The Naked Truth.........

Life in the country is fundamentally different from life in the cities and in the larger countries important questions are asked and answered before people set up homes and business away from the masses. Water supply is normally the most important factor because believe it or not water mains do not run everywhere. In England in a lot of cases you are never very far from a town, in parts of Scotland and North Wales its a little different.

Mountain ranges and long peninsulas make travelling more difficult in these areas even so for the most part you can travel to anywhere in the UK within a day. With the water supply being the most important factor, the location of a new home or venture can in out of the way place, be dictated where the water is. On-site water sources can include a well, stream, or lake. Depending on the water source, this may include pumps and/or filtration. Rainwater can also be harvested into tanks.Filters can be advanced running off an energy source of boiling and storage.

Being in the jet stream we get all kinds of weather here in the UK ranging from heat waves  in  October when it should be cold to tropical style storms in July when it should be dry and sunny. Overall we get our fair share of rain but believe it or not regardless of reputations,it doesn’t always rain here. Once your water main source has been identified they’re are other way to top that up by using rainfall collection and even water recycling.

97 % of the water on the Earth is salt water and only 3% is fresh water; slightly over two thirds of this is frozen in glaciers and polar ice caps. The remaining unfrozen freshwater is found mainly as groundwater, with only a small fraction present above ground or in the air. Fresh water is a renewable resource, yet the world’s supply of groundwater is steadily decreasing, with depletion occurring most prominently in Asia and North America, although it is still unclear how much natural renewal balances this usage, and whether ecosystems are threatened. So you can see how important it is to find your own local water source if you live in a out of the way place.

During my ventures into the countryside of Essex you see many stocked up reservoirs in deep countryside, which the farms uses to irrigate fields and water the crops during the dry months. Over the years the powers that be have let things slip in the countryside all in the name of profit of course and as a result rivers haven’t been dredged and ditches left undug. The result last year was wide spread flooding and a panic to repair the natural drainage systems left in decline for over 20 years.

People in the country rely on each other for things and also help people out. Communities are built around clubs, pub, shops and businesses this leads to a local self sufficiency of a kind, which once was in evidence nearly everywhere. There was no Internet, no shopping centres, no out of town supermarkets there was however Milkmen, Coalmen and Mickey Murphy in his bakers van (sorry couldn’t resist), bakery deliveries, shops a plenty and a local community spirit that disappeared as  soon as the supermarkets,built their first superstores.

Politicians try to give you the impression things move on getting better and better, to me I personally and honestly think the don’t. By the closing and shutting down of businesses and services I think things just go round and round in circles. Schools close only for more to need to be build some years later. Railway branch lines closed in the 1960s only for the need of more roads and motorway to carry the freight that was once on the trains.

During my younger years (I’m 50 years old) I always wanted to live in the built up areas,but as time goes by and the towns of my youth get more and more over developed I long for a move into the countryside. When I was a child you could see the stars in the night sky now all you see is the orange glow of the street lights. Back then it took around an hour to get anywhere out of town where as now the hum(noise) of the motorway traffic is present at most times of the day.

Silence is another plus of living in the countryside and for most the year,the only thing you can hear is animal noises and the only thing you can spell is animal smells. I’d like a house in the country where we could grow our own food where we could use and harness the ways of the country and also to have a garden in which we could live clothes free.