Bill Bryson

Magical summer series that’ll make you love Britain anew

THERE is a small, tattered clipping that I sometimes carry with me and pull out for purposes of private amusement. It’s a weather forecast from the Western Daily Mail and it says, in toto: ‘Outlook: Dry and warm, but cooler with some rain.’

There you have in a single pithy sentence the British weather captured to perfection: dry but rainy with some warm/cool spells. The Western Daily Mail could run that forecast every day — for all I know, it may — and scarcely ever be wrong.

To an outsider the most striking thing about the British weather is that there isn’t very much of it. All those phenomena that elsewhere give nature an edge of excitement, unpredictability and danger — tornadoes, monsoons, raging blizzards, run-for-your-life hailstorms — are almost wholly unknown in the British Isles, and this is just fine by me.

I like wearing the same type of clothing every day of the year. I appreciate not needing air conditioning or mesh screens on the windows to keep out the kind of insects and flying animals that drain your blood or eat away your face while you are sleeping. I like knowing that so long as I do not go walking up Ben Nevis in carpet slippers in February I will almost certainly never perish from the elements in this soft and gentle country.

I mention this because as I sat eating my breakfast in the dining room of the Old England Hotel in Bowness-on-Windermere, two days after leaving Morecambe, I was reading an article in The Times about an unseasonable snowstorm — a ‘blizzard’, The Times called it — that had ‘gripped’ parts of East Anglia.

According to The Times report, the storm had covered parts of the region with ‘more than 2in of snow’ and created ‘drifts up to 6in high’.

In response to this, I did something I had never done before: I pulled out my notebook and drafted a letter to the editor in which I pointed out, in a kindly, helpful way, that 2in of snow cannot possibly constitute a blizzard and that 6in of snow is not a drift.

A blizzard, I explained, is when you can’t get your front door open. Drifts are things that make you lose your car until spring. Cold weather is when you leave part of your flesh on doorknobs, mailbox handles and other metal objects.

Then I crumpled the letter up because I realised I was in danger of turning into one of the Colonel Blimp types who sat around me, eating cornflakes or porridge with their blimpish wives, and without whom hotels like the Old England would not be able to survive.

I was in Bowness because I had two days to kill until I was to be joined by two friends from London with whom I was going to spend the weekend walking. I was looking forward to that, but rather less to the prospect of another long, purposeless day in Bowness, pottering about trying to fill the empty hours till tea.

There are, I find, only so many windowsful of tea towels, Peter Rabbit dinnerware and patterned jumpers I can look at before my interest in shopping palls, and I wasn’t at all sure that I could face another day of poking about in this most challenging of resorts.

I had come to Bowness more or less by default since it is the only place inside the Lake District National Park with a railway station. Besides, the idea of spending a couple of quiet days beside the tranquil beauty of Windermere, and wallowing in the plump comforts of a gracious (if costly) old hotel, had seemed distinctly appealing from the vantage of Morecambe Bay.

But now, with one day down and another to go, I was feeling stranded and fidgety, like someone at the end of a long period of convalescence.

At least, I reflected optimistically, the unseasonable 2in of snow that had brutally lashed East Anglia, causing chaos on the roads and forcing people to battle their way through perilous snowdrifts, some as high as their ankletops, had mercifully passed this corner of England by.

Here, the elements were benign and the world outside the diningroom window sparkled weakly under a pale wintry sun.

I decided to take the lake steamer to Ambleside. This would not only kill an hour and let me see the lake, but deliver me to a place rather more like a real town and less like a misplaced seaside resort than Bowness.

In Bowness, I had noted the day before, there are no fewer than 18 shops where you can buy jumpers and at least 12 selling Peter Rabbit stuff, but just one butcher’s.

Ambleside, though hardly unfamiliar with the possibilities for enrichment presented by hordes of passing tourists, did at least have an excellent bookshop and any number of outdoor shops, which I find hugely if inexplicably diverting — I can spend hours looking at rucksacks, kneesocks, compasses and survival rations, then go to another shop and look at precisely the same things all over again.

So it was with a certain animated keenness that I made my way to the steamer pier after breakfast.

Alas, I discovered the steamers run only in summer, which seemed shortsighted on this mild morning because even now Bowness gently teemed with trippers.

So I was forced, as a fallback, to pick my way through the scattered, shuffling throngs to the little ferry that shunts back and forth between Bowness and the old ferry house on the opposite shore. It travels only a few hundred yards, but it does at least run all year.

A modest line-up of cars was patiently idling on the ferry approach, and there were eight or ten walkers as well, all with Mustos, rucksacks and sturdy boots. One fellow was even wearing shorts — always a sign of advanced dementia in a British walker.

Walking — walking, that is, in the British sense — was something I had come into only relatively recently.

I was not yet at the point where I would wear shorts with many pockets, but I had taken to tucking my trousers into my socks (though I have yet to find anyone who can explain what benefits this confers, other than making one look serious and committed). I remember when I first came to Britain wandering into a bookstore and being surprised to find a section dedicated to ‘Walking Guides’.

This struck me as faintly comical — where I came from people did not require written instructions to achieve locomotion — but gradually I learned that there are two kinds of walking in Britain: the everyday kind that gets you to the pub and, all being well, home again, and the that involves stout boots, Ordnance Survey maps in plastic pouches, rucksacks with sandwiches and flasks of tea, and, in its terminal phase, the wearing of khaki shorts in inappropriate weather.

For years, I watched these walker types toiling off up cloud-hidden hills in wet and savage weather and presumed they were genuinely insane. And then my old friend John Price, who had grown up in Liverpool and spent his youth doing foolish things on sheer-faced crags in the Lakes, encouraged me to join him and a couple of his friends for an amble — that was the word he used — up Haystacks one weekend.

I think it was the combination of those two untaxing-sounding words, ‘amble’ and ‘Haystacks’, and the promise of lots of drink afterwards, that lulled me from caution.

‘Are you sure it’s not too hard?’ I asked. ‘Nah, just an amble,’ John insisted. Well, of course it was anything but an amble. We clambered for hours up vast, perpendicular slopes, over clattering scree and lumpy tussocks, round towering citadels of rock, and emerged at length into a cold, bleak, lofty nether world so remote and forbidding that even the sheep were startled to see us.

Beyond it lay even greater and remoter summits that had been invisible from the ribbon of black highway thousands of feet below,

John and his chums toyed with my will to live in the cruellest possible way; seeing me falling behind, they would lounge around on boulders, smoking and chatting and resting, but the instant I caught up with them with a view to falling at

Remote? Even the sheep were startled to see us I presumed that hill-walkers were genuinely insane