Miles Collins

Cumbrian memoirs part one…..

Back to 1993 and I have returned to England after a year cooking in Germany in a bid to climb the culinary ladder.

I’ve chosen Cumbria as the next place to lay my proverbial hat and I feel good about it. The English Lake District is one of the most beautiful places on the planet, it was the home to one of England’s finest poets, William Wordsworth and more importantly, ‘Squirrel Nutkin’ of Beatrix Potter fame.

My family are happy, for mother I am back in England, for Father I am still a good six hours away on the other side of the country and for Brother, well the trout and pike fishing takes some beating.

I arrive on April 1st, better known as April Fool’s Day. I’ve been travelling across the country since the early hours and arrive in Windermere on a cold, damp and overcast afternoon, which, to be fair could have been any day of the year in Cumbria. The taxi drops me off at the hotel reception, I’ve got a suitcase of clothes, a box of knives and a fishing rod. The head housekeeper meets me and takes me to my room.

I am immediately introduced to a full on Cumbrian accent, I’ve spent a year talking, thinking and being sworn at in German, Austrian and Swiss. Here we go again, she’s making small talk and I’m not listening, I feel like a paratrooper on excercise with full kit, I’m twenty four and I’ve developed a hunchback between Grimsby and Windermere. I need a shower followed by the four cans of warm, shook up bitter I’ve saved to cure the inevitable first day headache.

My living quaters are in a seperate, large, ugly white building. As we approach I ask how many rooms there are, “fifty” says the housekeeper/goat herder. The penny should have dropped but I was more interested in the smell as we entered the building. “What’s that smell?” I asked, she looked at me like I had a chicken on my head. “That would be cannabis” “Oh, yes,of course”, I lied. I was as familiar with cannabis as I was with nuclear physics. I’d spent a year in the Black Forest having to listen to Bavarian folk music, not exactly San Francisco and the Grateful Dead.

The housekeeper led me to the second floor, I was serenaded by rap music (’gangsta’ as I later learnt) from one room, Metallica from another and that god awful Manchester based music so popular with the acid heads of the early nineties in every other. Not to worry, I thought. I’ve got Motorhead!

She unlocked the door to my room and said ‘Here we are’ in the way a receptionist says showing you to your honeymoon suite in a five star hotel overlooking the Niagra Falls or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. I stood at the entrance and looked in. “Where’s the rest of it?” I asked. A cell on Death Row would have been more inviting, and bigger. The room was the size of a standard household bathroom, there was a sink in the corner, a cigarette burnt matress in the other and a single wardrobe with the door hanging off in another. Oh goody, I’ve got a whole corner left to fill, in interior design terms the world was my oyster.

Al Capone had kindly left me his grey blanket and single pillow, I opened the window to see how he’d escaped. It was a twenty foot drop but thankfully there was a huge tree blocking any natural light into my room so if I waited another five years for a branch to hit my window I could make good my escape. 

The door banged shut behind me, I was on my own again. I filled the sink with cold water and put my beer in it. Stay positive I told myself but that room was hard to take in. There was a knock on my door, a six foot three, sixteen stone skinhead from Middlesborough smiled a toothless grin and introduced himself. He saw the beer in the sink and a Chris Rea cd on the table, that would prove to be the foundation to a great friendship….