The Romance of the English Lakes

There are so many repeats on Freeview, you often cut back to the panel after some news footage or other and there are different people sat there. Perhaps that's why you have channels called 'Dave'. It conjures the image of some geezer trying to run a channel from the back of a white van full of stolen goods. Having accepted this we then endlessly shovel repeats into our work-numbed faces.

But one repeat worth watching of late has been Wainright’s Walks. He was a man who walked and documented the English Lake District in obsessive detail. He managed to tempt me and the only walking I usually do is from John Lewis to the taxi rank, via Oddbins.

Several of us emerged from the pages of his books, into autumn mist and prepared for beauty amongst cams, stys, peaks, cairns and crags. As we rounded the first gentle slope at about five hundred metres and looked at gently grazing sheep below, I considered Wainright a benign influence, shedding the glaring light of natural truth upon the drudgery of our lives. By the time we had walked for two miles straight up, stood in deep mud, only several hundred yards from the moon, I began to doubt this Wainright.

For a start, I noticed a few omissions which TV had failed to highlight. Whereas the presence of goldfinches was mentioned, there was little information on the competitive uber-walkers smugly shouting:

“Let her find her own way up”.

When it was quite obvious I was nearly ready to be airlifted out of a 1 in 1 moss covered rocky slope before I found my way down. I also noted Wainright had failed to mention that entertainment in the Lakes consists of: ‘hunt for the only black person for a hundred miles‘. By the time I could form a blues band by flicking my overly tense hamstrings, I noted in addition that Wainright was, like all men, a hairy arsed anti-climax.

He certainly failed to mention the mitten machismo of climbers who would deliberately perk up as soon as you approached and yell: “Hiya”! through gritted teeth, when what they really meant was:

“Oh Jesus please rescue me from this endless pile of rocks before I die“.

Lying face down in a tepid puddle of dead rabbit’s blood, on the end of a ten mile walk up boggy mountains, surrounded by Americans so right wing you can‘t walk past them for fear of not being their sister, allowed me once again to see Wainright from a new perspective: hanging by a rope from Helvellen with a crampon through the middle of his ugly little bachelor's brow.

By the time I was trying to sleep in a slippy, wet tent, Wainright was not the benign rambler TV had made him out to be. Oh no: he was a misanthropic, deceitful, smart-arsed git who wanted us all to die so that nobody would be left alive to notice his lonely, lonely existence. Bastard.