Piers Paul Read on Town and Country

From Piers Paul Read's Week (Feb 18-22, 2002):

The journey to London's West End to go to the theatre or opera is a costly ordeal. Over the past five years or so, I have rarely remained beyond the interval of any one play -- feeling, perhaps unfairly, that the actors are enjoying the performance more than I was, and yet it was I who was paying them. The opera is prohibitively expensive. Art galleries seem only to exhibit the work of charlatans.

...30 years ago, suffering from the same kind of urbophobia, we sold our house in Hammersmith and moved 200 miles north to live in Yorkshire.... "Oh friends, how boring it is," Chekhov wrote from his estate in the country. And it was. When not writing a book, I could think of nothing to do. I did not farm, hunt, shoot, or fish: The only part of gardening I liked was buying expensive machines which brought the unit price of each dirty lettuce or gnarled carrot to around £5. Evelyn Waugh, equally bored in Somerset, used to go off to the cinema in the little town of Taunton; our local town had no cinema. We had to make do with television. "If I am a physician," Chekhov went on, "I need patients and a hospital; if I am a man of letters, I have to live among people." As time went on, we began to grab at any pretext for going to go to London but, too ashamed to admit to our friends that we had made the expensive 500-mile round trip simply to turn up at a book launch or attend a cocktail party, I would take on time-wasting appointments to bodies such as the Arts Council or the Society of Authors.

In 1979 we let our house in Yorkshire and rented a bizarre villa in the middle of Nice.... "I am cruelly bored here," wrote Checkhov from Nice. I felt the same. But I did not have tuberculosis; I was not obliged to stay; and though I did not know it at the time, we were on our way back to London.