Lake District: Day 4-8

Day 4
Muncaster Castle today - because who doesn't love a castle!  I certainly do - including the World Owl Centre with some amazing owls.  I mean, I knew there were a lot of kinds of owls in the world, but still not this many.  There were noble owls, noisy owls, intimidating owls, owls that looked like Muppets, owls that had clearly been coloured in by a children's craft class.  Loads of fun.

Clapped for a performer who can do an escalator (a diabolo move that is insanely easy but very effective on unknowing crowds) but who did have some amusing jokes, and toured a haunted castle, bumping into the owner too.  Later that night is Uno gone mad, ruleless Scrabble and some very weird dance moves.

Day 5
Half hour car ride to Whitehaven and the sea.  It's good to see the greeny-blue deep again, stretching out from the little town harbour to the horizon.  Leicestershire is a land-locked county and I couldn't actually remember the last time I'd seen the sea.  I like things that make me feel my proper size... the ocean, the sky, vast landscapes.

Had lots of fun in The Beacon museum with my sister, stroking plastic dinosaurs, tying sailors knots and playing Roman (Roman!) draughts.  Fish and chips with the Grandparents and then home for a pub quiz.  We came 5th, which was actually a pretty respectable position.

Day 6
Today was the challenge, the big one, Scafell Pike - England's highest mountain at 978m of walking straight up.  And up, and up.  Me, Mum, Dad and Emma - my youngest sister- made it to the top in 3 hrs 15 mins, and then 2hrs 30 mins more to get back down again.  I was spared the backpack in case my leg cramped up like it did when I attempted Scafell last year.  My right foot has always turned out and now that I'm older it seems to be making a different to how my weight is distributed on that leg, particularly when I'm carrying something heavy.  But with only my own weight and a walking stick to even it out I made it to the top! 

It's weirdly like walking up the flight of stairs in your house and then back down again... and then doing that repeatedly for 6 hrs.  But the satisfaction when you reach the top is well worth the effort.

Day 7

Recouperation day.  In a house containing four flights of stairs.  The longest walk I took today was down to the end of the garden, where you can slip through the fence and down the hill to the Santon river.

Day 8

Today was the journey home, but I took a different route to avoid the Liverpool and Manchester traffic jams.  Instead I took the A595 north and then cut clean across the country on the A66 from Cockermouth (where the big floods were in 2009) and Penrith, over the empty stretches of the Pennine hills to Middlesbrough to make my way down the eastern edge of Britain.  It's over a 4hr drive but now I've more or less circumnavigated the upper half of England, which is a good thing to be able to say.

Now, off to put the laundry in :)

Lake District: Days 1 - 3

Day 1
Yesterday I travelled up over the A595 from the Midlands to Santon Bridge.  You know you're in for a fun time when the A-road you're on roams and loops like a country lane, up over the passes with the Lakeland mountains to the right and the gleam of the sea on your left. But today, after an easy morning, we have gone out to Wastwater, the deepest of all England's lakes at 79ft.



Quick sketch of Great Gables from Wastwater

That said, it looks deceptively narrow when you gaze across it.  We paddled a bit, chasing tiny fish into herds, and watched brave folk on dingies and would-be swimmers mess about in the cold water.  We see dogs, a wedding, and a chance for a quick drawing with a 10-pack of petrol station colour pencils.  The shifting colours of the mountains are, naturally, impossible to get down no mtter how hard I try.
My youngest sister and I are living in a little side cottage while the rest of my family, including grandparents, take up the main house.  Fine by me as it puts us nearer to the walk that leads down to the green Santon river under the trees.  The holiday so far is beginning to take on a distinctly Roman-British feel with my current reading list including Rosemary Sutcliffe's The Eagle of the Ninth and The Lantern Bearers, a book on the geology and history of my home county East Anglia, of which the current chapter covers the rise and fall of Rome in Britain, Dad's recent return from walking Hadrian's wall with my uncle, and the prospect of Roman ruins later in the week.  It's all coming together.

