Unnamed tarn, Heathwaite.
Very heartening the other day to find this bewitching little body of water brimming with the good stuff after it spent most of 2022 emptier than a politician’s promise. Plenty of recent rain has accompanied unseasonably balmy temperatures in autumnal South Lakeland – might we be in for one of those cold, dry winters of yesteryear? When the air, sparkling with dancing ice crystals, seared your lungs and the paths froze in banded iron ruts.
Plenty of us will be hoping for the warmest winter ‘since records began’ with the rising cost of everything expounded last week by eye-watering tax increases and cuts to public services. Twelve years of the Monster Raving Loony Party could hardly have conjured worse economic conditions – and we might still be in the EU.
All the rain has made the paths up to School Knott Tarn claggy, but it doesn’t seem to bother the stumpy galloway cows carefully nibbling the hawthorn bushes. Didn’t see any sign of the little herd of blue albions that the indomitable Elizabeth Bottomley tended for so many years. Hopefully they were off somewhere only they know of, munching on a secret stash.
School Knott Tarn
Was anyone else ever dragged out for the ‘Boxing Day Walk?’ Ours fairly frequently took in School Knott, accompanied by older relatives’ memories of skating on its exquisite tarn in the fifties and sixties. A time of much simpler and more wholesome pursuits, whose festive seasons were blighted by frozen pipes and freezing churches and brightened, somewhat it seems, by carolling and peculiar liqueurs.
A far cry from today’s all-conquering advertising extravaganza in grubby pursuit of our dwindling contactless pennies. And this year with the added insanity of a World Cup taking place a stone’s throw (perhaps intended for an adulterer?) from the Holy Land. We can gleefully succumb to the marketeers’ demonic charms whilst worshipping before the sporting world’s ultimate altar to Mammon. Woohoo, Brucie betfred bonus time.
We also get to feast on the queasy spectacle of holier-than-thou, highly-paid football pundits trying to out virtue-signal each other with grim expressions one minute, while leaping like maniacal man-babies around their plush studio with every England goal the next.
For most of the last 49 years, all I knew about Qatar was its usefulness in a game of Scrabble. Then I seem to remember some murky goings-on during the Gulf wars and, more recently I guess, their huge oil revenues have been busy hoovering up football clubs.
Thank goodness for the football pundits of the Beeb and ITV. Those fearless modern-day crusaders have, in wracked tones, opened my eyes to the evils of the Qatari regime that refuses to subjugate its religious heritage, national identity and traditional values to their own brand of illiberal wokery. Every official Qatari utterance or gesture is leapt on by our erstwhile media mouthpieces and held up for ridicule by our waspy western gaze.
Things may be awful for women, foreign, disabled and gay people in Qatar (I don’t know, I’ve never been), but I can’t seem to find any information about mass emigration attempts – perhaps because it’s squashed by the state? I also don’t know anything about the ordinary everyday lives of the Qatari people as they are of no interest to our national broadcasters who prefer to unearth (with hidden identities) isolated examples of apparently persecuted minorities.
I suppose a lot of the anger in the UK directed towards the Qatar World Cup is down to money – the money that built vast stadia at enormous human cost that will soon be redundant; the money that continues to acquire UK assets while we lurch from one economic disaster to another; and the money that we believe greased the palms and bought the rights to host the jamboree from under our noses.
We’re failing, once again, to make any effort to understand a society different from our own and instead seek to judge it by our own shaky standards and try to impose upon it our own increasingly questionable values. Being politically and economically impotent, we pile into the seemingly peaceable country (Qatar apparently has the world’s lowest crime rate) waving our indignant human rights banners (forgetting our own appalling record – including the current asylum fiasco), much like the marionettes from Team America: World Police. Is it any wonder we fail to make friends and influence people in the Muslim world?
Team America: World Police, Trey Parker, 2004
But all will be brushed under the carpet if England or Wales win the World Cup; Qatar will become a place of pilgrimage, a Holy Land of the beautiful game. It could be the start of a beautiful friendship. In-ger-land, In-ger-land, In-ger-land…
Junction 36 
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