The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

This crappy, mean, broken-down school took five years of my life. I'd be mad, but for the fact that it taught me more about who I was than anything else I have ever done. It also made me think that modern life is rubbish for so many people. How few choices it gives them. How it lays out in front of them a future that bored most of them so much they couldn't wait to get smashed out of their heads each weekend. How little most people are believed in, and how much it asks of so many people for so little in return.

If my grandfather was invisible or little more than white trash in our teacher's sermon in 1987, then the high priest of her belief system was another old man of similar vintage: Alfred Wainwright. And now I had his book in my hands. I'd never seen one of these before, because we didn't really think of the Lake District as a place written about in books, or for leisure. I'd only ever once climbed a mountain for pleasure with my parents. We went for a picnic, and a gust of wind blew away the paper Womble plates my mother had brought. Dad hadn't wanted to go to the picnic anyway, they had a minor row, and we retreated back to the farm. Fell walkers we weren't.