- Hills: Whin Rigg, Illgill Head
- Classification: Wainwrights (145 and 146)
- When: Saturday 19 September
- Who: Me and the mountaineering minion
- Distance: About 9 miles
- Time: About 4 ½ hours including some lengthy breaks
- Weather: Glorious – again!
- Bog factor: Mostly ok
- Post walk drink: Prosecco, then Malbec (again)
- Post walk watering hole: The Boot Inn, Eskdale
- Uses of the arse crampon: Unless sitting down to have my lunch counts, still AWOL.
- Mishaps: I think the parking situation in Wasdale later on counts as a mishap.
It’s taken me a while to get around to writing this blog. For some reason, some blogs seem to just write themselves whereas others swim around in the subconscious for ages before finally making it to the page. In the case of this one, I think the delay on getting it written is largely due to the fact that it looks highly likely to be my last Wainwright walk of the year. With another lockdown looming and a miserable winter in prospect I think I just hadn’t wanted to admit to myself that it would be 2020’s last hurrah on the hills; I’d toyed with the idea of revisiting the Lakes in October, but the weekend I had earmarked ended up falling just after London went into ‘Tier 2’ so I reluctantly decided not to travel (the decision being helped somewhat by the fact the weather forecast was rubbish). With the situation escalating, getting anything else booked in just threatened it being cancelled – for whatever reason, having to cancel something that was already booked in is more depressing than just not booking it in the first place.
I can’t say that the imminent reality of another lockdown is helping my mood – or anyone’s I suspect. I am not looking forward to the prospect of two of my major ways of de-stressing being taken away (by which I mean hill walking and swimming) and even wild swims are looking doubtful. Plus with the change in seasons getting out for a local walk is going to be more difficult – blundering around my local woods with a head torch in the dark not really being top of my list. I am of the view that all lockdowns do is kick the can down the road and having had a serious health issue as a direct result of the first – my DVT – I can’t help but worry how many other people are going to suffer serious issues as a result of the next one. Yes, clearly COVID-19 is a very nasty bug indeed but there will come a point, in the absence of a vaccine, where we have to find a way to live alongside it in order for our society as we know it to survive. Human beings are designed to be social animals and enforced separation from family and friends has a cost.
Mountains and Malbec 