Finally Feeling Like I'm a Local in My Home Town

It's taken 20 years, but at last it feels like "the place I'm from", not just where I live

A quant English high street (not my actual home town)

It was a lovely sunny day in August, and my husband and I attended our town’s annual street food market.

We (Keith and I) enjoyed delicious lentil dahl wraps and perused the artisan gifts. We sampled one or =ahem= two of the craft ciders on offer.

Two grown adults dressed as cartoon sheep (that’s the country for you) were giving kids high-fives as they walked around (a real “What the f- ?!” moment) and were probably sweating like pigs (the irony) in the heat of the summer sunshine.

I wanted to pet every dog I saw, being successful about 30% of the time. (I always ask for permission first.) I’d have looked like a loon if I’d asked to pet all of them, so I dialled down my crazy (about dogs) despite my uncontrollable need to Pet. Every. Dog. Ever.

The general atmosphere was relaxed, with locals enjoying an unusually pleasant summer’s day.

Two grown adults dressed as cartoon sheep. Yes, really.

We bumped into our next-door neighbour’s dad and had a chat - we’d previously met him at her wedding, plus Keith works with her and her husband. We also saw her brother who’s another of his work colleagues.

Then our dog’s sitter stopped to say hello while we were having a sit-down and an ice cream (now she also doggy-sits for my mum’s cleaner, who happens to be the sister-in-law of the gardener who attends to the communal gardens where we live).

On the way back we saw another neighbour who used to be my parents’ postman for about 25 years till he retired, and he asked after my parents.

I also waved to one of the other doggy mums I often see in the local park.

By the time we got back, we’d lost count of all the people we’d seen that day that we knew. The benefits of living in a small market town? You get to know people. A lot of people.

In stark contrast, I lived in one particular flat in Battersea, South West London for three years and in all that time, I had NO CLUE who lived next door. That’s despite the doors to our respective flats being adjacent on the same floor in a large Victorian building. We never once crossed paths. Was it one person, a couple, students, older people, boys, girls? I had no idea who lived there. But that was typical of London living, and no one questioned it.

Would I have swapped living that sort of lonely life in a massive city for life in a rural market town where I knew tons of people?

20 years ago: No thanks.

Now: Thank god I left.

All the benefits we discovered of country living

Weirdly (to us), we seem to have fully embraced country life. No one is more surprised than me, the girl who’d always maintained she was a townie through and through.

Maybe it’s partly due to getting older that people move somewhere more rural? (I don’t know if it’s a British thing, but a lot of people move to the countryside and away from city life as they get older, retire, etc.) Maybe it has to do with more people working from home and not needing to be near the city.

Either way, we just… fell out of love with city life. We seem to have a more enriched life in the country with no money than we would in the city with money. (In the city with NO money doesn’t even bear thinking about.) Money that, to be honest, doesn’t really go very far in London anyway.

Here are some examples of things we do (or did) that never would have happened had we stayed in London:

• Attend annual street food markets (you knew that already)

• Watch local sports matches (for free) and attend local fairs

• Watch new movie releases at our small local community venue (a two-minute walk) instead of going to the multiplex 15 miles away

• Buy goods from local shops (that we could get online if we wanted to) because we want to shop locally

• Eat at local cafés and restaurants because they’re within walking distance - and anyway, who wants to drive all the way into the city

• Enjoy the open countryside every single day because it’s literally a five-minute walk from our house

• Submit official objections to local planning applications which would result in us losing green space (one successfully blocked, one awaiting a decision)

• Get a dog because we could afford to buy a house with a garden

Now, I must ‘fess up and explain that all this didn’t happen the minute we moved down to the South West (we moved due to no longer being able to afford London living, plus this is where most of my family now live, but that’s a story for another time). For years, we always had the intention of moving back to London or the South East… we basically felt a little displaced. It seems crazy to us now, but for a long time we thought we never liked living in Devon.

That wasn’t quite the case.

It was actually the town we lived in that we didn’t like. Unlike where we are now, we couldn’t be fussy about where we bought our first home: we had to go where we could afford (it’s known locally as not a particularly pleasant town, hence the cheaper prices). Although it took us 14 years and some encouragement from my mum to move, we eventually moved to a town we loved. Aside from asking Keith to marry me, it was the best decision I ever made in my life.

We bought a new build in a small block of new houses so everyone moved in within the space of a year or so. It became our own little community. It started with us getting to know all the neighbours as each house became occupied; we were able to say hello to each new resident as they moved in till every one of the houses had occupants. Being able to do that was wonderful: country living had become a revelation to us.

We have seven sets of close neighbours and we know all of them - kids and pets too.

