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’ve lived rural ish all my life, and I hate the smell of muck. Especially here because it smells like pig shit.

I’ve never heard “farmer with a hamlet in the middle of our fields”. I suppose that is what it is from your perspective. Which came first, the farm or the hamlet? I’m guessing a farmer with a few homes to house farm workers, now all modernized and maybe enlarged? Was the original farmer’s home fancy? Was it owned by gentry? Please ignore if I’m being too nosy!

To be fair, when we bought our house opposite a school, it was a lower school, with children aged 5 to 9. Almost all the children were local and walked to school.

Over the years, they have added a 4+ unit, then a nursery, then offered wrap-around care, and now take children from 4 to 12, and from all over the place, meaning parents for the most part, have to drive. The traffic is chaos around drop off and pick up times, and the parking has to be seen to be believed!

The broadband and 4G signal where we live is better than in many city locations. When using Just Park in Kingston upon Thames to park overnight I had to walk down the street to get sufficient signal to pay.

We live in a village next to an equestrian centre. Folk moan about horse shit constantly, the horses were here before the new estate. I said ‘once it rains it just turns to grass’ and was accused by the complainer of being an inconsiderate horse rider and it was obviously my horses shit. I don’t own a horse and I’m slightly scared of them. It became really mental.

Tractors really aren't that noisy unless you're very close, like if her house was right on the field boundary and they were cutting right up to her house. In which case, they would only be doing that for a very short period of time anyway. Farmers sometimes have to work at night because bad weather is coming and they need to harvest. That's just something you have to accept if you live in the country.
If possible, I'd be cutting close to houses in the daytime and as far away as I could at night. If the farmer isn't doing that it makes me wonder if the family is a PITA in general....

A friend who kept horses close to some posh houses was once rung up on a Sunday morning and asked if she could wash her horses because they were having people round for dinner and 'the horses look a bit scruffy when we look out at the view'.
In fact, they were not scruffy-looking. They weren't jolly hairy little ponies, they were rather well-bred and well-kept horses. But even the sleekest looking horses like a roll occasionally.

You have my sympathy.
Can't you report them for grubbing up a hedge without a licence?

We have new neighbours who are complaining about the number of people walking past their house heading for the school building.

We live in a small village and the school building is basically everything - before school kids stuff, after school kids stuff, evening kids and adult stuff, food bank, community centre… If something is happening in the village it’s either in the school or the pub. Even church stuff is happening in the school as the church is basically falling down. The main play park in the village is at our street as well.

There is a walking bus for the kids stuff that meets in the pub car park to stop the street getting clogged with cars. It’s really well organised. The pub also happily allow people to park there for any event in the school, which is good of them.

It’s basically not a street to live in if you don’t like people walking by. New neighbours are not happy at all with it.

I like a jolly little hairy pony, myself - the sort with a bit of a beard - you know they the - whiskery little chins (not unlike my good self 😁).

I stay at a distance, though, because I am not comfortable with horses and they smell my fear!

This is a weekly game round my way 😀

I used to live rurally and our local blacksmith was driven out of business because they built a housing estate next to his forge, and people couldn't stand the noise or the horses.

My favourite (from the days before the internet) was a woman who complained in the local paper that 'It's like war-torn Beirut round here on a Sunday morning.'

She'd bought a cottage next to a pub which hosted a clay pigeon shoot. She wanted it stopped.

My husband shot there regularly, & I even shot there once - I had to borrow a 20-bore & was absolutely useless, as I'd trained in prone rifle shooting with paper targets, so couldn't make myself lead.😂But that's a whole other story.

Bottom right would be "if this is not aloud" surely?

I grew up in a town, went to uni in a city then moved on to a road and the way out of a small town. It’s fairly remote and sheep have roaming rights on the roads but loads of people move into the area and then do nothing but complain about the sheep crossing the roads and insist the farmers should install fences so they can carry on driving like loons.

