My unlikely friendship with Wilf the farmer who'd never tried Indian food nor left his valley convinced me that the countryside ISN'T racist, says KIRAN SIDHU

Some things in life come to us unexpectedly; things we would never have been drawn to that surprise us and they show us we were wrong.

This is how I feel about living in the Welsh countryside, a wild and barren space  of otherness.

I came to Ceredigion, a remote valley in the Cambrian mountains, in the summer of 2020, when I was 45.

The decision to move came after the death of my mother, which floored me. I needed an escape, and chose Wales based solely on the fact my husband, Simon, and I had visited the area on long weekend breaks.

Compared with the city, the countryside felt limited. Coming from London, I wasn’t used to feeling so conspicuous. London is a world city and I have always felt like a global citizen. I couldn’t ignore the fact that I was the only brown girl in the valley; the countryside is predominantly green — and white.

While it was nothing like the picture painted by lobbying organisation the Wildlife and Countryside Link, which told MPs in February of a ‘racist, colonial’ white space — comments echoed recently by BBC Countryfile ­presenter John Craven, who said researchers were finding ‘disturbing’ evidence of racism in the British countryside — I did feel out of place.

When I first moved here, my Indian heritage meant that I was a foreigner in this rural Welsh land, even though I was British — my parents had moved to the UK from India in the 1960s.

In those early days, the lack of diversity perturbed me — there’s safety in numbers and shared experiences. Here, I stood alone.

That’s not to say I didn’t find the Welsh friendly and welcoming. I’m glad to say they were. It’s just that I was so used to seeing ­different types of people and hearing a ­plethora of languages and accents that I really noticed when they were absent.

At first glance, the countryside does appear to be a closed shop — I know many people who see rural areas as hostile because they are not white.

I can’t help but think, however, that the fact I was in the throes of grief when I moved to Wales, rather oddly, helped me.

Anyone who has experienced acute grief from the loss of a loved one will be able to identify with the insular feeling that separates grievers from others. The loss of my mother from womb cancer had already set me on a solitary path. I was well acquainted with the sense of being ‘other’.

But in the five years since I moved to the countryside, I have come to see something so nuanced about it, that you’ll notice only from living within it. If you’re a visitor it will pass you by.

For the fact is that there is a form of diversity in the country. And it is a diversity that was missing from my life in the city. There, people who are alike stick together. In the countryside people are stuck together —whether they’re alike or not.

I have forged friendships with people who are not only different from me — but different from one another. In the city, I now realise, we tend to form friendships with people ­similar to us. We go to the same gyms and are part of the same clubs. We think we’re diverse, but in reality, we’re not really.

For instance, when I first met my farmer friend, Wilf, who is in his 70s, four years ago, he was fixing his sheep gate and I was out on a walk. He didn’t greet me with a ‘hello’, but instead asked which route my walk was taking.

I liked this doing away of formalities — we shared a valley, and that was enough to group us together.

Everything else; age, gender and ethnicity didn’t matter — all that mattered was that we all walked this Welsh land: it held us in the palm of its hand, this lush, green giant of a valley.

It was a revelation to me that the landscape could supersede all other things when making friends.

It didn’t matter that Wilf was old enough to be my father and that he had hardly ever stepped outside the valley. When I was younger, I would’ve seen this as a myopic existence. But now, laden with grief and a desire to find ‘Home’, I felt rather envious of his commitment to this piece of land.

Wilf said that because he had found all the things his heart desired, right where he already stood, there was no reason to venture outside.

Most people spend years being square pegs, shaving parts of themselves off to fit in round holes. How wonderful that the valley Wilf was born in was cut in the shape of his heart. There was never a moment when he felt that he didn’t belong here.

Wilf had never eaten an Indian meal, or anything else that he called ‘foreign’. This could mean things as ubiquitous as pizza or hummus. Anything that was different he viewed with suspicion.

London to him was a place where people lived on top of each other in high-rise flats that prevented them from ever seeing the sky. He watched the sun rise and set as he worked.

He was interested in me; flighty, excitable, Indian. I was interested in him; a farmer and a man whose life was as circular as the seasons.

In the capital, I was an integral part of the multi-coloured patchwork of the city. I thought I had an eclectic group of friends.

