No, not really, is the short answer to that. Yet, every time we visit provincial England, this question crops up.
We live in London and have a bolthole in rural France, where we spend a few months every year. The only realistic way of getting there is by car, and over the past quarter-century we’ve tried every conceivable route down from Calais.
As a result, we know places like Senlis, Rouen and Rheims better than any comparable places in Britain. And of course, our regional centres, Auxerre and Nevers, are intimately familiar, but without breeding contempt.
We also strike out quite often, sometimes as far south as Provence, as far east as Lorraine or as far west as Bordeaux, and our gasps of delight come in a steady stream. But there is also guilt gnawing underneath, somewhere near the pancreas.
After all, Penelope is English born and bred, and I’m bred if regrettably not born. Our passports are British, we converse in English, our culture is more English than any other, I write in English only and, if you can forgive such a mundane detail, the means enabling us to enjoy France came from our activities in England.
We both love England, Penelope in an understated native fashion, I with a neophyte’s zeal. London is by far my favourite city in the world, and the only one where I’ve ever felt at home.
Then why on earth do we find provincial English towns stultifying while taking such delight in their French counterparts? Surely, that must be because we aren’t making the effort to get in touch with the salt of England’s earth.
This line of thought tends to make us hop in the car and go on exploration missions. Now, anyone who has ever driven in both Britain and France will easily believe this piece of trivia: France has the same number of cars, but two-and-a-half times more territory and, crucially, ten times the number of road miles per car.
Such dry statistics come alive when the same journey that would take 30 minutes in France (outside the Paris area) takes three times as long in Britain, especially in its South East. Hence embarking on such forays takes some resolve and an additional stimulus.
On Sunday the other day it came from some silly ranking of England’s most beautiful towns, in which the top rating went to Lewes in East Sussex – within striking distance from London, less than 70 miles away. Why not go there, have a pleasant walk and a nice pub lunch with a pint of good old English ale?
Easier done than said. The drive took almost two hours, but in light of the statistics cited above, that didn’t come unexpected. But our culinary hopes got frustrated.
The only edible part of the ‘nice pub lunch’ was peas cooked from frozen. The ‘good old English ale’ was a watery local brew. If you sent it out to a lab, the report would probably say that your horse has diabetes. (A disclaimer is in order: I’m sure we could have found better food and drink in Lewes had we known where to go. But we didn’t.)
The place itself was pretty enough. The ruins of a Norman castle were impressive, many houses were only a little younger, everything was in good nick. Actually too good for my taste – I missed the genteel decrepitude of similar towns in France.
But on balance Lewes is a good-looking place. We also passed by several bookshops and saw three posters advertising classical concerts – in similar French towns you may find the former but seldom the latter.
They why did we experience the same sensation of walls closing in on us that comes every time we find ourselves in towns strewn over England’s green and pleasant land? Does this mean we aren’t patriotic? Isn’t England our home?
The answer came to me a few days later, after the gastric ill effects of that lunch had subsided, and the toxic taste of that godawful beer had been washed out of my mouth with French wine and Scotch whisky. We feel that way not in spite of England being our home but specifically because of it.
When we travel in France, we are tourists exploring a foreign land. When we travel in England, we are looking at different rooms in our extended home. The different perspective creates different assessment criteria: our eyesight changes focus.
This tallies with the findings of modern science, specifically those dealing with the relationship between the subject and object of study. This sounds like voodoo science, but it can’t be dismissed out of hand: different researchers conducting exactly the same experiment with exactly the same equipment and exactly the same sample may get different results.
The object is identical, the subjects aren’t and neither are the test results. The only possible conclusion is that the mental energy emitted by investigators skews the outcome of the investigation.
I’m sure those who are better versed in such subjects than I am find such observations trivial. I find them fascinating: the material world may not be just material. Mind over matter may not be such an obsolete notion.
So why do we find Lewes and similar places stultifying while finding similar towns in France utterly delightful? Because when we find ourselves in a provincial English town, we always ask ourselves whether we’d like to live there. The answer is a resounding no, and that adds a bias to our aesthetic judgement.
The answer would be the same in Auxerre or Nevers, but we never ask the question. We are emotionally involved with English towns, and emotions queer the pitch of both aesthetics and reason. French towns, on the other hand, aren’t to us places of hypothetical habitation. They are closer to being museum exhibits, paintings we admire in a gallery.
These don’t leave us emotionally cold, but such emotions don’t overlap with quotidian life. They are detached and thus aesthetically purer and unencumbered.
Home is indeed where the heart is, but it’s also a place that comes laden with emotional baggage. With it comes a heightened critical judgement, sometimes fair, at other times not so much.
Some of our best friends live in provincial English towns and seem to enjoy it. They must be more philosophical than we are, less dependent on their physical environment.
Then again, they are our friends, not identical twins. They are neither blessed nor cursed with the same experience we’ve had, nor are their genes identical to ours. Vive la différence, as they say in Auxerre.
Much here to approve of.