Unicycle Emptiness

It smells of wet pedigree and everyone rustles briskly in brightly hued waterproofs.

The fabric bunting capital of England.

The quaint little cottages are blank eyed and empty with a ‘Holiday Home To Let’ sign prominently displayed in cursive script.

Everything is fifty shades of grey. The cottages are stone and slate, the sky a glowering ‘Off Black’, and the pubs and restaurants all clad in  Farrow and Ball ‘Murky Gusset.’

Two Lotuses parked cheerily  close in a pub car park make me dwell on if the plural is ‘Lotii’, something thats never had occasion to bother me before visiting Keswick.

It’s a genial friendly place- a middle class frontier town where the gold seam never diminishes- a place to chortle over a long lunch, not to peer and say ‘how much?’ at a price. There are no e-cig shops here but all the whimsical china sheep one could ever possibly desire. It’s like something Cath Kidston vomited up in a wet dream.

I’m having the best time ever of course. Pretending I’m au-fait with the price of the wine, reading the Times in a corner and pretending I have been for an actual walk in some never ending stretch of blasted bogland peppered by multi million pound crofts and venomous hills.

I’m just pretending it’s shit outside for pure inertia driven guilt of course. There is a hole at the heart of my being that has plumped for grilled halloumi and dukkah over climbing a mountain.

Or indeed a small incline. I did try. I chose the path that didn’t go Up because I don’t like Up and then followed the wide gravelled track  right along the side of the surprisingly busy road until after a mile I found a tea room and purchased a 7 Up for £1.80.  Alfred Wainwright, eat your heart out.

In a horrible fake gastropub ( clearly Wilkinson’s  ‘Found Dead in a Bedsit Grey’) they don’t serve chips unless as part of a meal. You are a small pub with uncomfortable seats and last October’s tattered Cumbria Life, not L’Enclume. Oh do piss off.

It’s a theme park of what it means to be English- the ‘locals’ starring roles played by people who live in the Midlands or London happily jollying it up in a pub with staggering priced wine and a wet dog fug.

It was brilliant. I love a bit of commodified selling of Nature with some avocado and panki fries and a large house red. I love the fact that teenagers don’t appear to exist and you are either in five and in Boden or forty in Trespass. It was a retreat from the confines of Town with all the all the attractions of Town and a staggering backdrop of actual Nature.
Sorry Nature. Next time I will walk in you until I see a dead pheasant or there’s a slight incline. Then I will retreat in indignity to a place with no primary colours and demand a Pot Noodle ‘Bombay Bad Boy’ in my poshest voice.

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