Junction 36

After an interesting and, at times, fairly well drawn-out process, I’ve managed to get a little walking pamphlet published. I don’t expect it will ever rub shoulders with, or even scrape the boots of loftier tomes like Wainright’s Pictorial Guides to the Lakes, Bragg’s Land of the Lakes or the AA’s Best Lakeland Pub Crawl etc. The problem on a certain level I suppose, is that, I don’t really want it to.

Much as I hope that my musings may provide some small measure of enjoyment for a proportion of its more easily-pleased readership, or that it might lure the odd couch potato away from Netflix and onto a bridleway, I wouldn’t want folk going overboard. The clue’s in the title really. Rather like the master fisherman in a small pond, you have to think about tomorrow’s supper. It would be my own stupid fault next time I heave up at a favourite secret spot only to find it awash with the unwashed brandishing my wares. Not that I suppose there’s any real danger of that.

But therein lies the rub for all arty-farty types. To be fortunate enough to make a go of earning a crust from, for example, coaxing words and ideas into aesthetically pleasing and/or thought-provoking combinations, myself and other writers need to appeal to as broad a swathe of humanity as our penmanship permits. Too much success and we’re cast aside as populist; too little and we’re just cast aside.

Jessie, being very farty at the moment, Sedbergh hay meadow

As we trudge to the polls tomorrow, it’s one conundrum at least that I don’t have to share with a worrying number of our politicians since Farage slithered back on the scene peddling his nationalistic nonsense. Ethical and economic responsibility? Do me a favour, guv. At least the tub-thumping will be over for a while and, who knows, Friday might even bring a brighter dawn?

No imminent signs of it being a warmer one though, dagnamit. Apart from the odd sunny spell here and there, the winter woollies have barely had a day off since last autumn in our neck of the woods. I can’t put the understriders back into service in July, surely? Oh well, a fabulous summer of sport lies ahead to warm the soul, if not the extremities.

Despite an almost existential upheaval across the Channel, you just know the Paris Olympics are going to dazzle and mystify and delight in a manner only the French could conceive. But whatever spectacles may unfold – beach volleyball under the Eiffel Tower? Fencing in Versailles? Surfing in Tahiti? – and whatever records may tumble, nothing, for me, will top what Mark Cavendish achieved today. The Goat of British sport? I think so.