Are you a townie or a country bumpkin?

Do you crave bright lights, bars, boutiques and culture to make your brain ache?

Or do you long for open spaces, lonely fells, clean air and time to reflect?

I grew up in the Lake District.

The population of my home was roughly 30,000. In Cumbrian terms a metropolis; compared with London, Birmingham or Manchester, a one-horse town.

Pubs lined the main street and there was a nightclub, Alley Cats, where your shoes stuck to the carpet. If you were an off-comer (not from round these parts) you’d be viewed with suspicion and thrown on the last stagecoach out of town.

I lived on a residential estate, but within moments of leaving my house I could reach drystone-walled fields, woodland and streams gushing down hillsides. My friends and I played in cow-pat-decorated pastures and considered baiting – and then quickly running away from – a herd of bullocks as sport.

Kids I was at school with were bussed in from remote hill farms. We never saw them when the winter’s snow blew in and cut them off from civilisation.

Shopping in my home town was, shall we say, limited.

For the full retail therapy adrenaline rush, my parents took me and my brother to the bright lights of Preston.

For football that aspired above the local non-league variety, we watched Preston North End, or travelled to Anfield to watch Liverpool. These were the days of Dalglish, Clemence and Hansen.

I was excited and slightly overawed by the experience.

The noise and throng of the Kop was so alien to me.

But if we were intimidated by Preston and Liverpool, then London was something else.

Throughout the 70s we had regular visits to relatives in the Smoke. The thrill of seeing Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London and Downing Street was offset by the fear instilled by my dad.

Believing the capital to be a den of murderers and pickpockets (as well as IRA bombers), he hid his folding money in one of his zip-up boots (again, this was 1970s fashion).

That was fine, but mortifying when it came to paying for a cup of tea in Woolworth’s cafeteria.

Watching your dad take off his footwear to pay for a hot drink, a queue of tutting Cockneys behind him, is not something I’d like to repeat.

I’ve now lived away longer than I did at home, and the place seems so parochial when I go back.

I consider myself a country-born townie and could never give up one over the other.

It’s the complementary yin-yang, ebb and flow that I love.

So, I ask again, are you a townie or a country bumpkin?