Day 2
Another easy morning, then continued the Roman theme with a visit to the ruined Bath house at Ravenglass.  We tried walking out the paths of the soldiers from Hardknott Fort as they would have entered, changed in the sight of their statues and gods who niched in the walls, and sat around scraping the grime and sweat off themselves with thin metal strigils.  Strange to be standing in the same place of hundreds of men before us, tracing the paths of their ghosts going about their everyday patterns.  We are not so far apart from our past as we like to think we are.

Went on the little steam train through to Boot village and looked over the old mill there.  On the way my sister tried to take pictures of passing sheep while my Grandma told me about her two evacuations during the Second World War, when she was just a girl.  The first time she was sent away and then brought back, but in the final year of the war she was evacuated again.  It strikes me how lucky I am to be able to hear about these things first hand.

We ground flour with a millstone and turned the handles of mechanisms long lost to history, the mangle, the winnower.  I wonder what happens if we ever forget the old times, and how we used to be.  The people who worked these mills were us, just a little earlier, and yet it's so easy to forget they were ever part of our lives.  All the same, I feel somehow that as long as these little nooks in the hills survive, and there are quiet, wild places in the world some of it will get through, we might be alright.

I've been reading... The Eagle of the Ninth

I'm subtitling this 'This Curse of the Bromance'.  Contains spoilers

 I fell onto Rosemary Sutcliffe's The Eagle of the Ninth after watching and very much enjoying the recently released movie adaption The Eagle.  Sutcliffe wrote a short series of book during the 1950s which are all based around the invasion, occupation, and hurried departure of the Roman Empire from Britain.  The Eagle of the Ninth is the first in the series and follows a young Centurion, Marcus Flavius Aquila, through his first command on the dangerous frontier of Hadrian's Wall and subsequent dismissal from the army following an injury.  Marcus has spent his entire life working towards a military career in order to regain the lost honour of his family following his father's shameful defeat in battle, and is forced to consider a new life as a crippled civilian.  Hearing that the bronze Eagle standard used by his father's former legion has been spotted in the hands of the northern barbarian tribesman, he resolves to try and steal it back with only his British-born slave Esca for help.  Either version of the story makes for a good Swords-'n'-Sandals adventure with a more personal touch, and although it won't win any Oscars I found it very enjoyable.  I'd highly recommend either the book or the film, but that's not really what I want to talk about.

The main point of this blog comes from when I sat down to watch the movie with my housemate.  I'll need to give you an idea of the two main characters first and the book and the film are set out slightly differently, mainly because of their different audiences and times of writing, so bear with me and I'll be fast:

Book version:
Book Marcus is quite different from Film Marcus. He's more enlightened (almost too enlightened to be realistic in some ways) about the nature of a slave. He saves Esca mainly out of sympathy and frees him before the quest even starts, so the story here really is mainly about the search for the Eagle. There is never any question that Marcus and Esca are on the same side, and even towards the British tribes who currently hold the Eagle Marcus has no real enmity, saying that if the tribesmen are able to keep the Eagle from him they are welcome to it. His aim in finding it is not to regain his honour so much as to prevent it becoming a trigger for further bloodshed. Still, the companionship between the two is central - in contrast to the film in which no women appear, in the book you meet a grand total of one woman, which was very much the way of the times. Men and women had different functions in society and operated in very different worlds, rarely seeing much of each other until a marriage was decided upon, and even then the union was often financially or socially driven. Esca needs less explaining as he is roughly the same in both the book and film: prickly, reserved and determined to cling to the sense of honour that is all he has left to him after being snatched away from his former life. I think this idea of being honour-bound is very interesting and something we've lost in our culture, but that's a pondering for another day.

Film version:
In the film Marcus subscribes very much to the view of Roman law and sees his slave as nothing more than a piece of property.  While he and Esca are able to work together well enough, the course of the movie revolves around the testy relationship between the two of them.  Esca, honour-bound into Marcus' service after the Roman saves his life on a self-pitying whim, rails inwardly against the master who represents the nation that killed his family, invaded his home and forced him into slavery.  In the meantime Marcus drags them both relentlessly through the Scottish Highlands in the hope of bringing the pride and glory of Rome back to his family, and cannot comprehend how anyone could despise the empire he has dedicated his life to.  At the start neither of them understands the other at all but by the end of the journey each has come to recognise that neither of their nations is purely good or evil, and their forced reliance on each other turns into a strong and trusting friendship that is tested when Marcus finally frees Esca from his enslavement and Esca in turn helps him defend the Eagle rather than running to safety himself and leaving his former master behind.

