James Hannah

Christ­mas 2003 goes down as a land­mark Christ­mas in my fam­ily. It was the first time Jols and I had the where­withal and resources to get away for a cou­ple of days before head­ing across to her par­ents’ house for the main fes­tiv­i­ties. A nice lit­tle holidayette.

After exten­sive research, Jols landed upon a stay in the Lake Dis­trict, in a cot­tage beside a dis­used slate mine, near Coniston.

Now, one expe­ri­ence that is com­mon to every­one as we grow inde­pen­dent in life is that of the ‘treach­er­ous last mile’ that must be nego­ti­ated before being able to set­tle into any kind of pleas­ant week­end away. Any des­ti­na­tion worth stop­ping at is by neces­sity tucked away off the beaten track, down a labyrinth of nar­row lanes.

To be fair to the owner of the cot­tage (which is some­thing I am very much dis­in­clined to be), the lit­er­a­ture did mut­ter some­thing about ‘arriv­ing in the day­light’ and ‘not hav­ing a low-slung sports car’, as the approach to the cot­tages was a lit­tle bit uneven. For­tu­nately, I didn’t have a low-slung sports car. I had a 1990 Volk­swa­gen Polo. (Was it green? Was it blue? Nobody has ever given me a sat­is­fac­tory answer. It was this colour.)

So it was that I found myself squint­ing through a rain-slashed wind­screen at a nar­row vista of dimly illu­mined shale tack as the car bounced and lurched up a steep incline at about 9pm.

‘Is this,’ I enquired of Jols, ‘def­i­nitely the right way to go?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t see the map.’

It was all aca­d­e­mic, really, because there was no way we were going to be able to turn round; a steep bank rose up into the dark­ness to the right of the track, and to the left, there was just blackness.

I kept the revs up as much as I could, but any real speed meant the car would bounce alarm­ingly over pot­holes, and I didn’t want to break the sus­pen­sion, espe­cially not out here, and espe­cially not in the pitch dark.

Of course, the loud thunk and drag­ging sound that fol­lowed one par­tic­u­larly hefty bounce was a worry. I stopped the car on the steep incline and squeezed out of the driver’s door to see what had hap­pened. From my posi­tion, semi-trapped against the steep bank, I could hear a tor­rent of surg­ing water com­ing from the black­ness beyond. I didn’t have a light, so I used the dim glow of my mobile phone’s face to try to look under the car. Thank­fully the light didn’t need a mobile phone sig­nal to work, as there were no sig­nal bars to be coaxed, how­ever wildly I wielded my handset.

The exhaust was lying on the ground at the back, but was still attached at the front, so my sus­pi­cions were aroused that there may have been some­thing wrong with the exhaust. Why — I have had three sep­a­rate occa­sions to won­der — is your aver­age car exhaust held on essen­tially by two or three rub­ber bands? No matter.

After a cou­ple of abortive attempts to string the thing up (with­out any string), the solu­tion Jols and I arrived at was to attach my jump leads to the exhaust, and for Jols to hold it clear of the ground as I exe­cuted the nec­es­sary series of tricky hill starts on loose shale.

The upshot of all this was that Jols ended up run­ning along behind the car in the rain and laugh­ing and inhal­ing exhaust fumes as I kept up enough speed to advance along the pot­holed track. Sev­eral times the exhaust fell away and clunked to the ground, and sev­eral times I stopped the car for Jols to retie it before we could start again.

Some peo­ple have protested the ungentl­man­li­ness of this solu­tion. I would point to the qual­ity of Jols’s shale-based hill starts at the time, and at how dead I would have been given a role rever­sal (or, more lit­er­ally, a roll reversal).

Any­way: in this fash­ion we limped onwards to our hol­i­day cottage.

Pos­i­tives: we were on the right road. And I am a mem­ber of the AA.

I aban­doned the car more or less in the right place, and we retrieved our bags of clothes and boots and milk and teabags and Pringles — all the sundry things you need for a relax­ing week­end — and found the front door.

It was, let’s just pause to estab­lish, quite lovely. It had a stone floor, and a fire­place for a real fire. Jols hung up our wet-through coats on the coat hooks in the kitchen — admit­tedly, hers was rather more wet-through than mine — and we flopped on to the sofa in the front room. After a naïve and com­pletely unsuc­cess­ful attempt to get the fire going with a copy of Heat mag­a­zine, we retired to bed. Enough is enough.

Evening passed and morn­ing came, and a very lovely morn­ing it was too. Look­ing out of the bed­room win­dow was enough to ban­ish the ghosts of the pre­vi­ous evening. The lovely blue sky and crisp sun­light revealed the expan­sive moun­tain­ous scenery which had pre­vi­ously been shrouded in the dark, and it all even dimin­ished the task of hav­ing to get the AA out to this place-with-no-postcode-and-no-phone signal.

And there was the scent, of course. It was tan­gi­ble. There is some­thing about the scent of an old cot­tage in win­ter, the wooden beams, the stonework, the tang of hot soot from freshly burnt coal. Draw­ing deep of this evoca­tive fra­grance I descended the stairs in my pyja­mas and went to put the ket­tle on for a morn­ing cuppa.

It’s amaz­ing, I reg­is­tered, how much mess — and smell — you can make with a copy of Heat mag­a­zine and some matches, with­out actu­ally cre­at­ing a sus­tain­able conflagration.

