Holidays and sad thoughts

We were in England for our holidays, and for the first week, we were in the Lake District (as Thimbleanna rightly guessed). We stayed in this house. The landscape consists of towering mountains, glittering lakes liberally supplied with (when we were there) misty rain. That’s why it has lakes, of course. And waterfalls. It’s dramatically beautiful, and as Wordsworth put it,

"The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye."

I have loved these lines (from “Tintern Abbey”) since I was an intense teenager myself.

This was the view from our house.

This is Blackwell, the most interesting Arts and Crafts house I've ever seen.

We went on a cruise on Lake Windermere.

This is the Hardnott Pass. It may look tame enough, but click on the picture to see how far below us that next car is. These are single-track roads, and it was raining hard. Luckily we didn't meet anything coming in the opposite direction. It wouldn't be that much fun to have to back down the hill to find a passing place.

For the second week, we went to the Cotswolds area, which has a much gentler landscape – sweet hillocks and impossibly pretty villages. The sun shone from time to time, though not enough for my mother, who likes it to be hot. We stayed in this barn conversion.

This was the view from the garden. The fields were usually filled with sheep, who woke us every morning with their dawn chorus. "Meh!"

This is nearby Broadway. So picturesque.

And Dumbleton, the nearest village to where we were staying.

Hidcote Manor Garden. I wanted to roll it up and take it home.

Here's another view. Hidcote is made up of "garden rooms". My plot at home is rather small to try this sort of design, alas.

Bourton-on-the-Water.

It was all good, but really it all seems dust and ashes because my son-in-law has been ill for a long time with depression and though he occasionally improves, he doesn’t seem able to sustain this long enough to be able to lead a normal existence. He is such a lovely boy and incredibly talented in so many ways. It seems so unfair. Of course, no one ever said life would be fair but this doesn't feel very comforting.