Lake District - July 1st

A nice change in the weather today; torrential rain all the time replaced by torrential rain half the time. Mostly starting just as we were getting out of the car, but hey. Another radical break with family holiday traditions was that we stayed out the whole Sunday rather than rushing back for lunch. We didn't explode. First drove to Windermere, to the same touristy little town we stopped at last year; and I still can't remember the name. Wandered down the same lane, fooled around the same beach and I got pretty much the same photos of Emily and Gemma lobbing stones into the lake. Had coffee, hung about for ages outside a remarkably ghastly little shopping arcade. Then drove a short way along the lake for lunch at a picnic resort. Great drops started falling when we were part-way through, sending us scurrying for the shelter of the trees; it just needed ants attacking the sandwiches during the first half to complete the cliché. Afterwards we caught a care ferry across Windermere – or perhaps another lake, even mum seemed confused by the layout sometimes and she was navigating – in what looked suspiciously like sunshine.

Our next destination was Beatrix Potter's former house – no doubt we'll be digging up the bones of Wainwright and Wordsworth later in the week. (Although Wainwright's ashes were apparently scattered all over Haystacks, something which made me determined to never climb the mountain again.) I wasn't enthusiastic about this and, hey, I was right. The house itself was nice enough, a trim and well-proportioned structure albeit covered with the sort of quaint ambience you'd expect. Unfortunately they've recreated the traditional lighting inside, a nice idea but it meant you could barely see a damn thing. One semi-visible exhibit I enjoyed was a publisher's letter accepting one of Potter's stories – 'Wee Little Fairy Boots' or something' but rejecting several others. Reasons given were that they were "not topical" or "obviously a children's story", suggesting that Wee Little Fairy Boots was a sophisticated modern satire. Drove an adventurous route back, along roads inundated by flood waters and up the lunatic haul to the Kirkstone Pass. Stopped for a few minutes there, parents trying to find ravens/peregrines/some other damn tweety thing, me staring at the grim black clouds lapping at the cliffs about twenty feet above.

I sprung out like a jack-in-the-box almost as soon as we got home to climb some, if not all, of Plaice Fell on my own. The usual wonderful views soon emerged; the head of Ullswater at one end of Patterdale, squat and rectangular Brothers Water at the other, a patchwork of dry stone walled fields in between, the Helvellyn valley beyond managing to be both bright and deluged. To climb Plaice Fell you toil across the hillside, over assorted gushing streams in this weather, reach a damp little gap in between two peaks and wonder what to do. I headed left for the summit, feeling a little silly climbing a mountain in the late afternoon but muttering over and over "You don't need a reason to climb a mountain, you need a reason not to climb one." Then the rain started, I had my reason and so turned round. This may be a reason I mention over and over in this diary.