Unicycle Emptiness

I hate nature and I hate life.

I am treading in deadly ground, Battenberg cake soft, too soft and spongily unpleasant. The car and the hill we left the car on have long since vanished and the worst thing is someone from the fucking Guardian has managed to traverse this territory, someone from WC1, no doubt in shoes more insensible than mine has found this hellish place forever in the distance and I fucking haven’t.

The Nine Standards are described in The Guardian’s travel section (where they decide for a week a year to cheer on good old Britain and recommend embarrassingly obvious places to go to instead of your usual fortnights luxury safari in Zambia) as something along the lines of ‘worth the walk to see them looming up through the mist.’

I like very much to see things looming up through the mist unless it’s a rapist. I am exited despite my anger that some twat in a North Face jacket worth more than my house has managed to find the looming stones in the midst.

And there isn’t even any bloody mist.

I am not a stalwart denizen of the north; my vowels go on for far too long when I speak and have lived here for but five years. But I grew too big for my boots with my little read blog of the north, thought I was something, grandiosely talked about little known places that I as a local knew about and now I am lost in turgid spongy Battenberg hell. And someone from the Guardian found it but not me. I have sodden ripped printed out OS maps in my pocket like some sort of retired old woman with jolly cheeks but still cannot find it. I plead for help to some rugged Cumbrians with border collies walking nearby who have never heard of it. That is not a good omen.

The OS map is remarkable in its minimalism.  If Philippe Starke were to do a map it would look like this. A slight red curvature on bold white A4 and a red arrow pointing vaguely and enticingly at the white. Maybe it is misty on the map.

I wanted to discover these ancient stones looming up through the mist all by myself. I resigned myself to finding them second handedly after reading about them in the Guardian but to not find them after reading about them in the Guardian is simply beyond the pale.

We walk, bicker, and physically fight over the potentiality of hideously distant Cairns on hill/mountain tops being the ancient stones of importance looming through the mist. We then trudge through the ankle turning Battenberg to find small piles of unimportant stones but then see other toppling lumps which could be the ancient ones of importance beckoning enticingly from other distant hilltops. In front of suspiciously green mires.

I want to see the Nine Standards looming through the mist more than anything ever now out of sheer spite and aggression, always a good starting point for a walk through nature with your boyfriend and baby but not a North Face clad skeleton with rusted iphone is to be seen, just more moist brackish nature.

I have formerly sneered at the rotund lovers of the picturesque who traverse around the outskirts of nature on clearly designated footpaths harking at the surrounding neat hedges before retreating for a nice picnic in the car park but there are no footpaths here, merely possible inklings, more abstract than real and I yearn suddenly to be in an overheated Tk Maxx. It is beautiful here but relentlessly so. Scarily so and to infinity.   I can’t even see the mountain near where the car is meant to be. The hills lead on to more hills and then the dusky outline of the hills beyond, beyond that, a slightly fainter hue of more sodding hills. And the oncoming rain.

We scrabble up hills towards distant Cairns, which must be the Nine Standards looming up through the mist. They are not. My boyfriend keeps insisting they are just over that ridge. And bog. And mire.

He says he can see them. I think he lies. I give up. The baby’s legs are slightly blue. We retreat away from the looming stones in the mist. At a vague essence of a crossroads, he consults his map and cheerily realises we have been the wrong way. The looming stones in the mist are that way.  Twenty minutes that way. We have never been closer. But we never will be again as I refuse to walk another step to see some stupid fucking stones.

I wish I had now. In retrospect I love stupid fucking stones.

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