Rural Mutterings

mutter mutter mutter.

Sometimes it's not so much a spluttering as a muttering and the claustrophobic life in a rural community can lead to some unexpected thoughts:

I prefer life in the shadows, watching, noting, wondering, sometimes, I won't lie to you, judging. But in a small town, living in the shadows can be difficult. You work with the same people you see at nights at the pub, you gym with the people who visit your mum’s bistro, you gym with the ones you work with, you see your gym people at the pub. Starting to get the picture?

Everywhere you go, you know someone and they know you. Your mum knows how pissed you were and with how many bikers you flirted before you can even remember the next day!

It’s like living in a big house with people you barely know, but you can’t call them strangers either.

I was driving home one night, when I saw the local IT ‘expert’ (I’m using the word very loosely here) riding his bicycle very hard on the main road, in the opposite direction of his home. Now, I don’t know what his last name is and I’m not able to tell you exactly where he lives. But I knew that he was visiting his mistress in the middle of the night. The mistress, who is the wife of the local doctor who I now knew, was obviously not in town. I don’t know much about these two people, I don’t know their musical tastes or whether they prefer to shower rather than bath. But for some reason, and I really can’t recall where I heard of the affair, a man riding his bicycle in the middle of the night was not just some passing stranger, but part of the town’s narrative. And I knew all about it.

It becomes difficult then, to stay in the shadows, unobserved.

Suddenly, I'm being observed. And it's eerie. Like a cheap horror movie, my basic little life has been slowly unzipped by people whom I would not have looked at twice while living in Cape Town. And although I can hear them whisper, I can not make out the words, but they are insidious, like little drops of hail pounding on raw, cold skin.

I’m not saying it’s all bad. I’ve met some wonderful people, and I know that in a bigger city we would have never crossed paths, because those paths were so far apart. But here, we all walk the same path, or at least, if they don’t walk the same one, they will know someone who saw someone who knows you walked it yesterday. At 12.43.

So, it's made me wonder, is then the closeness forced upon the small community in part not responsible for their narrow mindedness? How can individuality bloom or erupt like an open wound, in such a closely watched, and watching, environment? Is this not one of those catch 22 situations? The defined narrow mindedness of the community is not because of the lack of many different opinions and views etc, but really because so many opinions and views can not be developed when one is so closely watched all the time.

I don't know if I was able to really capture my thoughts all to clearly here, but I am starting to think, that for all it's quaintness and rusticness, the small community life is rather more interesting from afar, from where IT can be watched and not from so close, where IT can watch me.