North

The Lake District smiles on me. I love North Wales and the mountain ranges of Snowdonia, but almost without exception when I’m there the Goretex will be on my back before I’ve trudged out of the car park.

The lakes are different. I know they’re officially one of the wettest places in the UK but in recent times the sun has always some on me, so I feel like the place actually doesn’t mind me being there, like it isn’t giving me a great big cumulonimbus-shaped “sod off” every time I haul my pack onto my back.

So last weekend, riding my luck weather-wise again, I trundled up the M6 with Hiking Buddy Extraordinaire to spend a couple of days in the hills. Heavy downpours on the motorway began to shake my faith a little but as we hit Newby Bridge the sun broke through the clouds and pretty well stayed with us until we left. Some may say the sun shines on the righteous, others say the sun even shines on a dog’s arse some days.

I like to think it’s the former in this case.

The rain started to fall on and off again as we arrived, but cleared within the first few hundred metres of ascent, leaving us with a beautiful day from there on in. We slogged up to the top and sat eating lunch watching the clouds cast their shadows across the valley and Haweswater as they raced across the skies above us.

After lunch we headed back along the arrow-straight path marked along Riggingdale and the beautifully accurately named Rough Crag. Although arrow-straight on the map, it was up and down like a bride’s nightie and quite exciting in places. We met a very elderly couple who offered us tea and advice on peanut butter sandwiches and I found a bog I thought I could clear by jumping. HBX bet me a sausage I couldn’t, and the die was cast. I even had to wait for him to sort out his camera in case I didn’t make it.

Having safely landed on the other side he put his camera away, hugely disappointed. The rest of the hike back to the car passed pretty uneventfully.

So once the tents were up, the barbecue burning with enough ferocity to be seen from space (thanks to some alarmingly liberal application of accelerants by HBX) and a couple of beers to the good we called it a night. Although I’d pushed for wild camping I was pretty happy as the site was fairly low key and gloriously isolated. Also the ground was flat and there were no errant mountain sheep likely to trip over the tent in the gloom. Also, hot showers are always good.

The next morning was clear and cold, a little overcast but looking good. Coffee on the go, bacon and eggs sizzling, we planned our route for the day. Coniston Old Man was just around the corner and seemed a good bet. we broke camp, loaded everything back into the car and headed off to find the trailhead. Parking up in Coniston we hauled on our packs and started towards the hills.

After a brief ‘discussion’ around routes about 15 minutes in we left the road and started hacking across country. The path rose and rose, consistently climbing without any significant levelling off until the summit, the only break coming in the form of some abandoned mineworkings about halfway up. These kind of places always feel a bit eerie to me, the machinery and buildings still there, gradually deteriorating back into the mountain. It feels strange to put hands on cables and flywheels and beams that once were turning and straining against tonnes of rock, dozens of men working to keep them going day in day out, but have now been still for almost 100 years.

And the views from the top were stunning, over Coniston and Windermere, out to the sea, another beautiful view on a beautiful day. We sat for a while and ate lunch, some of which I was relieved of by another hiker’s dog and we met another fine character. This guy was South African, easy in his sixties, navigating with a hand drawn map and a highly developed sense of hope. He asked us if we knew the way to the youth hostel where he was staying – we gave him a shot on my full sized map which cheered him up no end. In return we got yet more advice (no peanut butter involved this time). Here it is:

“Sometimes people tell me to grow up. I tell them to fuck off”.

Quite.

So we headed back down towards sea level and the car and then back down the (amazingly clear) M6 home.

Usually I’d have peppered this post with a photo or ten, but this time I’m having a shot at a video (it’s all the rage with the youngsters these days I hear). It’s my first ever video so any tips or hints would be most welcome – comment away. Unless the comment is ‘don’t make videos’. Keep that one to yourself. I might even put up a video of day two….

NDC

High Street May 16 from Andrew C on Vimeo.

Small Town

I love the town I live in, it’s a really nice little market town with a great mix of small independent shops sprinkled with enough supermarkets and the like to make living here very easy. There’s a fast train to London and good connections to pretty well everywhere in the country. We have access to at least
4 airports within an hour and a half’s drive, so our numerous microadventures to other parts of the planet are pretty cheap and easy.

The mix of people here is quite interesting too. Although the connections to London have meant that quite a few commuters live here, you don’t have to scratch too far below the surface to find the rural community. It’s not at all unusual to see a kanckered old pickup with hay bales and a collie parked up in the town centre between the BMWs and there is a tractor showroom on the main road into the town just next to the ford dealership.

Old school and new school occasionally have differing priorities and have been fighting a battle over aesthetics recently as evidenced below:

This door was, until yesterday, attached to one of the lovely little terraces that happens to be on a route I take when walking into the town. We’ve lived here for a couple of years now and it’s always been shabby (which I am a huge fan of. To quote mrs A: “If it looks old and knackered you’ll like it”), but over the last couple of weeks has become, shall we say, embellished?

I spoke to the guy who owns the house, who explained that he’d been getting anonymous letters put through the door about the shabby paintwork. He started by ignoring them but, as the letters kept coming, he painted the door as above. The thing that made me laugh the most was that he’d actually gone out and bought a notice board just so he’d have more space to write scathing commentary about the actions of his neighbours. He cackled as he was telling me the tale, whilst in the background fitters were installing a new front door in a very tasteful colour.

I couldn’t see any haybales or a collie, perhaps they were in the garden.

You should come and live here, I can thoroughly recommend it.

Happy Birthday

Today The Boy Wonder has turned 10. A lot has changed in the last year, for a start he’s been doing a ‘how to stay safe online’ study at school today, hence there is no picture of him and we now have a super-secret password just in case someone decides to hack my email account and tries to start an illicit conversation with him, so he can check it’s really me.

