Dirty weekends? I'd rather stay at home: Under the Counter

I was made to go to the country last weekend. Getting away from it all sounds heavenly, but in reality I don't want to get away from it all. I like it all.

In order to make this rustic sojourn as brief as possible, I spent Friday night in town and dosed up on the synthetic pleasures of metropolitan life, trying to block out the manure and cider that was waiting at the end of the motorway. Saturday morning involved lugging heaps of unflattering outerwear to the car, as our hosts were bound to make us go for cold, damp walks round their muddy land, to admire their yawningly efficient fences and incredibly dull ditches.

On arrival, down on the farm, initial depression set in as I had to gird my loins and protect my soft Italian handbag from the eight dogs and the charging geese. Our hostess (seven months pregnant with twins) was wearing a never-washed hairy sweater and stirring a pot of something brown and steaming on the Aga. After we had patted her tummy and congratulated him on his amazingly powerful testicles, there came an immense lift to my country blues - they poured us huge G&Ts and switched on Blind Date.

Then it was time for dinner. As I lifted a forkful of duck, a hearty shout came from the kitchen: "Watch out for the shot!" Thank God I didn't crunch on one of these mini ballbearings, as I've just spent more money on a filling than I did on a new tumble drier. My husband, however, hit the jackpot, and was spitting out shot all evening. I had been hoping that kneading had not come into our hostess's culinary preparations, but dessert was home-made apple pie. I won't have to take any Yakult for a while, as she could have grown mustard and cress in those palms.

Of the country pursuits I might have dreaded, Sunday morning's activity hadn't even crossed my mind - a 7.30am start to take fifty cute little lambs to the slaughter. We hadn't even had breakfast! On arrival at the abattoir, we were greeted by a grim-faced ewe with rigor mortis, who had come down from Scotland, but obviously didn't travel well. I tried not to think of the talking sheep in Babe, and hoped it would be beef for lunch.

Our host's idea of a pre-prandial was to make us muck out the cattle, then give them bales of stinking silage (which the poor cows actually eat). At least I was semi-prepared for this, and had doused my polo-neck with Giorgio, so was able to smother myself every time a bale arrived.

It was beef. In fact it was "Flossie" for lunch. But we were only eating her because she had no reproductive organs, so there was no point in keeping her. Yum, yum - pass the horseradish.

Never again will I be tricked with promises of bucolic bliss. It's all about dung and death in the country. I can create my own rural idyll at home - safely within the boundaries of the M25.

Emulating Emmerdale:

Cultivate stomach flora hygienically with Yakult (each 65ml bottle contains 6.5 billion active Lactobacillus casei Shirota). A pack of seven costs pounds 2.50 from most supermarkets; wallow in manure-free mud with AHava black, mineral-rich Dead Sea mud, pounds 14.95 per kilo from Selfridges, Oxford Street, London; adopt a pig, pounds 20, or a goat, pounds 90, from London Zoo, and visit it when feeling Marie Antoinetteish, telephone 0I71-722 3333 for details.

Lyndsay Calder