"Joy in looking and comprehending is nature's most beautiful gift.“ Albert Einstein
We have traded convenience for beauty. Breathtaking beauty, but it is a trade nonetheless. There is a price for everything in life, and the price we have chosen to pay to live in this stunning landscape, is the price of convenience. The concept of 'local' has been dramatically re-conceptualised and the only places of socio-cultural interest within walking distance are a post box and a village hall. It is however an NHS priority post-box whereby post is both expedited and handled with extreme care which is in our remote little hamlet, exotic and novel. When I discovered this gorgeous red box residing at the end of our lane, I was texting friends and family to share the news with them. I think there was even a phone-call. Life has changed.
We live within driving distance of idyllic Transpennine and Lake District market towns populated with independent shops, cafes and galleries. Our new home is the place celebrities come to make documentaries and film period dramas, then swagger smugly back off to where they can get a hot shower on demand, order a takeaway, walk to a shop and sit in static traffic. It’s pros and cons.
17 miles in rural Cumbria is not 17 miles as I remember it or as most folk know it. I have come to know and love it as 17 miles of blind bends and no passing places. Two way unmade roads barely wide enough for a 4x4 with dry stone wall on each side and a 60 mph speed limit. Still, no passing places. Floods, weak bridges, pot-holes the size of craters with the gift of disguising themselves as puddles, quad bikes herding sheep and just as commonly, tractors. When the tractor is ahead of you, 17 miles goes on forever. When the tractor is coming towards you on the lane I have just described, reversing however many miles along the lane you have just driven…takes a while longer. When we lived in Suffolk, we drove along these lanes largely as a diversion, as a cut through or to take the “scenic route.” In our new home, these lanes are the “only route.” Mercifully, on our early morning commutes to work or school, one can drive for 30 minutes without seeing another vehicle. The obstacle we most commonly have to stop for is a rabbit.
Houses here are not identified by street names, but property names and postcodes. As we have come to learn however, the postcodes cover sprawling, rural areas and are of limited use. They narrow down a search, but search is the key-word and the experience of going to visit my Son’s new friend recently was Ray Mears meets geocaching. In conclusion, postcodes do little to help in the effort to locate an exact address and I have had to embrace map-reading and understanding GPS coordinates as part of our new life. I cannot tell you how excited I am about this.
A dear friend put this so succinctly to me in a recent call. “You can’t pop anywhere can you?”
These words have been written across my life in the spirit of a transformational philosophy. The concept of “popping” will never be the same again.
If we run out of anything at all, the nearest pharmacy or shop is a drive away. Our most local shops have very limited opening times and nothing closer than a 40-minute drive is open on a Sunday. We recently ran out of eggs when Daughter was baking and I suggested she go to our next door neighbour’s farm to ask for some fresh. Our other next-door neighbour offers up fresh milk from their farm. When covid moved in recently, we had to travel 45 minutes for PCR tests and any fast-food treats would be a similar distance away. Similar issues have arisen with frantic last minute school shoe shops and for essential supplies. And it is essential to have enough fuel in the tank to be able to drive to a petrol station! Some weird Beckettian irony at play there I feel.
But we didn’t end up here by mistake, or with a pin in the map. There is a meticulous method in our apparent madness and for every convenience we have sacrificed, we have been lavished with an abundance of beauty, beyond which any of us could ask for here on earth. Life is more peaceful, there is an inherent and manifest magnificence in everything I look at, from the mountains to the Lakes, to the moors and the craggy little crumbling barns that have stood for hundreds of years. My mind is endlessly busy with the effort it takes to comprehend what I am looking at from the windows of our house, the car and when I’m outside, surrounded by it all. Every photograph I take falls hopelessly short of capturing the humbling reality and so I try to remember each moment of the miles I have to drive to go anywhere, to do anything. I exhaust every (lame) effort as a spoken word poet when it comes to relaying my visions to the family of a long journey home from work in the half-dark, scrabbling through photos on my phone that do nothing to elaborate my faltering descriptions of the sun setting against the Pennines and the eagles that flew over my car and across the moors into shadow, then silhouette. It is quite simply, as I say it. Even if I cannot describe it.
I need to “pop” out now. Off to pay homage to our landmark of soci-cultural interest.
Or in local dialect: I need to post a PCR test in the priority box.
Rock n Roll.
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