Last week, I was late to meet a client at the rural barn that serves as the headquarters of my new antiques business in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds, but as the dog and I walked out the cottage door to the car, the heavens opened. . .
Within minutes, there were streams of water running down the track to the main road, and the rain was so heavy that I slowed to 30 mph.
Not wanting to disappoint my client, I continued driving, fording a newly created stream and swerving around flooded shoulders as hail pounded the windshield.
The trip was terrifying, but it wasn’t until my client left that I realized what a stupid thing I had done.
When I left London for the Cotswolds in 2020, I really thought I knew what I was getting into, writes Sasha Wilkins.
If I had broken down on the winding single track lanes or the car had gotten stuck in the flood, I wouldn’t have had a single friend nearby to ask for help.
Sitting in the barn, I began to cry as I thought: I felt more alone than ever. But this was just the latest reminder that living alone in the English countryside is not for the faint-hearted.
When I left London for the Cotswolds in 2020, I really thought I knew what I was getting into. I grew up in Kent, so the difference between slurry and silage is no mystery to me; I can also drive a tractor.
I’ve always known that smiling charmingly in a hay field in a long floral dress in a summer heat wave, or staring into the distance at an imaginary hot vet for Instagram, is a lot different than getting out of a car in a corral in February in horizontal sleet.
But I never ever thought I could feel alone, or how much that would affect me.
I like peace and quiet, so choosing to live alone in a cabin on a rural estate didn’t seem like a bad idea. But that delicious solitude also means that I never see my neighbors, who are outside all day driving farm machinery or exercising horses.
There are no dog walking trails which means no opportunity to meet the locals. As any country dweller knows, dog walking is often the glue that holds communities together.
But my biggest mistake was not taking into account how much gas it takes to get out of the cabin and run even the most basic errands. My nearest city is only seven miles away, but I don’t have the time or money to make that commute, so it’s easy to go three or four days without any in-person interaction.
I thought working from home as a writer wouldn’t be that different from working from home in North London, and really, how hard could it be to find a new social circle when I already knew friends of friends in the area?
Frankly, I was fooling myself. I never could have predicted how isolated I would be.
In Camden, despite being a natural introvert who had lived alone for years, she had a thriving professional network, with a strong circle of close friends whom she saw frequently.
I like peace and quiet, so choosing to live alone in a cabin didn’t seem like a bad idea, writes Sasha Wilkins. Pictured: The Cotswold village of Castle Combe
Back then, I took my daily interactions with other people for granted, whether it was going out at lunchtime for a sandwich, chatting by the garden fence, or strolling through the park in the middle of the afternoon. That simply does not and cannot happen here.
I knew that not having children would mean missing out on those vital school-to-school connections that ease the path of so many rural immigrants, but it never occurred to me that it would be so difficult to make close, like-minded friends.
Geography alone means that everyone is much more spread out. In London, if you throw a cookie, you hit a creative. Throw a cookie here and you’ll hit a squirrel.
It turns out that the problem is not just the fact of not having children. It soon became apparent that being single and in your forties is a big red flag for some women. It is very difficult to build any kind of meaningful friendship if one is allowed to be part of only a small, external fraction of someone’s life.
A source of personal amusement since moving here has been watching the mental and vocal gymnastics other women perform to avoid inviting me into their homes.
Casual coffees, pub lunches and dog walks are on offer, but the women I know would rather cut off their hands than entertain me in the presence of their husbands. While I admire your collective belief that the men in your lives are irresistible, I’m here to tell you that middle-aged, down-at-heel husbands with a wandering eye are not my problem.
Traditional solutions to loneliness often involve playing sports, taking classes or, shudder, online dating. But my idea of sport is running towards a bus. I have no desire to learn new skills when I don’t practice the ones I already have, and the suggestion of dating assumes that I’m actively looking for a partner.
Having dipped a virtual toe into the microscopically small dating pool available around here, I can confirm that permanent celibacy seems a more attractive option.
There’s also the added horror of running into a previous date at the local gas station, pub or farm shop, when all you (or they) want to do is erase the date from memory, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind style. .
We’re often told that we’re in the midst of a loneliness epidemic, and while I’ve always understood that it’s just as easy to feel lonely in a city as it is in the countryside, it’s become abundantly clear that there’s something particularly grim about it. rural loneliness.
Whether you are alone by circumstance or career, health problems or caring responsibilities, it sometimes seems like the countryside is full of isolated people. You only have to listen to Radio One to hear the countless farmers calling from their tractors as they plow the fields, all of them evidently desperate for human connection.
The only thing that saved my sanity was starting an online antiques business a year after moving here.
Shortly after, I rented that barn to store my stock and meet clients by appointment. Without this professional reason to leave home, I really don’t know if I could survive living here.
And there is one small ray of light: I can report that the yoga at the town hall, which, as a non-flexible person, I signed up for with extreme reluctance to fill the long, lonely winter afternoons, has turned out to be wonderful.
So maybe there’s still hope for me to make some connections while working on my downward dog.