Complaining about Village life?

[BumpkinChic]

I just don’t really get this.

I live in a rural village and almost every week we have someone complaining on the village online group about one thing or another… mostly over things that pretty much come along with rural village life. The top culprits are usually along the lines of:

”they haven’t told us they are going to spread manure and now I can’t open my windows because of the smell”

“church bells ringing at all hours”

“the internet speed is always so poor”

Why are you living rurally if you didn’t factor these things in? What is complaining on a Facebook groups supposed to do about manure? IMO a lot of these things are minor annoyances. I know not everyone has the choice of where to live but I know this is not the case for some of the regular moaners. And I know village life can sometimes be dreary but I love it and have always lived in small villages so I know I’m biased.

please enlighten me, I’m genuinely baffled.

I really love the sound of church bells. Like, really love it, it sparks so much joy.

But yeah obviously yanbu. I hate the smell of manure, I hate "local community" events, I hate horses and dogs, I am ambivalent about country walks and well-dressings and guy fawkes scarecrow competitions. I know I am a miserable Ebenezer Scrooge. So I live in London and put up with living near vape shops and "we buy your gold" instead. It'd be extremely unreasonable of me to move to a rural village and complain about village stuff.

It does make me laugh when I hear people complaining about the seagulls

My neighbour knocked on my door to tell me there were seagulls in my garden and they were scaring her cat. Wtf was I supposed to do, go out and wrestle them?

I live on Salisbury Plain and there is always someone complaining about the big guns going off anywhere between 5am and 11pm. To be fair they do rattle the windows, but don't buy a house on an Army training ground.

@brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
A couple of those posts have a sort of Chaucerian charm:

’Ladys bring your men the more the meryer’

🙂

I've always lived in lovely rural villages, moved back from the 'big city' a few years ago, and me and husband love having a giggle at the dramas on our FB group. It's either the village newcomers (and not always young people as suggested up thread) moaning about normal village/countryside things or the born and bread villagers moaning about the newbies or cars going over 20MPH. I actually find the life long villagers to be much ruder at times. And dare I say it, snobs. All rather dramatic and no one ever comes out smelling of roses.

It is annoying, isn't it? It's always the same people as well... (The same 10- to 12 people.)

What really pisses me off, is when somebody shows (for example,) a picture of a car that cut them up, at a certain traffic island, or that overtook on a bend in town, or parked on a double yellow line, and they put a photo of the car and sometimes the driver. (They do this on the Facebook group for the market town that I live near, (which has got about 10,000 people on it.)

Totally identifying them and naming and shaming them on fucking facebook. With a pathetic stern 'telling off' - like they're a fucking teacher, or a police officer. Who do they think they are?! 😆

Someone said the other day - whilst posting a PHOTOGRAPH of a particular elderly gentleman - 'this old boy was only doing 20 miles an hour in a 30 mile an hour zone.' I mean, actually naming and shaming - and showing him and his car - with the registration number. It really is a nasty and pathetic kind of attention seeking! Naming and shaming people on facebook. Some people must think they are terribly important! 😂

I used to live in a village but it was right next to an army base. And u would regularly get them practicing over head. Boy did they swoop down really low. The local airplane acrobatics used to practice as well. I loved to watch it.

omg people used to moan. Like seriously. U move right next to an airbase and then moan about them practicing and they used to train in the local woods as well in big troops. Always made me feel safer.

one women was moaning on Facebook about it. Until I pointed out that they are literally training to keep u and the rest of the U.K. safe. How about a Thankyou and if u don’t like it bog off.

Oh god mine is too funny!

we have posts like 'lock your doors peeps there's a white van driving slowly down *** lane looks dodge'

someone replies 'it's the newspaper delivery van'

people moaning so much about the dust from the combine (they live on the edge of fields) that the farmer now has to announce when he's doing it

And on and on. I might see if I can find some gems now

Are they a mnetter who made a thread complaining about the movement of the cows from fields to 'the barns' and how noisy it was and why didn't they just keep them in one place?....
This was a dairy farm and they'd bought a cottage basically right next to the farm 🤐

We moved from central London to a small rural village, and although we love it (in the main) there are negatives!

The main negative for me is how unwelcoming some “true villagers” are of new comers.
How defensive and territorial they are of “their” village and how much small minded local gossip and piss taking there is about anyone new in the village.

