Tag archives for Lake District

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 between the driver’s door and a steep shale 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.

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 ungentle­man­li­ness 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.