A couple of weeks ago I had a painting in a Stuckist show in Liverpool, which was fun. I bought Laura a Charles Thomson painting with a melting cat in it – according to Charles it was the cat’s soul, but whether it was a soul of a cat or indeed a melting cat, it doesn’t really matter as it is now our cat, on our wall, doing whatever we say it is doing. My painting of a dancing roast chicken was greatly applauded for it’s subversive humour and then we went for a curry and slept in a bed at a Premier inn.

The next day we drove to the Lake district as I said before we left “What’s the point of going all that way up north for one day”, and so we stayed in a tent near Keswick for two nights. The first day/night was ok. We looked around Keswick and considered why people find it entertaining to potter around shopping, whilst we pottered around a book shop accidently buying books we have already read. I’m not really sure how that happened. Maybe we were drunk on excitement. Who knows.

After we bought books we ate a pub meal and decided to drive to Glenridding, which is a village near Ullswater. The start of the route up the mountain ‘Helvellyn’ is there and I wanted a quick recce to see what the start of the route up was like, as I had planned to go up it the next day.

After I had scoured the first bit of the route we went back to the tent, got changed and then went to the pub.

In the morning it was pissing down with rain and so we went to the pub for breakfast. We then drove to Glenridding so I could go up Helvellyn. Laura drove back to Keswick to potter about whilst I did this self imposed challenge.

I went up the mountain via Striding edge, got blown about a bit, looked at and petted some dogs at the summit, ate a pasty and then got lost on the way down – I skidded down a mountain on my bum as I had gone a mile in the wrong direction due to fog and the only feasible way back was to skid down in a careful yet carefree manner.

I got back down and then went to the pub again – by this time it was 3pm and Laura wasn’t due to pick me up until 4pm.

Laura picked me up and then we went back to the tent so I could change again as I was soaked, however it turned out all my clean clothes were also soaked, so we went to the pub to dry off.

By this time I was getting bored of drinking (bizarre) and we were both bored of eating, so we drove to another pub to pass the time. It was still raining.

We got back to the tent and the wind was threatening to blow it away and into the wilds of wanny, but it didn’t and we woke up in the morning with it still pissing down with rain but us sort of dry.

Then we drove home and on the way back we saw a van on fire on the side of the motorway, but nobody was hurt luckily.