhere else or gracing the sticks and it wasn't her that made reference to 'a women in a burka' (that was someone who lives in the country and was saying that she'd like to meet a wider range of people, but do feel free to cringe away (pontipines*).

She's said on several occasions that she's made friends, got involved with things, works etc but still feels like a square peg in a round hole where she lives.

I'm not sure why this is provoking people to talk about second homes and the like tbh.

OP I feel your pain. I'm a city girl now, through and through - having experienced naice rural and rough rural, give me urban

really I thought you lived round there - you know the half moon tavern?
Anyway doesnt matter, I was just interested in your tale of gentrification.

cat for sure, villages are better. Ours is so funny. A lot less small-town than a small-town IYSWIM.

It wasn't OP who was talking about 'a woman in a Burka' before we all get carried away about that, and definitely not describing diverse populations as a 'background freize' rather that she would like to live among them.

sunny, if your children go to a (state) school with a diverse intake in London or any city then you will most certainly have the same people as your neighbours.

Admission areas are often tiny!

tbh I find that debatable, christina.

....am in the middle of effing nowhere and all the families are white and middle class and wear Boden.

I find that comment ever so slightly racist. (if there is a thing such as being 'slightly' racist)

I live in a major city, where one particular area of this city - lets call it X, is populated mainly by black people.
If I were to walk down the street in this area, I would more than likely be the only white person around.
Imagine the outcry if I were to start a thread:

''I have just moved to X and all the families are black......''

Love the double standards on here sometimes.

My parents moved from London (my mum grew up inner-city, dad suburbs) to a small city in the North when I was a small child. So we're not even talking that rural here, my city had a fair amount of culture going on. However, I grew up never meeting a black family, or even really experiencing any other religion than CofE. I'm culturally Jewish which I was teased about, and I was also made fun of because my mum had a 'funny' name (she is half Turkish).

OP as long as you make sure to teach your children that where they live has many benefits, but that the downsides are lack of diversity, casual racism etc. they will grow up ok. I had 'friends' at school who used homophobic and racist language in a shockingly casual way, and they'd obviously learnt it at home. If I hadn't had strong influences from my parents I would have assimilated and spoken the same way I imagine.

When I was old enough, I moved to a much larger and diverse city for uni at the encouragement of my parents, and now I live in Hackney which couldn't really be much further from where I grew up.

I'm grateful for my mum's sacrifice, as I grew up in safe surroundings. She felt exactly as you did.

"Nobody swears or cracks jokes, there's no vibrancy or creativity, everyone is the bloody same."

There are no vibrant, funny or creative people in an entire town?

Actually there probably are, but it's very difficult to know who they are when everyone is being relentlessly twee and polite. I'm presuming OP, though she would like to swear and crack jokes, is not scattering her conversations with obscenities and ripping the piss out of people, because she's getting the sense that it's not the done thing. There may well be someone there who could be a kindred spirit, but reaching that level of honesty is difficult.

That's why I love MN, because the anonymity means you can be who you are without fear of messing up your role in smalltown life forever. It might be a good way to seek people out, OP.

I live nearby but not in HH.

Debatable in what way sunny?

State school admissions work primarily by distance. If you live in a densely populated area, your children go to school with your neighbours.

Or have I missed something about the relationships between who my neighbours are and who they go to school with?

Get to know the right people OP, and you will soon find out who whips off the Boden as soon as they get home and does the ironing and gardening in the nude, who is shagging the French teacher, where to buy the best exotically "spiced" brownies and why the vicar's wife always has that serene smile.

christina if you live in London it cannot have escaped your notice that blocks of flats are v close to 'posh' streets of big houses, surely?

Sorry, I don't understand your point sunny.

Honestly, I'm not being cryptic, but I don't understand what point you're trying to make or debate?

well you were the one who started a debate christina, and telling me I was 'wrong' - now you are saying you dont know what I am talking about...
ok yes, whatever.

I think that many of us in London delude ourselves about just how "diverse" a group of people we know. I may chat to a Greek man who sells me cheese in the market, I may smile at the woman in niqab and help her off the bus with her pushchair, I may make next door's Polish builders tea; but they're not really my social life. My social life involves people I work with, people I was at university with, people who have had or have childen at school with mine: there's some racial diversity there, some homosexual/heterosexual mix; some state/independent education mix; some mixture of ages but I will admit that most of my friends are broadly middle class professional types, as are the neighbours. It's not a very "diverse" group at all. Going to the Notting Hill Carnival or similar does not give one any more than the most tangential contact with a culture other than one's own (if it is not part of one's own)

My core friends would be my friends wherever I lived; but I actually think that it is easier in the country to make new and less strongly connected friends, to get from the acquaintances to dinner invitation stage because people have to try that little bit harder and are more willing to do so.

There are great museums and theatres etc in London and they are one of the reasons I like living here; but there are plenty of books in the countryside and so many other delights that I really think that the OP just needs to look a bit harder