We had a birthday for him on Saturday with us, with cake and bowling with his mate and burgers and presents. It was lovely.

Happy birthday big fella, may the wind always be at your back.

Photographic Memories

Once upon a time I used to be a quite keen photographer. When I was in my early twenties I spotted an old Minolta X-300 35mm SLR  in a charity shop and got bitten by the bug. Over the space of a few years I began a learning process that took me from knowing very little about f-stops and  apertures, to being able to discern between specular and diffuse reflection and take a pretty good shot at setting up a multi-light arrangement for most occasions. The full manual setting on my SLR was my weapon of choice and I even managed to take a handful of decentish pictures.

I was, in short, a nerd.

Years later digital arrived and I gradually moved over, eventually assembling a pretty decent digital outfit including one of Canon’s legendary ‘L Series’ lenses (see nerd comment above) and I lived it all over again. There was a new learning curve to be had in post production which had previously been way outside my scope. It used to be that I’d think nothing of lugging around a couple of kilos of gear for hours in search of that one elusive, perfect image, a choice made a little more straightforward by the fact that compact cameras were pretty limited and phone cameras were laughable.

But times change and since I was really firing on all cylinders with this stuff, technology has moved on (along with airline luggage weight allowances). I picked up a pretty decent compact a couple of years ago to travel with me to Sri Lanka, I’ve found that it has more than enough manual control for me to be happy and to get 99% of the shots I could have got with the full fat setup plus others that I would have missed through being too slow with heavy gear. As a result the bulky old SLR has languished entirely in the back of the wardrobe along with flashes, light modifiers, stands, tripods and assorted other bits and pieces. It’s time had been and gone for me so its currently finding various new homes via eBay and charity shops.

And the proceeds of selling off my gear?

Well, please allow me to indulge myself in one of my favourite photographer quotes, attributed to Jim Richardson:

“If you want to be a better photographer, stand in front of more interesting stuff.” 

Next stops Riga and Berlin, maybe more depending on how much people value L series glass these days…

Not So Dry February

So here we are in February, the start of a new month and the first beer of the year for me.

Mrs A and I decided to pack in the booze for a month after a hectic Christmas and new year, a cheque written by my confidence that I wasn’t entirely sure my willpower could cash. I thought that the early part of the month would be tricky but it was surprisingly easy (I think because we were both on the same wagon) and I always knew that once I’d got past the midway point only a forcibly administered pint would spoil the challenge, such is my competitive  nature.

Mrs  A is talking about extending the dryness through February as well (I’m not sure if she has, as she’s away with work this evening), but that’s not for me. I’ve done my time thankyouverymuch.

The beer in the picture was a Christmas present from The Boy Wonder, suggested by our local wine/beer merchant and is a belter. Apparently the brewery in Belgium that produces this beauty only make one batch per year and that’s that. To do my best to mirror the time and care taken in production, it’s taken me all evening to drink it, as it’s 11% and should probably be categorised as ‘weaponised beer’.

Cheers!

November 2015

November was a surprising month for our neighbours. We were actually at home for the whole month. My photostream for the month contains a grand total of just 5 pictures. 4 of them are of small boys desperately trying (and often failing) to be on best behaviour at the remembrance day parade. TBW got picked to carry the standard for his pack, mainly by dint of not paying attention and failing to be elsewhere at the appropriate moment. I told him it was a big honour and he just gave me the look of a boy that’s been told to carry something big, heavy and unwieldy. Later I stifled giggles as one his mates got told off by Akela for pretending his memorial cross was a sword as the vicar delivered his sermon on the folly of war.

And so the month passed in a blur of house viewings and auctions year end paperwork. The real world can be very dull, can’t it?

A bit of a short post bust next up is December (as is the way of calendars). We were busy in December.

Voyage

Back in May Mrs A and I took TBW over to Brittany to add France to his list of countries. We’d decided to drive as we we staying in a chalet (read big caravan) on a child-oriented site in the wilds of Dol-de -Bretagne. As the ferry crossing was an early morning affair we spent the first night in a Southampton Travelodge learning just how noisily a nine year old can sleep.

The following day we set off (adults knackered, child well rested) for a nice easy crossing and a couple of hours driving on beautifully quiet French roads. In an unusually forward planning manoeuvre we ferreted out an ace supermarket (Super-U, fact fans) just up the road from the campsite that stocked live crabs (fascinating for TBW), an ace wine aisle or 5 (for Mrs A and I) and a bewildering array of stinky cheese (for me). We loaded up on everything except the shellfish and headed off to check in.

We arrived at the site 10 minutes later and after a further four hours we were still not in our chalet (caravan). The cheese got stinkier as time passed.

Eventually, after haranguing and cajoling we were finally in, the cheese was safely left outside in the barbecue to limit the stink, the wine was chilling in the fridge and the boy was in bed.

The week passed in a blur of moulin rouge style “children’s” cabaret (this is not a joke – evidence below), beaches, castles and further disinterest from staff at the campsite about many tedious problems. Eventually it was time to come home and after a long and fraught journey we were all glad to be back.

We loved Brittany and will almost certainly be back at some point. It will almost certainly not be in a chalet (caravan).

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Heath Robinson

Here we go again.

Depending on how this particular phase of “trying to get the interwebz to bend to my will” activity goes you may well see this on two blogging platforms:

Blogger, my spiritual home and haunt of a number of good friends (but slowly being ignored-to-death by Google)
http://ift.tt/22S6jG8

And the shiny, updated and mobile-world friendly but not quite home WordPress platform
http://ift.tt/1TLF0aq

Hopefully both, possibly neither.

If it’s successful, future posts will be in stereo (and there’s a bucket full of postdated travel posts looming). If not I will fight with the blogger app and stay at home on blogger.

We shall see…..

NDC