17 March

An Italian friend of mine, Maria Rosaria, has announced that she is coming to stay, which has put the fear of God into me. I have friends in France and Italy who curl their lip at the thought of living in the country. Maria Rosaria, in particular, is an urban creature – a Siamese cat, if I had to allocate her an animal counterpart – and affects a haughty disdain for anything remotely bucolic. She grew up in a tiny, impoverished backwater in the heel of Italy (Puglia), and fled to the city as soon as she was old enough, the countryside to her a memory of boredom and isolation. I’ve been there, and for me, the tourist, it is an enchanting landscape of times whitewashed houses, village squares with dozing dogs and sonorous church bells, of afternoons spent drinking limoncello in the shade. For my friend, it’s just a stifling backwater, representative of a Europe that bears no relation to her life now. For her, urban life is wonderful. Of course, she does live in Verona, which makes a difference, I guess. I was thinking about the contrast between continental and British urban life today, as I did my usual Saturday schlepp around the toyshops of our local market town (and the obligatory quick dash into Waitrose to get ‘a couple of things’ which always seem to cost me around £60.00). Admittedly, our town (a large-ish market town) is hardly Beirut. It has a great deal of charm, which we weren’t blind to when we came to the area. We loved the fact that it had a dated, quirky air, plenty of specialist shops (ironmongers, haberdashers), which are slowly disappearing elsewhere, and seemed very sure of itself as a local farming centre, with livestock markets still being regularly held. Go into town on a Wednesday, and you will still see many pensioners in their finery, the men in their best brown suits, the women in tweed skirts or nylon dresses, tipping their hats or nodding their heads to acquaintances, all making the slow journey into town, often with difficulty, for this important day. It is, I suppose, a British version of the evening passegiata that Italians take daily. The same need to see and be seen, an honouring of an ancient ritual. Annoying, admittedly, if you are trying to negotiate the pavements with toddlers and/or a buggy, or in a hurry to pay for something in a shop, but I do at least try to check the impatience that rises in my throat. There are a still a couple of old men in my village who are proud to boast that they’ve never been to another town; although one did marry a girl from a village several miles north, and had to go to meet the in-laws there. A foreign land, where they built out of brick and flint instead of timber and reed, the shock of which queered him for travel for ever more.

Our town, hugely rich in the middle ages though in gentle decline for several hundred years, does boast a beautiful medieval core and wide open spaces, thanks to the town planning capabilities of the solid burghers of the middle ages. There is something about it that is resistant to change, something fixed and stubborn and rebellious; something very English about its character. It has an inspiring history of independent thinking; the townspeople destroyed it several times in the 14th century, in revolt at the riches of the Abbey, and the barons first met to plot what were the bare bones of the Magna Carta there, just outside the cloisters. The layout of the monk’s herb garden can still be seen, amongst the Abbey ruins. It has Georgian assembly halls and a regency theatre. Not a bad local centre, after all. Yet something does seem to be slowly dying. We laughed at the lack of big-name shops and the 50’s décor (not in an ‘amusingly retro’ way – think brown formica) of the local coffee shops when we first came; a year ago we got our first Starbucks. The flea-pit cinema of the 30’s has been replaced with a multi-screen complex. We used to have old-style trattorias with candles in Chianti bottles; now we have Pizza Express and Strada (although I admit I do frequent those). The voices are changing too; far fewer Suffolk burrs, far more estuary English and posh London. Men are far more likely to be addressed as ‘Mate’ now, instead of the traditional ‘Boy’. I’m not really reactionary; I can see how some of these things might stop you going slowly insane if you’re a teenager (or a mother with small children), like my friend did in her Italian backwater. But pride in our civic spaces seems to be in retreat, unlike in Italy (or at least, what I remember of Italy), where since ancient times they’ve celebrated the concept of urban life, rather than trying to escape it, and where towns are individual.

Maria Rosaria has only been here once before; she used to love visiting me in London, but I fear she only came out of politeness, last time. Not a woman for antique shops or long walks, she seems to waft in on a breath of summer and style. She’s funny and warm and bright and I love her, yet I’d be the first to admit that she is a somewhat high-maintenance. Last time she was here we spent the whole time in Cambridge (our nearest City) in an effort to tire her of the charms of retail therapy. Didn’t work. This time, though, might be different. She is bringing someone else, a new man, who is both an Anglophile and a historian. And she, my demanding career girl, wants a bambino. And they think it might be better for him or her to grow up in the country, enjoying the benefits of a more traditional way of life. I sense a worm on the turn.