Reasons Not to Move to the Country - Tapa dura

How often have you found yourself talking wistfully with friends of relocating to the country, as if it will offer a magical answer to everything wrong with city living - fresher air, better schools, an altogether less stressful, more wholesome existence? Beware! Most of these assumptions are based on memories of blissful weekends spent in a round of cream teas and blazing log fires...You know that Aga you coveted? It will soon reveal itself to be a living, breathing devil-spawn waging a personal vendetta against you. And that fantasy about becoming a self-sufficient, trug-toting son of the soil? If you've got the patience to make it through to the end of the baffling seed packet instructions, you'll be doing well. As for those children - do they spend all their time outside, fishing with jam-jars on string? Do they hell; they're slumped indoors watching telly, cursing the day they were wrenched away from their friends in town...

Judy Rumbold was born in 1960. She has written for the Sunday Times, Evening Standard, Mail on Sunday, Observer and Guardian, and is currently a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph. Six years ago, she moved from London to Suffolk, where she lives with her husband and two children.