I sit at the greasy table in the little pub with two other women, and try to concentrate on what they are discussing, instead of letting my eyes wander towards Mr Lost. It has taken me a long time to become friendly with these girls, and I am keen not to betray a misplaced interest in a man other than Mr Husband.

This is, after all, the life I have chosen.

When we lived the cocooned chrysalis of London suburbia's life, with its middle-class tree-flanked town roads and pointless 4x4s, our children used to attend the local primary church school. It was stern, both as a building and as an institution, with four-year-olds wearing a tie and collared shirt. Parents were expected to take active part in the life of the Christian community, and I did my fair share of leading toddler groups and Sunday school classes, threatening the children in my care with the nine plagues and the talking bush on fire.

When not teaching about the slaughter of the first-borns, I would sit on one of the front pews, like the other two hundred mothers who were desperate for the vicar to note their weekly attendance. The first criterion for acceptance at the excellent school was, in fact, regular worship at the church.

I watched myself in despair as I turned from a normal church-goer to a frantic, neurotic one, more concerned with scoring brownie points against the other women than trying to have my own private dialogue with Him above.

Having had to bottle up their prodigious energy all week and Sunday morning, the children would necessarily unleash their worst behaviour as soon as they left the church premises. Sometimes they'd be close to the point of self-combustion during the Sunday class, which goes a little way to explaining my regular reference to the nine plagues as an admonishment.

I left urban mediocrity and hypocrisy for the sublime horror of the countryside; swapped competitive mothers at the school gates, hell-bent on number tables, reading techniques and jogging around the 'common' in their skimpy Lycra, for the ones wearing peasant skirts, greasy hair and hands smelling of home-baked chocolate cake.

For a few months I felt like I did not belong to either world. Sometimes I still wake up in a cold sweat, from a nightmare where I do not exist at all, shunned by both the urban women and the cowgirls.

Both worlds have their exceptions, though; frumpy townies with compost bins merge, in my memory, with upper-class countryside skinny toffs sending their children to secret private tuition sessions to give their performance at school an extra boost.

Pest n. 1 was bullied at the first school we put him in, when we moved out here, a place where God makes rare appearances and school ties are even rarer.

Given the five-week timespan between buying/selling and moving out/in, I did no research whatsoever and just registered with the nearest village school.

This put me in touch with the more colourful elements of our community, complete with tattoos - I remember fondly "I love the bitch", written in big blue letters on a particularly well-developed triceps belonging to one of the stay-at-home fathers loitering outside the school gates at pick-up time - and interesting body-piercing patterns; cigarettes hanging from puckered mouths and plastic heels under white jeans.

I searched for a sassy haircut which would give a woman's background away, but saw none. It dawned on me then that I would struggle a little to make friends. I had left all my good acquaintances behind, and a couple of real soulmates had - intelligently - emigrated before mortgage rates, fuel and taxes had shot through the roof in this country.

I ruthlessly decreed that our boys would not spend another school year there because of the continuous trouble in which they seemed to get tangled up; one day Pest n.1's tennis racket would disappear, the next he would be offered the unique chance to have his face "kicked in" and his body "thrown in the river".

In reality, I secretly felt that children need to learn to cope with unpleasant characters, if only so that they are better equipped to deal with equally unpleasant adults later on in life; I also firmly believe that Pest n.1 and 2 are themselves perfectly capable of threatening behaviour; but what I could not cope with was the immense hole in my social life carved by the total absence of similarly-minded women.

Women who had worked and lost, lived and paused, bred and recovered. Women, in short, with a past which was not limited to rearing lambs and picnic-ing down the river wearing a sunflower summer dress.

Moving the boys to a different school in the next bonbon-pretty village with its thatched cottages and medieval church proved a partial success. Now Pest n.1 would be rejected and subjected to mild verbal abuse by middle-class children with a posher accent.

A shallow victory, but it carried with it the thrill of finally mixing with a different kind of women who, like me, had a little dirty soil under their manicured
fingernails but spent time working out at the gym rather than working the land.

It is with these women that I sit tonight at the greasy table, discussing city bonuses which our husbands did not get this year, the looming nightmare of private education for our brats, and the lack of decent shoe shops in the nearest town.

Half the pub is populated by people who, according to village rumours, either have or have had an affair in recent memory with the other half. Life in small countryside villages is as incestuous as the most thrilling passages of the Bible.

That would not persuade me to discuss my current emotional state, nor mention the fact that Mr Lost is drinking with some acquaintances of mine. It would be easy to ask to be introduced, but then the news of such blatant display of personal interest would be carried through three villages down the county by tomorrow morning.

Mr Husband already struggles with the idea of me going out without the children, so fanning the steaming local mouths into a frenzy of volcanic gossip that might reach him with Pompeian disastrous effect would not be a good idea.

Besides, Mr Lost looks like he is married. You can't be lost without having been first owned by somebody else.