Last weekend we went to visit my brother and his family in England. The big sell of the trip was a visit to Legoland in Windsor for our little boy, but my brother – knowing our three-year-old’s fondness for all things agricultural – had a surprise planned. After we hopped into a rental car at Stansted and spun down the road to Cambridge to his house, he took us to his in-laws’ farm. We rode in the back of a Land Rover and watched a combine harvester thresh grain against a cerulean blue sky. Squished into the cargo area of the Defender with his cousins, our son’s face was radiant with excitement. We patted a horse, ate sausages from the barbecue, and ran straw through our hands to show him what it looked like when it wasn’t just a picture in a children’s book. The trip brought back memories of my own childhood, but not, I’ll admit, in the fondly nostalgic manner you might expect. Tractors, cows, farms: back then, you couldn’t persuade me to like them, not to mind love them like he does.I’ve always known I was a city person. The fact that I was born in the countryside seemed for years an accident, a mistake of birth akin to the changeling in the home of the woodcutter, or a switch in the hospital maternity ward. You could plonk me into the most extraordinary rural scene – blue skies, sandy beaches, pure air, swallows leaping and twirling – and I’d briskly identify the smell of manure and moan about the lack of gig venues. (Obviously I was a joy to be around.) My arrival into the city – first to Cork to study at UCC, and then Dublin for my master’s, was a cause for celebration. I worked hard at assimilating to city life. I felt like I was always trying to convince someone of something, maybe like a lot of students do when they arrive at college. That I was cool enough. Hip enough. City enough. “I thought you were a city slicker,” a fellow student remarked when I got my UCC graduation results and happened to mention my hometown. I was thrilled by the compliment. I still wanted to be home when I was home – my accent would grow stronger, I’d pretend I knew who pals were gossiping about in The Corner Bar in Skibbereen, and when someone asked where I was from I would say “West Cork, but Dublin, but west Cork”. But I identified clearly as city. So imagine my surprise when a couple of years ago things started to tilt towards the countryside. It’s human nature to want what we don’t have. The rhythms and the slower pace of life in west Cork make far more sense to me now I’m in my 40s. For my husband, a Kildare transplant into Dublin who spent much of his teens around horses and cows, it’s an amusing about-turn. We sit in our home in the heart of Dublin, surrounded by hyped restaurants and with easy access to big gig venues like the 3Arena – and we read about Massey Fergusons and John Deeres and we talk about cows. At Legoland, we queued, we went on rides. We sat exhausted in the heat as Flopsy the bunny danced on stage. It was sensory overload, it was ice cream, it was bright colours and 45-minute wait times. It was wondering how to get from The Dragon’s Apprentice rollercoaster to the Fire Academy, and figuring out how to use the app and wondering where the coffee was. It was fun. But it was no farmyard. When we arrived home, our minder asked our son how the trip to Legoland had gone. He told her how much he loved it. “I got to see a combine harvester and a tractor!” he said, beaming. You couldn’t make it up.[ I like the idea of being a Reading Champion – it implies that I myself have conquered the artOpens in new window ]I know it’s not forever. He’ll change, and maybe one day appreciate the rhythms of the city himself. (Either that or he’ll buy a farm.) But having him has given me a deeper gratitude for the rural quality of my own childhood – the wide open spaces, the freedom to roam, the calmer pace and the emphasis on nature. Particularly now, with doomscrolling, the manosphere, the always-on lure of social media and a new generation reporting greater anxiety as they look for the button marked “off”. Even Instagram, full as it is of celebrity make-up routines and glossy endorsements, keeps telling us to “touch grass” these days. Growing up, my siblings and I would be sent with huge bowls out to the garden and warned not to come back inside until they were full of raspberries. Standing in the sunshine at the raspberry bushes, fingers stained berry-red, checking the fruit for greenfly, the picking was tiring work. It was also mindfulness in action, and a very healthy way to be. I might be located in the city, but I understand that now better than I ever did.