OMG, how annoying is the English countryside? I may command spectacular uninterrupted views over a particularly beautiful, luscious, forested estuary, but it's not all plain sailing, I can tell you...
Last night I took one, last, lingering look at the clouds scudding hurriedly across the bright, full moon, and then ran for my life. I have always had an irrational fear of werewolves. But then I've never met one. I had a pretty well-developed fear of sharks, too, until I met some, and they turned out to be lovely. Werewolves on the other hand, are a big no. And in the same way that as a child I was convinced that streamlined bringers of death and dismemberment stalked me whenever I was in the water, I cannot shake the idea that clouds-flitting-moon action means the imminent sudden appearance of a slavering, howling menace with an unholy amount of pointy teeth, propelled by a musclature that would have any self-respecting leopard trotting away to the gym with its tail firmly between its legs.
And people wonder why I hate camping...
Anyway, werewolves are not the problem. I can deal with them by remaining in large groups of (preferably) drunk people, and whenever I am separated from the pack moving very quickly in a sort of alert crouch. And then barricading myself in, somewhere very robust with plate glass windows. Because they can jump through ordinary windows. Anyway werewolves are not the problem with the countryside. Birds are. Whoever named it the "dawn chorus" either slept right through it, or was very stoned. "Deafening cacophony" is what I called it at 0430 this morning (expletives deleted). I thought I had gone to sleep in England and woken up (almost immediately, I might add) in Papua New Guinea! But, when I peered outside, the creeping light revealed nothing brightly coloured, interesting or edible enough to imply a geographical anomaly. In fact English birds are all camouflaged to look as boring as possible, probably to avoid the attention of werewolves. It also sounds as though they too gather together in large drunken mobs, but wait for the world to go to sleep before bursting into something almost, but not entirely, unlike song.
Eventually I became used to constant noise and drifted back into a fitful sleep, only to be precipitously awoken again, I don't know whether by what sounded like incoming gunfire or by actually banging my head on the ceiling (well, a surfboard, actually) which turned out on closer inspection to be a milk float. The noise did, not the surfboard. Duh. Now when I was an urchin milk floats were electric, and hence spookily quiet, so it seems ironic to me that in these days of people trying to heat up the world and cause motorway congestion by driving electric or hybrid cars, the milkman has gone out and purchased something that sounds as if it's powered by a whole row of marine diesels, or someone firing an Uzi on auto under a mattress. It's probably unacceptable everywhere outside of mainland China, and especially so right next to my head at five-thirty in the morning.
Now that I have resolved to have an early night in lieu of the sleep deficit unfairly imposed by these countryside irritations, guess what? The farmer is deliberately goading his cows into a bellowing frenzy, by (it sounds like) racing about in a tractor doing something entirely pointless in the gathering dark. The tractor appears to have a similar power-plant to the milk float, but infinitely more powerful and maybe equipped with a straight-through exhaust or possibly carbon cans and a cherry bomb. The cows are just annoying. Go inside, mate. Have a beer. It's the bloody night time, shut the f*ck up.