You can't take an urbanite to the country......

One of the things about moving to the centre of nowhere is that you start having people to stay, rather than just seeing them for a cup of coffee, or dinner. This was something I was looking forward to. I had visions of myself transforming into a Nigella like figure who casually tossed together endlessly delicious meals, showed the glories of Wales to impressed friends and sent them back to their particular metropolis with a longing to live my life, not their own. Naturally this is not how things have worked out.

It turns out that my southern based softie mates all find the idea of travelling to Wales traumatic to say the least. It takes six months of nagging and cajoling to persuade them that they can make the journey at all and when they arrive with a vision of a Welsh Babington House, they are usually horrified to find that the gates have to be operated manually and that real sheep and cows have not been housetrained, but instead have chosen to use any road near said gates as a literal dumping ground.

The start of the weekend usually goes well. They are so relieved to arrive at all that this overwhelms everything else. Having invested in electric blankets that stay on all night I can be sure that they will not freeze to death before morning and I can then look forward to their reactions in the morning when they wake up and see the hills climbing in front of them, and not a house in sight. That thrill lasts for about half an hour. Then reality kicks in.

My sophisticated guests turn into three year olds. It's too wet to go outside, they are bored inside. They want to go to a shop. They can't understand that the shops are shut because this is the backend of nowhere and people have other things to do than shop. They want to go out for lunch and don't believe that the ex Little Chef is the only place nearby. They offer to help with the gardening until they realise it is a chore, and will involve getting wet / muddy.

In the meantime I am running round like a headless loon, trying to make everything look effortless - lighting fires, cooking, washing up and making beds - anything that will make them feel that they are having a fabulous time. In between I have to run outside for a breath of fresh air because the heating is on all the time to stop their thin southern blood freezing up and I am about to suffer from heat stroke. I drag them all out for a walk and they panic when they realise there really is no phone reception, and that there are no footpaths or cafes at the end of the walk.

They come home and flinch at the sight of the peaty bath water, however much of my precious Space NK lavender and peppermint oil I have put in it. By Sunday morning I am exhausted and thanking my lucky stars that they are only houseguests, not small children who I can't send away after lunch.

Now, obviously not all guests are like this. One of my oldest friends came to stay last weekend and is the epitome of the perfect houseguest. This is blissful. We had a great weekend, getting extremely wet every time we ventured outside and finding it funny, not traumatic, before returning inside for restorative cups of tea / glasses of wine and the general knowledge crossword. We explored tiny lanes that might have houses for sale at the end of them, and shared in the cooking / cleaning chores. We played cards and bitched about celebrities in the magazines that she brought up with her. She is always really good company and the definition of a good houseguest - willing to pitch in but also extremely happy to entertain herself for the odd half hour. She also understands that this is Wales, not a film set of Wales so has no unrealistic expectations. All in all, exactly what I had looked forward to.

This was just the start of my big social week which has been in the planning for many months. After friend number one, I had 24 hours for a changeover before friend number 2 and her daughter arrived to stay. I had changed and ironed the sheets and picked flowers for the bedroom, mopped the floor in the kitchen and tidied to within an inch of my life in preparation. I have known Friend number 2 since school and am godmother to her daughter, who was also coming to stay. They normally lives in Qatar, which she loathes, and which means I get to see very littl of them but they have been home for the summer and this visit has been planned since the dawn of time.

Unfortunately a summer of single parenting (her husband stayed in Qatar) had driven her to the edge of desperation and when I rang to check she had everything she needed for her trip she burst into tears and sobbed so hard that I had that horrible impotent moment where your friend is beyond miserable and you can do nothing but listen to them cry.

The upshot of this was that she was exhausted, depressed and driving four hours to Wales with a one year old was, it seemed to me, the straw on the proverbial Qatari camels back. I immediately refused to have her to stay and promised to come to London to see her at the weekend instead. The tears turned to hiccups and I could hear the relief in her voice at not having to set out on such an epic journey with a 1 year old and a famed ability to get lost on a straight road with no turnings. Despite being sorry not to have the long promised visit, I was glad that telling her not to come was a help and made things a little easier for her.

