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We drove to Coniston for a change of scenery and looked round the museum, much to the boredom of the kids - what they're not interested in Donald Campbell and John Ruskin? What's happened to the youth of today. There were a few references to Swallows and Amazons, a book I mainly remember for my father's complete failure to engage us when he tried to read it to us on holiday in the early 70s. My siblings and I could not have been more bored by the book that had delighted my dad as a child. I can't properly have sensed his sadness about this at the time, but I feel it very hard now and in retrospect his frustration permeates the memory. Luckily I don't care too much about posh people killing themselves on lakes and I don't really know who John Ruskin is (though I bet I studied him at University) so their apathy did not sting.
Campbell is undoubtedly an interesting man who deserves a museum as well as psychoanalysis, but it is a little weird that the place the reveres and celebrates him is the place where he died. The pub we ate our lunch in had beers named after his doomed boat. Hey look, I suppose Christians cash in on Jesus' crucifixion. We are a weird species.
Campbell's head is still out there somewhere (though they found his body twenty years ago), so I might try and find that so I can set up a rival museum and rival ales. Imagine the merch.
Then we headed over to Beatrix Potter's house, but she wasn't in. It promised to be another dull trip for the kids - who have only had the whole holiday dedicated to their pleasure- but they did enjoy trying to find the six pretend duck eggs in the garden. The sixth one seemed to be flummoxing everyone. It's under the rhubarb leaves if you can't find it. I'm hoping that one day our own house will be preserved in memory of the children's author who lives here. But only if they leave it in the tip it always is and have to try and explain our valueless nicknacks.
The drive to the house has been particularly quaint and mildly perilous as we went up steep single track roads (some with grass growing in the middle of them) with no regular passing places and drops on either side and I worried about meeting oncoming traffic (though the one time we did, the other car was able to back up a few metres to a place I could pass). The sat nav seemed a bit confused by the area, at one point almost giving up completely and telling us to turn around, which was annoying after we were 30 minutes into the journey and looking like we might be late for our ticket time. but I pressed on and it recalibrated. After the Potter house, the sat nav decided that it had all been too much and directed us down to the lake and we got a ferry across to Windermere. Which I suspect would have been the easier option on the way there. And I think the sat nav agreed, hence it's little meltdown.
