downsizing?

are you ready for the country…..because its time to go?
neil young

remember downsizing? time was all you had to do was get on the ladder, get on at work, tuck a bit back for a rain day, enjoy the urban life, before one day, it creeps up on you….youre not having fun anymore, the worlds a compromise….you remember holidays in the lakes as a kid, making jam with your gran, the stolen valentines weekend in the country….thats when you were happy….why cant it be like that all the time?

and so it goes….country life stops being just the toilet read at the inlaws…..your jokes about ‘that’ place with all ‘that’ land to farm a little more tantilisingly spoken….but its almost a straight swap for our semi?

you look, you dream and one of you bites, and you go and see one, two…then you see it, the place, and in a few short months youve swapped your town life for the rural idyll….youve downsized

a stereotype, yet thats how it was for many, but things have changed….prices out here in the sticks arent the snip they once were, land values continue to soar, and unless youve a small fortune you have pretty much no chance of finding a place with land to straight swap for your city pad…..now, in a ridiculous irony, you have to pay big time for the privilege of entering an industry likely to reward you with a miserable income

all the escape to the country, river cottage, jimmys farm programmes have tapped into so many peoples need for some kind of reconnection with their food and their countryside…..yet so few can make the leap now, just check the river cottage forum and youll find the enthused, the skilled, the dreamers all wanting their piece of the countryside on which to let their imaginations go…..but its not an option for most

around the country the pattern continues….local authorities sell off our allotments to developers, small parcels of land near our towns and villages are snapped up by planning permission prospectors, once affordable fields now sell for top dollar as paddocks…..outpriced in a soaring market theres nowhere for many to start smallholding, simply grow their own, or for imaginative minds to run wild

so no more downsizing, for most the reality is upsizing….selling up and taking on larger mortgages, and squeezing regular work with the dream, if youre one of the lucky ones

theres a place I can get to
where I’m safe
from the city blues
and its green
and its quiet
only trouble was
i had to buy it stephen stills, johnnys garden