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.

Oh, yes, the people who will sit there on a single-track road, quite entitled, waiting impatiently for a farmer with a tractor towing a huge trailer full of hay bales to reverse - because they would find it far too difficult to reverse their Nissan Micra to the nearest passing place.

It never ceases to amaze me how many people completely fail to make the connection between farmers needing to farm - with the associated noises, smells and other small disturbances - and there actually being food available for them to buy from shops.

I had to beg my friend not to call the police for that reason when we were walking on a public footpath through farmland. 🤣🤣🤣

Our wifi is the local satellite broadband (not Sky) as we don’t have a landline and it is pretty slow (downloads 15Mbps, uploads 2Mbps if you’re lucky) but I can get 5g on my phone. 🤷🏻‍♀️

This was me - moved to a cathedral city and complained about the bells ringing 😂! A shock to the system at first for a city girl but you learn to live with it and become an intolerant local complaining about blow ins. I now love bell practice days and enjoy explaining what the racket is when I’m on a Zoom call!

Unfortunately these are the people that ruin any society or locale. The amount of establishments that closed after gentrification e.g moving to a run down area next to a well known nightclub then get it closed down due to noise complaints.

OH the hatred of children in our retirement area is overwhelming. They're not Welsh just happened to fancy retiring here. And then the buggers go on the local council and block the locals wishes because they retired here for the peace and quiet so they hate kids, dogs, paddling pools 😡

I agree that the WiFi thing can be annoying - ours is okay but can be sporadic at times.

but it’s not that bad that you can’t get on Facebook and complain about it, is it? 😂

There's a man who posts on my local FB village page and I swear he's in some sort of batshit moaners competition.

• someone sprayed some donkeys with water during a heatwave
• combine harvesters being impossible to pass
• cows moving from one place to another and holding cars up for a whole minute
• a stone wall being uneven causing his child to fall off
• the village shop not stocking whatever obscure item he desperately needed
• a farm shop being closed because of a death

My favourite was the woman who complained that we’d locked the field gates. We had a footpath running though the fields with stiles at either end but we kept finding the gate which was next to one of the stiles left open. Horses were getting out, so we locked them.

Turned out this woman didn’t want to use the stile because it was a bit muddy due to the amount of people using it, and it was making her shoes dirty. So she was opening the gates instead.

She was quite upset to get very short shrift.

Oh and people who complain about electric fences. They’re to keep animals in and humans out.

“But what if one of my children or the dog goes too close?”, they bleat. And take it badly when they’re told “Keep the buggers away, then”.

Well complaints about village life in our fb include:
Yet another new housing estate that the locals have no chance of affording
Yet another field being surveyed, with the only access road being a poorly maintained single lane road.
Yet another van hitting the railway bridge

I have a friend who lives in a village. They seemingly spend most of their time drinking - your post confirms that 🤣

Petition up on ours to stop the lovely young cows being taken to market 😂😂😂😂😂😂

It always amuses me (as someone who grew up in the country and moved to the city), when people move to the country for some 'peace and quiet'. It's honestly much quieter at night where I live (on a main road on the edge of a city). There's no RAF practising night flying over my house, no combines doing the harvest all night long, no livestock making noises, no church bells bonging the hour all night and the roads around here are much cleaner, even the middle of winter. If I go and see my family I have to get my car washed as soon as I get back, because the roads are covered in mud from Sept-Mar with all the farm vehicles using them.

There was a message in our village Facebook once. Moaning about tractors driving over the grass verges. There was a LOT of laughing and deriding the poster.

It was me. I had posted it because one tractor driver had twice in a week driven over the water main and broken it, flooding 3 houses and requiring Severn Trent to work overnight, all noise and bright lights that they also moaned about. The first time ST left a large sign over the drain. The second time they let 2!

I repeated my post, pointing this out a lot more clearly - "Please don't drive over the water main. We ALL lose our water supply" - and the driver was identified by his mum - much to the amusement of all and sundry! 😄

Our current favourite neighbours ripped out the hedges between their garden and the fields to improve their view and now moan if a cow ends up in their garden, if only there was something that could prevent it from happening. We are now planning on replacing the missing hedge with rusting, redundant farm equipment and bedframes all tied together with baler twine.

