The Lake District: Helvellyn via Striding Edge

To the Lake District, for a couple of days of walking with Alex on a cold but dry weekend late last year. It had been a while since I went up to Lakeland – I used to go there quite a few times when I was in the Ventures, and this time there was a sense of unfinished business. We used to do a lot of hiking, or fellwalking if you prefer – Great Langdale was a favourite, as I recall – but I always felt, looking back, that we’d missed something.

Helvellyn is the third-highest mountain in the Lake District, which also makes it the third-highest mountain in England. Located on a ridge between Thirlmere and Ullswater, there are various routes up it and we did a couple, but we never did what is regarded as the classic way up. I’m talking about Striding Edge. 

If you approach Helvellyn from the east (ie. if you hike up from Ullswater), there are two ridges that lead onto the summit – Swirral Edge to the north and Striding Edge to the south. The latter is an increasingly narrow ridge which involves much scrambling before the final ascent; a favourite among walkers who fancy a challenge, but it can get very dangerous when the weather turns on you.

(The dangers of walking at altitude in the Lake District are nothing new, by the way. There have been a number of fatalities in the vicinity of Helvellyn, the earliest known one being Charles Gough, an otherwise obscure artist who fell off Striding Edge in April 1805; his body was found three months later with his dog, Foxie – his only companion on his final walk – watching over him. A Lakeland version of Greyfriars Bobby, perhaps, although many accounts of Gough’s demise – which inspired poetry by Scott and Wordsworth, no less – omitted contemporary speculation that Foxie had survived by eating her master’s remains.)

Alfred Wainwright, that legendary fellwalker who casts a long shadow over the area thanks to his seven-volume Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells which remains the standard work of reference for walking in the Lake District despite having been written decades ago, described the ascent of Helvellyn via Striding Edge as “a classic ascent recorded and underlined in the diaries of all fellwalkers”. It was Wainwright who gave his name to the Wainwright Fells, a list of 214 peaks which are the ones he described in the afore-mentioned series of books. Climbing all of them is the aim of many a fellwalker who loves walking the Lake District, just like those who like to ‘bag’ the Munros up in Scotland. We managed a few Wainwrights back in the day (Helm Crag, Scafell Pike, the Old Man of Coniston, various of the Langdale Pikes, etc), although no-one was keeping score.

The closest we got to Striding Edge was a morning ascent of Helvellyn via Swirral Edge which, looking back, was ridiculous to the point of being downright dangerous. Alex, myself and a couple of friends thought it would be fun to walk up to Red Tarn, the small lake located underneath Helvellyn on its eastern flank, camp overnight and ascend Helvellyn itself in the morning. This was undertaken during the week between Christmas and New Year (a favourite time of ours for going up to the Lakes, what with there being no sixth-form or university commitments).

It was as mad as it sounds. Camping overnight at an altitude of over 2,000 feet in December was an ordeal in itself (it turned out that my supposedly four-season sleeping-bag had its limits) and in the morning, after a quick breakfast of tea and Ready Brek (we’d taken a petrol-stove with us) we packed up our kit and went for Swirral Edge. We chose that one purely because we were carrying full kit (the plan was to end up on the Thirlmere side) and Striding Edge would have involved some significant doubling-back on ourselves.

I’ve never been exactly sure what happened next but instead of the expected path, we ended up scrambling up a steep scree-slope before having to do some actual climbing (and no, we did not have a rope with us). At one point I was struggling to get a hand-hold and the only thing I could firmly grasp was a ledge which Matt, who was above me, was using as a foot-hold. If he’d shuffled a couple of inches over to his left, the result wouldn’t have been pretty. When I reminded him of this a while ago, he referred to it as ‘that time we nearly died’. He wasn’t joking … much.

A couple of years later, Alex and I were back, this time on a day-walk up from Ullswater, and once again we declined Striding Edge, mainly because we wanted to see where we’d gone wrong; after making it to Red Tarn we followed a fairly straightforward path up Swirral Edge; the only scrambling was to get to the summit plateau itself. Obviously, we’d missed the path in a big way.

So we never did do Striding Edge. Over the years, it occasionally rankled – there was a sense that, although we had stood on the summit of Helvellyn on several occasions, we’d not done it justice. We did plan to do it a couple of years ago, before my fortieth birthday, but in the event we ended up heading back to the Lakes late last year, shortly after I’d turned forty-one.

