Morecambe could become a little northern English equivalent of Sausalito or St Ives. You may smirk at the thought of it, but what other possible future is there for a place like Morecambe? People could come for weekends to eat quality meals in new seafront restaurants overlooking the bay and perhaps take in a play or concert at the Winter Gardens. Yuppie fell walkers could spend the night there and thus ease pressure on the Lake District. It would all make eminent sense. But of course it will never happen, and partly, if I may say so, because you smirk.

 CHAPTER TWENTYTHREE

 I HAVE A SMALL, TATTERED CLIPPING THAT I SOMETIMES CARRY WITH ME and pull out for purposes of private amusement. It's a weather forecast from the 'Western Daily Mail and it says, in toto: 'Outlook: Dry and warm, but cooler with some rain.'

 There you have in a single pithy sentence the English weather captured to perfection: dry but rainy with some warm/cool spells. The Western Daily Mail could run that forecast every day for all I know, it may and scarcely ever be wrong.

 To an outsider the most striking thing about the English weather is that there isn't very much of it. All those phenomena that elsewhere give nature an edge of excitement, unpredictability and danger tornadoes, monsoons, raging blizzards, runforyourlife hailstorms are almost wholly unknown in the British Isles, and this is just fine by me. I like wearing the same type of clothing every day of the year. I appreciate not needing air conditioning or mesh screens on the windows to keep out the kind of insects and flying animals that drain your blood or eat away your face while you are sleeping. I like knowing that so long as I do not go walking up Ben Nevis in carpet slippers in February I will almost certainly never perish from the elements in this soft and gentle country.

 I mention this because as I sat eating my breakfast in the dining room of the Old England Hotel in BownessonWindermere, two days after leaving Morecambe, I was reading an article in The Times about an unseasonable snowstorm a 'blizzard', The Times called it that had 'gripped' parts of East Anglia. According to The Times report, the storm had covered parts of the region with 'more than two inches of snow' and created 'drifts up to six inches high'. In response to this, I did something I had never done before: I pulled out my notebook and drafted a letter to the editor in which I pointed out, in a kindly, helpful way, that two inches of snow cannot possibly constitute a blizzard and that six inches of snow is not a drift. A blizzard, I explained, is when you can't get your front door open. Drifts are things that make you lose your car till spring. Cold weather is when you leave part of your flesh on doorknobs, mailbox handles and other metal objects. And then I crumpled the letter up because I realized I was in serious danger of turning into one of the Colonel Blimp types who sat around me in considerable numbers, eating cornflakes or porridge with their blimpish wives, and without whom hotels like the Old England would not be able to survive.

 I was in Bowness because I had two days to kill until I was to be joined by two friends from London with whom I was going to spend the weekend walking. I was looking forward to that very much, but rather less to the prospect of another long, purposeless day in Bowness, pottering about trying to fill the empty hours till tea. There are, I find, only so many windowsful of teatowels, Peter Rabbit dinnerware and patterned jumpers I can look at before my interest in shopping palls, and I wasn't at all sure that I could face another day of poking about in this most challenging of resorts.

 I had come to Bowness more or less by default since it is the only place inside the Lake District National Park with a railway station. Besides, the idea of spending a couple of quiet days beside the tranquil beauty of Windermere, and wallowing in the plump comforts of a gracious (if costly) old hotel, had seemed distinctly appealing from the vantage of Morecambe Bay. But now, with one day down and another to go, I was beginning to feel stranded and fidgety, like someone at the end of a long period of convalescence. At least, I reflected optimistically, the unseasonable two inches of snow that had brutally lashed East Anglia, causing chaos on the roads and forcing people to battle their way through perilous snowdrifts, some of them as high as their ankletops, had mercifully passed this corner of England by. Here the elements were benign and the world outside the diningroom window sparkled weakly under a pale wintry sun.

 I decided to take the lake steamer to Ambleside. This would not only kill an hour and let me see the lake, but deliver me to a place rather more like a real town and less like a misplaced seaside resortthan Bowness. In Bowness, I had noted the day before, there are no fewer than eighteen shops where you can buy jumpers and at least twelve selling Peter Rabbit stuff, but just one butcher's. Ambleside on the other hand, though hardly unfamiliar with the manifold possibilities for enrichment presented by hordes of passing tourists, did at least have an excellent bookshop and any number of outdoor shops, which I find hugely if inexplicably diverting I caiPspend hours looking at rucksacks, kneesocks, compasses and survival rations, then go to another shop and look at precisely the same things all over again. So it was with a certain animated keenness that I made my way to the steamer pier shortly after breakfast. Alas, there I discovered that the steamers run only in the summer months, which seemed shortsighted on this mild morning because even now Bowness gently teemed with trippers. So I was forced, as a fallback, to pick my way through the scattered, shuffling throngs to the little ferry that shunts back and forth between Bowness and the old ferry house on the opposite shore. It travels only a few hundred yards, but it does at least run all year.

 A modest lineup of cars was patiently idling on the ferry approach, and there were eight or ten walkers as well, all with Mustos, rucksacks and sturdy boots. One fellow was even wearing shorts always a sign of advanced dementia in a British walker. Walking walking, that is, in the British sense was something that I had come into only relatively recently. I was not yet at the point where I would wear shorts with many pockets, but I had taken to tucking my trousers into my socks (though I have yet to find anyone who can explain to me what benefits this actually confers, other than making one look serious and committed).

 I remember when I first came to Britain wandering into a bookstore and being surprised to find a whole section dedicated to 'Walking Guides'. This struck me as faintly bizarre and comical where I came from people did not as a rule require written instructions to achieve locomotion but then gradually I learned that there are, in fact, two kinds of walking in Britain, namely the everyday kind that gets you to the pub and, all being well, back home again, and the more earnest type that involves stout boots, Ordnance Survey maps in plastic pouches, rucksacks with sandwiches and flasks of tea, and, in its terminal phase, the wearing of khaki shorts in inappropriate weather.

 For years, I watched these walker types toiling off up cloudhidden hills in wet and savage weather and presumed they were genuinely insane. And then my old friend John Price, who had grown up in Liverpool and spent his youth doing foolish things on sheerfaced crags in the Lakes, encouraged me to join him and a couple of his friends for an amble that was the word he used up Haystacks one weekend. I think it was the combination of those two untaxingsounding words, 'amble' and 'Haystacks', and the promise of lots of drink afterwards, that lulled me from my natural caution.