A Different Life in Two Hours

My in-laws live in the north of England, in Yorkshire, known for its haunted moors and 'celebs' like the Yorkshire Ripper. Ha ha, just kidding, B & M.

It always strikes me how different that part of the country is from where we are.

We went there on the train, because for us city folk, a car is a luxury item that you buy if you want to subject yourself to more stealth taxes and move slowly enough on the road during the rush hour that mothers pushing prams and three-legged dogs overtake you. Here, a car depreciates to half its value by the end of its first year. With insurance, fuel hikes, maintenance and others, it all adds up to quite a lot before you even release the hand brake. And if you are one of the unfortunate few who owns a 4x4 to ferry your kids around, pretty soon it will cost you $50 to drive into the infamous area of central London called “Congestion Charging Zone”. That’s $50 – a day!

In Yorkshire, you pretty much need a car to get around. A 30- to 45-minute drive to the town or city is rather normal. Public transport isn’t all that good – buses on some routes run once every hour. One train I know passes by a certain station just twice a day - that's once in each direction. Missed the train? How about ... tomorrow?

But I’m digressing.

On the way back on the train, I spent much of the two hours staring out the window. (Mrs Pig didn’t mind, as her magazine told her things such as the latest fashion and celeb gossip – why does Madonna have three kids by three different fathers?) At the start as the train sped along you would mainly see a landscape of field after field, divided by hedgerows, littered by houses. Sometimes you saw yellow fields – I’m not sure what they are (grapeseed?), but it was interesting to see patches of yellow in the distance.



Often from the train you could see people fishing in ponds or playing golf. Sometimes the train made its way just thirty-feet behind people’s backyards. I wondered why people would want to live so close to a train track, to have trains thundering past your homes during the day and night. I saw this family of four waving at the train as it passed, and I thought maybe for them, in their house in the middle of nowhere, they liked being this close to civilization. In the city you wouldn’t want to be that close to a train station. Too much noise, too many people.

Stevenage was a bit of a surprise. Up to that point the landscape was pretty much fields and ponds and a few houses here and there and suddenly at that all changed – a big complex of shops and shopping centres around the station. It didn’t creep up on you, it just suddenly plonked itself in the middle of nowhere. If you scroll over the photo (set it to 1:50,000) you can see how fields on the left of the track exist side by side with a more developed landscape on the right.

From that point southwards until the end of the ride we could gradually see more buildings by the sides of the track – warehouses, offices and backyards. It was almost like a different world when we disembarked. It’s funny – where the in-laws live, there are so few people that you pay a lot more attention and courtesy to them, yet two hours later, in the middle of a big city, everyone can’t be bothered about whatever the next person’s doing. Everyone tries to go inwards within themselves; ipods, mobile phone texting, newspapers.

All these things about city folk and country folk and the differences in lifestyles were clearly illustrated over the journey and it struck me how differently people separated by two hours live.

We like where we are and wouldn't move to the country - not in the immediate future anyway - even though you could buy a whole house (or two!) for the price of a city matchbox. Still, for now, two minutes down the road is good enough.

We still haven't worked out how to get the sofa past the front door and up the stairs.

Where did I put that chainsaw?