The Road to Little Dribbling (45 page)

Am I wrong or is this becoming a feature of British life—and I mean by that behaving in quietly disgraceful ways when you think no one is watching? I am not saying that this is exclusive to the British or that it is universal among them by any means. I am just saying that it barely used to exist at all and now you see it pretty regularly. The Britain I came to was predicated on the idea of doing the right thing most of the time whether anyone knew you were doing it or not. So you didn’t drop litter or empty your paint can at the curb or let your dog shit on footpaths and willfully take two parking spaces and all that sort of thing. You might not leave a tip—you were British, after all—but you wouldn’t pretend to leave a decent tip and then stick in a small coin. Slyness wasn’t part of the culture. It didn’t occur to you to be a dick. Now lots of people are governed not so much by whether something is right or wrong as by whether they think anyone’s watching. Conscience only operates when there are witnesses. Where did that come from? And what do you do about it when it infects even pleasant-looking ladies in Patagonia jackets?

—

I drove on to Bowness-on-Windermere, the Lake District’s principal town and tourist center. Bowness is always described as bustling, which really means packed. It is perennially thronged with visitors, mostly white-haired, shuffling around, looking in windows, killing time between pots of tea, waiting for it to be time to go home. Since I came to the Lake District twenty years ago for my
National Geographic
article, the number of visitors has increased by eleven thousand a day on average, and most of them seem to end up in Bowness without any clear idea of why they are there.

Bowness does have a lovely lakefront, it must be said. Windermere is the largest of the Lake District lakes, though that isn’t saying a great deal. It’s only ten miles long, barely half a mile wide at its widest extent, and often only a few feet deep. It is one of the most intensively studied lakes in the world thanks in large part to the Freshwater Biological Association, which has its headquarters at Windermere and has been dipping nets and beakers into its waters since 1929, one of the longest stretches of freshwater monitoring anywhere.

The British, as you may have gathered by now, are the most devoted studiers of nature on the planet. If a thing breathes or twitches or even just sits like lichen doing nothing at all, they are all over it. There is a British Bryological Society, a British Myriapod and Isopod Group, a British Phycological Society, a Simuliidae Study Group, a Malacological Society of London, a Conchological Society, a Chironomid Study Group, and of course a British Lichen Society, plus several dozen more, all devoted to collecting, conserving, and studying tiny living things that most of us are barely aware of, if at all.

And when I say study, believe me I mean study. Between 1976 and 2012, volunteers with the United Kingdom Butterfly Monitoring Scheme walked 536,000 kilometers of “butterfly transacts”—which is to say, arbitrary squares of countryside—to record the state of the nation’s butterflies. Other groups have just as devotedly counted moths, bats, frogs, caddis flies, dragonflies, fungus gnats, freshwater flatworms, and—well, everything. There is even a Slime Mold Recording Scheme, whose manager—I am so pleased to tell you this—lives in Mold. Some of what these people have found is more interesting than you might expect. A species of millipede was found in a domestic garden in Norfolk and has never been seen anywhere else on earth. A moss that had only ever been recorded on the campus of Stanford University in California was also found living beside a path in Cornwall. How it came to inhabit two such dispersed localities and no others is a question no one can answer, though you can be certain it is the kind of thing they talk about pretty avidly during cocktail hour at moss conferences.

For the
National Geographic
article, I spent a morning on the lake with a young scientist from the Freshwater Biological Association without for a moment understanding a single thing she told me. I found the file with my notes in it the other day and this is the sort of thing the notes say: “Biotic assessment—dichotomous? Rotifers, ostracods, fairy shrimps. V. difficult to measure. Outlook not good. Diptera pupae. V. alarming!”

Eventually I stopped taking notes, and then stopped listening altogether, and just enjoyed the scenery while she prattled away and dipped containers in the water. The man driving our boat was a park ranger named Steve Tatlock, and he told me that on a busy day you could have as many as sixteen hundred powerboats on Windermere, an amazing number for a lake of its size, all of them speeding wildly, many pulling water-skiers and slicing through flotillas of sailboats, rowboats, canoes, inflatable rafts, and even some hardy swimmers, filling the lake with noise and danger and irksome, bouncy waves. England doesn’t have a lot of lakes, and most are closed to motorboats, so Windermere was a rare place where people could drop a boat in the water and let her rip.

Tatlock asked me if I wanted to experience the speed water-skiers went, and of course I did. He let the scientist stow her stuff, then threw open the throttle and we took off with a velocity normally only seen in cartoons. We bounced across the water, barely touching the surface. It seemed wildly reckless, but at least it was a quiet morning and we had a few acres of empty water to ourselves. “Imagine sixteen hundred other boats doing this,” Tatlock shouted, “moving about in all directions at top speed. It’s absolutely mad.”

In 2005, after thirty years of arguing, a ten-mile-an-hour speed limit was introduced on Windermere, so the lake is much improved for those who value tranquillity. As for all the things that live in and around it, the news isn’t so cheery. Algal blooms have become common and fish populations have been falling steadily for years. In the wider world of nature, things aren’t so good either. In 2013, a consortium of wildlife organizations released a report called
State of Nature
which found that about two-thirds of all species in Britain, plant and animal, are in decline, in some cases perilously so. The number of breeding birds has fallen by 44 million since the late 1960s. Over a longer period, fourteen mosses and liverworts have vanished from the British landscape, as have twenty-three species of bees and wasps. Britain, it turns out, is outstanding at counting what it has, but not so good at holding on to it.

