MAYBE it’s the idea of a Garden of Eden paradise that draws so many of us to hanker after a life in the country.

Perhaps, too, it’s a defence mechanism against 21st century stress to aspire to abandon the rat-race, take your wife and two plus two children, buy a chicken and a goat and make your own soap in rural basic-land.

There are many approaches. There are the well-heeled, who spot the potential of a sagging, sprawling barn conversion, stuff it with hi-tech 21st century gizmos, ban ‘disturbing’ rural sounds such as the echo of bat and ball from the neighbouring cricket ground, take out injunctions against the early-crowing rooster and lop off the branches of any errant tree that dares to shade the gin and tonic sunshine from their jacuzzi.

Then there are the idealists who will quite literally step back in history and resolutely attempt to milk the family cow by hand, insist that the children don’t get to calling the family chickens and animals by pet names so as to prevent traumas when parts of them end up on the dinner plate, and are genuinely prepared for hard work, cold, sore hands and no TV.

The trouble is that such a vision harks back to days when country matters were static and idealised. It’s not surprising that the media promote this idyll, reinforcing it with the slow pace of soaps like ‘The Archers’, ‘Heartbeat’ and ‘All Creatures Great and Small’, which are no more real than the contemporary serial urban violence in EastEnders and Coronation Street.

But however the incomers try to merge, there is an inevitable clash of cultures. From the start, they see the countryside through the window, where you don’t kill animals, and cows don’t smell. They probably haven’t even considered that the reason they’re able to buy ‘desirable’ properties is because the folk who used to live there have been driven out, either because they were unable to make a living, or found themselves deprived of the services most urban dwellers take for granted. It’s a sad fact, but 32% of rural dwellers live in poverty. Nowadays, getting away to the country doesn’t always quite mean what it says.

Urban sprawl and the ease of commuting has taken its toll on once isolated, interdependent communities. And there’s the anathema of the absentee tenants who have snapped up every buyable dwelling in the area to use as weekend or holiday homes, leaving the locals, who would normally preserve the ‘country’ ways and traditions that make living there desirable, dispossessed, resentful and obdurate.

Flying over rural France, you’d be forgiven for believing that there is stacks of room. Same population as the UK and three times the land space, but the underlying problems are all the same. Only there, you don’t have to wait 12 years for ‘quallies’, so the effect of the foreign land grab has been the more acute.

In an island such as ours, it all gets blurred. Those living more than half a mile from the Central Market might consider themselves rural, but the way we’re going, it won’t be long before we’re all rezoned and built-up, and the glimpse of even the shadow of a tree at the bottom of our garden will be little more than an illusion. In my youth, the ‘country’ was anywhere north of St Clement that involved a ride in a JMT bus from the Weighbridge. No trip to relatives in St John would be undertaken without a pullover — an extra one during winter. Who can forget the caricature of country life played out each year in a side-splitting ‘country’ dialogue between Teddy Noel and Harold Michel, masquerading as ‘Ph’lippe et Merienne’, in the Green Room Club panto-mime? Didn’t the townies rock in their seats!

Of course the Michael was extracted in a theatrical, in-family manner. But there was a definite cruelty witnessed, especially at school. Too easy to ape the accent of our ‘country cousins’ when they were isolated among their peers — but who of their tormentors could speak Jersey-French?

So much depends on what you want to identify with, and where you feel you belong. Look at the example of the English in France. I speak as a regular observer, and it won’t surprise you to learn that I frequently find myself in despair. Too many just fail to adjust, perhaps because they’re incapable or can’t be bothered either to learn the language or adjust to their surroundings.

Overwhelmed, they reinforce English haugh-ty reserve, which, for the French is as risible as it is offensive — and gets them nowhere fast. One degree further along the scale of remoteness crawl the tortoises of country roads — the caravanners. Impregnable in mind and spirit, they are self-contained and certainly not up for integration on any terms.

It’s amazing how your attitude changes as your horizons expand. Within two minutes of take-off from Jersey Airport, you have a pano-ramic and sobering reality check as to how limited our room for manoeuvre and expansion really is. The surprising thing is that from that height there is still an overall green effect stretching over our seemingly overcrowded Island, which could be called ‘countryside’.

Nonetheless, serious questions remain over its ability to accommodate the policy of encouraging incomers — workers, that is, not 1(1)K retirees — to bail the pension shortfall and support the ageing population. The balance is delicate. Addressing it will be the most important and potentially most difficult aspect of an escape to the country. Don’t tell a new arrival that it will take 25 years to be assimilated — he won’t believe you. But you don’t have to live in an island to appreciate that.