Editor-At-Large: Wrecked cars. Rubbish. Rats. Townies have their moans, too

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Today central London will be brought to a halt by thousands of people from rural areas protesting that they are being "ignored". The Countryside Alliance claims that the Government is made up of townies who don't understand their needs. Its march is intended to highlight the plight of British farmers, poor transport, lack of affordable homes, and of course, the right to rip a living animal to shreds with a pack of dogs if that's your turn-on.

Can you imagine the scene in reverse if the inhabitants of London decided to plan a march on Gloucester or the Cotswolds to complain about their lack of affordable housing, poor public transport and the fact they can't walk down a street in the centre of town without the possibility of an aggressive beggar harassing them or a mugger ripping a mobile phone from their hands? They could also protest about the fact that in central London public lavatories have disappeared, with the result that at night back streets are awash with vomit and urine. They could also complain that since the privatisation of refuse collections, lorries noisily load up detritus from 5am and foul smelling bags with holes where the expanding rat population has snacked, are to be found on every central thoroughfare. They could also protest about the fact that their local schools lack staff and their children get bullied and beaten by other kids, while the police do nothing. Perhaps this isn't as important as the right to rip foxes apart, but personally I'm not so sure.

Let's deal with hunting first. I do believe in the freedom of the individual, and if that extends to wearing funny pink coats and women donning hair nets on horse-back, that's fine. Statistics proving that hunting doesn't have much to do with curbing the number of foxes will always be hotly contested. And if working-class men want to spend their evenings lurking about the countryside getting rid of vermin with dogs, they can carry on – I don't think I'll be losing any sleep. Hunting ought to be encouraged because it arouses such strong passions – like eating meat, snacking at McDonald's and drinking Starbucks coffee. Life is too short to get hung up about whether fish feel pain or the Prince of Wales knows anything important about modern architecture.

But let's spend a minute or two defining our priorities. The quality of life is what we should all be marching for, and that is as important to us lesser city-dwellers as it is to those of you out in the sticks. Let's not pick on the Government for things that are not its primary responsibility. Are there not housing associations all over rural England who decide what money will be spent on affordable housing in villages and councils who decree what bus services they will provide and subsidise? And didn't Londoners, rather than the Government, elect as their mayor the inept Ken Livingstone?

It is true that for many people on lower incomes in Britain life has got far less pleasant over the past few years. And it is also true that the Government has failed in key areas such as sorting out the rail network and the National Health Service. But it's not just farm-workers in North Yorkshire who have nowhere to live. Any nurse, firefighter, teacher or police officer in central London will tell you they can't find homes within an hour's journey of where they work. Lower paid office workers spend over an hour each way commuting rather than sign on the dole. For all commuters all over Britain, the time they have to spend with their families has lessened considerably over the past few years. And if they decide to sell up and move out into a rural area, they have a horrible choice of new housing available to them. Unless you spend a fortune on something rustic and old, the option is a box on an estate with few amenities miles from anywhere. Our spec housing is the ugliest in Europe.

National Health patients face the same wait for a doctor's appointment, and the same waiting list for treatment, whether they live in Fulham or Ainderby Quernhow outside Thirsk. I think the Countryside Alliance is making a huge mistake by somehow implying that people who live in towns don't understand the "problems" faced by those in the countryside. To pit town against country in this way is shortsighted. (By the way, it was the Tory government that let Beeching close all the branch lines, the Tories that signed us up to Europe and the Common Agricultural Policy, and the Tories that privatised the railways. Now that's a real case of the government not understanding the countryside.)

You might find all this bizarre coming from an ex-president of the Ramblers' Association and someone who has spent months at a time filming and walking the length and breadth of rural Britain. But because I have listened on my walks to what hundreds of farmers and country dwellers actually think, I know what I'm talking about. You cannot legislate for people not to own second homes. You shouldn't subsidise farmers more than any other group of workers in Britain, but you can create equality of opportunity, and that ought to apply to lower-paid people in towns as much as those who live outside them. It's the local councils of Britain that destroyed their own town centres by permitting the building of superstores. The same people installed ludicrous pedestrian precincts which drove away visitors who can find nowhere to park. We have a chance to change all this, and it's called voting. So the next time you have a chance to change who's mayor of London, and who runs Harrogate council, you can either stand yourself, or vote out the people currently performing so badly. Marching will achieve nothing.

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When I die and am in the holding pattern before I go to heaven or get condemned to hell, I hope the waiting area is like an airport terminal. Not the kind the British do so badly, such as Heathrow or Gatwick, but somewhere exotic like Bangkok. En route to Australia last week I had a couple of hours to kill ... there was simply no end of distractions. First, the terminal itself stretched for at least a mile: a wonderful hour of leisurely strolling past countless duty free shops, stalls selling orchids, dim sum, noodles, fresh coffee and stir-fries.

You could buy anything from chocolates to fabric to gadgets. At the end of it all was a room full of luxurious reclining leather chairs in which teams of women performed foot and shoulder massages on weary travellers. For £12 you get your feet washed and given a work out by a smiling Princess of Pain who delights in probing all your weak spots (usually the liver meridian in my case) while another kneads away at those gnarled knots in your wooden shoulders. After 30 minutes of this, you positively skip back on to the jumbo jet for another 10 hours of lousy air and indifferent food while lying in the praying mantis position.