It is midnight, and I have just come home from work.
Mark is still working, and the dog and I went for a stroll round the Library Gardens for our late-night emptying session: the dog, not me, obviously: I don’t ever have enough of an emergency where I have got to empty myself in the Library Gardens, even at my age and even after dark.
It is a still, cloudy night, warm and a bit damp. Somebody has mown the grass today, and everywhere is heavy with the scent of the blossoms and the cut-grass smell. This has upset the dog, who likes the smell of wee best, and who can’t find any because it has all been mown away and swept up and then rained off, and now he has got to put up with the flowers.
I have always liked being out in the night. When I was younger I loved the feeling of excitement in the air, of being awake and alive when the world was asleep. Now I am older and it is different. I don’t need to capture the adventure promised on the breeze any more.
Now it is nice to walk quietly and by myself in a town where there are lights and the safe feeling of people sleeping all around me. If I were a traveller arriving late and tired I would know that I could find warmth and shelter here, which is a cheering thought. Years ago we drove across France in the night time, through miles and miles of lonely darkness, and coming to the lights of the little communes was reassuring every time, even though everywhere was deserted, because we knew we had reached a settlement of our own kind.
Windermere is a little bit like that, because it is surrounded by the hills. Actually it isn’t really alone at all, because there is Ambleside in one direction, and Kendal in the other, and lots of tiny villages like Staveley or Troutbeck in between: but if you were walking they would seem a long way off: and so there is this very pleasing feeling of being in a bright oasis of people under the distant stars and great silent fells.
Of course you only feel this at night. During the daytime, and especially at Bank Holiday times, which is what is about to happen, and so everybody has spent the day rolling up their sleeves and rushing around organising things, it is not a tiny safe island but a huge mass of crawling traffic, full of travellers from all over the world.
I like this as well. It gives the place a rather exciting cosmopolitan feel, to hear lots of languages and see Japanese people taking photographs and laughing a lot, and being excited about the ducks, and Muslims enveloped from head to toe in flowing black robes, and hugging their children safely, and Germans feeling a bit out of their depth but being brave and curious about everything, and young Australians with rucksacks and beer.
At night it is completely different, and you can remember that it is the English countryside again. The scents come crowding in on you, and you notice things. Tonight something was fluttering and rustling in the bushes by the path. I thought that it was perhaps a blackbird, it sounded about the right size. Since I don’t watch scary films I don’t need to listen anxiously for serial killers in the bushes, because I know perfectly well that nobody has ever been murdered by a serial killer in Windermere, and it would be very unfortunate indeed if one happened to have come here on his holidays and have decided to be lurking menacingly in the Library Gardens pinning his hopes on the chance that a lone middle aged lady might come pottering unguardedly along in the middle of the night with nobody but a small smelly dog for company.
If you are a serial killer reading this and planning a weekend break then I made that up. Whenever I go round the Library Gardens I am heavily armed and my scary dog has killed two postmen already.
The only person I came across tonight was a young Polish man, who said: “Good evening,” politely as we passed. In the village the bistro was still lit, but closed up, all customers gone and tables being wiped and chairs being stacked and the staff laughing and talking quietly to each other. The last taxis were still out, bringing home the late night drinkers from Bowness, which is what Mark is doing, and a police van chugged slowly past, making sure the world is a safe place for middle aged ladies to walk their dogs.
We came home and I thought I would tell you about it before I went to sleep as well, like the rest of Windermere, by my own safe fireside, with my own contented dog, in the heart of the silent slate-grey village, in the peaceful night.
