ANOTHER LOST WEEKEND

The first weekend after my mother's funeral was not spent, as you might have expected, in going through her stuff and sorting it all out, but was instead spent in the Lake District.

This was a break we'd booked several weeks earlier in the anticipation that we might be in need of a bit of a breath of fresh air, given that, at that time, our schedule of daily hospital visiting looked as if it might be pretty endless.

Ah well, you live, you learn.

The Beloved was intensely worried that I might suffer a catastrophic "slump" after the continuous rigours of having to "keep going" over the last couple of weeks, as well as during the long months leading up to this, and we really considered that cancellation of our 48 hour getaway might have been the best option, but I maintained that fresh air and some different scenery might help to give us a little perspective and so, late on Friday afternoon, we threw a couple of bags in the car and headed north, after stopping briefly to drop off the plates we'd borrowed from the church in our futile attempt to find another home for the mountains of leftover food from after the funeral.

We then had a few surprise meetings with familiar faces from the funeral as we stopped at mum's local Tesco, because when you are part of a community like she was, you do kind of run into people. This has made me realise how out of touch I have become in recent years and may yet prove to be the touchstone in my recuperation from my own isolation. Indeed, I may have to reconsider my position on "joining things..."

Out of great hardship, some good may yet come.

The traffic getting out of Manchester on that Friday evening was dreadful, and it was three hours after leaving the house before we arrived at, er, Preston, but after that it got easier and, despite a wobbly moment when we hit a storm on that dark stretch of motorway just after the South Lakes exit as you head on up towards Penrith, and another freaky time negotiating the roadworks on the road towards Keswick, we arrived pretty much at the time we'd said we would, dropped our bags off in the room at the B&B, and headed off to the pub whilst they were still serving food.

After that we sauntered back and watched TV in the room until Ken Russell's self-indulgence in "Tommy" finally sent us to sleep.

Ah yes. We wild types. Hanging around in the pub until nine o'clock and indulging ourselves by having that second pint, just because we could...

After the "breakfast" part of the overnight B&B experience we did as we always do when in those parts and, whilst admiring the autumn colour and marvelling at the height and speed of flow of the river, strolled into Keswick to mooch around the shops, have a look around the market, and have a coffee in "Temporary Measure", our very favourite little coffee shop.

After that, we returned with our goodies and got into the car and spent some time trying to park in Ambleside before heading over to Zeffirelli's for a latish lunch, because we're nothing if not creatures of both habit and loyalty.

We were both strangely weary, though, perhaps because we've been through a lot recently, and so, after more retail therapy, we returned to Keswick for a bit of a doze and it was only the prospect of the "Lite Bites" menu in the pub that made us venture out into the rain once again where, shockingly, I had another two-pint evening...

Doctor Dougie would be appalled at my profligacy with my weekly quota, but there you go. I kind of think that it evens out, given how much I've had to avoid the stuff in recent months just in case the phone should ring...

After an extra hour in bed, Sunday brought another excellent breakfast and another sad departure, as well as the beginnings of what might turn out to be the storm of the year. I'd already read that it was the anniversary of the "Royal Charter" disaster, and the coincidental follow-up rescue one hundred years and a day later, so perhaps we all ought to expect a bit of wild weather over the last weekend in October.

We returned to "Temporary Measure" and went to Booths for some foodstuffs before heading south for a moody mooch around the Lakeland shop and a failed attempt at finding the Dodo exhibition in Kendal, before joining the motorway and heading home again, arriving just before the heavens opened and all the power went off for a few hours.

So, almost exactly 48 hours after we left the house, we arrived back there, convinced that the entire adventure had passed in the blink of an eye, and then I even got to do one of those "safely home" phone calls that my mother always insisted upon, although this time to my sister who had survived an interesting weekend herself, and told me that our spontaneous "family group hug" in the church during the service had been the talk of the neighbourhood, which brought a slight tear to the eye...

You might, of course, think that spending a weekend in the Lakes just to go shopping is a bit of a waste, when there's all that walking and climbing to be done, but, do you know what, I think that it did the world of good...