Recovery: Part One
I am a big fan of agricultural words – some of my favourites are soil, clay, quarter, plough, arable. The reason I love them is that I grew up in a city and have only ever lived in cities, and as such have an obnoxiously romanticised view of the countryside. Years ago I was driving through Norfolk with my ex, when the most repulsive smell suddenly filled the car, not at all like the rich sweetness of new manure or freshly turned-over earth that I expected to find as soon as we came off the motorway. I closed the windows and asked what it was. My ex, who had grown up near there, said it was what chicken sheds smell like, and there was constant tension between locals who wanted as much land as possible given over to chicken sheds because they created jobs, and second-homers who held a similar theme park idea of rural life to me. One of the owners of those chicken sheds I believe was later found to be employing and underpaying a large number of immigrant labourers, so it turned out I wasn’t the only one who entertained fantasies about life in the country.
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