I went to the country and it was lame

I went to the country and it was lame
(A rant by me)

In between complaining about how much the city sucks, how much the people in the city suck, and how much the city sucks for producing people that hate it (the metaphorical equivalent to a spoilt child hating its eternally-doting mother who gently rubs the six year-old’s head whilst it suckles ungratefully at her teat), I do occasionally like to lapse into the self-induced trance of imagining myself frolicking about in the wonderfully free and ethnically homogeneous countryside.
Sadly, after a mere 3 days of “the great outdoors”, the best part of which I spent inside watching reruns of the Jeremy Kyle show and eating snackfood, I now realise that that dream was about as sugar-coated as a stick of rock from a seaside vendor and more biased than Judge Hitler towards a Jewish rape victim. They say that you never truly appreciate what you have until you lose it. I can certainly verify the truth in the statement, and never have I been so happy to set foot back into that great, polluted, ethnic melting pot that is London.
Having been born and bred in the city gives the advantage of, even though being somewhat of an indoorsy, social B-list, slightly-overweight (SPAKE THE BMI CALCULATOR) kind of guy, a lot of lessons in life. For example, I know that asking a group of hooded black people for directions in the middle of Brixton on a Friday night is not a good idea. I also now know that the only valuable roles white people play in society these days are those of politics and teaching, and that virtually any other role in society can (and usually is) filled by one of the many minorities that make up the cogs in this giant cuckoo clock.
Alternatively, the only lesson the country has taught me is that the bad smell of a place is directly proportional to the price of the nearby merchandise. Imagine that after an evening of eating stale kebabs and downing unneeded litres of coffee, you relieve yourself in the loo. After doing your business and leaving the bathroom (with the door roughly 1/3 of the way ajar, naturally) you decide to return approximately two and a half minutes later, perhaps to brush your teeth or because you forgot the packet of condoms on the side. The smell you’re greeted with then is basically the constant, natural smell of anywhere you happen to go in the countryside. The only way to escape it is to either carry a gasmask or stay inside; not that it really matters though, seeing as your nostrils will soon assimilate themselves to what people always tell me is the great country air but which smells more like parfum de mon derrière. If you’re new in the town, such as I was, it can be a handy excuse to dive into a local shop and spend some money.
My first taste of les magasins de campagne was a local Costcutter specialising in alcohol, tabloids, overpriced eggs and pretty much anything else the local wildlife need to satisfy their urges in between breeding and harvesting tomatoes. To be fair, the ironically dark-skinned couple operating the front desk were refreshingly friendly and I could practically smell the charisma seeping out from the pores of their jolly, ‘half-adapted-to-the-English-weather’ bodies.
Upon reaching the front of the queue, I began mentally comparing each of the prices of what lay in my basket as they rang up on the cashier’s till to those back at my own local corner shop. I’m not sure whether this is purely a Costcutter dealio (since I’m too awesome to shop there), but practically everything was 10-20p dearer than it would have been back home. That may sound a bit miser-ish, but in essence that would mean that for every 100 items I bought, I would be paying an average of £10-£20 more. Money that would be better spent on video games, more consumable junk or cheap whores. Even then, that difference in price seems to be the benchmark for items actually being eligible for the shelf; if you want fresh eggs or fresh milk or fresh cheese or fresh local cider or fresh bubblegum, you’re looking to add on a considerable amount for each one. I can understand why you would be expected to pay slightly more for those godly, life-prolonging FRESH items, but there’s really not a lot of difference between those and my standard industrial-quality Morrisons eggs that warrant a £1 country surcharge for their life-altering, metabolic properties.
