I am avoiding going to work.
That is to say, I am ready to go to work, but I am not going to go until the last reasonable moment.
I am not going to be late, I have just not got the smallest intention of being early.
This is because for the entire weekend, the Lake District has been packed to the seams with healthily sporting types, all wearing jogging pants and vests, staring into the middle distance in the manner of the long-enduring unassailably virtuous.
There have been two events here this weekend. The first was the Great North Swim, which is an extremely tiresome cavort up and down the lake, lasting for two days. It is attended by people who think that they are doing something called Wild Swimming, instead of just swimming, and who inexplicably prefer to swim in Windermere in the company of hundreds of other people.
This is completely baffling to me. We do not swim in Windermere, which is cold, because of being deep, and the endless surface-churn caused by the steamers mean that there is no sun-warmed water on the surface, even when the weather has been clement, which it hasn’t. Also it is dirty, because of the same steamers, and helped along by the sewage works, and even if I could chortle merrily at the thought of such perils as being cold and filthy, I can’t begin to imagine wishing to swim in the company of dozens of strangers, wearing wetsuits not proper swimming costumes, and being bellowed at by men with loudspeakers in supervisory little boats.
All the same, hundreds of people have turned up to do it.
The other major event was the Windermere Marathon. This happened today, at the same time as Day Two of the swimming, and is an exhausting-sounding run which goes all the way around the lake, and it is a big lake.
I am sure that you do not need an explanation of why such an event lacks appeal. It is not difficult to work it out.
That attracted hundreds of people as well.
In consequence, there have been swarms of extra visitors, because every swimmer and runner has brought along their own personal encouragement team, probably their mother really because it is the sort of event that most wives would try and think up an excuse to avoid. They have filled up the roads and the guest houses and the parking spaces, and hence I am waiting until they have all buzzed off before I venture out along the arteries of our little town.
It made for a fairly quiet night at work last night. It is not difficult to work out that such a customer base is not going to go out on the town and consume fourteen pints and a curry before collapsing into a taxi and not being able to remember where they left their guest house. All of the guest houses were full, except the ones which attract the more rascally inclined sort of hedonists, like Aphrodite’s Lodge, and prices had climbed to the maximum that everybody hoped they might be able to extort. As a result our normal customer base of stag and hen parties and fat old people with bad legs, could not find anywhere to stay, and will be coming back next week.
I will not be sorry. It has been a quiet weekend.
It was enlivened by occasional outbursts of utterly torrential rain, and I suppose the swimmers might have been pleased to discover that they had a lot more lake to go at then they might have expected, indeed, it covered most of the Newby Bridge road in several places, thus offering to handily combine both the swim and the quest for a parking space for several people. I crawled into bed at around five on Saturday morning to the accompaniment of shattering claps of thunder and rather splendid lightning-flashes, none of which kept me awake, but it was rather nice as a background melody whilst I drifted into sleep, smugly, thinking how splendid it was to be warm and dry, with an electric blanket.
I can delay no longer.
I think the crowds will have vanished from our roads.
I am going to go to work.
