Province <

If you think of any country, you might focus on its capital city first, or certainly its largest cities; London, Paris, Rome, New York, you get the idea. But these metropolises are the equivalent of the ‘Sunday Best’ and don’t by any means tell the whole story.

So much of any country lies outside these cultural centres. Little slices of provincial life, unpolished, unlit, unflashy, largely going unnoticed by the rest of the world, rather. Over the course of my travels, I’ve often been very curious about these quiet little backwaters and how they exist, when so many of their young populations are lured away to the cities and the promise of finding fortune.

These towns, villages, hamlets, have their own sense of time and often look like they have let go of any aspiration or ambition, happy to the resist the inevitable march of so called progress. But contrary to that being a sign of hopelessness or despair, I like to think of it as maybe more a contentedness, a letting go of the need to keep up, compete or show off and an easiness with just being. Perhaps there’s a lesson in that that resonates with me.

Province is the word, but not used here in the derogatory sense.