Village people
Wednesday, 19. July 2006, 19:41:30
On the weekend I saw some villages and some trees and mountains around the parque nacional de Picos de Europa (in northern Spain).
I started wondering about a lot of things. Is a village where people are building new houses, but fewer and fewer people spend as much as half the year there growing or shrinking? What is important to a village - a school? A football team? A festival?
It's hard to say, but my first instinct is to suspect a lot of it has to do with children. I grew up mostly in a big city, surrounded by other children. There were always people to play with.
But I was not a very sociable kid, compared to how I am now. I would go off on my own and read literally for days on end. I did play with other kids. We had a farm where we spent time, and I was the oldest of my family, almost as old as the youngest of the neghbours (who were a few kilometers away) and they would be the only people we would play with for a week. More commonly friends would come - my parents were (and are) fairly social people.
As I think about my experience, and about kids I have known who grew up in isolated parts of Ausrtalia or, like me, in the centre of major cities, I don't think the difference is in the children themselves, or the effect that life has on them.
Until recently, it has been pretty hard to have a "good job" in a village - either you inherit it, or you move to town for it. Is the web changing that? Is the fact that people can work from anywhere going to reverse some of the urban drift that has been a major feature of the last few centuries?
Will the people who have grown up in towns be drawn to the restaurants and bright lights so much that they stick to the towns for their everyday life, and take country holidays? Or will they see the vegetable gardens and the same people gathered in the bar as a world to live in while the city is a place to holiday?
I don't know. I am not a village people, I am a traveller. I enjoy being in a village, the easy familiarity, the sense that people belong, the ease of not having to choose every day which bar to go to and who to meet. But then, I am just passing through. What else is behind a village, what does it mean for the people who are always there, or for those who belong to the village, though they come and go?
I started wondering about a lot of things. Is a village where people are building new houses, but fewer and fewer people spend as much as half the year there growing or shrinking? What is important to a village - a school? A football team? A festival?
It's hard to say, but my first instinct is to suspect a lot of it has to do with children. I grew up mostly in a big city, surrounded by other children. There were always people to play with.
But I was not a very sociable kid, compared to how I am now. I would go off on my own and read literally for days on end. I did play with other kids. We had a farm where we spent time, and I was the oldest of my family, almost as old as the youngest of the neghbours (who were a few kilometers away) and they would be the only people we would play with for a week. More commonly friends would come - my parents were (and are) fairly social people.
As I think about my experience, and about kids I have known who grew up in isolated parts of Ausrtalia or, like me, in the centre of major cities, I don't think the difference is in the children themselves, or the effect that life has on them.
Until recently, it has been pretty hard to have a "good job" in a village - either you inherit it, or you move to town for it. Is the web changing that? Is the fact that people can work from anywhere going to reverse some of the urban drift that has been a major feature of the last few centuries?
Will the people who have grown up in towns be drawn to the restaurants and bright lights so much that they stick to the towns for their everyday life, and take country holidays? Or will they see the vegetable gardens and the same people gathered in the bar as a world to live in while the city is a place to holiday?
I don't know. I am not a village people, I am a traveller. I enjoy being in a village, the easy familiarity, the sense that people belong, the ease of not having to choose every day which bar to go to and who to meet. But then, I am just passing through. What else is behind a village, what does it mean for the people who are always there, or for those who belong to the village, though they come and go?
WIDGETIZE