Windermere

This morning I went across to Windermere and, as I'd arrived a few minutes early, I took a short stroll along the lakeshore.

As a young man, I enjoyed all of the Arthur Ransome books, a delight that I have signally failed to pass on to any of my children, despite occasionally resorting to actual financial incentives for them to read the first one, hoping they would get hooked.

Standing here, this morning, looking over the water, I thought about how perhaps Arthur had stood here, too, and how little the view would have changed over the years. (The first book was set in the summer of 1929 and published the following year.)

Later on, the chap I met up with pointed out the MV Tern and told me that it was built in 1891. And so, even though that actual lake upon which the adventure takes place is never given its real name, I was almost certainly seeing one of the steamers that is referred to in the books.

Just thinking about them gives me a nostalgic pang for a time when I wasn't even alive but for a world which, in my mind, I inhabited with enthusiasm. I guess that maybe some things just aren't meant to get passed down the generations: in my family, Swallows and Amazons belongs to me, ownership uncontested!