Donald Clarke: spring – the time of year when I recall how much I hate nature

This is the time of year when hopeful frescoes of sunlight surprise us in the hitherto sepulchral afternoon. The mortified soil – pressed with frozen fox paws – yields to warmer moistures as pining curlews summon vernal energies from the retreating pagan mist.

It is a time of rebirth. It is a time to ponder the eternal unstoppable clockwork. Look there! A rogue snowdrop takes a stand. Look here! Some sort of rabbit is eating some sort of stick. Hark! I hear the pussywillow caw.

It is the time of year when I recall how much I hate nature. Okay, that’s not quite right. We are all engines of the natural process. Bricks, televisions, phones and street lamps ultimately emerge from the same soil as that yellow flower or that uninteresting tree.

What I hate is sentimental wittering about dead badgers or fields enveloped in pathetically fallacious frost. What I hate is the countryside.

Woeful drag

The romantic poets could be a woeful drag at the best of times, but they were at their utter worst when describing rubicund peasants in valleys. You can drone on all you like, Wordsworth, but I’m betting

[ the solitary reaper ]

would, if the option emerged, happily exchange her hovel for a comfortable room in Belgravia.

The single-celled organism evolves into a rudimentary sea creature. The amphibian leaves the ocean and makes permanent home in the swamp. The monkey eventually leaves the jungle and, after a tad more evolving, buys a nice little house within walking distance of an off-licence and a sushi place. It's all there in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. The more sophisticated we become, the less likely we are to live near cows or babbling brooks.

People in the countryside are forever indulging in my least favourite recreational activity. Since I was old enough to act like an unreasonable, bigoted malcontent, I have experienced chills at the phrase “going for a walk”. By all means walk the dog. As a proud non-driver (a state of being that, in itself, rules out countryside dwelling), I have always been content to walk where I needed to go.

“Going for a walk” is something else entirely. It entails being put into a car and being driven to some awful river, along which one trudges until the surfeit of dreadful swans becomes too much to bear.

Then you turn around and go back again. As a metaphor for the pointlessness of existence, “going for a walk” can scarcely be bettered. As a sophisticated recreational activity, it falls some way behind shaving warts or dunking witches.

Social distance

Ah, yes, you say, but the unreasonable, bigoted malcontent will find peace to ponder his bitter condition in the countryside. No, he won’t.

Among the many virtues of city life is the relative privacy that citizens accord one another. You are always among people, but you are usually at some social distance from them.

In the countryside it is, as I understand it, expected that you say “hello” to everybody you pass on every squalid, overgrown laneway. You nod to that man. You raise a hand to that lady. Who are these people and why do they expect me to pretend we’ve been introduced?

Some will argue that the most useful portrayal of life in the countryside is Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie. I would put forward Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs as a more accurate representation of rural intercourse. The concluding violent siege, during which, as fires rage, Dustin Hoffman assaults gap-toothed maniacs with a mantrap, is perhaps not representative of life in every Cornish hamlet.

But the insistent nosiness that drives the academic bonkers in the opening act does ring depressingly true.

Yet otherwise admirable writers are forever finding inspiration in the drifting of clouds, the changing of seasons and other rural baloney.

Certain literary magazines would perish if they couldn’t count on poets to contribute a few lines every time they ran over a hedgehog on the way to their shack in the woods.

Glowing flat-screen TVs

All of which is a way of saying that, although spring is kinder to the elderly, it brings irritation for those sufficiently evolved to no longer crave a home within the bole of a tree.

During winter, we are allowed to sit happily behind thick urban walls and warm ourselves on glowing flat-screen televisions. Come spring, “going for a walk” becomes an ever more insistent demand. Manifestations of nature demand admiration. Poets insistently connect revivification with the screeching call of obscure waterbirds. Robert Burns did it. Gerard Manley Hopkins did it.

I'm not sure I don't prefer the great Tom Lehrer. "All the world seems in tune on a spring afternoon/ When we're poisoning pigeons in the park," the Harvard wit sang.

Oh, not really! He was only joking.