ENGLAND’s Lake District

“a blended holiness of earth and sky”

 Painterly skies daub sunlight and cloud shadows on the shores of Ullswater, one of 16
major lakes that give England’s lake district its name
 Mud pies and monkey business offer antidotes to city stress for vacations in the lake
district. “It’s a little Switzerland in our backyard”
 Few places anywhere offer a more beguiling interplay of hills, lakes and soft green
valley than this small corner of northwest England in the county of Cumbria
 The rugged peaks, wild, high moors, and wandering values contain a drama and
grandeur elsewhere lacking in the tranquil landscape of England and have provided
inspiration for generations of poets and artists
 A symphony of steep, muscular hills, dotted with sheep and mottled with patchy
sunshine, framing a tightly confined valley of low white farmhouses and small, neat,
vividly green fields. Far below, a tractor trundled slowly across a field unfurling in its
wake a golden strip of new-moved hay
 A small, gleaning emerald in a crown of natural treasures, the Cumbrian heartland is
the domain of sky-lacquered lakes, glacial valleys and chiseled peaks, including
England’s highest mountain, 3,210 foot Scafell Pike
 The farmhouse, the stone walls, the winding lanes – they all seem to have grown from
the land rather than been imposed upon it.
 The views are sensational – the jagged peaks of the Langdale Pikes rising opposite
and crowding against the narrow and gratifying remote valley laced with tiny, stone-
walled fields, and off to the west a swelling sea of hefty brown hills disappearing in
mist and low cloud
 Fell (Hill) running – scrambling up and down mountains, often at considerable peril
to life and limb – is one of several sports keenly supported in the lake district
 To watch a group of young and not-so-young runners take off en masse from a valley
floor and within minutes become pinpricks on a distant ridge that took you half a day
and many rest breaks to haul yourself up the week before is arriving at a special
appreciation of the lake district people
 Joss Naylor – In 1976 he ran 108 miles through the lake district in just 24 hours,
covering 38,000 feet of ascent and descent and scaling 72 summits, all over 2000 feet
in elevation. Much of the run was done by moonlight all of it over uneven ground. He
was 40 years old at the time

Plaid to the bone: SCOTLAND

 The kilts-and-tartan caricature of Scottish culture is still hard to escape on the tourist
trial. At a lookout point on the road to Loch Ness, I met Murdo the Highland Piper,
who, in his kilt, cap, and waxed mustache, plays and poses for tourists
 As dark clouds coagulated over the loch below, a tour bus pulled in, and out poured
Chinese visitors in a slap-stick mood, one of whom rolled-up his trouser legs and
posed for snapshots in a mock plastic kilt and oversized tam, puffing on Murdo’s
pipes
 A tall, thin man with kindly blue eyes, he interrupted his dinner of boiled rabbits to
read one of his paeans to a stout, uniformed nurse who had appeared to him in a
hospital hallway like “a vessel of good wishes under sail”
 The Scottish are untamed, noble, hearty… open-handed and generous
 Blackened into an Edward Gorey gothic by a century of intense industry and blighted
by succeeding decades of depression and decay. GLASGOW was once regarded not
so much as a city as an abscess
 But now this muscular, open-hearted, sandblasted metropolis is basking in the glow
of its European community
 A city so self-regarded that it refuses to embrace its sobriquet because that would
concede too much to Athens
 Glasgow holds one of the UK’s greatest art collections outside London and a wealth
of free museums covering everything from costume to education to transport
 The shopping centre appears more like a village fair than a dreary mall in a drearier
scheme. There are lovers walking hand in hand and children teeming over the
playground equipment and groups of men debating politics, and even a dog and a
pony show being directed by a pair of English circus people who told me that of all
the audiences they entertain in Great Britian “these people are the friendliest”
 But not the healthiest. One in eight children under the age of 8 suffers from asthma in
Drumchapel, where the second most common cause of death among 20- to 40 year
old men (after heart disease) is suicide
Scotland’s nationhood has always stood on 3-legs- its church, its school, and its courts.
The pride of Scotland – maintaining Scottish culture

Oxford
 For 800 years the University of Oxford has been polishing minds and confounding
outsiders in roughly equal measure
 It is a place where students generally aren’t required to attend lectures, don’t receive
grades, seldom study anything outside their chosen subject, and take just 3 sets of
exams during the course of their college careers “one to get in and two to get out”
 A bewilderment of tradition is perhaps an inevitable consequence of a place so deeply
steeped in history
 Walk down the broad and cunning High Street, thought by many to be the most
beautiful in England, or through the maze of back lanes that wander among the
golden, age-worn college buildings, and you follow in the footsteps of Samuel
Johnson, Jonathan Swift, John Donne, Oscar Wilde, TS Eliot, CS Lewis, Indira
Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher and Bill Clinton
 Beyond its medievil heart, it is a sprawling town, fringed with factories and housing
development, home to 120,000 people and long an important centre of the British car
industry
 The rooms in Oxford University are comfortably elegant, the architecture equivalent
of a fine pot – rich, dark, woody and refined – and, a visible reminder that Oxford
enjoys not just wealth of tradition but a tradition of wealth
 However now, you don’t see many pranks any longer. Students used to get up to all
kinds of stunts – reversing all the one-way signs in town or putting chamber pots on
the spire of the Radcliffe Camera
 The Radcliffe Camera, one of the universities central buildings, towers some 150 feet
above a cobbled square. East read my mind. “The mountaineering club.” He
explained with a smile
 The strength of the tutorial system at Oxford is that its almost impossible to be lazy
under it. You can’t slump down in your seat and hope you’ll go unnoticed
 Because Oxford’s colleges grew up, piecemeal over the centuries the modern city is a
confusing mass. Colleges seem to have been set down at random and to have grown
in erratic, unpredictable directions, like the pattern of words on a scrabble board with
no central focus, no obvious heart, the university seems to be everywhere and
nowhere
 “Oxford is an edgy and exhausting place” observed writer Jan Morris, “Her various
energies chafe each other, setting up magnetic fields and making sparks fly.”
 Oxford has one of the greatest concentrations of historic buildings in England – 900
in the centre square mile of the city alone
 The Library owns 6,5 million volumes and requires 2 miles of new shelving each year
– it sprawls across several buildings. Readers order books from a central desk, and
wait for them to be delivered – a process that seldom takes less than 2 hours.
 A book can be handled as many as 13 times in getting it from the shelf to a central
collection point, on to the reader and finally back to the shelf again