If you want real stress, move to the country

It’s much more stressful to live in the country than in a town. There are always threats of one kind or another — wind farms, housing developments, road ‘improvements’, and so on. And then there are often arguments with neighbours about this and that. If it’s not leylandii, which are not one of our problems in south Northamptonshire, there’s always something. We used to have peacocks that migrated to our neighbours’ gardens and proceeded to ruin them. (The peacocks were duly eliminated.) Then the man who mowed our lawn upset people by doing it too early in the morning and waking everybody up. Some of our neighbours have also been quite justifiably annoyed by the wedding receptions we hold periodically in our garden to help pay for the upkeep of two Inigo Jones pavilions. The dancing goes on till midnight, with the music getting louder and increasingly frenzied towards the end — the opposite of what used to happen in my youth, when it became quieter and slower to allow smooching.