Tales of the Country: Worrying recruiting ground

Having used several precious column inches last week to explain why I wouldn't be going on the Liberty and Livelihood march, there I was in Hyde Park on Sunday, propelled not by a burning sense of injustice but by The Independent's news desk. At the moment, I haven't lived in the sticks for long enough to develop a burning sense of injustice. My sense of injustice is not even warming up in the lower oven of the Aga. We have only been country-dwellers since mid-July, and with the notable exception of a wasp screeching up Jane's skirt at a barbecue and stinging her twice on the bottom, cue several unforgivably lewd and insensitive remarks from some of the men present about sucking the poison out, things have been pretty much hunky dory. Herefordshire is without doubt God's own country.

On the other hand, there is, God knows, a welter of social and economic problems here. There is an inadequate supply of low-cost housing (although I was pleased to learn that the old SAS base in Hereford has been developed, deliciously enough, given all those macho soldiers who used to live there, by Wimpey Homes). And public-transport provision outside the towns is downright pathetic. The bus from Leominster to Worcester runs every third Tuesday of months ending in Y, but only if there's a full moon. At any rate, we've never seen it.

So I don't doubt that, a year from now, I will identify much more with those who marched, that I will echo their gripes about weedy bus services in rural areas, about closures of banks and post offices, about the seeming complacency of Westminster.

As keen as I am on the royal and ancient game of golf, I even sympathised with Jack Lovell of Berkshire, whose banner in Hyde Park said simply "Ban golf!" I asked him, why golf? "Why not golf?" he said. Because unlike fox-hunting, it cannot possibly be construed as cruel. "Yes, but it requires nitrates to put into the soil, people are passionate about it, let's ban it. You can find an argument for banning anything." I took his point. That when governments start telling people how they should or shouldn't spend their leisure time, that way tyranny lies.

Which still leaves the question, will I be marching down Piccadilly next year waving a placard instead of a notebook? I think the answer is no. Not least because a protest that encompasses so many grievances means you can get lumped in with causes you don't much care for. Or worse, that you despise. In Hyde Park on Sunday, several well-groomed young men busied themselves handing out copies of a newspaper called The Countrysider. At first glance it seemed innocuous. A cute squirrel adorned the masthead. Then I read an editorial under the headline, "Countryside under threat from white flight".

Prime farmland and priceless wildlife habitats are being destroyed by housing developments, thundered The Countrysider, and those moving in are "mostly white, middle-class city folk – ordinary people who, in the main, are sick to death of living in our increasingly alien, cosmopolitan, overcrowded, congested, polluted, crime-infested urban centres... they are people who see rural Britain as a refuge, a place to make a fresh start".

I must have been having a slow-witted day. It wasn't until I saw the adjective "cosmopolitan" used pejoratively – an adjective we used in the "reasons to stay" column during all those late nights of agonising over whether or not to leave London – darker thoughts came to mind than squirrel welfare. Sure enough, on the next page was an application form to join the British National Party (family membership £35 a year).

Obviously the vast majority on Sunday's march would disassociate themselves totally from the repugnant views of the far-right, but the fact remains that the BNP had recognised a potential recruiting ground. They thought they might be among fellow-travellers, and no wonder. Moments earlier, I had talked to a thoroughly respectable, rather posh family from Suffolk, whose 14-year-old Alice-banded daughter, a Pony Club stalwart if ever there were one, was holding a placard screaming "Blair is vermin!"

I asked her whether she had written it herself. She squirmed with embarrassment and, eyes flicking to her mother for guidance, said no, then yes, then no again. It is not such a philosophical leap, I mused, as I descended into Knightsbridge tube station – narrowly avoiding being disembowelled by a woman carrying a "Rural Britain, the new ethnic minority!" sign that seemed a little too heavy for her – from "Blair is vermin!" to "Keep Britain white!"

Watch out! Low-flying earthquakes...

The epicentre of Sunday night's earthquake, Brick Kiln Lane, Dudley, was close enough to us for my seven-year-old son, Joseph, to be juddered out of his bed. This earned him great kudos at school the next day, not to mention the envy of his big sister, Eleanor, who was miffed to discover that she had slept through all the excitement.

On Monday evening the "quake" – as people who live in southern California and presumably now Dudley tend to call them, affecting an intimacy to make them seem less dangerous – was the talk of the King's Head. The landlord, Roger, confided that he had briefly wondered, in his somnolent state, whether it might be a poltergeist, some 18th-century coach driver irritated to find the bar closed.

Less romantically, I had woken up and concluded that the rumble must have been a low-flying RAF jet on night exercises. After all, from a few thousand feet up in the middle of the night, Herefordshire could just about pass for Iraq.

Give or take the odd cockerel, low-flying jets are the only disturbance to the tranquillity here. Several times a week they scream overhead, much to the excitement of Joseph, whose every felt-pen picture features a pointy-winged jet with a bright orange flame shooting out of its behind. He was recently asked by a relative what he enjoyed most about living in the countryside. The expected answers – making dens in the woods, climbing apple trees – did not materialise. "The really loud aeroplanes," said Joseph without hesitation. "They're so wicked."

The lives of Brian

On Saturday we returned to London N8 for a party, our first visit to Crouch End since our rather emotional departure at 1.53pm on Friday 12 July, not that it's burned into the memory or anything. I debated whether to turn up to the party, at which urban black chic was very much the order of the day, in a flat cap, waxed jacket, cords and green wellies, but Jane rightly pointed out that "it will be funny for two minutes and then you'll feel like a div for the rest of the evening". In any case, I still don't own a flat cap.

Yet even without a cap I am, slowly but surely, assimilating into country life. And I have one asset that has not been much of an asset before: my name. Brians growing up in the Sixties were made painfully aware that they shared their name with the snail from The Magic Roundabout. By the time I moved to London, Brian was distinctly unfashionable. At the party there was a Rob, a Paul and a Chris, but no Brians. Here in Herefordshire, by contrast, our electrician is a Brian. So is our painter-decorator, although the curious thing is that he keeps calling me David.