Country people.
I HATE seeing the British countryside destroyed by endless house building. I wish with all my heart there weren’t so many people. I yearn to live in a quieter, emptier world. The world’s population trebled between 1900 and 1960, and then it doubled between 1960 and 2000. We’ve gone from one billion people in 1900 to eight billion today.
But, though I long to live in a quieter Britain, with fewer houses, fewer people and fewer cars, I have zero nostalgia for country people. I don’t mean people who lived in the countryside, I mean the real, old rural people (‘peasants’, I guess - though I’m not sure if that’s now an offensive word). I grew up in Suffolk in the 1980s. True country people weren’t rosy-cheeked and warm-hearted. The vast majority were nosy, sly, gossipy, spiteful, secretive, suspicious, tight-lipped, and mean-spirited. Everything you did was watched, and any eccentricity or oddity was twisted and distorted and used against you. They would spread horrible rumours, and not one of them would stick his neck out for anyone else - no matter how innocent. I remember an old woman in a cottage near me who spread a rumour that the woman next door left her children on their own at night (total nonsense). That was typical. Rural people were very different to the urban working class. Working class solidarity would have been incomprehensible to them. Thankfully, the kind of people I’m describing have more or less died out.