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.

We live on the coast- our street has new people who have compained about:
a) Foghorn
b) The smell of fish on the fish quay
c) How high, high tide was one day and how low, low tide was (How are they supposed to know when it's going to be what?)
d) Salt on the breeze when it was very foggy, leaving salt marks on their newly washed car (just washes off)

Here it's the RAF and the USAF rattling the roof tiles regularly, visitors look shocked at my lack of reaction!
One of the funniest village story is from a long time ago, someone bought a cottage on a village green, next to the pub The Cricketers then spent the whole summer complaining about cricket balls flying round.

Our village Facebook group is brilliant for this.

”warning to all residents, this man was seen on our cctv at 4 this morning walking around near our house”

“Yes, he’s the milkman”

Things being necessary or common doesn’t make them pleasant. I grew up in a town surrounded by farming and plenty of people who had lived there all their lives (including my grandfather) moaned about muck spreading and Church bells. Surely people are just blowing off a little steam?

If it's actually your land, not rented, you can refuse access to the hunt. They may moan about you, but they should respect it. Hunts do exist by the permission of landowners, and if they are trashing your land and upsetting your animals, then there's no need to allow them on your land.

If it's a farmer's land and you rent it it is a little different, but they still shouldn't be trashing the place and should be letting you know that they are coming well in advance.

If there's one particular route, or e.g. one field you'd be willing to allow them to go through, then do speak to the huntmaster and discuss it with them, because they're very likely to be amenable.

There are lots of hunts now that have terrible control over their hounds and really upset livestock, or cause issues on the roads- then the hunts moan they lose access to the land- it's hardly surprising!

Reading this thread has made me so happy I live in smoggy salford! 🤣

Guy in my DM’s village complained that a farm (about 1/3 mile up the road from his house) had the temerity to use milking equipment which he could hear when he had his windows open! He sold up within a year!

He had bought a barn conversion by the way.

I swear all villages are the same, there’s always complaints about normal village life lol!

The hunt are trespassing on your land and the bloodthirsty scrotes get away with it because people don't complain. Know your rights and do something about it 😡

Quite. I grew up in a tiny village but now live in the suburbs of a large town. My folks come to visit and sit enjoying the quiet.

I remember back in the late 80s our local free paper (The Blackmore Vale Magazine) would always feature one letter a week from new people complaining about smells/muck spreading/noises. They didn’t call it Idiot of the Week but the letter was always in the same spot on the letters page.

We’ve had people calling the police for a man in a field with a gun. Yes, that would be a farmer
There was an excellent thread on here about a similar scenario. It was a long time ago, but if I remember correctly the non-rural person took umbrage at being told that calling the police on a local farmer for having a gun on his land is probably not going to help them fit into the village.

I teach rurally, one of my sixth formers was recently late to school because she got stuck behind a tractor in the morning. I did gently suggest she may need to factor that in to her commute.

I agree what a lot of people really want is to be on the edge of a town- that's where I live and it's wonderfully quiet, nice views, not close enough to smell muck spreading etc, rarely hear tractors.

Rural bus services have been hugely cut recently, so I do think moaning about that is legitimate.

Admit it. Some people just like spreading manure for any reason 😂 I side with the complainers in this case.

I remember that thread! Yes, that was the gist of it.

Ah, like my ex-neighbours who lived in a block of flats behind a pub. Complained endlessly about pub noise. I mean WTF?
The bedrooms of the properties weren't even on the side the faced the pub, so it wasn't a sleeping disturbance problem, just general noise.
Some people are just born complainers I think.

This thread has cheered me up no end. I live in a rural hamlet, which until last year had terrible internet, still has no bus, no mains gas or mains drainage. We've been here 17 years. The year after we moved in, a chap knocked on our back door, introduced himself as the farmer who lives 2 properties along and farms the field behind the house. He saw my veg box from the local delivery scheme and asked if I had had cauliflower that week, and what I thought of it. Yes, he was the grower. He then offered to flail our hedges on 2 sides, one of which is 10m above the lane. I asked how much it would cost and he said nothing. Apparently the former owner of our house was always on the phone to him moaning about something, so he used to charge him £100 a year. We had never bothered him and were indirect customers, so he was only too happy to do it as a favour.

Even now, we wave and say hello when we see them, but the only times I contact him are either when his cows escape or when I witnessed one of his workers reverse into a BMW that was driving like a complete tool and the worker was reversing into a passing place. When we get snowed in, the farmer always knocks on or emails to see if we need any milk or veg. From the stories on here, he obviously thinks he's got off lightly.

Funniest one I ever saw was a series of posts, house searching in local rural area.
First it was rural house wanted , fair enough.
Then house must have rural views.
Then a rather angry sounding post that houses so far have been no good, they want views of fields but not big fields had to be small fields with hedges between them.
Those pesky farmers planting large fields to feed the population to make views unacceptable to townies.

its certainly a puzzlement with some people at times

This sort of post really upsets me. I don't know whether you are left-wing, but people who write this sort of thing usually are. Why do you "love it" that older residents want a quiet life and dread seeing their village ruined by supermarkets and housing estates? The left accuse the right of being 'hate-filled', but I often find left-wing people every bit as hate-filled. Because their hatred is directed towards old NIMBYs, however, somehow that's ok.

I live in a village, and it has been totally ruined by new build estates. Developers have hacked down half the local woods to build new houses and flats, and at the other end of the village they are building a massive new estate that, frankly, is more like a new town. The traffic is now so bad that I hardly go out at the weekends. Instead of bird song, all you can hear on a summer evening is the screeching and exploding of boy racer cars. Still, I'm a middle-class NIMBY, so I guess I deserve to suffer.

Unless there are bridleways/rights of way across the land, in which case, they have legal right.

@JaneyGee, your post provides a SHINING example of why people take pleasure in the displeasure of people like you.

I work seven days a week. I'm writing this while taking a break from work. My profession is one that required years of tough study. There are severe worker shortages. I held down part-time and full-time jobs while I studied. That's normal these days. I don't remember the last time I took a holiday.

My landlord just put up my rent by £150 per month. I'm living in a studio where the windows only open a crack and there's no outside of any sort, not even a balcony. I'm now middle aged and can't see how I'll ever own a house.

I and all of my friends are in this situation for one reason. People like you have voted for the party that bought your votes by starving my generation and younger people of housing. You took the council houses for yourselves. You find decades-long retirements on our backs. You expect to live in paradise while we have nowhere to live. You stop every effort to build much-needed housing. Even if people like you were put in your place today, it would be impossible to clear the back-log in the next few decades.

The selfishness is simply astounding. You lot have been so insulated from the pain you've caused everyone else. On top of it all, my taxes pay for you to keep your houses when you go into care!

Im not convinced we need to build more housing in the countryside - there are plenty of non countryside sites and neglected town centres that could be used for new housing. Look at all the derelict industrial estates - they are close to main roads, have gas, electricity and water supplies already and they'd be perfect for housing estates. Just because done people have been screwed over re housing costs, that doesn't mean we can trash the nice bits of the country that are left, to make everyone equally screwed over.

IMO online village groups or local Facebook groups are best avoided.

Most locals aren’t on them. They’re full of professionally outraged people puffed up about trivial issues and the very vocal complainers actually come across as mentally unwell.

Mine is full of daily moans about cyclists, dog poo and pointless posts like
“Beware I saw a white van I didn’t recognise driving down our lane on Tuesday morning“

I don’t think it’s a realistic representation of the residents living there at all. Most people are just getting on with their lives and minding their own business