Boats and lakes

In 1975, when we went to live in Hong Kong, the bank for whom my dad worked offered a lot of perks to staff willing to go and work so far away from home. Amongst these, for the ladies, was membership of a club called the Helena May. 

It primarily consisted of huge room, the size of a school hall, with a high ceiling from which hung slowly rotating fans, sparsely populated with tables and chairs. I remember a lot of wood panelling and large windows, and, although my memory is vague about this, I imagine lots of flowers and portraits.

At one end of the hall was an air-conditioned library and in here one could take refuge from the heat while perusing the books. I can still picture exactly where the children's section was, full of well-worn hard-back books, and it was here that I discovered both Jennings and Arthur Ransome's 'Swallows and Amazons'.

A little amateur psychology would suggest that I fell in love with these books in direct response to being so far away from home; both series had something very British about them, although I suspect that the Jennings books, which could reduce me regularly to tears of laughter, were based on a greater fiction, a far cry from the true emotional brutalities of public school life.

But the Swallows and Amazons books proved to be the greater, enduring love. When we returned from Hong Kong in 1978, we'd go on holiday to the Lakes every Easter and I remember as we drove around thinking that it would be incredible to live here. (I think all of this contributes to my unhesitating move north in 1990, when my then girlfriend landed a job in Kendal.)

I never get bored of living here, particularly of driving around Cumbria, like today when I drove up to see our accountant in Ambleside. Somewhere deep down, my love of Swallows and Amazons still provides a lens of sorts as to how I see the Lake District - I love finding those spots where there's little evidence of modern life - and that perception has been resurgent of late due to the release of stills from the forthcoming remake of the Swallows and Amazons film.

I've been excited about this for a long time. Via Twitter, I became friends with Andrea Gibb who has done the new adaptation so I have been following the development of the forthcoming film from a distance for three or four years now. I was excited by the photos she posted of the filming and I can't wait to see the finished result. (And because she is so lovely and smart and funny and warm and brilliant at writing, I have every confidence that the story is going to be retold wonderfully.)