Half Term, Half Witted

It’s the middle of February and the Northern Rock story means economics man Evan Davis on BBC news each day looking more and more like an effeminate Tintin. It can only be weeks till he abandons Captain Haddock and joins a Village People tribute band, though I worry he may be a bit too camp.

So, time to switch off and head somewhere with no telly to celebrate the pagan festival of half term.

For those without kids, this week off from school is supposed to be a break for the little people but turns in to a nightmare for the parents as we get pestered for weeks that “Tamsin’s going skiing for half term” or “Zach’s off to the Caribbean” or, if you live near us, “Tristram and Isolde are setting up a vegan collective at their Algarve villa with their mum and dad”. The days of staying home are over. How you spend half term is a statement about how you’re spending your money.

For us it was off to Lake Windermere so we packed the car, safe in the knowledge that cries of “are we there yet” would be avoided thanks to the new DVD video monitors in the back seat. They worked wonderfully, with beautiful, crisp pictures and remote fast forwarding to the good scenes. Next trip I’ll hope to get the sound working too. Thank God I’d brought some detective stories on CD as the thought of six hours playing I Spy would make amputation seem preferable.

One gizmo that did work was our new GPS which guided us there with no problems. I’m not bad at directions but, as Debbie was navigator, we could have ended up in Kowloon rather than Kendal. She’s like Jade Goody who this week told a reporter that she wanted to open a gym in the North of England. “Somewhere like Cornwall”, she said.

Jade Goody – where O levels go when they want to be left alone. Imagine playing I Spy with her. “I spy something beginning with, er, what’s it called again, er, is it Kicking K?”

But I digress. We arrived at a marvellous country house in a place called Graythwaite surrounded by the most eccentric topiary I had ever seen. These hedges looked like a series of giant top hats resting on top of deodorant cans but were, in fact, chess pieces which had preservation orders on them. The owners can knock down the centuries old house, or build an abbatoir with a disco ball on top, but can’t touch the topiary other than to trim it. Such is the quaintness of Cumbria.

We opened our curtains in the morning to see bicycles fly past the window with no cyclists on board. It was surreal for a few minutes till we remembered the road passed by our window and the cycles must have been on top of car roof racks. Cyclists, walkers, mountaineers. They all love the Lake District.

I think it’s because there it’s like stepping back in time, in a nice way. Some car parks operate an honesty box policy where they rely on your sense of fair play to put money in but others, like the University of Cumbria, operate a dual tariff where it’s dearer at weekends but they don’t tell you. They very kindly then leave a present on your windscreen when you return.

The quaintness is amplified when you realise that getting the Sunday papers means a drive for three miles to a lone garage only to find the papers don’t actually arrive till ten o’clock. Television and radio reception is bad enough to have made John Logie Baird and Marconi give up and take to repairing kettles so bad news just doesn’t figure here, and I was beginning to see why everyone was relaxed and chilled. Literally. The temperature each morning was so cold the topiary turned white and I turned blue.

Whilst I scraped windscreens, the kids picked eggs from the yard and it would have been rude to refuse the full fry up breakfast which was the best meal of the day. We ate at a lakeside hotel where they’ve just found out that JFK has been assassinated and the new fad is something called nouvelle cuisine which has just arrived on the stage coach. Little plates with zig zags of juice separating a cuckoo spit of potato from a splinter of meat that someone had obviously flossed from their teeth made me think I’d just been given a dirty plate. I ordered bread and butter pudding and I could have sold it as art at Christies. Unfortunately I wanted to eat it. I lost it under my pinky nail and couldn’t find it again.

And there lies the problem for me. I could come to love the lack of contact with the outside world, would relish news of the Beatles splitting up reaching me sometime next month, and the freezing cold and treacherous roads wouldn’t bother me. But I need my food. Still, it beats the Portuguese vegan collective hands down. As Evan Davis might say, bigger portions please.

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I received a few calls over the weekend offering commiserations and asking if there was anything friends could do for my family. If you want to know why go to http://www.allmediascotland.com/articles/2310/18022008/coia_case_of_mistaken_identity