Journeys of life....part the first

There was a curious radio program today which suggested that young people should not travel overseas.
I think the thesis was that basically you are "too young to appreciate the experience" and, more than that, you might be ruined and never learn to settle down.
I will get to that later on (part the fourth perhaps)
But as a boy it was wonderful to grow up in West Cumberland  ( the Western Lake District) we used to go to the beach at St Bees (where my Dad had lived as a boy  and my Great Uncle and Aunt still lived ...he had been both the bank manager and a lighthouse operator....!) and then we stayed at Braystones...just a bit further down the coast. Coastally beautiful!
How we swam I don't know as it was the Irish Sea, by Australian standards it was probably colder than even the south of Tasmania.!   As I reflect, I realise that at least one of our holiday 'houses' probably did not have electricity nor running water (we used to go to the Well to fill buckets!). But I think we got up at 6 or 7 spent the day at the beach, picked mushrooms, built sandcastles, swam...caught crabs, picked cuvvins...( a sea snail which you picked and soaked and cooked...Yum! [let us not however begin to think about the discharge from the Windscales Nuclear Reactor...which meant that Sellafield was discharging waste water which may or may not have been tainted by nuclear waste....might explain why I have three brains!]...but we enjoyed them...Cumbrian escargots)
The main picture above is of the wonderful Campsite that the Scouts developed at Ennerdale. Many of my holidays as a teenage boy were as a member of that organisation. I am really happy that I had the opportunity to be both a Cub and a Scout.
The formal campsite, but also rough camping in fields and on mountainsides was very enjoyable. And is etched very deep in my memory.
For all these childhood holidays I am really grateful.

The old country

For a brief moment, the youngest S Clark and I were going to NY, NY (so good they named it twice!) for 10 days after Christmas. But it was not to be ( despite how much we would love to see Sean and Kristin in Promises Promises...(what DO you get when you fall in love?)

I was relieved in a way because I was a bit worried about the cold. It's relatively warm today as I write this ranging from 2 to -4!!

However have a thought for Aunty Adelaide who lives in chilly old Penrith, Cumbria, UK...the land of my birth. Looks like the sun is shining and temperatures range from -2 to -7!!

Tomorrow (bear in mind it's always warmer when it snows) it will be snowing and the temperature will be a sweltering 1 and down to -4!!!

Glad I am not there!

Misericordiae

It was tragic to wake up and find there had been an awful slaughter in Whitehaven the town of my birth. As far as I can gather my family is OK, though one of my childhood friends is a local doctor and I heard him being interviewed on radio today.

Awful, awful stuff

The detours of our lives

Yesterday we detoured, got lost, reminisced and all in all had a jolly nice day. We ended up in Kendal which used to be in Westmorland (which no longer exists) but is now a part of Cumbria which now takes in all of what was Cumberland where I grew up, Westmorland and part of Northern Lancashire.
Any way Kendal is famous for Kendal Mint Cake as every hiker will tell you an absolute must when hiking in England's Lake District.
Removing the wrapper immediately I thought it didn't have the same sharp white colour I remembered as a child. There was a certain inspidity about it, the taste was OK. But a lot sweeter than I remembered.
Sue grinned and bore it. The eating of ethnic food is always a trial to those who have not grown up with it! And we Australians forget that there is is as much disgusting English ethnic food as there is Sauerkraut in Germany, frog's legs in France or dogs in Korea.
There is of course brawn, made from pig's head, black pudding made from pig's blood...and of course sausages are just an excuse to eat anything that you shouldn't really eat!
Many times I have found that the fond memories of the food of my childhood have been tempered by the fact that we now eat next to no animal fat if we can avoid it, our children have never known vegetables cooked with a handful of salt. And everything these days has a quarter of the sugar it had in the 50s.
This I think was the Kendal Mint Cake shock, it had the sugar content of my childhood rather than the plastic content of today.
Food is an interesting example of our distorted memory, but perhaps not the important one (We often seem to trivialise ethnicity back to food and music and dancing...when really it is about the ways people relate to each other).
So one has to be careful talking to family you haven't seen for decades, or to whom you are genetically connected but with whom you have little or no shared experience. I watched my cousin wince as my wife deflated an image of one of my closer relatives...did he really want to know what she was actually like or did he prefer the sharp taste and stark colour contrast of childhood.
It's good stuff, as we make these detours into our dreams. But we are reminded by Yeats:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.