9. Grasmere

It took us a long time to find the hostel, searching in turn, and though it actually wasn’t that difficult to track down I think probably the reason it took so long was that we were a little hypothermic. It’s a sliding scale, coldness, and there were a few times every now and then, usually when we hadn’t eaten in a while or we’d got particularly chilled through that our minds started to get a bit sluggish. At any rate, we eventually crossed the hallway of the Grasmere Youth Hostel, guiltily leaving a trail of slimy-looking sock prints across the floor on our way to the welcome, sweltering heat of the boot room.

If there’s one thing I have noticed about youth hostels, it’s that there almost never seems to be any youth in them. Grasmere was a case in point. There were a couple of thirty-something continentals with neat little beards knocking around, but of the few guests in the lounge, most of them must have been well into their retirement. Admittedly it was out of season, and students will have been at university, but still you wonder whether youth hostels are a bit of a dinosaur. When you can fly half way across the world for the price of a DVD plus your airport taxes, and stay in a nice en-suite on the cheap, you can see why a sheet sleeping bag doesn’t quite cut it. Apparently in the last decade three of the YHA hostels on the Coast to Coast have closed down simply because no-one was staying in them.

A pity, because Grasmere was pretty, which is more than could be said for us. It was four days since I had seen my own face, and what grinned back at me from the mirror was a horror. There was a scrappy stubble spilling down my cheeks and neck, and my hair, which was far too long, hung matted and greasy across my forehead, sticking somewhere on my cheekbone. The hollow eyes, cracked lips and wind-chapped red face were nicely accentuated by unusually white teeth, and I couldn’t work out why that should be the case, having not cleaned them in days. Intriguingly, Christian’s were much the same, and after a little thought we remembered that since the first morning coming off Dent we had been loading up the stream water in our water carriers with chlorine tablets. Were we unconsciously bleaching our teeth, I wonder?

It was also only in a clean room that we began to realise how bad we smelled, and washing the sweat and grime of days off made us itch like hell. Still, cleaned up and in a set of dry clothes we finally started to warm up, and when, at two thirty in the afternoon, a very strange little old man in a blue shirt done right up to the top button came into the bedroom, climbed into bed and went to sleep, we decided it was probably time we went out to face the world.

Aside from the thoroughly vile experience of putting sopping wet boots on again, feeling the icy damp soak through the warm dry socks and into our soft feet, the afternoon was pleasant. Sitting over a pub lunch we agreed that we couldn’t have faced the tops again, and the calm of Grasmere after the storm we’d endured just hours before lent the whole afternoon a sort of sedative quality. We ate steak, stocked up on provisions at the Co-op, including an unnecessarily large tub of Vaseline for Christian’s bleeding lips, then sat back in the lounge at the hostel. I ate a Mars bar and read a magazine about Myra Hindley, then in a cold basement room we played a game of pool on one of those hilarious tables that are so warped by generations of damp and temperature change that it’s more like playing pinball. I think Christian won.

A thirty-second pad through the drizzle in our socks was the self-catering block, deserted and smelling of fresh paint, where we drank tea made with hot water that we didn’t have to boil ourselves, and ate our pasta in a warm and empty dining room with rain trickling down the big bay windows and fabric flowers on the tables. Luxury is all relative. I remember years ago coming home from South America and feeling soft carpet under my bare feet, and realising that I hadn’t missed it but equally that I couldn’t remember anywhere during my five months away where I’d encountered it. As we washed up, a friendly, retired couple came in and started to cook their own supper, and we talked to them about the weather, more significant than usual, and about a grandson they had who was a journalist (I kept quiet about my own profession – proper writers with qualifications make me feel a bit of a charlatan).

Back up in the dorm, we were on our own. Everyone else was still at dinner, or in the lounge, or wherever, and it can’t have been much after seven. There’s a photo I have of Christian tucked up in his bunk, smiling through the bars. You can read in his eyes that he’s shattered, but the smile is wide and relieved. There’d been a few moments that day when our morale had started to get a bit shaky, but as we laid our heads down on soft pillows we knew we’d just about picked ourselves up again.