We have lots of friends now but I’ve been told several times by locals that they thought we were gangsters when we moved in because of dh’s cockney accent And in fact when the village pub was robbed just after we moved in, lots of them assumed it was us. 😮😂

I don’t moan about it on local Facebook groups but I do roll my eyes at the small mindedness!

Reminds me of the time (Now ex)H was stationed in Cornwall. Whenever anyone new moved into the town from outside the county there were always grumblings about how there were so many helicopters going overhead....well yes there would be seeing as how it was right next to a huge Naval airbase.

The most recent gem on the village FB page went along the lines of " we didn't realise it would be so chaotic and noisy when we bought our house in March"....written during a weekend in June in a village within a 10 mile radius of Glastonbury.

My sister lives near to a farm, and got an note put through her door asking if she could move her cows (they are not hers) to a different field as they kept staring at the note writers children and it was giving them nightmares.

Oh god, this has been going on for years. I grew up on a farm in a small village and people complained about tractors, mud on the roads, late night harvesting, smells, cows mooing early in the morning, farm vehicles moving slowly on the roads.

The absolute worst were people who thought farms were some sort of free community resource crossed with a playground. The amount of times my dad would find people with dogs and small children picnicing in his fields or dangling very young children over pens containing ewes with recently born lambs.

Or the ones who would turn up at our door addreassing my dad as "farmer" and demand zome sort of favour like delivery of a ridiculously small amout of straw bales, free use of a field or use of his tractor to move some earth.

My local FB group is just the conspiracy theory nutters convinced the council is trying to poison them by chlorinating the drinking water. The new 5G tower was a good time too.

Yep

Most people who ‘want to move to the country’ want to live on the edge of a market town. Of which we have plenty.

TBF I grew up in a farming village and IF I ever moved back to the country it would be to that, and it’s also what my sister did. Proper rural living has an awful lot of downsides.. especially with teens.

My favourite was the people who reported us to the RSPCA as the few outdoor pigs we kept were covered in mud - it was summer and we made them a wallow (basically a hole filled with water) so they could keep cool and protected from sun burn (they were white pigs)

Don’t. The people who moved into the house opposite us tried to start a petition to get the local farmer not to harvest outside regular working hours… apparently the two weeks of late night lights from the combine harvesters is interfering with their right to quiet enjoyment of their property…

the mind boggles.

I live in a hamlet. We are bordered on all sides by farmland.

One the village WhatsApp group, EVRRY FUCKING SHOOTING SEASON: ‘Who’s shooting?! It’s scaring my dog!’
Your dog has been in the village since it was a puppy Pam. I would argue that you have had ample time to get it used to NORMAL FUCKING FARMLAND NOISE.

oh god - the ones who get up in arms about shooting crows.

Dear Pam have you seen what crows to to songbirds? Lambs? What they would possibly have done to Fido as a pup if you left him in a field unattended?

I keep hearing what sounds like a gunshot! Yeah, that'll be the crop scarer.

Are horses even allowed on roads? Erm yes.

Working farms can be really noisy, I'm amazed some people don't know this, and also seem to think the farmers are living a twee hobby lifestyle growing a few vegetables and keeping a few cute animals.

The constant moaning about nothing for children, young teens or older people to do always gets me going. Our village has a population of over 3000, when I point out that these facilities existed but were stopped due to either lack of interest or lack of volunteers to run them you get the village idiots saying they weren’t asked and would have been only too happy to help. So you tell them that as they are so keen they can hire the hall and run the youth club, coffee morning or mother and tot’s group and you will help, they come back with they are too busy!
The other ridiculous posts are people complaining about various shops shutting, the fact that no one used the butchers and hairdressers tells you all you need to know.

😂 That's such a great image!

@Eastofe, hard to choose, but I think yours wins!

😂Oh my days!

@Suckingalemon exactly that! I have no idea why peoppe think rural life is quiet. I am sitting here in my flat in zone 3 London with my back door open and the only thing I can hear is the parakeets and the distant noise of the odd train.

If I was at my dads (on a farm in a small village) I would hear - cows and sheep, dogs barking, several tractors, chickens, traffic from the bypass near by, helicopter overhead (he is near the seaso the coastguard heliocopter can go over head). Farms are factories.