21st-Century Yokel. Tom Cox

stretches of countryside in Britain.

      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 minutes earlier when a man had shouted ‘Loose ’orse!’ and a chestnut mare galloped through the crowd, almost trampling us, chased by two huntsmen.

      ‘IT WAS FOOKIN’ SPECTACULAR,’ my dad told everyone now, in the living room. ‘WE ALMOST GOT KILLED. YOU SHOULD HAVE COME. TOM DIDN’T LIKE IT AT ALL. I THOUGHT HE WAS GOING TO THROW HIMSELF IN FRONT OF ONE OF THE HORSES AS A PROTEST FOR A MOMENT, LIKE A SUFFRAGETTE. THEY’RE COMING OVER THE BACK FIELDS BY HERE IN A MINUTE. JO! GET THE CAT IN! HE’S ORANGE. THEY MIGHT MISTAKE HIM FOR A FOX.’

      The conversation moved on, somehow, to owls. I told my cousin Fay about the noisy tawnies who roosted in the trees behind my house, which reminded her of the time that, upon the birth of her son, who is named Hal, a colleague of his father had sent the family a card which said, ‘Congratulations on the birth of your son, Owl!’ We talked also about Granny Pam, Fay’s dad’s mum, who nobody ever seemed to call Pam, always Granny Pam, and who lived in a high-rise flat in an area of Nottingham later to be even better known for gun crime than many other areas of Nottingham which were known for gun crime. I remember Granny Pam as a long skinny grin in a cloud of cigarette smoke, who – despite barely knowing me – always bought me amazing, imaginative Christmas presents, but Fay explained that Pam had a less-well-known vengeful side too, especially when it came to her parking space outside the flats.

      ‘She once got mugged and turned round and punched the mugger in the face with her keys inside her fist.’

      ‘Wow,’ I said.

      ‘Did I tell you about her lipstick?’ said Fay.

      ‘No,’ I said.

      ‘When I was a kid, if ever anyone nicked her parking space, she’d say to me, “Right! Get my lipstick!” Then we’d go outside and, while she put a chain across the space and padlocked the car in, she’d get me to write all over the car using her lipstick.’

      I was keen to find out what Fay had written on the cars in question, but she didn’t get the chance to tell me, as the phone rang at this point. My dad picked it up. ‘HELLO?’ he said. ‘FOOK OFF, YOU BASTARD.’ He put the handset down and turned to us. ‘IT WAS ONE OF THOSE BASTARDS YOU GET SOMETIMES.’

      Nobody was particularly surprised by this, as everyone in the room had known my dad for at least twenty-six years. He was in typically high spirits this festive season, although to be fair the season itself had little bearing on this. He’d got what he saw as the most indulgent bit of Christmas out of the way with typical alacrity on the morning of the day itself, eagerly shaking a bag next to my mum and me as we opened our presents, then packing the wrapping paper into it ready to be recycled. ‘RIGHT!’ he’d said as my mum carefully finished unwrapping the last of the usual huge mound of gifts she’d received from her friends. ‘LET’S ALL GET BACK TO WORK.’ This was standard behaviour on Christmas Day, at the dawn of which he had greeted me not with ‘MERRY CHRISTMAS’ but the bellowed instruction from his upstairs workroom: ‘THERE ARE SOME CRISPS AND MILK IN THE FRIDGE IF YOU WANT ANY!’ Boxing Day or one of the days immediately