Thursday 29 September 2016
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.
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It's a funny thing that for many of us who were born in Cumbria, the Lakes and fells are just something "there" that we show little interest in - indeed, if anything, we resented them for acting as a barrier between us and "the real world".
ReplyDeleteMy dad - an avid walker from youth to the present - tried constantly to get my brother and I to partake in a trip up Scarfell Pike or whatever, but I much happier moping in my bedroom listening to the Smiths or Joy Division. As you do.
Sacrilege ! But seriously you're right, we don't consciously appreciate things that are right on our doorstep. Littleborough seemed a safe but mundane place to grow up in and I was always surprised by how impressed visitors were with it.
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