Читать книгу Godless in Eden - Fay Weldon - Страница 12

That one used to work, and very well, when husbands had nine-to-five jobs and wives stayed home and looked after the kids. But that’s in the past. Then there was time and energy to work out the logistics of transporting a family, its goods, its bedding, its games and toiletries, to a place some scores of miles away on Friday nights and the reverse process on Sunday evening. Plus guests. And it was lovely, if you were skilled at logistics, that is. Log-fires and cheerful talk and mild drunkenness and happy flirtations and country walks and pink cheeks and a ploughman’s lunch at the pub and no-one worried about drink-and-drive. Oh paradise.

But nine-to-five drifts to eight-to-eight. And Saturday mornings too, and women are working, and the mobile phone and the laptop turns Sundays into Mondays, and the traffic’s worse, and they’ve tarmacked the track and lopped the trees and it’s sensible, but the romance has gone. There’s a strong steel fence where you used to nip under the wire, and the badger set’s been cleared for fear of TB, and what’s that smoke on the horizon – surely not a funeral pyre for the poor dead cows? Or else the Right-to-Roamers have found a footpath through your garden, past your very own back window.

When change comes in the countryside, it’s seldom for the better. And the village store has closed. Okay so you never went in it – if you did they always said, pointedly, ‘Haven’t seen you for a long time’ – so it got embarrassing; but you like it to be there. Say no to the country cottage; it isn’t what it was!