Even if you love them, student houses are hectic, the blend between friendship and family awkwardly jumbled together. Was that my milk, or do you think anyone has an egg I can steal?
When temperatures soared to thirty degrees, there’s nowhere to escape it in a city, even a ghostly quiet one. Everything stagnant and still.
It can be overwhelming and alienating – a chunk of life suspended out of time. Every day a carbon copy of the one before it. You try go for walks, to keep active, to keep busy. But it made me realise being still was not my strongest suit.
So I think for us all being able to escape, finally, to the Dales for a few nights had been a long time coming. I mean, hey, we are from Yorkshire, but still. The switch from flying to Paris or Berlin reversed to the freedom of driving a few hours West. Walking along waterfalls in the warmth of the last of the summer sun. Then the vastness of the Dales, a world away from the cramped, sweltering summer we had spent underneath the bell jar of quarantine. Everything pales in comparison to the moss green hills, flowing and ebbing away, startlingly sharp following the haze. Just to be somewhere else, surrounded by sky and the natural world. We had a waterfall outside our cottage door, and the constant roar through the glass pane was a happy replacement of the number 5 bus that usually hugs our front window.
On our final day we wound our way North to Lake Windermere, reminding me of how sick the bending roads make me feel. We hired two electric boats, crashing through the swell and battling with the already quite strong wind. Ever tried switching drivers in a small boat? It’s chaotic to say the least. But it’s movement, and energy, and change. Probably what I’d missed the most.
It’s not all romantic – I’m not Keats or Wordsworth no matter how hard I try. McDonald’s breakfasts, Instagram photoshoots, forgetting a bottle of water on a long walk, a messy attempt at making a nine-man fry up. Our cottage had three bedrooms, two of which had bunk beds, which is pandemonium on check-out day. Also, hiking gear? Not heard of it apparently. But it broke the spell, and felt like finally waking up after a long, drowsy summer.
The natural world is good for grounding, and we’ve all needed that recently. A reset, a recharge, a reminder. That there’s more than worrying about finding a job now that University has ended, and that paddling in bone-chilling rivers is sometimes just what you need to do. Starting life again, was daunting, and nerve-wracking for me. I personally found it hard to imagine an “after”.
But this is the during, and it was beautiful and healthy.
