Rural idyll provides perfect antidote to stresses of city

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

We all like to think of Galway as a city – and in an Irish context, it certainly is – but when we talk of commutes to work that can last up to an hour, the Americans scoff that this is as close as they’ll get to living over the shop.

Now we all know that everything – including ego – is bigger in America, but in this case they have a point.

Londoners do too, with property prices in the UK capital running out of control; a recent Channel 4 programme revealed that one-bed broom cupboards in Kensington will set you back the price of a small street in the North of England.

You will pay a million for a shoebox – or what estate agents like to call a crash pad – which is why more and more Londoners are moving into Essex or beyond or travel daily from Brighton and beyond to the city.

A good commute is anything around an hour, and two isn’t out of the question. But the wear and tear of that on the body – not to mention the train fares – is still a better option than a million pound mortgage on a place where you couldn’t swing a cat.

Dublin isn’t there yet, but it’s making a good stab at it – not in terms of house prices, but in terms of availability. Ask the students living a million miles from their university, or, more critically, the hundreds of families in emergency accommodation.

But this isn’t new either; more than a decade ago, I knew of work colleagues who rose at dawn to beat what is laughingly called rush-hour traffic – and they’d then kip in their cars for a half an hour before going into the office.

But even that doesn’t qualify as marathon commuting by international standards.

There were pictures last week of a monster traffic jam in Beijing which would make the worst hold-ups on the Headford Road seem like a Formula 1 finish.

The ‘carpocalypse’ coincided with China’s Golden Week celebrations, and left thousands of motorists stranded near a toll station in Beijing, as they returned home at the end of the week-long National Day holiday.

The nightmare bottleneck was reportedly caused by the combination of a new checkpoint, which sharply reduced the amount of lanes on the motorway from an estimated 50 to 20, and foggy weather.

Drone footage captured the unbelievable traffic gridlock on one of the country’s busiest roads, the G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway.

But on any day of the year, New Yorkers will routinely spend as long getting into the office as we spend getting from Galway to Dublin, so everything is relative – and yet that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take cognisance of a new report on the stresses of city life.

Maybe we didn’t need a neuroscientist to point out that you’ll be calmer and more relaxed if you’re surrounded by green fields instead of grinding traffic, but his findings go a serious step further by associating city living to higher levels of anxiety and depression.

Scientifically that’s because city-dwellers are apparently hyperactive in a region of the brain called the amygdala, which is linked to depression.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.