E for Eskdale at last

After months of soul searching, and we are not talking tracking down an old Motown hit, and amid thousands of requests, which i have decided to ignore, i have pleasure in announcing the return of the Biggest Blog in the world, no not Wayne’s world, but Lessall’s world.
OK lets be honest, it's not really the biggest in the world, it just feels like it now and again, and its been a long time since the last time, far to long and apologies for that. Oh and while i'm at it, i would also like to apologise for throwing the bucket of water containing bleach, over the cat that was doing its business in my front garden. I mean where do they get off doing that? have they no shame, its my garden for Fugs sake, why do they never crap in their owners gardens? anyway what i would like to apologise for was for missing the damn animal and wetting the telephone engineer behind my hedge, who was fixing the phone line while drinking his coffee. how did i know it was coffee, well i am sure he shouted, who the then a pause for coffee over me, but it was difficult to hear as i shut the door quickly and headed for the safety of the toilet.
Anyway as I sit here, at my laptop and not the toilet, i left there about ten minutes later after two squirts from the air freshner, needed more but i was not sitting there any longer, so as i sit here and contemplate what to write, I can see that huge wall that they talk about.
Sometimes it looks really huge, made of a mixture of concrete and iron, that would need a bomb ten times the size of the one that flattened Hiroshima. Other days I just start to tap and the verbal diarrhea just gushes forth. You know that feeling after a really hot curry when you think your brains are running out of your backend and the pan will overflow, flooding the loo and ending up soaking into your socks, making you flush desperately even though you had not finished. Well today is not one of those days. Although every great writer has them, Tom Sharpe, was dormant for a number of years before the latest Wilt Novel was written, and if you have never read Wilt , Ancestral Vices and especially The Throwback, then you have not lived. The Throwback is the funniest book ever written, get a copy u will not be disapointed. Oven cleaner in a condom, i cried for hours, its pure genius.
Tom Clancy had months of writing then deleting and rewriting and redeleting, and then found seven months later he had the same dialog as the first day he hit the delete button, ( just like a woman out shopping then ) and even the great Enzo I heard, but not sure how true it is, hit the wall for 30 minutres, yes 30 whole minutes, before a witty repitoire issued forth. it was only once, and i did hear that there was a riot going on outside his house with Afgan terrorists holding his wheelybin to ransom, it seems they thought it was a new form of plastic tank, and they wanted to take it back with them.
And for me the longest was 3 days before something remarkable came out of my pen. It was ink. All over the key board. It was a disaster. last time i use those cheap ones everyone nicks from Argos.
But I am determined to get this done, even if it drives Mrs Lessall to drink. Oh how I wish someone would drive me to drink, being the only car driver in the house it’s a bloody nusance, one pint of beer and that’s it. Not like the old days. thirty pints, six bags of crisps, those ones with the little blue bag of salt, which usually was damp and came out in one lump, then a hair raising drive to the chippy for a bag of salted chips and crackling. and no one seemed to suffer from high cholesterol back then either
But E is for Eskdale, and more specifically to the Eskdale Mountain Rescue Centre. Its in the heart of the lake district, and I was lucky (?) enough to go there between July and August in 1973. I was a first year apprentice and had left the Dehydrated Doughnuts behind, had the expereince of the Emporer of India, and was now starting out on years of hard work, being misunderstood, undervalued, underpaid, abused and eventually tossed aside, but in 1973 as a reward for the hard work and effort put in during my first year full of hope and expectation, I was sent to Eskdale for 4 weeks. Character building i think they called it. sounded more like Boot Camp, and not the Dale Winton type of camp either.
But I was lucky I could have been sent to a triple mast sailing boat, like the type used on Hornblower, ( no, don't you dare think it, i know your mind is going there, but just don't ), yes like the one in Hornblower, rocking about in the sea just off the coast on North Wales for 4 weeks, and as I can not swim and get sea sick sitting in the bath, ( ever wondered why the bath and a sink are in the same room? well its unhygenic to vomit in the bath, but the sink is much more acceptable ), anyway I am glad to say that honour was passed to someone else. so no campish "Hello Sailor for me"
So with suit case in hand I headed to Kings Cross station, not really heading, thats something that happens in football, i was driven to the station and if I remember correctly it stopped at Crewe, then up to Workington, and all the way there more "lucky people" were joining the train and heading ( there is that football reference again ) in the same direction. All keeping our heads down and wishing we were somewhere else, and hey ho eventually we did arrive somewhere else. See wishes can come true if you pray hard enough and squeeze your knees together so hard that .... well i don't need to tell you do i? and when British Rail made us leave the carraige at Ravensglass, we eventually ended doing the final stretch of the journey on the picturesque Ranvenglass and Eskdale railway Can you imagine 106 lads aged between 17 and 20, mainly Police or Fire cadets all sitting on that train wondering what the hell we had let ourselves in for.
And did you know that Elephant is a unit of paper equal to 28 by 23 inches, no? you must had led a very sheltered life then.
It must have looked weird as we walked from the station in single file up the road to the mountain rescue outward bound school, then had to stand and wait as they assigned us to a patrol. After about six minutes my name was called and i was sent to join the ten others of Slingsby Patrol, and the Patrol leader was a guy we called Paddy. He was Irish, i bet that was a surprise, think there was a clue in his name perhaps?? and he then told us he was born in Limerick. There once was a team leader called Paddy, who at first we thought was a nice laddie, but he made us all run, which was not a lot of fun , so in the end we thought he was a baddy, and as well as working there, he was a professional fell walker. Now thats a real contradiction if ever i heard one, fell walker? because they never walk anywhere all they do all day is run, run and run, he used to run more than Alfies nose. He could run up and down the fells all day long and all I could run up was a tab at the Emperor every Sunday evening. Boy did i have bad vibes about this.
So after been designated our dormatory, we dumped our suitcases on the bed, well our own bed, there wasn't just one in the dorm, it sort of sounded like from the first statement, but i did not want to mislead you, as if we threw them all on the same bed, no. it hadn't got that bad yet. We had one each. That done we headed off, running of course down the hill, in clean shorts and gym shirts, and proceeded to run around the TARN for what seemed like hours, but was in fact about a mile and half. Then we had to run to the edge of the jetty and jump in. luckily it was only about 3 foot deep by the jetty, but later I was to find out it’s a bloody damn site deeper. So run finished and P.E. kit wet and smelly, it was back to the shower room, and a warm shower, and we didn’t get to many of those in the 4 weeks. then dried off and dressed, we were given our time table.
Being lead by the newest instructor there, we were made Rescue Patrol for the rest of the day.
So what did that mean? well on that first day it meant setting the tables for the evening meal, then washing up and drying and putting all the crockery, plates, knives, forks, spoons, you name it we had it, back afterwards for 106 “students“ and about 20 members of staff. Have you ever washed up for 120 odd people? or even 120 normal people for that matter?, but to have that many odd people in one place was well odd. I can tell you its not fun. and i will tell you, it was not fun. The water was so hot you needed at least five pairs of Marigolds, which is what probably re awoke my rubber fetish. more on that later, but the next time we were Rescue Patrol it meant something a lot different.
so i have now arrived at Eskdale, more next time about what really happened.
The things i did not tell Mum and Dad Lessall