Countryside friendliness

We went to rural Devon this weekend, as the holiday that I had to take my RHS exam. We stayed at a lovely pub called The Bickford Arms. The host there is incredibly lovely - in that part of Devon it's almost impossible to get anywhere without a car, and we didn't have one. He drove us to the exam on the Monday when we had to sit it, as well as up to Morrisons to do some shopping, and drove us round Holsworthy and Bude to show us about. His husband even drove to the station on the way back as well.

They were incredibly friendly - the entire staff was friendly, chatty, and almost... completely different from in the country. It wasn't just good customer service, it was actually a sort of informal breaking-down-barriers between the customer and the server. It wasn't a transactional exchange, but was a realer exchange between people.

It is lovely. Of course, it's well known that is the case. You can feel, as you come back, the atmosphere get colder and colder, more and more impersonal. At Okehampton station, we had a nice chat with an old man who had come to try to buy a plate from a shop he saw, but found out that it had been sold already. He told us about how he enjoyed trips to Italy, and was going to go to Italy soon for his 70th birthday. You get to Exeter St Davids, and it was already... fairly impersonal (noticeably so), but still there was a little bit of conversation between strangers. Once you get to London, all sociality is completely stripped. It's cold, isolative.

That's the lovely aspect of countryside, though. Everybody is more open, friendlier.

I think, I would like to try to bring that back to the city. Talk to people a bit more, try to have more conversation. Of course, people in the city are very closed off, and hesitant around others talking to them. Isn't it a shame, though?