SMALL TOWN BLUES

It is possible for a "nice little place" to be far too little for your own good. If you're not the sort of person who likes to "join in" with things, living in such a place can become quite ghastly for you, especially when everyone knows your name, your business and, more terrifyingly, where you live and they can take it upon themselves to try and "involve" you in things because they think that "it's for your own good" or something.

Big cities can, of course, be lonely and anonymous places where a timid soul can get lost and forgotten in the busy bustle and the mayhem and the anger and the fury, and can spend years not knowing who it is who's living upstairs and what they're getting up to. Entire lives can pass by without even registering as the important business of just surviving goes on all around you and can leave some people behind to fend for themselves or simply drown in the gutters.

So there has to be a "Goldilocks" size for a town to be. Not too big that you get lost in the melee, but not too small that you get no sense of privacy. After all, whilst many of us might need some sense of belonging, it really doesn't suit everyone, and some people really need the space to be left alone if they choose to, whilst still having the option to emerge into the daylight and exchange a few pleasantries over the garden fence if the need should arise.

Small town America has had its fair share of problems in this regard. Sometimes, a you drive across those vast open spaces, you quite suddenly happen upon an entire town which seems to have sprung up out of nowhere and jet, with just a couple more miles on the clock, the place is behind you and your back in the wide open spaces again and it's as if the whole place was never even there.

And yet, within those communities, entire lifetimes are being lived and shaped in those few square miles that they have to call "home..."

But with small town living come small town problems.

When everyone knows everyone else, it's rather difficult to feel "free" at all, especially if you feel that everything you see or do, or everyplace you go and everyone you talk to is being scrutinised and dissected by any and all of your neighbours, who might have already mapped out your entire life, from where you're going to work, to who you're going to end up living with, almost before you've even learned to walk.

Never can the phrase "I know who you are" be quite so constraining and stifling.

This can, quite naturally, lead to the kind of disaffected youth that causes all sorts of little rebellions which can grow into bigger rebellions and which will find those self-satisfied know-it-alls who decided that they knew all about you when you were eight to congratulate themselves and tell themselves that they "always knew they were a wrong 'un..." which can, of course, become a self-fulfilling prophecy whilst those same sanctimonious types would never be able to see the part they played in shaping this poor unfortunate creature.

When everyone you know lives within eight square miles and the next town can be over fifty miles away in any direction, getting out can be a problem, too. Even if it's only for one night. Otherwise all of your socialising and other leisure activities are spent in the glaring spotlight of the neighbourhood and nothing that you do will do unreported or unremembered.

Such societies sometimes find it difficult to evolve and change, too, and getting people to embrace new thoughts and philosophies can prove almost impossible in an environment where the answer is "we don't do things like that around these parts..."

There are other, more "harmless" seeming, insidious dangers, too. The horrors committed in the name of "having a laugh" or "just a bit of fun", or when you find that so much of the local culture orbits around in that circle of hell known as the "High School Prom" and those who end up being "Kings and Queens" of such a ghastly event can also end up being your civic leaders for the rest of your life, being the person who can't get a date from within that limited gene pool can immediately set you out as a loner, or an outsider...

And we all know how that can go.

God! I dislike with such intensity the fact that Britain has started to embrace the "prom culture" in recent years. It's just such a ghastly and tacky idea, and yet we've bought into it with such enthusiasm that the roads are clogged with stretch limousines full of over-dressed, screeching teenagers throughout the summer evenings.

Just another in our long list of not-so-cheap and tacky imports that do so very little to improve our lives.