Guest 3 was supposed to be arriving tomorrow night, for the weekend. The ultimate urbanite she has been promising to come and stay for two years and this date has been in the diary for four months now. She rang yesterday to say that she had got her diary in a muddle and forgotten she was going out for dinner on friday night so couldn't come. I am confused as to why going out for dinner with someone she sees all the time takes priority over coming to stay when this was arranged so long ago, but forbore to comment. She has promised to put a new date in her diary which she can then cancel at the last minute. I am now officially thwarted of my endless life of houseguests and Nigella impersonations and have resorted to my normal slovenly self but with a fridge full of food to tempt the delicate appetites of guests who aren't here. The Loyal Hound and I are going to be eating very well!

All this thwarted effort at having people to stay in Wales reminds me of when I was fifteen and asked a friend from Nottinghamshire to come and stay. The day before she was due to arrive she rang and suggested that instead of coming to stay with me, perhaps I should come to her "as it was closer".

Need I say more.

Yes, I am a hobbit.

I've just spent the last 36 hours or so in London and I can't tell you the relief at getting back to my hillside again. I spent 9 years living in London and there is no sense left of it feeling like home. In fact, it sometimes feels positively alien. This is partly because it is hard to be rootless in a place where you used to have a home, but it is also because I don't think London wants you to feel at home. It wants you to feel overwhelmed, a little uncool and envious of all those with whom the force is strong because they live there and you don't.

I think the thing I find hardest is the superiority that so many Londoners seem to feel towards anyone who chooses not to live in the same place as them. I am somehow made to feel as though I have hay in my hair and in place of my brain. This isn't from strangers particularly, but more from London born and bred friends who just can't understand why anybody would leave London. It drives me crackers.

I know it is pointless trying to justify it - they think the whole 'living in the country / not in London' idea sounds like terrifying hard work. They panic at the thought of no coffee in a paper cup (so do I come to think of it), no access to beautiful shoes (valid point too) and probably no electricity, newspapers, internet, radio, or Waitrose. They certainly seem to think that anyone not in London is unlikely to know about what is on at the theatre, or the galleries or the news for that matter.

The irony that vexes me about this is that as a general rule London is so insular it has very little idea of what is going on in the rest of the country, whereas my experience of people who live in the country is that they have a fairly accurate sense of what is going on nationally and give the crime rates in Newcastle the same importance as a tube strike in London. If you don't believe me, look at how snow is reported. Northern Scotland had endless snow this year, with entire areas cut off but the only time the snow gets into the news is when the M25 grinds to a halt because three flakes of snow drifted down onto an unsuspecting car causing untold trauma to a the London driver. It is a terrible divide that I think I notice far more because of having chosen to leave one world for the other.

I know that this is a bit of a rant, but I feel ranty about it. I am fed up with the assumption that because I live in Wales I have given up on any mental sophistication in favour of bucolic bliss. I can survive on a hillside in Wales, and in London. Could they??? So to cheer you up a little and give you a taste of the best example of this type of stereo typing here is a little tale for you - entirely true and pretty much verbatim........

On a trip down to London I went into PC World to look at a laptop. One of the drones working there spent some time trying to persuade me to buy a PC that I didn't want and wasn't remotely what I was looking for. I resisted, strongly and was considering stapling a notice to my head saying NOT INTERESTED when he came up with a plan. In a wheedling tone, he suggested I buy the offending article and take it home where I could appreciate it's true fabulousness. If I still felt the same inexplicable hatred towards it then I could bring it back to him. Fed up by now, and desperate to escape, I pointed out that it was a little impractical as I lived in Wales so couldn't just pop back in and see him with the offending article. The look of amazement on his face was extraordinary. He did a genuine double take before asking me in a lowered, respectful tone the following question:

"You live in Wales, really? So do you live underground then?"

I assured him that yes, I was indeed a hobbit and left, without a computer, to go home to my burrow. Need I say more?