Carlisle

We have been to Carlisle.

It has been the children’s Krav Maga lesson today. Their instructor is opening a new gym in Carlisle, so we won’t be going up to St. Bees with them any more.

I was sorry about this, because it is absolutely brilliant to go to St Bees and amble along the beach with the dogs whilst the children are beating each other up.

I was more sorry about it when we got there because it don’t think I like Carlisle nearly as much as I like the beach.

It seems to have a disproportionate quantity of tattoo studios, also of betting shops. After those came Poundland and Hair And Nail And All Over Body Waxing Salons. I do not think that I would want to be waxed all over if I lived that far north, you would need all the extra layers of warmth you could get.

In fact the sun was shining, which was splendid, although Mark thought that people looked as though this might not happen very often.

We were interested in Carlisle. We have only been there twice before. We went once when I had got to go and argue with the council about something, probably taxi related although I forget what: and once when we got married.

We did not get married in Carlisle, of course, we got married in Coniston. After the party had finished we drove to Carlisle in the middle of the night and got on the overnight sleeper train to London. That is to say, Mark drove us to Carlisle. He did not drink then.

How things change.

We had vague but fond memories of getting married, and so we were interested to look at Carlisle station, about which I could remember not a single thing. We stared at the station and tried to recall what we had thought and felt on that momentous day.

Regrettably, other than thinking that I might have felt a bit sick after what had been a jolly good party, it eluded us. I remembered the sleeper train, though. That was ace, almost as good as having a cabin on a boat. It is splendid to go to sleep in one place and wake up in another, especially if somebody brings you a cup of coffee and your breakfast in bed, which they did on the train.

Carlisle must have been a rather imposing sort of place once, before they invented Poundland. There is a castle, which is built of dark red stone, and looks solid and impregnable. Apart from that its chief tourist attraction appears to be the council offices, about which you could probably say the same.

We wandered about and admired the council offices. We looked at the railway, which we liked because you could see where it must have once been a massive station with great stone walls and an arch overhead, the sort you see in films about people with sweethearts in the war.

Next to the railway was a decrepit hotel which must once have been the epitome of wealth and northern sophistication, with beautiful carvings just visible under the scaffolding, arched windows and a special little road to it directly from the station platform.

We stood on the bridge and looked down at it. Once upon a time you must have been able to get off the train and have a porter take your bags whilst you crossed underneath the road, sheltered from the noise of the streets and the weather, in a dark little valley lit by the bright windows of the hotel.

The picture of the way it might have been was very splendid indeed compared to the way it is now, with several broken windows and weeds sprouting out of the guttering. I hope somebody with a lot of money takes it on and makes it magnificent again. Maybe if enough people get on the train to come and look at the council offices it will become worth it.

We went back to wait for the children outside the gym, which was on a cobbled street just outside the town centre. There seemed to be rather a lot of these, maybe the council budget doesn’t stretch to tarmac everywhere, Cumbria is a big county.

We were so tired after our adventures that we crawled on to our bunk and had a snooze, and then I put a tray of sausages in the oven and we went to see what they were doing.

When we arrived they were practising what to do if somebody attacks you with a baseball bat. I am not worried about this eventuality especially, as far as I know it is not a frequent event at either school, but you never know. Oliver had an accidental wallop with a cricket bat once.

Anyway, if it does they will be able to look after themselves perfectly well. They were doing a manoeuvre which involved disarming the attacker and then placing a knee in their groin.

Mark and I watched and smiled politely. Their instructor insists that they are not allowed to say rude words in class, so the first line of defence is telling an attacker to back off. If that fails to work then they punch them several times in the face, knee them in the stomach and hurl them to the ground.

Lucy tried this on Mark later on. He had to have a quiet sit down for a while to recover.

Afterwards we had sausages and doughnuts in the camper van whilst we listened admiringly to stories of violence.

Lucy is getting very good at it indeed. Her career ambition is currently to become a bouncer in a nightclub and then a soldier, followed by a career in the personal protection security industry.

I wonder what school will have to say about it.