Leaving the city behind

The day we moved into our farmhouse I promised myself I would never say anything nasty about anyone I met in this, our new rural life. The country is simply too small for spite and malice, particularly the corner of country we've chosen, which happens to be an island with a radius of just 72 miles: small enough for spite and malice to whizz right round it and boomerang back to you in about 24 hours.

In an unguarded moment recently I let slip: "Jim? I can't stand him," and before I could clap my hand over my mouth I heard the bush telegraph begin to hum.

I've felt less spiteful and malicious anyway, since leaving London. Like the thousands of other middle-class families fleeing the capital's noise, litter and congested traffic, I find the country makes me better-tempered.

I can't remember now what finally persuaded us to leave. Was it that my then 11-year-old and two of his friends were terrorised by local youths yards from our house? That the same son was knocked off his bike by a lorry the first time he was allowed to cycle home from school alone? Or that the police patrolled the gates of his south-London independent school at going home time to ensure the pupils didn't get robbed or beaten up?

Looking back, I marvel at the fact we accepted - almost expected - these things to happen. Life is simply not that scary on the Isle of Wight.

Of course, living here has disadvantages. Only now do I understand what people value in the anonymity of London. Three weeks after we arrived an aunt wrote to us. In her spidery writing she addressed the envelope to me but neglected to mention the house, the postcode or the correct name of the road we live on. The letter was delivered by a beaming postman the day after it was sent.

I was similarly disconcerted a few days later while showing off in the supermarket car park. Competing with my son to click my heels higher in the air than he could, I was brought to an abrupt and undignified halt when I landed on the feet of his headmaster. You are never more than a few yards, or fields, from someone you know.

This being the case, it is a matter of some triumph if you can produce a supper party guest who is unknown to the rest of the assembly.

I have managed to produce a few strangers in the form of visiting friends and relations but am now quite happily resigned to a round of evenings where everyone knows everyone else.

What bothers me - given that everyone also knows what everyone else is doing and that I'm anxious not to offend - is how to control the guest list.

"I gather you're seeing the soandsos on Friday," my dogwalking friend will say as we march along the beach, and I immediately invite her, too, lest her feelings should be hurt. The same thing happens in the queue at the chemist and so it goes on until, as Friday dawns, I wonder how I am possibly going to find chairs for 20 people.

These 20 people will be much more disparate than they would be in the city. In my experience, Londoners like their friends fairly uniform: up to five years older or younger than themselves, preferably with matching children, a similar income and occupation and a house on the same side of the river.

But at one recent party the guests numbered a farmer, a brewer, a bank manager, a design consultant and the island's family planning nurse, and their age range - like that of their absent children - spanned at least twoanda-half decades.

The best thing about this is that, with everyone at different stages, schools - always a top London topic - don't dominate the conversation. Nor do property prices as country folk see their houses as places to live in rather than investments.

Perhaps because I'm not forever being drawn into those competitive, neurotic school conversations, I've lost the habit of filling my sons' leisure hours to bursting point. Instead of a timetable detailing extra-curricular activities, I have a whistle, kept by the back door and blown loud and long when I want them to come in for a meal.

Their new-found freedom has resulted in us all shouting at each other a great deal less, but it leaves me at a loss when friends from London ring for a progress report. My happy burblings about ruddy cheeks and washboard stomachs are met with concerned enquiries: "The cricket team? The choir?"

In fact, it has proved easier to take the child out of London than it is to take London out of the child.

My boys, now aged 12 and 10, have one dilapidated car and a motorbike apiece on which to bomb about the surrounding fields; they have an airgun to terrorise the pigeons, endless barns to play in and a ping-pong table should the weather drive them indoors.

But my youngest flatly refuses to invite any of his friends here because "there's nothing to do", which, translated out of boyspeak, means "we haven't got a PS2".

Not that he wants a PS2 - they both made that clear last Christmas - but he's sure it's what his friends will expect.

What they are more likely to find, given the open-door policy that I delight in here, is the neighbours' chickens clucking round my kitchen or their incontinent sheepdog, or even on occasion their (continent, thankfully) Shetland pony.

The rats are another matter; if I don't leave the door open for them they just eat through it. Last winter they bedded down under my kitchen cupboards.

"I smell death," said the island's chief poisoner on his second visit as he lay prone on the kitchen floor in the exact spot to which our terrier had been glued, quivering, for a week. He didn't offer to disinter the corpses, I suspect because I failed to offer him a cup of tea.

In London, what with parking being impossible, repair men charging £90 call-out fees and any stranger calling at your door an object of suspicion, I had rather forgotten about doling out refreshments.

But here a mug of Tetley's and a chat is the least that is expected and, given that our last repair bill (for a 10-year-old washing machine) was £30 for parts and labour, I don't mind parting with the odd digestive biscuit, too.

Nine months down the line, people still ask if I miss London, and I do miss the life I would like to have led there: living in a pastel-painted house in Primrose Hill with regular trips to theatres, art galleries and expensive restaurants.

But in reality I lived in the back end of Balham and spent most of my time in a traffic jam (next to people who could travel from calm to blind rage in 0.5 seconds) between the school, the supermarket and Clapham Common, where I fought for space to exercise my children and my dog between hordes of football-playing Aussies.

Now, when I wake up in the morning and glimpse the sea from my bedroom window, I feel as if I've found myself in heaven.