How to avoid gossip

From our Cotswolds columnist, Catherine Moore, who said goodbye to inner-city London and upped sticks for Gloucestershire, for the sake of family life and more space...

 

'In some of the posher villages round here, I'm sure we'd be regarded as quite the wrong sort. Our fridge freezer blew up recently (literally - mice had chewed through the electrics), so I dragged it out of the kitchen and dumped it outside the house for three weeks until a man in a van removed it to the fridge graveyard. It made the perfect accompaniment to the cracked fishtank by the front door, the broken dog guard from the estate car waiting to be taken to the tip and a couple of big wiggly metal things that I presume had come out of one of my partner's classic cars.

'In the next village along, where my friend's mum is the vicar, it just wouldn't be tolerated. This is a village where you get tut tutted if you have too many empty wine bottles left out for recycling.

'Fortunately though, we've ended up in a pretty tolerant spot, where you'd have to do something much more extreme than litter your own garden to get gossiped about.

'Like starting a fight in the local pub. When a good friend called me, distraught that I was having a nervous breakdown, I was intrigued to learn that I had, the previous night, been screaming our local down, accusing an art gallery owner of having an affair with my partner whereupon I had knocked her down onto the floor of the bar. Only thing was, I was at home putting the kids to bed at the time.

'The story of my showdown got legs when the confrontation was revealed (through the filter of several gossips) to have involved, ‘That woman whose husband's into classic cars.' No doubt a cohort of other local women whose husbands drive anything pre-1975 are also wondering why they're getting slightly odd looks.

In London, revealing the odd snippet of gossip was acceptable if you could work it so that the person you were telling was never going to come across the person it was about'I was expecting a pretty well-developed informal news disseminating service when we moved to the country. I grew up in Warwickshire and it was a nightmare as a teenager - you couldn't bunk off school or go out with an unsuitable boy without the news being relayed pretty damn quickly back home.

'The anonymity of London was a dream in my late teens and 20s when it was a freak occurrence to bump into anyone you knew while doing something you didn't want to have to explain. Now as a mother in my forties, I'm not bothered about who knows my - all too predictable - comings and goings.

'So far I have resisted the urge to gossip myself. I just can't. People have told me too much since I moved here and I can never let all those bagged cats free.

"You're from London aren't you - you're pretty open-minded then?" is how it starts. I now know who's had affairs with who, which married school teacher was dating his pupils, which local farmer is a secret transvestite, who's got a hidden heroin habit and one secret I can't even hint at because it's so big I daren't take the slightest risk of it being found out.

'I know far too much for my own good.

'In London, revealing the odd snippet of gossip was acceptable if you could work it so that the person you were telling was never going to come across the person it was about. Telling your old friend in Muswell Hill about the Latvian lover of one of the respectable mums from nursery in Clapham was never going to land you in trouble.

'Here even trying to start a story with, "You know that woman who runs the yoga class..." will lead to a, "Yes, she married my cousin," and you have to stop your story dead.

'It is quite remarkable how many people have links with each other around here. No chance of six degrees of separation - you're lucky if you get to two. Even with the incomers like me. Now I've been here seven years I hear myself saying "Who's that then?" if someone is mentioned in conversation - inevitably I find out that our children go to gym together or that my friend is going out with the ex-husband.

'It does make it tough for people who want to carry on as they oughtn't though. A couple of weeks ago I went to the cinema in Cheltenham - the fourth furthest away from us - and next to me in the dark came and sat my friend's sister-in-law with one of the dads from school. They'll have to head off for Birmingham next time they fancy a tryst.'