Windermere

I had dreams of an "English Tea". Scones, slathered with decadent layers of clotted cream and strawberry jam. Piping hot tea served in a teapot with china cups. My dreams were not to be.

On arrival, the sky was an ominous iron grey, although chinks of light peeped through in places. We shrugged. "It's early, barely 10 0'clock", we dismissed. "Maybe it will brighten up later." This was optimistic, given the impossible, unpredictable nature of British weather. This was doubly optimistic given the fact that we were surrounded on all sides by hills, in the Lake District.

But it didn't rain. Not yet. Not while we were on the boat, which cruised at a leisurely pace over the serene waters of Lake Windermere. Not while we were firmly ensconced in our own compartment in a train being pulled by a genuine steam engine. Not while we pottered around the quaint, "chocolate box" shops bordering the winding roads. When, peckish, we were searching for a suitable teashop at which to plonk our weary backsides at, the first heavy drop escaped the sky's confines and splashed to a halt on the exposed skin of my lower arm. Drop. Drop. Drop-Drop. Drop-Drop-Drop-Drop. SPLUSH! The rain didn't just fall. It poured. Or better still , it gushed, as the clouds abandoned all sense of propriety and empied their bowels as the rain sheeted to the ground. So I sacrificed my dream of an English Tea and instead contented myself with the warm bottle of flat lemonade I'd been carting around the entire day and snaffled half of my Mum's Starbar.

My English Tea fantasy was, to put it gently, shot to pieces.

It's all very well wanting an "English" day out, with the quaint stone buildings, in a picturesque location. It's all very well to hanker after that so English Tea, replete with scones. However, one must make allowances for the fact that the typical English weather is not the azure skies of postcards, not the heady summer sun glinting through the trees, but is, nine times out of ten, rain.