City and Country

Hannah and Ruby are cousins, born three weeks apart, and for most of their twenty-six years they have been politely convinced that the other one has made the wrong choices in life. Hannah lives in a twelfth-floor flat in the center of Birmingham and works for a design company. Ruby lives on her parents' dairy farm in Devon, where she looks after a hundred and twenty cows. At every family wedding, they have the same conversation. "How can you live with so much noise?" asks Ruby. "How can you live with so little to do?" asks Hannah.

Last spring, after one of these conversations, their grandmother made a suggestion. "Stop talking about it," she said. "Swap. One month each. Then you'll know." Hannah's company let her work from anywhere, and Ruby's brother agreed to do the milking. So on the first of May, Hannah took the train to Exeter with a suitcase full of the wrong clothes, and Ruby drove up the motorway to Birmingham with a box of eggs and a pair of wellies she would never need.

For the first week, Ruby was in heaven. There were more restaurants on Hannah's street than in the whole of her valley. She could buy a coffee at any hour, see a film on a Tuesday night and walk to a museum. Nobody knew who she was, which was a strange and wonderful feeling for someone who had grown up in a village where everybody knew what you had for breakfast. She sent Hannah a photo of a Korean restaurant with the message: "I'm never coming back."

Hannah's first week was rather less wonderful. The farmhouse was colder than she had expected, the internet was slower than anything she had experienced since 2009, and on her first morning she was woken at half past four by a cow standing directly under her window. There were very few buses, no shops within walking distance and absolutely no Korean restaurants. She replied to Ruby's photo with a picture of a muddy field and a single word: "Help."

But things changed in the second week. In Birmingham, Ruby discovered that the more time she spent in the city, the more tired she felt. The noise never stopped, even at three in the morning. The flat was smaller than her bedroom at home. She had hundreds of neighbors and didn't know a single one of their names. On Sunday, she caught a bus to the edge of the city just to stand in a field for an hour, and she felt slightly embarrassed by how much better it made her feel.

Meanwhile, in Devon, Hannah had started getting up early, not because of the cow but because she wanted to. She found that she worked much better with fewer distractions. She learned to drive the quad bike, badly, and helped deliver a calf at two in the morning, which she later described as the most disgusting and most amazing experience of her life. The air was cleaner, the food was simpler, and, to her surprise, she was sleeping better than she had in years.

Of course, neither life was perfect. Ruby got lost in the shopping center three times and spent far more money in a month than she usually did in six. Hannah discovered that a farm offers very little privacy: by the third week, the whole village knew she had driven the quad bike into a hedge.

At the end of the month, the cousins met for lunch at their grandmother's house, exactly halfway between the two. Ruby was wearing new trainers and Hannah had a sunburnt nose. "Well?" said their grandmother. "Who was right?"

They thought about it for a long time. "The city is more exciting than I thought," said Ruby, "and much more exhausting." Hannah nodded. "The country is far more boring than the city," she said, "and far less boring than I thought." Their grandmother smiled. "So you were both wrong," she said, "which is the best possible result."

Both of them went home the next day. But Hannah now spends one week in every month on the farm, and Ruby has booked tickets for a concert in Birmingham in December. At the last family wedding, for the first time anyone could remember, they didn't have the usual conversation at all.