We had one this morning, tractors driving up her lane, going far too fast. I have been stuck behind “fast” tractors for 35 yrs, never experienced one going over 30mph. I suspect that her car was capable of and was travelling at speed.
We had a rep from the Campaign for rural England speak at the Parish Council AGM a few years back. A pressure group of townies who have moved to the country and want a return to their idea of the rural ideal. We all sat there trying not to make eye contact because she was hilarious.
She didn’t want HGVs on country lanes. Most HGVs are servicing farms, the country lanes they use wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for farms.
But the sniggering started when she suggested moving egg farms ( battery variety) to industrial estates in built up areas where the smell wouldn’t be so intrusive.
The “don’t allow cockerels to crow before 8am” and “muck spreading is offensive “ brigade get short shrift locally.
We live close to a well known safari park. On a still night you can hear the lions roaring. They have lots of complaints from people who move to the area. Me, I love to stand in the garden on a warm summer night and listen to the lions. If you close your eyes you could be in the Serengeti. In fact I did it last night it was so still and warm and the lions were roaring.

FARNHAM'S town hall clock is once again ringing out over Castle street, a week after the historic landmark's owners silenced its chimes following a solitary complaint to the council.

The plight of the clock, which had chimed every quarter of an hour for 146 years before last week's intervention, has made national headlines after The Herald's lead story last week.
The Daily Telegraph and BBC Radio 5 Live are among those to have covered the story, as well as BBC South Today which interviewed the man behind the campaign to restore the chimes, Kiran Davies, on Monday.
Kiran said: "I'm really happy and didn't expect to be able to turn the chimes back on so soon. I never imagined it would attract as much publicity as it had done. My phone's been ringing non-stop!"

There was uproar, turned out it was a DFL who was renting, not even buying. I am reliably informed that they didn't hang around at the end of the rental period.😂

People power and they climbed down after less than one week. 😆

Oh and farmers do muck-spread selectively. We have caravan clubs use our village hall for weekend meets. I can tell when to expect them because the local farmer will muck spread the adjacent field on the Friday afternoon they were arriving just to give them an authentic country feel.

@Emotionalsupportviper
@Mummyoflittledragon
The hedge was on their property but had been there for as long as anyone can remember. The mention of the minion fridge has reminded me that I still have the remains of a tumble dryer that caught fire that can be added to the pile.
@Raincloudsonasunnyday
Not sure how I can prove the existence of a hamlet surrounded by farmland without outing myself entirely. I can't imagine that the farm was ever part of a bigger estate, name of farm and field names don't suggest anything that grand. I've tried (not very hard) to find some history but I've not had much luck. The current farmhouse dates from early 1800's and there is a cottage that was most likely the original house. There are 2 former farm houses nearby and a barn conversion, the rest of the houses are small cottages. I suspect, that rather than being a larger estate being broken up, a number of smaller holdings have joined together. In fact we rent 1 small field that is completely surrounded by our fields with no access other than crossing our fields.

@Raincloudsonasunnyday
From my perspective a hamlet is a small group of houses, smaller than a village with no amenities such as pub, church, school or shop.

You do realise donkeys come from Mediterranean areas and aren't very good at insulating themselves from rain and are probably better suited to hot weather (so long as they have shelter) than wet

Hilarious. I can only imagine the mocking that ensued.

We get parking, fireworks, wood burning stoves and wondering if a cat is missing because it’s in someone’s garden. All standard parts of city living

Thanks for the replies! I see what you mean re hamlet with no amenities versus village with a pub etc. Yes, that does indeed sound like farmland with a few houses in a clump in the middle. I'm thinking All Creatures Great and Small right now! It sounds very bucolic (to this uninformed townie!). The history of how these regions and areas came to be is so interesting.

Sometimes you just want to whinge to blow off steam, but silly whining about the basics of life always baffled me. I live in a busy, popular tourist city, and it'd be like me saying "There are always new people about! Can't anything be done?" It's so true that aging doesn't automatically make one a sensible adult.