I hate the countryside

So this week, the missus had a few days holiday.

We live in London, and our idea of getting away from it all is to have a few days out IN LONDON. The thought of actually going outside London into the back of beyond like, for example, St Albans or even worse (shudder) the countryside fills me with fear and dread.

For a start, the countryside stinks, and is full of selfish, greedy, small-minded,  ghastly Rotarians, or whinging layabouts who think the world owes them a living, and blame everyone else for their troubles. I cannot recall ever meeting a single friendly person in the countryside. They are all obsessed with their own little lives and the bloody view. View? What view? It's just full of trees, mud and angry huge beasts. And if you manage to find a pub, the bartender is some miserable homophobic drunk who's going out of business, and no we don't do bloody cocktails you big poof.

 And at night, it is the most terrifying place to be. Pitch black, and the eerie silence is only punctuated by the maniacal gibberings of some inbred cretin locked in an attic, or the crack and splinter of wood as the local axe murderer, crazed by the lack of a decent independent cinema, attempts to gain entry to an isolated farmhouse where the occupants, driven half mad by the total absence of experimental theatre companies, cower behind the dreary Welsh Dresser in the freezing damp with their mangy slavering black labrador that smells of sprouts.

Anyway, I digress. So I put my retirement on hold for a week, and we went for a wander round Mayfair on Monday morning, going into the galleries pretending to be eccentric billionaires looking to buy a Gaugin or two. The missus looked perfectly respectable, but I on the other hand, looked a bit like Mussolini after the invasion of Sicily. Great fun to watch the gallery owner prancing about, not sure whether to kick us out or fawn over us.

In the afternoon, to the Curzon Mayfair to see August, Osage County. Unbelievable. Not the film, but the audience. I thought we’d have the place to ourselves: Monday afternoon. Not a bit of it. I realised in a few seconds what I have to look forward to. There were thousands of them. Old wrinklies in various states of decrepitude, stumbling about the foyer, advancing on the luckless assistants and sucking on polo mints with their toothless gums. It was like Night of the Living Dead without the teeth.

Hmmmm. I think I can get used to this.