As someone lucky enough to have moved from London to a house in the country, the broader sentiment is one to which I relate. My own experiences of growing veg and dealing with bees and livestock, however, have not been quite as successful. In fact they have been disastrous enough to send me seeking supplies in the local supermarket faster than you can ask: has a bug eaten your beetroot or is it supposed to be that shape?
Let's face it, Beckham's utopian vision bears little relation to reality outside the M25 -- at least for those of us without a multimillion-pound bank balance, army of staff and endless free time. Not that I realised this at first. When I moved from Haringey to Rutland in 2018 I was so hellbent on recreating The Good Life that one of my first steps was creating a vegetable plot.
Visions of picking potatoes in a Cath Kidston pinny abounded as I ring-fenced it with chicken wire -- not quite the white picket fence that surrounds Beckham's plot on the grounds of his £6 million home near Chipping Norton but still -- spent a fortune on seeds, dug, raked, planted and waited. And waited.
Granted, the broad beans grew. Sometimes we got a few beetroot. Once, giddy with excitement, I spotted half a sweetcorn. But the carrots, kale and onions Beckham has grown (reportedly with the help of a head gardener) were conspicuous only by their absence, the green beans that could have compensated smothered by runaway ivy that seemed to sprout from nowhere overnight.
* David Beckham to edit Country Life (which he reads cover to cover)
On a cost per courgette basis we'd have been better off buying them, along with gold-plated dishes on which to serve them, from Harrods. And while Beckham found joy tending to his crop of vegetables I felt an escalating sense of failure as weeds took over at breathtaking speed and every spare moment was spent trying to get rid of the blighters.
Staring forlornly at a sea of knee-high thistles earlier this year my husband, who acquiesced to the grow-our-own project under duress, finally called time on my dream. "Do you think we should take it down now?" he asked. "Yeah," I said.
Unlike Beckham we didn't keep chickens. We upped the ante with quails. What started as a particularly ill-thought-through lockdown experiment to see if supermarket quail eggs are fertile (spoiler: they are) led to 14 of the creatures hatching in my study over four fraught days in January 2021 and a crash course in keeping livestock.
While Beckham's chickens "settled in nicely" to his sprawling chicken coop replete with glass windows and decorative spherical pruned trees, our quails started life in an Ikea box.
* Gardening in white shoes? I don't buy it, Becks
Shocked but smitten, we gave them pandemic-inspired names such as Hope and Astra and took them on walks round the house. Within days, however, they had doubled in size and after just two months were fully grown and ready for outdoor adventures in rapidly assembled accommodation. The video Victoria Beckham uploaded on social media of son Cruz sprinting round their land trying to capture a runaway hen is one with which I can sympathise.
One piece of advice I have yet to read in any Escape to the Country manual is that male quails cannot abide each other's company. I'll spare you the details of the injuries our nine incurred. Suffice to say we parted with increasing amounts of cash on new quail housing to separate them and I lay awake at 3am guilt-stricken and terrified they were going to decapitate each other.
Did the delectable quail eggs make up for the exhaustion? To a point, although the visceral memory of life cracking out of our supposedly lifeless shop-bought eggs did add a frisson of danger and when they died I vowed never to dabble in poultry farming again.
Frankly we have enough creatures to contend with -- and not just the spiders, mice and rabbits that surround us. Beckham, who built his beehives at the start of lockdown, might have invested in a monogrammed beekeeping suit and state-of-the-art hives but our honey bees came free, courtesy of infestations above our front door and in our chimney.
* Inside the fabulous world of the super-rich Cotswolds set
I was alerted to their presence by a crackling sound in the wall, which went on for months and which I put down to wifi problems at first (a rural issue for another time, perhaps). Then one morning I walked into the living room to find hundreds on the carpet, having dropped down the chimney, three storeys up and unreachable by ladder.
It turns out bees love nesting in crevices in old houses -- another countryside fact nobody warns you about. Because they are protected under UK laws regarding pesticides, pest control can't help. An ethical beekeeper quoted us upwards of £5,000 to draw them out which, given the £5 per potato situation we had going on in the vegetable patch, felt an expense too far.
In the end we spent more than £1,000 on scaffolding and took a kind local beekeeper up on his offer to extract the bees from the chimney, along with plates of honeycomb more than a foot long. Beckham might have "a deep appreciation for honey as a powerful superfood that provides natural energy" but I was simply deeply appreciative that the bees were moving out of our home. Don't get me wrong, I think I've found as much "solace" in the country as he has. Every morning I breathe in the fresh air and can't quite believe my luck that I'm here. But living off the land? I'll leave that to Becks.