Miles Collins

Q: What’s the Weather Like in the Lake District?

A: Awful! 

Four years in the Lake District might sound like heaven to some and for much of it I have to say it pretty much was. Everyone told me how lucky I was to work in such a beautiful place and how they envied me but I always said that living there and visiting for the weekend were two completly different experiences.

Everyone associates England with rain and if Cumbria was England then they would be right. A rainy day in the Lake District is generally taken as a given and I’ve seen every type of rainy day you can imagine, from the stop and start to the torrential all day downpour.

Rain is the worst, when the sun is out the tourists invade and you can’t go anywhere. I lived and worked in the most popular part of Cumbria bar none, there was one road which cut through the centre and that was it. If you wanted to go to the large market town of Kendal you had to use that road, likewise to Windermere, Ambleside, Keswick, Thirlmere, Grasmere etc, etc. When the sun shone a ten minute car journey could take forty minutes, no joke when you couldn’t afford a car with air con.

If it rained from the start of the day then that meant you could go about your business, undisturbed by water skiers and pensioners in fleece jackets buying lavender pot pourri’s. If there was a downpour in the middle of a nice day then the small, antiquarian bookshop you were enjoying a chat with the owner in would get swamped by a coach load of Japanese tourists photographing everything from the cash till to the waste paper basket.

If, on the other hand it snowed. Well….

This was taken in the winter of 1995, the road is the main Windermere to Ambleside road-the road in the Southern Lakes. The next was taken from my prison cell bedroom shortly before going head over heels down the steps to the kitchen:

There is something about snowfall which brings out the juvenile in an adult. A barman from Newcastle with a penchant for vodka binges and practical jokes thought it would be hilarious to ‘hide’ my car shortly before my 200 mile drive home:

I had the last laugh, I decided not to go home and went back to the kitchen for a mug of tea. Showing sportsmanship above and beyond the call of duty I offered said barman a cup of tea. Still laughing from his ingenuity he gratefully accepted and, grinning broadly raised his mug in my direction as a sign of his success. I nodded and watched as he put his lips to the mug which I had liberally rubbed with a fresh Thai birds eye chilli.

As he stuck his face under the cold water tap I leant over and asked if I’d forgotten the sugar…bad weather, it brings out the worst in us.