Welcome to the green belt: a safe space for lily-livered Londoners

I am thoroughly enjoying Melissa Kite’s latest, justifiable, gripes which have been provoked by her move out of London. Stuff shuts too early, for a start. And there are signs everywhere telling you what you can and can’t do, officious Lib Dem and Labour parish councillors and a general air of nastiness. Also, they won’t let her ride her horse in the village.

I think Melissa’s problem is that she hasn’t moved to the country, but to the faux country. She is in the green belt, and the green belt is crowded and fraught and terrified that it is about to be eaten up by London. Further, its inhabitants are increasingly the same bad-tempered, moaning, sociopathic middle-class tossers that one finds in the capital. People who have got the hell out to avoid being the victims of an acid attack, or a jihadi stabbing, or an LGBTQI workshop. But they still want quick and ready access to London. In other words, it IS London, in all but name. And that will change too – soon there will be no green belt at all, it will just be London.

You have to get further out, Melissa. The stuff you moan about doesn’t happen anywhere in the real countryside – apart from maybe the Cotswolds. You have to cut those ties completely.