Life in a small town

There are pluses and minus when it comes to living in a small town.  It only takes me 5 minutes to drive home from work and traffic is practically unheard of but it takes 1.5 - 3 hours to access a decent selection of shops.  No-one seems to care what you wear or what you look like.  Which can be a good thing when you're having a bad hair day and a bad thing when it looks like half the town got dressed in the dark.  The most pressing issue in the letters page of the local paper concerns punctuality and the modern world's lack thereof or God and the modern world's.... you get the drift.

Would I swap it for life in the big city with access to all the great festivals and exhibitions, amenities galore and a huge array of shops to chose from?  Not unless I could magically get rid of the traffic, the crazy house prices, the length of time it takes to get anywhere and the rush, rush, rush that tends to accompany life in the city.  So for now I think I will stick to the pace of small town living with occasional forays into more populated areas when my need for variety and culture becomes too stark.