I needn’t have been amazed.

Hav­ing filled the ket­tle with swirling soft Lake Dis­trict water, I gazed around the kitchen to find where we’d dumped the milk and teabags. I really hoped we’d not left the milk in the shop­ping bags by the stor­age heater — that would have been fairly typ­i­cal, and the ‘coun­try cot­tage’ smell was sus­pi­ciously strong from over there. Thank­fully I didn’t find any milk when I hunted in the shop­ping bags.

I did find that both of our coats had dried remark­ably well — the coat hooks were, after all, sit­u­ated above the stor­age heater. So well had they dried, in fact, that a large smoul­der­ing hole was work­ing its way through the back of my coat, and Jols’s was now a good few inches shorter. It was from the smoul­der­ing of 80 per cent wool and 20 per cent polyamide that our ‘coun­try cot­tage’ scent was sourced.

How best to describe the dimen­sions and data relat­ing to the hole in my coat? Well, the diam­e­ter was just a lit­tle bit big­ger than the diam­e­ter of my back­side, and, iron­i­cally, the posi­tion­ing of the hole on my coat was exactly where the coat would nor­mally have been cov­er­ing my backside.

As an extra added bonus, the heat had been enough to rise through the coat and char my wal­let, fus­ing together all of my bank cards, library card, national insur­ance card and sundry mem­ber­ship cards into one colour­ful but use­less lump of brit­tle plas­tic. You could make out my AA card as a lit­tle sliver of char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally bright and reas­sur­ing yel­low some­where in the middle.

Pos­i­tive: we weren’t dead from nox­ious fumes.

The upshot of our exploits thus far meant that we would have to walk, with­out coats, back along the labyrinthine roads, down to the vil­lage to find a pay­phone and the num­ber of the AA in order to phone them to con­vince them in the absence of my card that I was a mem­ber, and that they should come to an off-road des­ti­na­tion with no post­code, and roads wide enough only for a hatch­back vehi­cle. We would also, being by now quite grown up and assertive, visit the owner of the hol­i­day cot­tage and show him our coats, at which point he would surely see the error of sit­u­at­ing a coathook above a stor­age heater, and gladly part with some funds by way of apol­ogy and compensation.

It would be bet­ter of course to get this out of the way before we could start our hol­i­day. By the time we had dressed and gath­ered our­selves, the blue skies had turned as grey as the slate moun­tain­sides, and the rain had started to fall. Win­ter get­aways: you’ve got to accept it. Only, there was the whole ‘coats’ sit­u­a­tion. There was really only one decision. We would wear what was left of them down to the vil­lage. That would keep the rain off our shoul­ders at least.

So, hav­ing laughed all the way up the shale track as she bore the exhaust pipe on the way to the cot­tage, Jols now got her revenge by laugh­ing all the way back as my coat gave a charred frame to my revolv­ing but­tocks as I stumped back down the shale track. She laughed all the more heartily as I insisted she get close behind me when­ever a car approached us. Note that there were sev­eral of these, and none of them stopped to offer us a lift.

We got to the vil­lage, and I found a phonebox and phoned the AA.

‘What’s your mem­ber­ship number?’

‘I don’t know’

‘It’s the long num­ber across the mid­dle of your card.’

‘Yeah… um…’

We landed on some alter­na­tive details, and that seemed to suffice.

‘And where is the car?’

‘It’s in a slate mine.’

‘Right. What’s the name of the road?’

‘Um, it’s a shale track.’

‘Do you have a postcode?’

‘No…’

I finally man­aged to give them the inter­sec­tion of two roads where I would meet their mechanic. He would be with us in an hour or so.

While we waited, we popped over to see the owner of the cot­tage. An ini­tially bright wel­come quickly grew frosty (“Well, I can’t do any­thing about your coats, what do you want me to do?”), and then down­right hos­tile (“Well, sue me then. See how far you get.”) I’ll leave you to make up your own mind whether putting a coat hook over a stor­age heater and then blam­ing us for hang­ing our coats on it is a rea­son­able con­clu­sion. We didn’t sue him.

The AA man was much more pleas­ant, and he — like most of the many AA mechan­ics I have encoun­tered — was very help­ful, and found the whole sit­u­a­tion very funny. He vanned us back to our car, skil­fully nego­ti­at­ing the tight squeezes, and then spent a good half an hour fix­ing the exhaust back to the under­side of the car with wire. He warned me to get it fixed prop­erly (i.e. with rub­ber bands) at my ear­li­est oppor­tu­nity — a warn­ing I entirely ignored, lead­ing the exhaust to fall off in a car park in Steve­nage some three months later. Deserved.

So now we were able to enjoy our hol­i­day, tak­ing very lit­tle care of any of the host’s fur­ni­ture or belong­ings, and hav­ing a lovely big rag­ing (inten­tional) fire, which we started with his Christ­mas tree. We headed off to Pre­ston on the Mon­day morn­ing, and set­tled in the much more com­fort­able sur­round­ings of Jols’s mum and dad’s house, and watched the telly.

The one news story that struck us that Christ­mas time was of a dis­cov­ery ‘off the beaten track’, near a dis­used slate mine near Con­is­ton. The TV news reporter stood in front of the very same cot­tage sit­u­ated just by the edge of that very same mine.

Pos­i­tives: Our expe­ri­ence on this hol­i­day could, let’s con­clude, have been worse.