Cheap Channel 4 Television lifestyle shows espouse the benefits of leaving the stinky city, with its failing schools and stabby schoolchildren, and moving to the countryside, a bucolic idyll where everyone is happy and you can catch and eat your own hedgehogs.

And I love the countryside. Two or three weekends a year I still find time for three or four day walks along national trails between real ale filled gastro-pubs. I am rarely happier than when surveying the rolling green of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Wales. I even like Morris dancing. But I live in London. As everyone should, for a bit at least.

I went there in 1989 to seize life by the lapels, to see musicians from all over the world playing within spitting distance, to wallow in all-night weird cinema at The Scala, to eat Turkish banquets in Dalston dives in the small hours, to grapple with the biggest comedy scene in the country from the ground floor upwards, to suck inspiration from the galleries and museums, to browse Camden market record stalls racked with unknown names, and to walk over Waterloo bridge at 4 a.m drunk looking at historical landmarks reflected in the rippling river.

In Solihull where I grew up, in the Seventies still almost a country town on the fringe of the Birmingham conurbation, we had a sixties concrete square with some fountains, and sometimes bands played in the Scout hut. Even billeted in a shared house in Acton, where wind blew plastic bags through the deserted and all but derelict shopping precinct, the big city was a blast.

But now I’m forty-two, a father. It’s comforting to know that culture is within arm’s length, should we ever find time to reach out and fondle it, but increasingly, the idea of shops and services being but a few minutes’ easy drive, rather than out of sight, at the end of a massive negotiation involving traffic flow analysis or arcane levels of public transport expertise, seems incredibly attractive.

And the idea that your kids could just go to a school, rather than being unwillingly involved in a conscience-shredding decision process involving analysis of Offstead reports and the study of newspaper stories of playground murders holds an undeniable charm.

But can I go? Is it ethical to come to the city at twenty-one, suck it dry for experiences, and then split as soon as you just want to do some convenient shopping and not have your children killed? And what of those who weakened, and left, the ‘dear departed’, as I call them? They put a brave face on it, the former city dwellers, decamped to the borderlands.

But they want you to come and stay, so desperately, to bring news. Once, winding down in the hotel bar of a rural market town after a stand-up show in some half full arts centre, I was surrounded by escapees, internet drones working from their stonewalled homes, buying me pint after pint in exchange for the opportunity to reminisce about the city.

Their kids played in fields, and were not required to be armed, and they ate home slaughtered meat from the farmer’s freezer. But these were desperate people. Healthy, happy, economically secure, terrified, bored and mad, like polar bears pacing an inappropriately small enclosure, pawing at their own flanks.

Once I went walking on a largely uninhabited Hebridean island. The man who drove the mini-bus that picked you up from the quay, after a trip across the sound on a small boat that was buffeted by a basking shark, told me that there were two pubs on the Island. Or at least there had been.

One was on its last legs, after the owner had said or done something to alienate his slender customer base, now decamped en masse to the competition. This was the countryside, the non-city, where one stray remark would wreck you forever, an occupational hazard for a man like me, a stand-up comedian, paid, essentially, to behave inappropriately.

Once I was playing a plucky comedy club that ran in a room above an isolated Peak District pub. In the bar afterwards, a local who had visited London remarked disparagingly on its unfriendliness. No-one knew anyone, or said good morning.

Thank god, I thought. To be anonymous in a crowd. To be where nobody knows your name. Perhaps I’ll stay.