506 A View From The Lakes

First  viewed  :  7  August  1981

This  is  quite  a  painful  one  to  write  about   given  the  personal  context. This  short  series  of  mini-documentaries  about  the  Lake  District  was  one  of  a  series  of  early  evening  replacements  for  Granada  Reports  whilst  Tony  Wilson  &  co  went  on  their  holidays. I  avidly  tuned  in  because  of  a  developing  obsession  with  the  Lakes  which  wasn't  all  that  healthy.

As  mentioned  a  few  posts  back,  I  had  arranged  a  youth  hostelling  holiday  in  the  Lakes  for  just  after  the exams  with  my  friend  Michael. We  were  staying  for  ten  nights  moving  from  one  hostel  to  another  until  the  end  where  we'd  have  two  nights  at  Ambleside  sandwiching  a  relaxation  day. En  route  between  the  hostels  we'd  be  conquering  some  of  the  highest  mountains  in  the  country. All  went  pretty  much  to  plan  until  the  fourth  day  when  I  refused  the  ascent  of  Bowfell , opting  for  a  road  walk  to  Duddon  Youth  Hostel  instead,  even  though  it  would  leave  us  with  hours  to  kill  in  a   desolate  area  before  the  hostel  opened . There  were  numerous  reasons . One  had  always  been  there;  Michael  was   hardier  , stronger  and  braver  than  me, in  short  a  better  walker. We'd   both  been  spooked   by  our  misty  ascents  of  the  Helvellyn  edges  ( me  Swirral, him  Striding )  the  day  before  but  it  affected  him  less  than  me. I  was  also  fretting  about  what  might  be  happening  back  in  Rochdale  where  my  love  rival  was  planning  to  make  a  move  on  the  girl  I  fancied  after  their  last  exam  that  day. But  really,  it  was  a  combination  of  fatigue  ( bear  in  mind  we  were  doing  every  walk with  a  rucksack  filled  for  10  days )  and  lack  of  appetite  for  walking  high  in  what  looked  like  it  was  going  to  be  heavy  rain. Michael  reluctantly  complied  but  can't  have  been  impressed. He'd  been  happy to  leave   all  the  route-planning  to  me , I'd  talked  about  it  incessantly  for  months  and  now  I   wasn't  living  up  to  it .The  next  two  days  followed  the  same  pattern  of  me  opting  for  the  path  of  least  resistance ( and  picking  up  blisters  from  all  the  road  walking ). We  conquered  just  one  more  mountain  ,Green  Gable, as  staying  at  Black  Sail  gave  us  such  a  good  head  start,  but  the  next  day  Michael  himself  declined  a  summit  and  that  was  the  end  of  our  mountaineering  with  three  days  still  to  go . To  make  matters  worse , just  before  we  broke  up  for  exams ,  my  Drama  teacher  had  suggested  I  re-write  a  silly  set  of  stories  I'd  been  touting,  as  a  play  for  the  new  Drama  group  he  was  organising. Therefore,  I  took  pen  and  paper  with  me  to  write  it  up  in  the  evenings,  without  a  thought  as  to  how  boring  it  would  be  for  Michael , just  sitting  there  watching  someone  else  scribbling.  By  the  end  of  the  holiday,  he  was  getting  pretty  short  with  me  and  no  wonder.

Our  return  journey  concluded  with  Michael's  Dad  picking  us  up  in  Manchester  and  all  the  talk  was  of  him  starting  work  on  the  Monday. The  holiday  was  tossed  off  in  one  line  , "it  was  OK"  or  something  like  that. I  knew  there  and  then  that  I'd  lost  him. It  took  him  a  few  months  to  make  the final  break  but  it  was  inevitable  from  that  point. My  promised great  walking  adventure  had  turned  into  a  tedious  tourist  trot  and  he  was  never  going  to  put  that  sort  of  trust  in  me  again.

That  put  the  Lakes  out  of  reach  as  I  had  no  appetite  for  walking  alone. I  could  have  gone  with  the  school  the  following  year  but  the  climb  down  from  having  organised  my  own  adventure  was  too  much  for  me  to  swallow. Instead,  I  wallowed  in  a  sort  of  self-pitying  exile , lamenting  my  mistakes  and  eagerly  devouring  any  book  or  TV  programme  about  the  area  that  came  along.

The  programme  was  amiable  enough. The  first  episode   concentrated  on  the  first  tourists  in  the  Victorian  era  and  their  bonkers  practice  of  turning  their  back  on  a  great  view  and  looking  at  its  reflection  in  a  hand  held  glass,  lest  their  animal  passions  be  aroused  by  nature  in  the  raw  or  something  like  that. The  other  one  I  recall  was  a  programme  about  Dove  Cottage, Grasmere  which  concluded  by  interviewing  one  of  the  staff  there. They  let  him  drone  on  for  far  too  long  and  he  was  grumbling  about  intrusive  questioning  by  the  tourists  when  my  mum  got  up  and  turned  it  off. I  was  about  to  scream  in  protest  that  I  was  watching  it   but  then  realised  I  couldn't  make  any  sort  of  case  for  continuing  to  watch  an  old  bloke  moaning  about  his  job  and  let  it  go.