Lake District

Tuesday

Andrew Lambirth

Witty, lyrical and abstract: the art of Kurt Schwitters

From our UK edition

Aged ten, Jennifer Potter moved to Ambleside in the Lake District and was soon aware that one of the giants of modern art, Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), had lived there some years earlier. He was a German artist associated with Dadaism, the anarchic movement that ushered in Surrealism, who developed his own brand of anti-rational art called ‘Merz’. He assembled urban detritus into two or three dimensions (collages and objects). His work was witty, lyrical and abstract, but also organic. He called art ‘structure’ or ‘creative evidence’, as natural as a plant or a crystal, but reliant, too, on the action of the artist’s imagination. He was a large man, somewhat shambolic in appearance.

Monday

Ameer Kotecha

Is the Lake District still as Wainwright described it?

From our UK edition

The Lake District isn’t really meant to be about eating. It’s about walking and climbing and gawping. The guide one carries is not that by Michelin but Alfred Wainwright, whose seven-volume Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells turns 70 this year. Food is mainly to be consumed from a Thermos rather than a bowl, and eaten atop a precariously balanced upturned log rather than a restaurant table. The culinary highlight should be Kendal mint cake, gratefully retrieved from the pocket of your cagoule. And so I was as surprised as anyone to find real gastronomic delights on a recent trip. Not from Little Chef, though that was where Wainwright religiously went for his favourite meal: fish and chips, a gooseberry pancake and cup of tea.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Milkshake me!

From our UK edition

Nine days of campaigning to go and I haven’t been milkshaked yet. I’ve hung out near McDonald’s in the hope – anything to get ten seconds on the evening news. It seems that in my constituency, the rank, sanctimonious, narcissistic and dim-witted monomaniacs of the new, kind and gentle left are somewhat thin on the ground. Nigel Farage copped a milkshake early on, and members of rival political parties and the BBC tried to pretend they were concerned. It didn’t work with theBBC because when the side-splitting but fabulously unfunny comedienne Jo Brand suggested it would be better to throw battery acid at Farage, she was not sacked or even suspended.

Friday

Amy Rose Everett

Tuning in and dropping out at Gilpin Hotel

It is 7:30 a.m. and already seventy degrees in Bowness-on-Windermere. A rare, early summer heatwave. My friend Ebele and I lower ourselves into a sunken outdoor hot tub in groggy disbelief. We appear to have woken up in Utopia. Llamas and alpacas frolic yards away as we sip coffees in silence. A butterfly lands on the decking. There’s no noise but for the bubbles, until a perfect breeze ruffles the fronds of the tree that’s dappling the sunlight. The grass could not be greener, skies cerulean. This is the definition of “bucolic,” I think. William Blake’s England, plus massage jets. His pastoral poems that plagued me in university start to make more sense (plenty of lambs here, too; the local “Herdies”).

Gilpin