Letter From Rural England — The Threat of Coronavirus In Our Remote Valley
For just over 45 years I’ve been working as a journalist in the UK, often filing from abroad when I’ve been on travel-writing assignments. Now, having been made redundant after serving as editor-at-large on a large daily newspaper for the past 20 years, I want to write a regular diary about life in general as seen from a remote rural valley inside Exmoor National Park in the English West Country.
The voice of rural England is rarely heard nowadays in the UK. Not on the national or international stage, at least. Perhaps that is the same when it comes to life out in the sticks everywhere. In this increasingly urbanised world, the people who live a long way from towns and cities are becoming ever more marginalised.
Which is a shame, because not so very long ago the countryside is where we all came from. And maybe rural life, and it’s often old-fashioned values, can still have a relevance — can help shape — the increasingly frenetic urban existence.
I don’t know. But what I’d like to do here on Medium is to post a regular Letter From Rural England — partly for my own enjoyment — but mainly because there may well be people out there who share the kind of experiences and observations I manage to enjoy, or endure, in my valley.
The late and much celebrated Alastair Cooke became famous for his Letter From America which was aired on BBC radio for almost 60 years. My humble Letter From England won’t be anything like as grand, but let’s give it a go and see if there’s a mutual interest out there for my topics which, basically, will included anything and everything…
So… The latest big thing here in the West Country — and just about everywhere else around the planet — is the spread of the dreaded coronavirus. Now I am thinking about talking to neighbours about building a barricade across the mouth of this quiet out-of-the-way valley. No one in. No one out. At least until the threat of the virus has been and gone.
Like just about everyone else in this community, I’ve been suffering one of those long lingering colds that has been making itself known since a croaky Christmas. It’s the cold that keeps on giving. Not the heaviest, but the most stubborn.
Now, just as it’s just beginning to fade, the last thing I want is to suffer from, or be bumped off by, some wretched respiratory illness from the other side of the world. It’s the last thing any of us wants. So perhaps I’ll make one last trip to Lidl, buy every cheap non-perishable food they have along with a bottle of this or that, and build that barricade.
It would be easy to seal off this valley. Easier than most places, anyway. A couple of well-placed machine-gun nests should do it. That would cover the single road in and out — I can’t see anyone wanting to take the steep muddy tracks that come in from the hills.
We’ve got our own water, and with a well-stocked pantry we’d be okay up here for months. Even years.
I was thinking about all this while reading about the coronavirus this week, just after learning a good friend had died. Alexander Hollweg was a brilliant artist who lived here in West Somerset. I first got to know him in 1976, which is relevant to all of the above because Alex and some other denizens of what was then an artists’ commune at Nettlecombe, in the next valley, had become worried about the continuing drought.
Many readers will remember it. Despite global warming, we’ve never seen another summer like it. It didn’t rain for months and I clearly recall the countryside turning yellow and the ground becoming concrete and cracked.
The people who lived in and around the old stables at Nettlecombe were pretty much self-sufficient back in those days — huge vegetable gardens, pigs, goats and even a milking cow…
Alex, who had two young children, grew more and more concerned. He was of an age which meant he’d done national service and as a young officer he’d become adept at the war games his regiment staged. One evening he came to two of us younger men and told us that if civil unrest was caused by the continuing drought, we might have to defend ourselves from marauding groups coming out of towns like Taunton and Bridgwater looking for food.
He might have been having a joke, because he sometimes had a mischievous sense of humour, but it was Alex who mentioned the idea of machine-gun nests saying that, if push really did come to shove, the deep steep valley would be easy to defend.
The marauding townies never did turn up and it rained eventually. Has probably been raining ever since, come to think of it.
No one within living memory, apart from Arthur Scargill’s British coal miners and a few rioters here or there, has ever really had to build a barricade in this country. Other than a few isolated groups with axes to grind, no one has built barricades since the Normans crossed the English Channel in 1066.
And probably 99.9 percent of the population believes that this pleasant peaceful status quo will continue. We just don’t go in for internecine wars, death viruses, starvation droughts, or anything else too life-threatening in this ancient lovely civilised land.
But you never know. You only need the merest hint of imagination to think: “Blimey, what we do in this household if society were to start falling apart at the seams?”
If a news reader on national TV even mentions the phrase “fuel crisis” you will see queues gathering at petrol stations. Talk of oil embargoes or national strikes sees supermarket shelves being emptied before elevenses… I am not the only one with an imagination.
Apparently, one little change in the genetic make-up of this latest virus out of China could turn it into something more frightening. If people started dropping like flies it would certainly alter the way society goes about its daily business, for a while at least.
If you watched Chris Packham’s alarming programme focussing on out-of-control population levels on BBC recently, you might think there is something inevitable about such a thing hitting the human race one day. It’s a case of the worst of two evils, because the massive growth in world population is just about as scary as some horrible bug.
All of which makes my barricade seem futile. Years ago The Guardian newspaper sent me to meet a man near the small West Country town of Wiveliscombe who’d built his own underground nuclear bunker. He took me down into its dark damp depths and after five minutes I realised that surviving the bomb huddled down there was a far worse hell than being fried instantly by some mighty explosion.
I learned then that there is only one way for an individual to tackle Armageddon, and that is not to think about it. So my immediate aim is to have a good weekend. Have a drink. Have a party. But under no circumstances, to worry.