Tales of the country: The pleasures of settling in

Not least of the fascinations of living in the country, as we have now been doing for five weeks and six days, is getting to know new noises. Our friends Linda and Dominic visited us last weekend from rural Surrey and, sitting outside on a gloriously starry night, told us authoritatively that the plaintive, high-pitched cry we had taken to be a bird's was actually that of a fox. They also identified different types of owl from an array of hoots – long ones, sharp ones, engagingly chirpy ones – that would have done justice to a BBC sound effects record.

Still an essentially urban animal myself, I am a rapt if naïve listener when these Percy Edwards types cock their ears, nod sagely, and say "lesser-spotted woodpecker". Such is my almost total ignorance of the particular cries of birds and woodland mammals that, if told I was listening to the mating call of an adult male nitwit, I would be agog. Especially, as on Saturday night, after several bottles of Chateauneuf-du-Pape. Even in my semi-inebriated state of unquestioning contentment, however, I had reason to doubt Dominic when he identified as that of a tawny owl a hoot that sounded to me more like the warning cry of a member of the Peugeot or possibly the Saab family, on the nearby A44.

Whatever, these unfamiliar countryside noises extend, too, to the humans indigenous to north Herefordshire. It is not a dialect I have come across before, and I have identified two interesting quirks, one of which is to suffix every sentence with "like". Yesterday the greengrocer in Leominster, after I had asked in my urban liberal way whether his eggs were free-range, said, with just a hint of exasperation, that they were barn eggs, and that the chickens were free to roam "whenever they like, like".

The other, rather pleasing local quirk, is to give all objects a gender, Gallic-style. Our occasional gardener looked the other day at our magnificent Wellingtonia tree, and said: "I should think he's been there for a few hundred years, like." And the builder we had in to quote for pulling down an internal wall, invited me to "look how thick he is".

Such are just some of the pleasures of settling into a new part of the country, and there are many, many more. For example, a man arrived at our back door last week and asked my wife to sign a petition against the proposed erection of a large telecommunications mast a couple of miles away. They got chatting, and he told her that one of his signatories, passionately opposed to the unsightly erection, was the woman formerly known as Miss Whiplash.

Evidently she moved out of London with the proceeds of selling her story to the tabloids, and now lives in a nice house just east of here with lots and lots of ducks for company. Intriguingly, she asked the chap with the petition if he wanted her to make representations to a certain Cabinet minister. "I know him," she said, with what I hope was a twinkle, "very well."

But until a few years ago, I'm told, Miss Whiplash would not have been the most notorious resident hereabouts. In this charming hamlet of ours, opposite the church, lived Baroness Susan de Stempel, the debutante who was cleared in the late Eighties of battering her former husband to death with an iron bar, but was sentenced to seven years for conspiring to defraud her aunt, Lady Illingworth, of all her worldly goods.

Ironically, when we moved out of London, I felt a pang of regret for the celebrities we would be leaving behind. It was always a kick to see Victoria Wood or Alison Steadman or Maureen Lipman filling their baskets at Marks & Spencer in Muswell Hill, but it's far more exciting to walk past Baroness de Stempel's old house and wonder what secrets are contained therein.

And to share a country parish with Miss Whiplash takes me from M&S to S&M. As far as I know, she has hung up her high- heeled boots and quit the sado-masochism business, but I bet Miss Whiplash could still introduce me to a whole range of night-time noises that even my friend Dominic would struggle to identify.

Four-legged addition to the family brings a new responsibility

For the first time in my life, I have become a dog-owner. It would be downright negligent not to have a dog in countryside like this, and so, on the day after we moved in, we took possession of Milo, a seven-week-old Golden Retriever with a handsome snout and sublime temperament. If I stretched out one toilet roll for every time someone has looked at him and mentioned the Andrex puppy, the bog-paper trail would lead all the way back to London.

But of course it's not all sunshine and cuteness. Milo is still piddling indoors, although saving his poos, mercifully, for the garden. Having become fairly adept at changing my children's nappies over the years, the pooper-scooper holds no terrors for me. But I'm still adjusting to the dog-owner's mindset, realising with a start when I was in Leominster the other day, that a poster featuring an accusing finger in the manner of Lord Kitchener, above a caption screaming "Have you wormed your pet?", was directed at me.

Before, if I had noticed the poster at all, I'd have relaxed in the awareness that he was pointing somewhere over my shoulder.

Grouse season is under way

A few weeks ago I wrote in these pages an account of how, selling for virtually the same price as we bought, we came to exchange our terraced house in Crouch End, London N8, for a rather run-down Victorian manor house and three holiday cottages, in four scenic acres of Herefordshire, not far from Ludlow.

I should have known that I was setting myself up to be shot at; in fact I could not have presented a more obvious target were I a plump grouse with red, white and blue concentric circles painted on my chest. A reader from Acle in Norfolk duly wrote a letter, published here, acidly pointing out that my lifestyle was hardly representative of the rural norm. By the same token, the photograph of me and my family merrily playing croquet on the lawn was hardly representative of our lifestyle (a photograph of my wife and I fretting about mortgage repayments might have been more appropriate), yet her point was a fair one. The acid had the desired effect, dissolving my complacency.

A day or two later, however, I received a delightful letter from Mike Harris of Cowbridge in the Vale of Glamorgan, saying that he hadn't "laughed, giggled, chuckled so much for a long time" as he did on reading my article headlined "Far from the madding crowd". And the day after I got another letter, from Robert Adams of Highgate, neither praising nor damning the article, but explaining that he had just made the same move in the opposite direction, from Pudlestone, Herefordshire, to north London, and enclosing a fascinating account he wrote of ructions between two teachers at Pudlestone School in 1912. Ah, the readership of The Independent... all human life is there.

The domino effect

Roger, the landlord at our excellent local, the King's Head in Docklow, tells me that the pub has just been shortlisted in the Flavours of Herefordshire contest. I am almost as chuffed about this as he is, since in a short time I have come to feel decidedly proprietorial about the King's Head. All visitors here are compelled to climb over a barbed-wire fence, negotiate a field mined with juicy cowpats, and cross a main road. If they make it in one piece, their reward is a pint of Dorothy Goodbody's bitter and, if they are really lucky, a marvellous chunk of Herefordshire beef cooked to perfection by Roger's wife, Jean.

I am thrilled about having a local again. In Crouch End I only ever went to the pub to watch a big-screen football match, yet in my first week here I went four nights on the trot, which I haven't done since I was a student. They even give me pints on tick. It is probably only a matter of time before I have my own tankard hanging behind the bar, and a look of withering contempt for anyone who sits in "my" chair playing with "my" dominoes.