The sun shone this morning, and we went off up the fell for the first time in absolutely ages.
The tiresome dogs were desperate to go out. They have got very fit over the last few weeks of dashing about, and were starting to become restless with the prolonged inactivity they have been obliged to endure, due to my long weekend of idleness.
I was less desperate to go out, partly because although the snow had mostly disappeared in the sunshine, there was still a remarkably cold wind. This meteorological phenomenon is always considerably more pronounced on the top of the fells, and I was in no hurry to experience it: but the dogs were bouncing about round my feet in noisy paroxysms of excitement, and so out we had to go.
We set off at our usual pace of halfway-jogging, halfway-staggering, and all the way gasping for breath. The dogs charged about and barked at everything, and I huffed and puffed and wheezed my way up the hills.
I hate getting out of breath, and not only because it is red-faced and undignified. In my now-distant youth I had a bout of whooping cough. The nineteen seventies were a more stoic era than the present, and once I began to show signs of recovery I was dispatched firmly back to school.
The thing was that it was the season for cross-country running. I protested, ineffectively, that I had a fatal disease and therefore was in no condition to rush up mountains, but these were the nineteen seventies. I might have had a fatal disease, but I did not have a note for cross-country. No note, no excuse. Get changed.
I got changed and loped self-pityingly around the cross country course, somewhere near the back of the runners.
I was about halfway round when I started to cough.
Whooping cough is a horrid sort of illness, mercifully not seen very often now. The whoop is not a whoop, it is the agonised sound of a person choking as they try and breathe through a thickly clogged throat.
I have a vague recollection of fighting for breath which seemed that it would never come, accompanied by the total conviction that I was about to die, there and then, at the back of the all weather pitch, never having had any of the adventures that seem desirable when one is fourteen.
Obviously I managed to breathe in the end, probably quite quickly I imagine, since unconsciousness and lasting brain damage did not result. Indeed, nothing much resulted except that once I pulled myself together and set off again, I came in last. If I am honest I would probably have come in last even without the whooping cough.
However the whole whooping-cough-experience left me with a lasting horror of breathlessness, which surfaces now every time I get out of puff. I feel uncomfortably panicky, and frantic to clear my throat, which is, of course, perfectly clear anyway. This has not been my greatest asset whilst making my recent attempts to become fit.
Number One Daughter, who would probably have fitted in nicely in the PE department at my school, says that proper breath control is the answer, and has even given me some instructions, with things like breathing in on one leg and out on the other. These help when I remember them, which I don’t, usually. and when I do they involve such a tongue-sticking-out effort of co-ordination that I don’t really do them terribly well.
I discovered that this difficulty had not abated during my weekend of sloth, and was almost relieved when Roger Poopy disappeared off across the fields in pursuit of a couple who looked as though they might have an interesting dog, about a mile away.
I was obliged to stop, and stand around bellowing for him to come back, which he didn’t. He was gone so long that I quite decided that the couple must have kept him, and set off for home without him.
In the end he emerged, filthy, out of a hawthorn bush beside the beck, and I was so cross with him he tried to be invisible all the rest of the way home, trying to walk actually underneath his father, who got cross with him as well, and bit him.
I had had enough of dogs when I got home, and shut them both in the house. It was still sunny, although not exactly warm, and when I had pegged out the washing I cleaned out my taxi and went to the library. My mother had called to remind me that it was my grandson’s birthday, hurrah for parents, so I posted his card on my way to the bank.
It is nice to be back to normal again.