While we’re on the subject of the town itself, I would also like to point out the complete and utter lack of anything to do there. The “town centre” lives up to its name in the same way that a deranged psychopath jamming blunt rocks into your face while a group of X-Factor rejects sing “Hush little baby, don’t you cry” lives up to the expectations of “a good time”. I can actually list the entire amount of establishments alongside the main road on my fingers, and still have enough left over to comfortably masturbate with. There’s the aforementioned Costcutter, a pub, a spa, a gift shop/tea room, a Chinese takeaway, a restaurant and an estate agents, leaving with me three fingers to have a whale of a time with. To summarise: it is boring. Sure, you can drive 5 miles to the nearest town to satisfy yourself with the basic commodity of round-the-clock entertainment like us spoilt, attention-craven city-slickers have become accustomed to, but that defeats the purpose of the “convenience” the country life is supposed to give you in exchange for living within close proximity of herds of passive (yet smelly) animals and acres of monotonous crop fields. I mean, you could always engage in some of the more local activities like watching sheep, vivacious gardening, or joining the local cult which captures and eats passing travellers, but I’m just not feeling the basic level of familiarity that I expect to feel wherever I go in the British Isles. If I were planning to move to a remote village in India or an oil rig off the coast of Sibera, then yes, I would expect some sort of drastic cultural shock, but that is not to be expected when I’m only spending 3 days in a hamlet barely 60 miles from my gardenless, shitty home.
In fact, the highlight of my stay was a visit to the “Rare Breed Centre”, a delightful farm/animal hospice which showcases uncommon and unexotic animals on one side, whilst serving burger buns and hot dogs on the other. One tent had a whole two rows of pregnant sheep who were constantly vibrating like they were funking to the beat of the Bloodhound Gang’s “Uhn Tiss Uhn Tiss Uhn Tiss” at a really lame sheep rave. I actually got to see a confused and bleary-eyed lamb get its leg caught on the afterbirth which was still attached to the mother ewe, while it bleated and people nearby told me how cute it was.
The cows only smelt marginally better, and as for the pigs...Well, they just suck really. I’d once heard a rumour that despite the popular opinion of pigs being disgusting, dirty animals (thanks, Judaism), they were actually some of the cleanest animals. I’m still not entirely sure whether that’s true or not, but I can tell you that they stank. Really bad. If you can picture falling down a sewer manhole and landing in a thick, creamy slurry of watered-down faeces gushing past your knees, only to stoop down and gulp a few mouthfuls while savouring every bit of undigested corn that brushes past your trachea, then you’re probably making the exact same face as I did while passing the pig pens.
Oh, and remember my initial hypothesis about the bad smell of a place being directly proportional to the price of the nearby merchandise (while writing this, I’ve decided to call it Farmer’s Law)? Well all I can say is wow. The gift shop presented itself with more overpriced and completely useless souvenirs than the whole of Brighton, Blackpool, Portsmouth and Spain. I saw key fobs of the animals I had just spent the morning trying to avoid, looking like they’d been made by a team of 9 year-olds in a factory somewhere in the Philippines, with a price tag pleading for the meagre sum of £2.50. The thing is, I wouldn’t actually mind spending £2.50 on something useless if it were for charity or if it actually looked good. These tourist-magnets just looked horrible and badly-made, and I knew that the money was only going to line the pockets of that rich, pot-bellied, moustached, top hat-wearing fucker who owns the place; probably laughing at us in his office his concubine fans his robust carcass and dances exotically for him. The whole experience was comparable to sticking your head up a fat man’s rectum and then being asked to pay for the experience. 
My only respite was the amazing food I got to eat every night – but that’s only due to the “local” (a dialectal term meaning “somewhere between 5 and 25 miles away” in English) Tesco that my sister had the sense and goodwill to shop at before we came down. I really don’t know how these people survive with what they have, especially who don’t drive and are limited solely to the village itself. Perhaps they make their own entertainment by cracking a hammer against their heads (which, in retrospect, would explain a lot of things), but that sort of thing really isn’t for me.
I think next time I’ll just hop on a lorry, travel to India, don a miniskirt, blonde wig and enough make up for 5 Marilyn Monroes and work as a transsexual prostitute in the backstreets of Goa because at least that way they’ll be paying me to get royally butt-fucked against a backdrop of bad smells and people I’d rather not be around.