The village pub was lovely, and we half regretted not having discovered it in time for lunch. With an hour to kill we found what began as a quiet corner and Christian got us a couple of pints. On the table was a sort of cardboard cube showing step-by-step instructions to pouring the perfect pint of Guinness, complete with the angles at which you should hold the glass at each stage of what seemed an enormously complicated procedure. Christian turned it over for a few seconds then pronounced it ‘bollocks’ and put it back on the table again. It seemed one punter at least was immune to the propaganda of the Guinness marketing machine.
It was warm and the beer tasted lovely and soothing, and with darkness falling outside we lapsed into sporadic, sleepy silences. Presently a family, or possibly the conglomeration of a couple of families, spewed across the big table next to us, and promptly murdered our already sparse conversation.
The alpha male of the group was spindly, very clean-cut and tremendously irritating. He had a loud voice and evidently a rather competitive nature, spending a large part of the meal bragging loudly to the assembled children about one accomplishment or another, before leaving half way through the meal to trounce one of his sons (who I’d have put at about 11) at the dartboard. Naturally such a triumph occasioned more crowing and boasting.
I have a feeling that the man’s painful nature was accentuated by his wife. Looking slightly overweight and undernourished, with small, watery eyes, she spent her meal sniping at the children and whining at her husband in equal measure, limp as a heap of old seaweed. Her husband wagged an overly jovial finger at her and exclaimed at four times the necessary volume that he hoped she was going to eat up all her food after he’d bought it at such extraordinary cost. She didn’t really seem to register his chiding, but rolled her eyes and moaned something back at no-one in particular.
In Regency times you’d have drawn a caricature of a pair like this and sent it off to some periodical with the caption ‘fwete domeftic fimplicity’ or similar, but as it was we finished our pints hastily and made a move. Christian has never been good at concealing his opinions, and on our way to the door he wore an outstanding scowl.
‘That man was AWFUL’, he hissed.
Back at the hostel, a tall and peculiarly-shaped old building that looked like it might at one stage have been an old mill, we were in for some much finer caricatures. A polite notice on the door declared the YHA closed for winter, which was a bit of a blow, and we were just casting around for a square of grass to pitch our soggy tent when the three blokes from earlier in the afternoon rolled down the path. Where we’d supped one pint they’d evidently set a faster pace, and announcing that they’d phoned ahead and reserved, they marched straight in and down the long corridor to reception. I dragged our bags into the hall and Christian shuffled hesitantly after them.
It turned out these jovial drunks had saved us from a night in a wet tent. The two-man skeleton crew who were manning YHA Patterdale for the winter months had opened up shop specially for them, and there was plenty of space for a couple more.
The older two out of the three musketeers must have been in their mid-to-late forties. One was tall and tubby, with specs and a bald head. This was the Comedian, with a not extraordinarily witty but pretty quickfire response to anything anyone else said, usually relating to beer or sex. Then there was the Expert. The Expert was shorter and stockier, again with a bit of a belly, and spoke almost exclusively about mountaineering, while avoiding discussing any aspect of the field for which you might need actual specialist knowledge. As everyone knows, the role of Expert in a group of blokes is not actually to possess knowledge, but just to be able to talk as if you do. I reckon I could carry off an Expert pretty well.
Then there was the Mute. The Mute must have been around the 30 mark, and seemed faintly embarrassed by his companions, but in a good-humoured, affectionate sort of way. He smiled sheepishly but didn’t speak a word. He might have been some relation of the Comedian, who occasionally spoke for him while nudging him with an elbow, but somehow the trio had the feel of pub mates about them. They were planning on making a hung-over assault on Helvellyn the following morning, and before nipping back out to the pub again they took a few moments for a little predatory flirtation with the girl on the desk, as if she might have been a barmaid in their local.
‘I keep thinking of funny things to say back to them but I can never get them out in time’, she confided to Christian as they rumbled off down the corridor to their room.
‘That’s because they’re not actually saying anything funny’, said the bearded but youngish warden from the corner of the open office where he was doing some paperwork. ‘They’re boring old men who are so confident that they’re funny that we think they are too.’ He looked up and grinned, and the girl gave Christian and me a room of our own ‘for a bit of quiet’.
It was strange being in an empty youth hostel. The warden and the girl we’d found on the desk seemed quite busy considering their lack of guests. They both had the look of outdoor types, and let us put our tent up in the drying room. I sat and read in the lounge upstairs, and listened to the girl singing along to Maroon Five, while Christian made some more of our E-number-laced pasta, this time greatly enhanced by the addition of a tin of Spam. Yes, cat food, laugh all you like. It tasted good. The next day we would reach our highest point over Kidsty Pike then we would leave the Lake District altogether.
