Coniston - 25/7/09

So once again it's the Lake District for us. Which has become the new Scotland, which in turn has become the new Cornwall, I guess, which... anyway. The poignant note on this holiday, of course, is that Granddad is no longer with us. An ever-present on these family trips and, for that matter, the one who paid for them all.

Picked up my my parents this morning at the rather decadent time of 10.00. A new route was devised which mainly involved crawling along really slow roads and getting stuck for about half an hour in Harrogate – not a good place to get stuck in any circumstances. We eventually made it up to the Dales, which looked very nice in the clear sunshine. Stopped at a Little Chef which amazed us by not being awful, saw a bunch of cows standing in a lake as a sort of protest, passed a factory specialising in 'wound management' (i.e. plasters). Finally saw the Lakes in the distance and then, after an age, got out of bloody Yorkshire. Had lunch on a tiny road halfway up a hillside with more mountains in the distance – and that's been the theme of the day. We're not at Patterdale this year, right in the heart of the Lakes. We're on the edge, in an area officially known as 'kind of near Coniston', and the 360 degree view of the peaks which Patterdale enjoys is more like 20 degrees. We're also travelling back in time somewhat; the villages we passed through seem to have been preserved in the 1960's without the help of a Sunday evening TV show. Stopped at Ulverstone, the nearest town of any significance, for shopping, drove alone a rather good estuary for a while, made several turns up increasingly narrow and windy lanes and finally found the house, despite the best intentions of the designers. It was allegedly once a vicarage and the Ye Olde aspect is being pushed mightily. Open fireplaces, creaking roof beams, a bath suite that seems to have been pinched wholescale from the Castle Museum and legions of flies in the pantry-cum-kitchen. For once everyone didn't arrive at once. We were here miles before the others, allowing me to pinch the only bedroom with that 20 degree view – of the Coniston range, incidentally. My stepbrother Gav and his kids finally arrived, having got repeatedly lost on the way here. A bit later came my sister Christine and Uncle Bill, who's got a week's pass from psychiatric hospital. And he must have felt he was back there again after I spent a lot of time running after my nieces Emily and Gemma, all of us screaming. Though I'm glad to say the elder girl, Lorna, seems to be cultivating a more restrained, bookish persona. Only another seven years or so and she'll be ready for full teenage angst.