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BB2525
: Whitbarrow Wonders and Roast Beef Futures
Wednesday
9th July 2025
I
don't know how he does it. Mike B
somehow time travels to communicate with
long gone celebrities and inveigles them
into writing his reports. This time
it was that king of the gurning face, Les
Dawson.
Today’s BOOTboys outing up Whitbarrow was less of a hike and more of a
slow-motion ballet - if ballet dancers wore hiking boots, ate Kendal Mint Cake,
and groaned every time they had to bend their knees. Stan, Martin and Mike -
the trio of intrepid wanderers who think Wainwright was an optimist - set off
under a warm, cloudy sky that was drier than a Yorkshireman’s wallet.
Their 6.6-mile shuffle took them up over 1,000 feet, though no one told their
legs till it was too late. Progress was deliberately glacial - not from any
philosophical love of nature, but because stopping to “admire the view” is a
fine cover for wheezing.
On the way, they met three Yorkshire folk armed with a guidebook so bad, it
may as well have been written in crayon. “We live in Wharton,” they said, proudly
- a place presumably famous for having no decent cartographers. Later came Ann
- a woman of boundless energy and 30,000 steps, most of which she used to
overtake the BOOTboys twice. Show-off.
And then, like a mirage in muscle, came Matt the Tractor. Nobody’s quite
sure if he was a person or a machine, but he ploughed past them with the
determination of a man late for a pub lunch.
The fields were full of brown cows, calmly chewing cud and eyeing the
walkers as if to say, “Laugh it up, lads. One day, we’re roast beef.”
A grand day out. Les would’ve wept.
Mike,
Wednesday 10th July 2025
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