THE LAKES

Of course, I never told you about my weekend away, did I...? Our pleasant little oasis of time spent in the cool, comforting embrace of the Lake District, guiltily grabbed at the back end of April when spring ought to have well and truly sprung, and the icy fingers of winter should by now be nothing but a distant and chilly memory...

Well, basically, it snowed.

The end of April and it snowed...

The end of April, and there's still snow lingering on the top of the mountains...

The end of April and... Ah, you get the picture...

Not only that, but there was an actual genuine ice storm on the motorway as we drove up there on the Friday night and we got caught in another one as we were stopped and looking at the new-born lambs in a field as we walked back from the restaurant on the Sunday evening.

Apart from that, it was fine.

Well, that's not strictly true.

Saturday was fine.

On Sunday and Monday it rained a lot, but, you know, it was Cumbria, so that's kind of expected.

But our weekend away wasn't just about the weather... Perhaps it might not have been your idea of what a weekend in the Lake District might include, but, under the present circumstances, it suited us fairly comfortably.

There was a swift meal in the pub upon arrival, excellent breakfasts making up the "Breakfast" part of the "B&B" experience, a stroll into Keswick mooching around the shops, and our traditional calling in at "Temporary Measure" which seems to have turned into our preferred "bolt-hole" of choice.

There was also a migraine, plenty of new-born lambs to look at, a drive to Ambleside, a chance encounter with someone from work (which totally freaked me out as that kind of thing never happens to me), our now traditional vegetarian meal in "Zefferelli's" (although we skipped their movie programme because the film we really wanted to see wasn't available in glorious 2-D), a couple of pints in the pub on a Saturday evening (these days a pretty unusual thing for me to do...), a Sunday morning trip to a cinema that did have 2-D on the Sunday morning, a very fine "pre-birthday" meal accompanied by an Old Vine Zinfandel from Lodi, California in a decent restaurant, and that second ice storm which I mentioned earlier, of course...

We did miss out on having the now traditional holiday ice cream cornet, though, which is a bit of a shame, but the icy winds and the rain meant that it really didn't feel all that appropriate...

There were, however, also plenty of shops to buy tat in, and, indeed, a fair quantity of tat was actually purchased, as well as certain amounts of cheese and chocolate from a couple of lovely little emporia that specialise in little else. There was also "Booths" to visit, which really is turning out to be the supermarket of choice whenever we visit that particular part of the world (and if we ever track down the one at MedioCrity, my debit card might just leap out of my wallet and make a dash for safety). All-in-all, a fairly banal and ordinary list of stuff, but, given the time we've been having these past few months, a weekend of just doing the banal and ordinary stuff without having to carry the burden of all the other worries, was precisely what we needed, and I have to put these words down because pretty soon, like that week at home we had in mid-March, if we're not very careful, we will totally forget that our quiet and pleasant little weekend away ever actually happened...

Because that's what the rolling snowball of other stuff tends to do for you. It accumulates and sucks every other thought you have into its benign presence and pretty soon, the only memories you have, the only thing you can imagine yourself ever having done, is making those trips to and fro, back and forth to a hospital bedside again and again and again...