Windermere

I don’t remember when I first start reading Arthur Ransome’s books. Certainly by the time we lived in Hong Kong, I was passionate about them and I carried on enjoying them when we came back to the UK. The annual trip to the lakes every Easter during my teenage years cemented the books' place in my heart and it has been a source of disappointment to me that not one of my children has picked them up and read them, too.

Well, actually, that’s not strictly true. I did pay one of my older girls to read ‘Swallows and Amazons’, which she did before collecting her five pounds and declining my offer of the next in the series (‘Swallowdale’, of course).

Today I had reason to be up on the hillside above Windermere and the view filled me with that peculiar nostalgia for a time when I wasn’t even alive. Apart from a couple of aerials, this view is pretty much as Ransome himself would have seen it.