Icy doom

Once again the day has escaped me, except somehow today I do not seem to have achieved anything very much.

Once Mark had gone off to work I hauled Oliver out of bed and suggested that he came with me to empty the dogs. It was a lovely day, I explained, untruthfully, and we could have some wonderfully invigorating exercise striding up the fells and pretending to be in The Lord Of The Rings.

It would not be exactly accurate to say that he was excited about the idea, but after some sleepy hesitation whilst he tried to work out what I was talking about, eventually he agreed.

We cocooned ourselves in layer upon layer of woollens, starting with first vests and then second vests, and working our way through the layers until we got to gloves, hats, and scarves.

Even then opening the back door was still an icy shock.

The ground outside had frozen perilously hard, after which it had snowed. We were both wearing military walking boots, because of having a usefully military daughter with feet just a bit bigger than mine. The boots in question were so good that after Oliver outgrew them and I re-inherited them, we bought him another pair.

The tread on their soles is like caterpillar tracks on tanks, but even then we had to be cautious.

I puffed and panted up the first fell in Oliver’s wake, because despite an untimely rousing from his hibernation, his legs are now longer than mine. Also he is not nearly as fat. I have failed quite resoundingly at my New Year’s Intention to become thinner so far, not least because I have made no effort whatsoever and we have still got lots of Christmas chocolate left.

The dogs charged across the snowy fields, because dogs do not seem to slide into undignified bottom-bruising tumbles on the hidden frozen bits, whuffling about in snowy holes that might be harbouring rabbits. We plodded up to the top and gazed with satisfaction at the vast expanse of whiteness below us.

We thought we would go across the valley and up to the second peak, and on the way we passed the tarn in the bottom. For those of you who are reading this on Facebook it is the little lake in the picture that appears with every posting from these pages.

I do wish it would not do that, incidentally. In a perfect world it ought to show the picture of the day, but it stopped doing that of its own self-upgrading technical volition ages ago, and all of my computational expertise has failed to get it to come back. This is because I have got no expertise whatsoever, and can only press buttons that look as if they might be helpful, and then frantically try and find ways of unpressing them when it turns out that they were not, and also they have made a pig’s ear of something important.

The lake was frozen, with a layer of snow on the top.

Oliver and I looked at it in awe, and wondered if the ice might be strong enough to walk on.

Obviously it would be dreadful to remain in ignorance, so we tried it.

I have seen lots of films where people get out into the middle of frozen lakes and then the ice cracks and they plummet to a terrible bitter doom. In some cases they are even swept away under the ice itself, bashing from underneath in a futile and despairing sort of manner as they hurtle to an inescapable double combination-death of drowning and hypothermia.

It would probably be a triple combination these days because you would have to get bat-flu in there somewhere as well.

We thought that this might be exciting, and promised to rescue one another if we started drowning and freezing and catching bat-flu.

It was almost disappointing to discover that the ice did not even creak. We walked right across the lake, and Oliver jumped up and down on it, but it stayed reassuringly solid, because life is just not as exciting as films.

Oliver scraped some of the snow off the surface, and we looked down into its icy black depths with a very satisfactory chill of horror. I have attached a picture of this. I took lots of pictures which I shall probably use over the next few days when I have forgotten about illustrating these pages until it is too dark, but this one seemed most appropriate for today.

We trudged up the last hill feeling very pleased with ourselves for having had a brush with Certain Death and come away unscathed.

We thought that if the weather lasts we might come back with our ice skates.