Then I moved here. Now, at the age of 49, I socialise with people who share very few commonalities with me — if any.

I am friends with a sound healer — someone who uses sound vibrations to promote healing and relaxation — who mostly wears the colour ­purple. I also hang out with Tess, a gardener, who once rowed from Wales to Ireland.

They — and Wilf — have a wealth of life experience, but none that matches my own. Our friendship comes from acknowledging our differences of age, race, sex and cultural environment. What binds us together, like an invisible thread, is the valley we all live in.

This quirky friendship group I now lean on has highlighted to me how much we miss in life by sticking to what we already know. It’s a misconception to think that because someone is so different from you, they’ll have nothing to teach you.

I have made friends with Sarah, a sprightly woman in her 60s, who taught me how to toboggan down the drive we share when the snow came and held us captive.

I am friends with Emma, who lives in a peculiar, quirky house with a tin roof. One afternoon, we made ­pottery. And then there’s Jim, a man who is nearly 80. Jim makes bows and arrows. One sunny day we spent time in his garden shooting them from the bows.

Every conversation I have had with Wilf over the past four years has been a lesson in a new way of being and thinking.

He taught me that a world existed outside the cacophony of my own troubled mind, and it is silent, except to those who want to listen.

I now recognise the sound of the cuckoo when it arrives from Africa in April, and for a few months, makes our valley its home.

I notice the subtle beginnings and ends of each season. Nature is not arbitrary; it is ordered and precise.

October is the time to put the ram in with the ewes so we can have lambs in the spring. Lambs arrive as early as February.

The countryside is not always gentle: crows will pick at the lambs’ eyes as they are being born, given the chance. A lorry-load of sheep off to the abattoir make a hell of a noise.

The countryside has shown me there’s a time to live and a time to die. And Wilf has taught me there’s movement in the stillness of life, if you pay attention, you’ll see it.

One hot summer, sitting on our balcony, my husband and I spotted a large bird in the middle of the field. It had been still for a while and we wondered whether it had been injured. Along with our neighbours, Glen, Rod and Sarah, we decided to help it.

Simon put on his gardening gloves and went out into the field. He crouched down and gently picked up the bird, and discovered it was still alive. That afternoon we all sat on the balcony and nursed a bird of prey, a Red Kite, back to life. We all took turns to feed it and give it water. It was an honour to be so close to something that always felt so distant. Perhaps this is what living in the countryside is all about; that the lives of those we share our planet with is felt so profoundly.

After a few hours, the bird became noticeably stronger; its wings wanted to stretch and we loosened the towel that we held it in. Its eyes brightened and darted around, acknowledging the five humans present.

Simon walked to the bottom of the garden to release it, and it flew, low at first, then gradually higher until it disappeared into the forest. We all clapped for joy.

In 2021, I wrote about Wilf. Post-Covid, in a world that was asking the big questions of life, I wanted to introduce him as someone who’d found contentment in the place he’d always stood.

This is something that’s quite radical in our world, where the proverbial carrot is permanently dangled. There’s an idea that ­happiness and joy lie outside ­ourselves and therefore have to be pursued. And here was a man who relished the routine of life without any desire to change it.

The article I wrote went viral and was discussed on UK radio stations as well as on the Today show in the US.

I was approached by directors wanting to make a film. Heart ­Valley, on which I was writer and co-producer, would go on to win numerous awards, including Best Short Film at The Tribeca Film Festival in New York in 2022 as well as a Bafta Cymru last year. The success of my stories about the countryside and the people in it surprised me at first. But looking back, it is the quiet stories, such as Wilf’s, that really move us, stories that are whispered.

Often, when life is felt so deeply, we go quiet. I did when my mother died. And sometimes life is at its most poignant and profound when we’re silenced by it.

I admit that the idea the countryside is a ‘white’ environment is something that still chimes with me; even though I have found a place within it.

I hope more people like me will get to enjoy its beauty.

It’s a place where you can lose yourself in its natural beauty. It’s a place where your problems can be swallowed by an environment that is far greater than any of them. Nothing will make you feel more insignificant than standing in a forest or on a mountain.

It is a place where nature is King, and everything else, including ourselves, is secondary.

• Kiran’s book I Can Hear The Cuckoo, published by Octopus, will be out in paperback on April 25.