We have lived in the Lakes for almost my whole adult life, really, with a few short-lived alternate adventures here and there. Most of that time I have loathed the place profoundly, which has not been ace for my chosen career as local representative to incoming tourists: but over the last few years I have become resigned to it, and last year when Mark suggested that we consider moving to Dorset where his company has a base, I suddenly realised that I didn’t want to, very much indeed.
We were fairly stuck here to start off with, because Mark’s family farm here, and have farmed here for the last hundred generations or something like that, pretty much the whole of Windermere is his cousin, which has not been great for the gene pool. So much so that his grandmother makes an appearance in a Beatrix Potter book, as the little girl Lucie in Mrs Tiggywinkle, who looks splendidly like Mark’s niece did at that age. All the women in his family have got to be called Lucy, for some arcane historic reason into which I have never enquired; including the ones who are called things like Margaret and Helen.
Anyway, Mark doesn’t farm any more, not least because it was immediately apparent to everybody concerned, especially to me, that I am not remotely cut from the sort of cloth that makes a farmer’s wife. The prospect of lambing in a freezing shed in the middle of the night in January has never been high on my list of career ambitions: and so he has broadened his ambitions from repairing tractors to repairing oil wells, where there is far less poo and a lot more money. We have a tall thin terraced house in the middle of a street now, and I have never stopped being profoundly grateful that the milk arrives in a bottle on the doorstep every morning, and I don’t have to get up and go and squish it out of a cow. It isn’t London, which was where my heart yearned towards, but it is just fifty yards from the post office; and there is a very good butcher and an ironmonger, and an ace bar with big outside heaters and excellent wine: so I think it is probably the next best thing. And also there is a very nice view.