Still, I must say, on the day I was there it all looked lovely and healthy, too. The water by the shoreline was clear, and the insects that darted about near its surface seemed happy enough, insofar as I am capable of judging, which obviously isn’t very far. I walked along the waterside to the landing stage for the ferry to Sawrey, across the lake, and peered over the edge there, too. An empty cigarette pack sat in the water. I fished it out and gave it a shake and looked around for a litter bin, but there wasn’t one, so I sighed, squeezed it more or less dry, and put it in my jacket pocket. Realizing that there wasn’t much of anything else I could do about the state of nature at Windermere, or indeed most of the other matters troubling the planet, I wandered back to the car and moved on.

Chapter 24

Yorkshire

I
STAYED THE NIGHT
in Kirkby Lonsdale, unofficial capital of the Lune Valley. It is a region of great beauty that hardly anyone knows about, but then that can be said about a lot of this corner of England. The Lake District and Yorkshire Dales National Parks so dominate everyone’s thinking that the rest of the region is blissfully overlooked. The Lune Valley is as fine as anything in the Lakes (though without a lake, it must be said) or the neighboring Dales, and yet who has ever heard of the Lune Valley?

Kirkby Lonsdale is a nice little town, compact and prosperous. It used to have shops selling sweaters made of local wool and little craft galleries and things like that, and those are mostly gone now, but there are more restaurants and cafés, which I suppose is what the world wants these days.

In the morning I drove to Sedbergh, an attractive town now in the county of Cumbria but historically in Yorkshire, in the area known as the West Riding. Sedbergh is best known as the home of an ancient public school, also called Sedbergh, dating from the fifteenth century, but it has been trying in recent years to become known also as “England’s Book Town,” based on the fact that it has one large and excellent bookshop selling mostly secondhand books and a couple of smaller ones. It has a good hiking shop, excellent hardware store, some cafés and delis—in short, more than you would expect to find in a small and fairly remote place.

I went into a café on the high street for a coffee. The café had clearly taken the Book Town boast to heart because it had a selection of books that customers could read while enjoying their refreshments. One that instantly caught my eye was a hardback called
You Only Live Once
by Britain’s number one goddess, Katie Price. You may only live once, as Ms. Price so astutely observes (very little escapes her with regard to existential issues, I find), but clearly that needn’t stop you from writing about it again and again. This, I was surprised to learn, was her fifth autobiography—quite an achievement considering that she is only about twenty-five years old, I think (though some parts of her may be somewhat older). As well as her compelling autobiographical offerings, Ms. Price has also written five novels. All this is in addition to running an international business empire and progressing through life with breasts that must weigh at least thirty kilos apiece.

You Only Live Once
concerned only a fragment of Ms. Price’s rich and eventful life, but appeared to involve two marriages, some children, and a number of relationships. Chapter One, entitled “Too Much in Love,” rather seemed to say it all. Chapter Six more intriguingly was entitled “Pink Up My Pony.” (I have no idea. I had only just had breakfast.) The book was primarily about her marriage to Alex Reid. They had met, I believe, in some antipodean jungle while taking part in a reality television program called
I’ll Eat Bugs for Money
. (I’m guessing this from the pictures.) They were married in February 2010 and divorced eleven months later. I’ve had pimples last longer than that.

I looked to see who published this treasury of high-class reminiscence and it was Random House, my very own publisher. I was part of the Katie Price family. We were corporately conjoined. But have they ever invited me to a launch party? Have they fuck.

—

And so to Yorkshire. I love Yorkshire and Yorkshire people. I admire them for their bluntness. As I said in
Notes from a Small Island,
if you want to know your shortcomings you won’t find more helpful people anywhere. I lived for eight years in Malhamdale, not far from where I was now, and hardly a day passed when some crusty Dalesman didn’t take time to help me identify one or more of my deficiencies.

I love and miss Malhamdale, but decided now, for the sake of novelty, to visit some parts of the Dales I was less familiar with and so headed to Dentdale. Insofar as Dentdale is known at all, it is as one of the principal locations of the celebrated Settle-to-Carlisle railway line, which may be both the most picturesque and wonderfully unnecessary railway line ever built in England. It was conceived sometime in the 1860s by James Allport, general manager of the Midland Railway, who wanted a route to Scotland. East coast and west coast routes already existed, so Allport decided to go up the middle. The only possible way was through the bleakest, remotest, emptiest stretch of the Pennine Hills, through seventy-two miles of landscape so irregular and deeply folded as to be an engineer’s nightmare. The project required fourteen tunnels, including one at Blea Moor that is almost a mile and a half long, and twenty-one viaducts, several of them quite enormous. None of this could ever be economic. Indeed, when it eventually dawned on Allport and his colleagues what a mad project it was, they applied to Parliament for an abandonment bill—which is to say, permission to pull out of the project—but Parliament cruelly refused to grant it.

Allport appointed a young engineer named Charles Sharland to get the line built. Almost nothing is known about Sharland other than that he came from Tasmania and was only in his early twenties. The immensity of the task confronting Sharland was almost unimaginable and made all the harder by the privations of laboring in a wilderness. He slept in a wagon and often worked for hours in drenching rains or driving snow. Even more remarkably, he did all this while suffering acutely from tuberculosis. Inevitably, it caught up with him and, with his work almost finished, he retired to Torquay at the age of just twenty-five. He died soon afterward, never having seen a train run on the line he helped to create. I had hoped to see his residence when I was in Torquay, but he was too obscure, it seems, for anyone to have noted where it was. But I could at least have a look at his line now.

It opened on May 1, 1876, and from its beginning it was a magnificent folly. For practical reasons it didn’t even go terribly near many of the communities it was built to serve. Kirkby Stephen station is a mile and a half from the village of Kirkby Stephen. Dent station is four miles from, and a steep six hundred feet above, Dent village.