My Love of the Lake District

We visited the Lake District again last year. I mention this because I have just been watching a programme about Wainwright and I find so many parallels. In character I am very similar, though not to the extent of his commitment and drive in producing his brilliant guides over how many years it took, but rather in my love of the fells and the solitariness and the beauty. He is so right that anyone who loves the Lakes is an exile when they are away. The Lake District now has the reputation of having the most unfriendly resident population in the Country as far as attitude to holiday makers goes but that is the inevitable consequence of living in a National Park with its unrelenting tide of visitors. I lived at the foot of Lake Windermere for years the realisation of a dream that took root the first time I visited what was then an area that embraced the three counties of Lancashire, Cumberland and Westmorland. As it was to Wainwright, first seeing the fells on a visit from industrial Lancashire, so it was to me. From that moment I became both a lover and an exile. As a youth in Industrial Lancashire I had little spare money and outside of my main work spent much of my time with freelance work and further education but whenever time and public transport allowed and with the most basic of gear I explored those hills. The emotional impact of the sights and sounds on those hills has
on occasion brought me to tears but more consistently absolute joy. I did all of this alone though ensured that any nights camping were in recognised sights amongst company. Not that I was in any sense gregarious but I wasn't brave enough to sleep out there alone. Much too timid, much too fearful, my lifelong burden rooted in my childhood.

As a child the common theme in my life was rejection. I dont say this out of self pity or to gain sympathy I am just stating a fact. It started off well enough for those times. I was born in 1942. my Grocers assistant father now gone to war, my mother and I living where my parents had lived all of their lives, a small Lancashire cotton mill and coal mining town, and now next door to her sister and my three cousins who became my surrogate family. My experience was not unique but like other children born in the middle of the war whos fathers were away a
vital formative period lacked the influence, company and familiarity with a father. They were strangers to us even intruders on their fleeting leaves and we were probably glad to see them go, maybe they felt rejected. I surmise because I don,t know. The details of much of my early childhood then is unknown to me, fragmented. I think my mother worked, out of necessity no doubt, at a local factory leaving me in the care of her sister and other members of my fathers large family most of whom lived within a radius of a few miles from our house. In 1945 my father returned from the War and resumed his job at the local Co-op. I have no memory of these times but two years later my mother died in childbirth. It was all downhill from then.

More again if your interested.

Yanks and Brown Scum

PREJUDICES

Like so many people I have always voted for one party, the Labour Party, all of my life. I don,t know why I suppose I identified with the class of people who are usually associated with Labour and anyway anything seemed better than Hume or MacMillan or Heath and worst of all that
criminal Thatcher.

I dont identify with that class now in fact I dont think I ever did. The Scum culture that today seems to embrace the previous title of Working Class is one I would never want be associated with. We live in an age where the lowest common denominator rules, booze ridden, uncouth and trivial with a significant number of our fellow countrymen seemingly lacking in any sense of social responsibility intent on educating their children in the church of ME and Materialism.

Then of course they wonder why the hand that feeds gets bit. Our leaders certainly since and very much including Thatcher have set the worst examples to the rest of society. You only have to judge Thatcher by her friends to see what she is. Blare is simply a smug bastard who always knows best and undoubtedly is more intent on World politics than those at home. His preoccupation with this countries maintenance as a World power has shades of Hitlerism about it. Standards seem non existent. What can one say of a society where the Sun newspaper is actually quoted as being of some significance. Where our present Prime Minister had to crawl and cowtow to the owner of that lowlife rag in order to be elected. Where Brown, a man who as Chancellor of the Exchequer has actively robbed us and created more social injustice than Thatcher, is seriously considered as a suitable leader of a Labour Party.

The fact is that people are better people when they have encountered hardship and suffering. The more people have the more they want. Compare society today with society after WW2. People had far less and were better for it. They valued what they had as little as that was. To some extent the popular media especially films reflects those historical values. Look at the principal values of the films produced just after the war and look at those today. We condemn the violence in our youth but feed them a continual diet through the media..We have film critics who themselves are a product of a society without proper values who instruct us to revere directors and writers whos main claim to fame is the extent to which they have extended the degree of violence in film.

Our values, or lack of them today, have much to do with the way we have abandoned any aspirations to embrace an English identity rooted in our history and sold our souls to the Yanks. These world class corupters have given us little of value in fact Yanks don,t give anything they only loan at high interest rates. When I was a child we had an American Base near to us. My father, who had fought with the 8th Army said you could always spot a Yank from behind because of his big arse. They got those sitting on them while we fought the Germans alone. Had we not done that far from the Yanks "saving our arses" we saved theirs. Had Hitler beaten us he would have had access to resources and bases that would have seriously threatened them. The big mouthed dickhead (Ed: - Eldon Anderson) who last week was accusing us of sucking our thumbs in the Second World War should have popped down our street and expressed the same sentiment to some of the demobs there in 1946.people who now had to live in a country that unlike the USA didn't profit from the war but ruined itself economically.

Yanks and Brown fupoff