There is part of me that wonders if it’s greedy to complain about these estates. Most other places in Britain are full of concrete, so why shouldn’t this one be too? A lot of people in the centre of the country would auction a close member of their family to be surrounded by countryside a quarter as unspoilt as this. But I know that’s the wrong way to look at it. You can’t evaluate a pushbike using the rules of a tank. We need some recognisable places to still be recognisable places, particularly at a time when most places no longer are. There’s nothing about these developments that smacks of necessity; they’re what you might call large uninspired expensive boxes if ‘boxes’ didn’t imply something more brutalist and original. This isn’t a weasel killing a rabbit or a hen to save its family from starving. One estate calls itself Origins, presumably to commemorate the origins of stoats, deer and owls losing their homes. Another far less imaginative one looked like it had reached its unsurpassable apex of blandness then decided to outdo itself by building the blandest wall known to man in a place where a wall did not need to be built. There’s no excuse for a terrible wall. Walls can be great, even those erected on a budget – miniature stone or brick galaxies – but you could stare at this one for hours and gain no extra vision. It’s just a wall. It will only become slightly interesting if nature kicks seven shades of shit out of it.
Devon is a little culturally isolated from the rest of the country, and there’s not a lot of employment to be had here; the upside of that has always been that it’s ruggedly beautiful and very green. But now it’s starting to look like going down to the woods here could become like going down to the woods in most other places: you’ll be in for a big surprise, which is that the woods aren’t there any more and have been replaced with an identikit housing estate called The Woods. The building and naming of these places work on the same logic of a large powerful man killing a defenceless chicken then renaming himself The Chicken afterwards. I’ve seen the plans, the red marks scattered on a council OS map like plague pustules, and this is only the beginning. The developers are selling a rural dream while bludgeoning the dream itself – not to mention the local infrastructure – as they do so. No doubt there’ll be a break at some point, maybe in a year or so. All the roadworks will be gone, and there’ll be a brief period of respite until the next lot of protected land is sold off to make rich people richer and the next, and the next, until finally almost all the magic will have been sucked away, and for miles around dawn in the countryside will be signified by little more than the sound of people waking up and starting some car engines where badgers and weasels used to live.
2
WOFFAL
A few of us were sitting around having a chat in my mum and dad’s living room in Nottinghamshire: me, my aunt Mal and uncle Chris, my mum and dad and my cousin Fay. My dad, who was wearing Chris’s jacket, having stolen it from a coat peg in the hall when Chris wasn’t looking, was telling everyone about the area’s annual festive hunt, which was taking place in the fields to the rear of the house. An hour previously, accompanied by a slightly reluctant me, he’d driven three villages east to watch the hunt begin in weather that made your teeth hurt.
‘COME ON! GET IN THE CAR, YOU BIG TWAZZOCK,’ he’d said. ‘I KNOW YOU HATE IT AND I DON’T LIKE WHAT THEY USED TO DO EITHER, BUT THEY HUNT A MAN IN A FOX SUIT NOW, NOT A FOX, AND IT’S REALLY SPECTACULAR WHEN THEY ALL COME OVER THE HILL, JUMPING THE HEDGES.’
‘But it’s the same people who did hunt foxes, before it was banned?’ I asked.
‘NO,’ said my dad. ‘THIS LOT ARE ALL FROM SOCIALIST WORKER MAGAZINE.’
My feeling about fox hunting is this: if you do it, I don’t want to be anywhere near you, let alone in a situation where I might have to speak to you. Recently the prime minister, David Cameron, had been edging worryingly around the subject of re-legalising it, making noises about some kind of compromise which he described as a ‘middle way’. To my mind the only acceptable middle way for fox hunting would be if the foxes were replaced with hungry wolves, hounds were banned and each hunter was forced to hunt alone with his hands tied behind his back. But I make my living from writing about the countryside, which I know means I should take an interest in all sides of it, dark and light. There was, on the surface of things, a mixture of the two here. On the one hand, a man in a furry bright-orange suit, capering around, watched by giggling children. On the other, the parents of these children, dressed in black, some in veils, all in big hats, celebrating the tradition of ripping a wild animal apart for fun. They looked like the guests at Death’s wedding.
I was glad I’d gone with my dad: it took me far out of the arguably oversafe bubble of animal lovers I normally spend time with. Also, the beginning was as explosive as he had promised, a thunder of hooves that reverberated across a dozen fields or more. Even more explosive was the moment five
