We spend our last night away in a trendy boutique hotel in Ambleside. It combines many ( if not all ) modern comforts with a peculiarly English love of dogs. Mutts and their owners are welcomed in the bar and ( even more entertainingly ) allowed into the dining room for dinner. The hotel very sensibly has a boot room where dogs can be washed after a day on the hills and a dog dining area where the chef feeds them satisfyingly large portions of chicken, gravy and potatoes. Suitably refreshed and revived they then join their owners for the evening meal.
A recently widowed gentleman in his early eighties is shown to a table by the window. It has the best light for reading. From snippets of overheard conversation we learn that he's been coming to the hotel with his wife every year since forever. He's unstylishly attired in brown trousers, blue patterned shirt, red tie and an ill fitting beige corduroy jacket. Female oversight and colour sense is clearly missing. He's belatedly joined by his happily rotund black labrador who has been lingering by the kitchen in the hope of more chicken. In between courses the waiters unhurriedly chat to the labrador and his owner as if they're old friends - which they may be. Scratches are dispensed. The labrador dozes until the sweet trolley arrives at which point he comes - enthusiastically - awake. The presence of a sweet trolley says all you need to know about the target audience of the hotel as does a table covered in a linen cloth which masks ( what the menu describes as ) a combination of five British and French cheeses.
Four fighter jets come skimming above the lake. They're low enough for their outline to be reflected in the water. Within seconds they're gone following the bend in the lake to the right. For some reason we're recently noticing more signs of the military. On our way across the moors we pass a team of soldiers pulling a Victorian field gun up a steep slope. A few locals are out cheering them on. Turns out there is method to their madness :https://www.militaryvscancer.com/field-gun-pull-september-2025/
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The garden is set in a non-descript municipal cemetery that could be anywhere in Scotland. A row of memorial trees do their best to break up the symmetry .
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Off to one side there's a stone walled enclosure with a dozen or so brass plaques set into the grass verges - more on the walls. There's something unscripted about the layout as if the suddenness of what happened rules out anything too planned or formal. On the back wall a simple granite memorial listing the names of the dead. In front of it a memorial marker with the epitaph ' Life is life - Enjoy it '. That seems to sum up the human condition pretty well. Rows of coins have been left sprinkled across the top of the tombstones. The cemetery keeper says this is an old tradition - the ferrymans fare for the crossing. This is old, old religion of the type we've seen at the Druid site near us.
A couple in truly horrendous matching orange fleece jackets are sitting arms around each other on a bench. We think they're amorous locals but as we get closer we see both are silently crying - tears streaming down their cheeks. We creep past. Just being there seems to be an invasion of their privacy. I'm guessing they have a story to tell.
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We're home in time for sunset. It's been a fun trip. The relatively unexplored parts of Britain are a joy. Despite the medias belief that things are falling to pieces civility, courtesy and kindness are not just alive but thriving. We should do this more often. As we drive down the track home we see a huge firework display taking place back across the fields towards St Andrews. The golf tournament is about to get underway. Rain can be expected.
1 comment:
It's been fun to read about your trip. I used to love to see (and hear) the military jets when they flew over our weekend house in Japan, but I think I might feel differently now.
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