I've never liked the term "townie", or anything else that suggests or reinforces a rift between those who live in and outside cities. We have more in common than most realise, a need for affordable housing, jobs, better public transport and broadband access. Poverty exists outside as well as in cities. From personal experience I can assure you that the word "bucolic" plays no part in the real life of most farmers and rural workers. Getting up every day of the week to round up cows in the dark at 4am for milking is hard enough when you're well but if you're not and there's no one else to do it - tough. I should point out that in my case the walk to the milking parlour was a mile each way and we had to steer them away from the bank manager's roses (there was a real sense of fear that he might not extend loans). When it came to foxes the problem was the blokes in pink jackets who rode to hounds. I've seen the damage caused by them in a space of a few seconds to a field that my then partner had spent hours preparing for sowing, mind numbing hours spent going round and round that damned field in a tractor. The townie/countryman argument falls apart when you know that many of those "hunters" were town dwellers who could afford to keep horses and the farmer was a member of the League Against Cruel Sports.
Albertina McNeill ● 4444d