GOOD!

Serves them right.

Not only have they removed a hedge which didn't belong to them, and which they had no right to interfere with, but they have destroyed a vital part of the local ecosystem that local wildlife relies upon. I'd have added a bull to that field if it had been up to me. Or a couple of pigs. They are intelligent and curious creatures, as you will know, and would love to visit your neighbours in their home.

(If you need anything to make up your fence my next-door neighbour has a minion old fridge freezer awaiting disposal. I'm sure they will be delighted to donate it.)

They must have really wound you up by the sound of it. The new fence will be spectacular!

Whose hedge did they remove? Yours or theirs?

My OH once in exasperation said to a chief moaner living on the edge of an entrance to a woodland walkers zone in our village who was trying to chase off walkers. "BUGGER off back to Manchester"

His reply was "How do you know I'm from Manchester?"

I was then howling with laughter which didn't help

I live in a village which is heavily wooded. It is now predominantly second home owners who complain, yes you have guessed it, about the trees. This is to such an extent that the local council put TPO's on the ones complained about. They make a huge fuss about leaf fall as well. They don't like anyone parking on the public road either although they bought houses facing a 100 bed residential home for older adults.

Another neighbour has recently ripped out a beautiful stretch of evergreen hedging which has been in place for at least seventy years I am aware of. It faces a listed church and graveyard and it's part of the landscape of the village. Apparently the council could not do anything because it did not form the boundary of agricultural land. If I had some livestock on my garden, they would have been forced to replant it. I just don't get it. Why do they even live here.

The countryside stinks, has no street lighting, you need a car to drive to the shops and the roads flood. Internet is rubbish and you get electricity cuts. Cows and sheep feel free to graze your garden and random dogs run around crapping in it as well. Life is tough.

OH and a man with binoculars and a camera around his neck having a go at OH walking our two working dogs walking quietly shouting "I've lived here ten years your dogs are scaring the wildlife"

OH response"I've lived her 70 years so bugger off"

Well I don’t blame you for holding that opinion if their behaviour is obnoxious; there is no excuse for that and I would feel the same way! That’s totally fair enough.

I know tempers can become frayed in difficult situations between antis and hunt supporters but that applies to both sides. When I have encountered them during their ordinary course of duty, the hunt servants have gone out of their way to be polite and civil.

Around here they are very keen to keep the locals on side and they have a representative who visits farms and keeps relations on an even keel.

My neighbour complains about our chickens because she’s worried they might get into her garden.. they don’t.
She says the tractors scare her cat. She moans about the cold and the wind and the sun and the heat. The smell of manure, the deer, the rabbits.
Her address literally has “farm“ in it. They rent and could simply move but I think she just likes to complain.

We have lots of horses two menage in the village so loads of horses on the lanes. One rental complained to the police and the council regularly wanting horse pooh banned from the lanes

Ooh yes we’ve had this one too during the harvest. All new build houses backing onto farmland, several were shocked to learn harvesting doesn’t happen 9-5.

I think part of the problem is that people who work inside in offices forget that the countryside literally is many people’s place of work.

So some of the horse-riders might be enjoying a leisure activity, but others might be professional horse people, and the person who runs the livery is running a business.

The person who complains about tractors running all night doesn’t appreciate that the demand for the machinery is focused on a few days when weather conditions are right, that the machinery is so expensive it has to be run 24/7 to justify the cost, and if we don’t get crops in at the correct time critical moment, we could potentially lose all or part of our profits for that year.

And that’s after we’ve battled adverse weather conditions, pests, a huge amount of red tape, price fluctuations and hostile pricing from supermarket chains. So sorry but no, compared to those issues, whether a neighbour’s sleep is disturbed slightly or not by the harvest , isn’t a huge priority for us in the scheme of things.

Especially when they have chosen to move to a place where their nearest neighbours are farmers.