The Main Point:
The point of all this back-story is that I jokingly described the film to my friend as a "bromance" (that is, a slang term for a very close but non-sexual relationship between two men, such as between brothers - hence the "bro" in bromance.  If you're not sure what that looks like, think of the friendship between Frodo and Sam from Lord of the Rings, JD and Turk from Scrubs, or Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson.  For some reason there doesn't seem to be a female equivalent).  It's true that The Eagle is a bromance, if only by necessity due to the lack of women, but mainly because of the depth of the friendship that evolves between Esca and Marcus.  But for some reason my friend has taken this to mean that the two main characters are gay, and cackles with laughter every time she finds a line in the movie or passage in the book that she feels backs this up.

If that's how she wants to see it then that's down to her (although if she did turn out to be right surely it ought to be worthy of a neutral shrug rather than hysterical giggling), but I think it does a great disservice to men in general to immediately assume that two male characters are sexually or romantically attracted to each other simply because they care about each other.  The author would be extremely unlikely to write two gay main characters into a book for teenagers and get it published (one of her adult books does allude to a relationship between two male characters, but it is very underplayed).  Additionally both the twenty-something-year-old actors and the director of the recent film have said that the characters weren't written or played gay, so where is this idea coming from that they are romantically involved?  Why is it that the behaviours they read as a bond between brothers are being read by others as signs of a sexual attraction? 

Much of it may be just the way our social conduct has changed over time.  Since 'coming out of the closet' has become more common and accepted over that last few decades there seems to be a pressure on both men and women to define their sexuality in a way that wasn't there before, and so any behaviour that could be interpreted ambiguously has been cut down, such as in this case showing signs of strong affection for another man, even if that affection is platonic.  So of course, any time we see those rare signs of affection they are jumped on, and mountains made out of molehills.  The excellent Charity Bishop has noticed a similar trend in female duos, with fans clamouring for relationships within the space of a few episodes.

It may be partly the fault of us women too.  We go on and on about how men are so much more insensitive than us and can't express their emotions that I'm afraid we're all actually starting to believe it -even to expect it.  Being masculine apparently now also implies being callous, crude and emotionally shallow, and so if any man does decide to be vulnerable with his friend it is seen as being far too forward or feminine compared to what is socially acceptable.  The trouble is, I don't think that's the truth at all.  I firmly believe that all of us, men and women, are capable of much more
humanity than that in the way we act towards each other, and that it's not the potential for sex but our belief in the value of other human beings that drives us.

The ability to be emotionally open or close with another person doesn't make you a wuss or determine your sexuality, it shows courage, trust and strength of character on both sides!  To assume that any man who genuinely cares about his friend must want to be involved with him romantically is demeaning to the great and noble hearts of the men around us, and if we don't want them to lose that ability to care then we'd better stop laughing at them for it.

So guys, it comes down to this.  I believe that you are capable of great kindness, selfless genorosity, and emotional depth.  And it appears there may be scant few of us left that think so.  Don't let us down.

Two tasters

Just today I got back from a well-earned holiday in the Lake District, so the next few posts will be updates on that.  In the meantime here's a taster...

A sunny day at Wastwater, about 10 mins away from where we were staying.  The day may have been hot enough to leave our skin pink and peeling, but the water was absolutely freezing!

...and a less sunny day on the side of Scafell Pike, England's tallest mountain.  That's my Dad sitting in front of that cloud bank, into which we had to trek as part of our climb.  Fortunately we passed through the cloud layer and were treated to amazing views from the summit.

And below, a taster of another kind.  I have recently discovered how to make meringues!  Far yummier than the shop-bought ones, crisp on the outside and chewy in the middle, and much easier to make than I expected, I've been having them with piles of strawberries on top.  However, having no electric mixer and being something of a stubborn food masochist, I had to whisk them all by hand.  Ridiculous? Unnecessary? Yes, maybe, but totally worth it!