The pandemic “settled” us

Less than two years after moving to our new house, we’d already adopted another dog (a rescued greyhound girl) a few months after losing our beloved 14-year-old lurcher Riley. We always said we’d moved in order for him to have a bigger garden and a more spacious home, and we’re so thankful he got to spend a whole year with more space and the countryside on our doorstep.

We were now enjoying all of that with Suki the greyhound.

I can remember exactly when we realised we no longer wanted to be in the South East or London anymore: it was about two weeks into the first lockdown of 2020. Like many others, we were glad to be “stuck” where we were (I know this wasn’t the case for everyone sadly, and many suffered greatly simply due to geography) and it dawned on us one day on a warm, sunny dog walk that “we love it here”.

Brits reading this might remember that we’d had a very wet winter 2019/2020 - some things never change?! - and as soon as Boris announced that first lockdown at the end of March 2020, the sun came out and gave us a mini heatwave for several weeks.

Mother Nature: Staying inside almost permanently, are you? Here’s some fantastic weather for you that you can’t enjoy.

(The irony was not lost on us Brits.)

Basically, the pandemic made us realise we did NOT want to be in London anymore, we had no desire to go back there, and we were glad not to be there for any kind of lockdown situation.

Suddenly we started loving and appreciating everything about where we lived.

And somehow we got to know so many people in a very short space of time.

‘I believe you are in league with the butcher’

~ Holly Golightly, Breakfast at Tiffany’s

I’ve taken my dad to appointments at the local hospital or doctor’s surgery and we’ve bumped into his Admiral Nurse¹ and enjoyed a chat. I’ve been greeted by the “four Spaniels mum” I see on my morning walks at the hospital reception where she works (we now know each other’s first names). My parents’ former postie spotted us at the surgery once and came over for a chat.

I see my 60-something “runner friend” every morning as he runs the same routethat I walk and we always have a catch-up about our health, our town and the countryside and everything in between. He’s a solicitor and sometimes has to cut our chats short because he’s “due in court in an hour”.

Last week I bumped into my mum’s cleaner while she was out walking her dog and I was on my way back from the laundrette (coincidentally I’d just collected the oversized quilted blanket that she’d given to my mum).

Last month our dog’s sitter was outside Tesco with a greyhound she was taking care of and we ended up having a 20-minute chinwag about dogs.

Last year we needed to bury a poor hedgehog we’d sadly found across the road - we borrowed an elderly resident’s spade to do this. His house is right by the nearest “wooded country space” and we say hello if he’s tending his garden when we walk the dog past his house. We took the poor departed hog and some garden trowels but they turned out to be totally inadequate tools for digging a small mammal’s grave (if only the ground had been as saturated with rain as it is currently). Keith went back to the house where we’d seen our man gardening out front and asked to borrow a spade. We’re on first name terms now. Another new friend.

Even my doctor knows me (this would be unheard of in London). Partly because I’ve seen her so often for all my perimenopause symptoms and weird health issues/pains, and partly because I have to attend my parents’ doctor appointments (we have the same GP) with them due to their mobility and cognitive issues. In the early days of living here - and before I had to accompany said parents to their appointments - I had an appointment with her immediately after my parents had come out (a total coincidence) and told her that she’d just seen my mum and dad. She even recognised me at reception once when she was talking to the staff and said hello, asking after them.

Even in the last town we lived in, I never got to see my own doctor once in 14 years of living there. NOT ONCE. Now, my doctor recognises me and knows who I am and who my parents are. It’s almost alien to me.

Lofty aspirations

I now feel like I truly belong here in this town. I even suggested to Keith that he should apply for the job of mayor the next time the position comes up (he says he won’t, feckin boo), but I think he’d be brilliant. It would sound almost comical to say “I’m the mayor” but did you know it’s an actual job with a salary (I didn’t!)?

Oh yeah, this is what I’m envisioning for myself. Get those chains and robes on me STAT.

Maybe I could be mayor? They’d probably only want born-and-bred locals, but should that stop me? After all, once upon a time I never thought that I’d never even know who my next-door neighbour was, let alone amass a throng of local acquaintances. Fast forward 20 years and I’m in cahoots with the local cleaner, the local doctor, the local gardener, the local solicitor, the local postie, the local admiral nurse and the local dog walker. I actually care about where I live and feel part of the community. I like this feeling of belonging.

In fact I just Googled it, and WOULD YOU BELIEVE IT our current mayor has just resigned (I didn’t know that when I wrote the paragraph above).

Of course, I’m now wondering how I’d look in a mayoral robe and chains. Penny Mordaunt at the coronation, eat yer heart out.

P.S. If mayor doesn’t work out for me, I guess there’s always a need for adults dressed as cartoon sheep…

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1. Don’t know if there are equivalents in other countries, but in the UK Admiral Nurses are NHS specialist dementia nurses who will visit you to give practical guidance on accessing services as well as offering emotional support.