SWAPPING urban life for the slow pace of the country? Worried that the bracing scent of fresh manure will make you right-wing? Here’s how to avoid it:
Choose your pub carefully
You used to spend many happy hours with like-minded liberals in your local gastropub. In your new homestead, once pubs are open you can choose between nests of gin-blossomed colonels, self-made tax-hating entrepreneurs and people determined that London should be destroyed, having once visited Woking.
Build a bunker
In the countryside people drop round unexpectedly, but being caught perusing the Guardian or watching BBC news without scowling is social death. A hidden bunker will allow you to indulge in proscribed liberal media without the entire county finding out and subjecting you to an ongoing campaign of pointing and tutting.
Avoid the Women’s Institute
It sounds like harmless jam-making and nude calendars. In reality it’s a far-right gathering more extreme than the Nazis and the Ku-Klux Klan. Within three visits you’ll be sewing fascist flags, plotting the execution of everyone under 25 and hearing a delightful talk from a sweet old lady who turns out to be Ilsa, she-wolf of the SS.
Homeschool your kids
When schools return be careful. Chats with mums at the school gates will focus on migrants taking all the fruit-picking jobs they would never let their kids do, and lessons will cover maths, English and the benefits of a one-party state. Homeschooling is safer.
Don’t go dogging
An illicit quickie in the passenger footwell of some stranger’s car by the A44 might sound tempting. But rural dogging is in fact a depressingly sordid world full of ruddy-faced middle-aged men and subordinate women, a lot like a meeting of the 1922 Committee.
