Thursday, October 02, 2008

Home again...

We got back from holiday at the weekend having had a really good break - although we could both have done without the flu! (Which explains why I'm a day or two late updating this - it hit me quite hard for once and I've been having problems working out which way is up.)

The weather was surprisingly good, if rather misty a lot of the time, and we managed some good long walks and a couple of climbs (to the tops of mountains, that is - I don't go in for rock climbing!) The scenery in the Lake District is magnificent at any time of year, but I often think autumn, with the leaves turning to gold and the hillsides swathed in russet bracken and purple heather, takes some beating. Mind you, we did get a little too 'up close and personal' with one particular lot of bracken, on a precipitous slope heading from the Dunnerdale Valley towards Seathwaite Tarn, but that's another story. Let's just say my lungs didn't take very kindly to being head-first in the vegetation as I crawled up on my hands and knees!

The search for background material was partly successful; I called into a local bookshop and came away with two books. One is a sensible one, full of old postcards of the area together with interesting snippets of history. The other is emphatically not sensible - a lurid little volume of ghost stories and other hair-raising tales, most of which are probably apocryphal but highly entertaining!

Part way through the holiday I realised that the Lake District is changing fast, to the point where it's in danger of losing its identity. Village after village is filling up with the sort of shops you can find anywhere else in the country; gourmet restaurants are taking over from the local cafes and pubs that used to sell hearty portions of well-cooked local food (bliss after a long day out walking the fells); and the people who visit are changing from serious outdoorsy types to well-groomed older folks on coach tours. It all seems a little sad (especially as I've known and loved the area for the best part of thirty years) but I can't help thinking it will make an excellent backdrop for a novel. The pressure on the locals to either conform or go bust must be horrendous...

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