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"imperially recruit otherness"! Wonderful! Indeed, full marks to our own, homegrown post-structuralists. But to deliberate on the city in this way is not an English forte. Look! We even have difficulties with the very idea of the city as a civic entity (rather than a mere agglomeration of building)! We were not even sure, for Christ's sake, that London even needed a central governing body and a mayor! The film City Hall (with Robert de Niro as New York Mayor; tough, tender) passed over this country with very little trace. It is only in the last year that we have (finally, finally!) voted one in.

Why, then, can we not be Idealist about the city? Why are we bashful about theorizing about the city? Perhaps…perhaps because we have used up all our Idealism, all our theory on…the Country?

The social, moral, sanitary (and latterly the ecological) superiority of "the country" is a perennial, and tedious theme. "Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain" is lodged, almost genetically, in our brains. 80 per cent of urban Britons dream of living in a cottage in the country, claims a recent survey, a profoundly depressing statistic. In the last week two newspapers I bought provide country living supplements; where to buy that tumbledown farmhouse, how to get on with the locals, that kind of thing. While the 'Year in Provence' business seems thankfully to have run its course, there will be more and new invocations of rural gemutlichkeit. (I spoke too soon; I find that we now have: Encore Provence. (Oh, to hell with Provence!)

Much of the country business, (like most tourism) is of course a yearning for the past. To move to 'the country' is a bid for the past, an evasion of the present day. 'The Country' equals 'the Past'. The title of one of the hugest best sellers in recent years in Britain been: Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady. (Two for the price of one) And of course the country always, most amusingly, fails to oblige. Crime is rife; the locals have the Sky dishes bolted to their cottage roof; lads skin up in the vandalised bus-stop. The "village shop" is a Costcutter.

The country thing is a particularly British obsession but of course exists everywhere, at every time. Roman poets eulogized the "country". But in its modern form it was probably a French invention, something to do with Rousseau (alright then, Swiss). Certainly I like to think that the true gallic and metropolitan spirit resides more in one such as Voltaire, who had no truck with the back to nature thing; he wonderfully traces this pernicious ruralism back to Adam and Eve, no less. Why, he asks audaciously, should we admire their "matted hair and broken fingernails"?

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