After a night in an Ambleside B&B (itself followed by a pint or three in the Golden Rule, our new favourite Lake District pub), we set off early (before the designated breakfast time, although the B&B-owner had kindly left the cereal out for us). One morning drive via the Kirkstone Pass later, we were parked up at Glenridding (one of two villages from which you can hike up to Striding Edge, Patterdale being the other) and on the path before 8am.

Some things had not changed; as we were sorting out our kit – sandwiches, waterproof jackets, a flask of tea, binoculars, Ordnance Survey map and the like – a couple in the car next to us were equipping themselves with much less kit than us, their clear intention being fellrunning. That’s never been our speed; as they were talking about making sure they had one of those water-bottles that’s got a rubber tube so you can have a drink without breaking your stride, Alex and I were asking each other whether we’d remembered the hip-flask, and who had the knife to slice up the block of Christmas cake we had with us!

Ullswater was covered in mist as we climbed out of the valley. It was cold, but it was a clear day, and other than the mist the views were wonderful. I’d been worried about the weather but, to be honest, we couldn’t have picked a better day for a hike if we’d tried. With a couple of stops on the way, made good time getting up to Birkhouse Moor, following which the path levels out and we were rewarded with a view of the Helvellyn summit in front of us, flanked by the two ridges and with the often-overlooked Catstye Cam to the right (“If Catstycam stood alone, remote from its fellows, it would be one of the finest peaks in Lakeland” – Wainwright again). 

We stopped for a break at the Hole-in-the-Wall, a gap in the drystone wall which marks the start of Striding Edge (from there, a separate path runs down to Red Tarn, this being the path we’d taken that time we camped out overnight). The Christmas cake, good walking food that, was duly sliced up and washed down with the tea from the flask. I’d made it black, as I know from experience that the metal makes the milk taste funny, although as the flask in question has been used for coffee many times it gave the tea a certain taste – from there on, we took to calling it ‘cofftea’.

Striding Edge, which is just under a mile long, starts off quite pleasantly with a well-marked path to the right of the ridge itself. This gradually changes as the ridge sharpens, with the path sometimes switching to the left of the high point and sometimes leaving the walker with no option but to walk (or scramble) along the frost-coated top, with views of the Helevllyn summit ahead. We were most certainly not alone, for there were people who’d come up from Patterdale as well as Glenridding (the two paths meet at the Hole-in-the-Wall); such is the allure of Striding Edge that when the weather’s nice (which it was), it is very popular.

For me, the hardest part was at the end of the ridge where you have to descend – awkwardly – before scrambling up a rocky path that leads onto the summit itself. Part-way up, there was a great view to be had of the now-completed ridge itself, and as we approached the summit we stopped briefly at the memorial to poor old Charles Gough (who was just 21 when he died).

The summit itself – the shelter and the cairn which marks the highest point (3,118 feet, or 950 metres) – was busy. As well as our fellow-walkers who’d come up Striding Edge, there were a couple of groups of students and even a few mountain-bikers who’d come up from the (considerably less arduous) Thirlmere side. Having admired the view, we had our lunch at the shelter and Alex took the cyclists’ group photo for them by the trig-point. The hip-flask came out for a celebratory swig, as it always had done years ago (the one thing that’s changed there is that we used to put blended Scotch in it, and now it’s single malt).

Getting down via Swirral Edge was something of a scramble, albeit nothing like the upward one we had done years ago. Looking down from the path, we could see the steep scree-slope that we’d ascended before, including a near-vertical climb to get to the path! What had we been thinking? Down by Red Tarn, we tried and failed to work out exactly where we’d camped before heading back to the car at Glenridding.

Back in the comfort of an Ambleside pub that evening, we plotted our next move. We’d allowed for two days in the Lakes, in case the first day wasn’t good weather-wise, but it had been a fine day and there was another one forecast. What to do next? How about another Wainwright Fell, preferably another of the higher ones, elsewhere in the Lake District? I bought an aerial map that marks the Wainwrights in height order (Helvellyn being number three). It turned out that we’d actually ‘bagged’ more Wainwrights than we had thought, for although by dropping down from Swirral Edge to Red Tarn we had not ascended Catstye Cam (number ten), we had unknowingly included number 78 on the way up, for Wainwright had included Birkstone Moor, that plateau before Striding Edge, as a fell in its own right!

Anyway, after some discussion we decided that the following day we would head west and attempt Sca Fell; having done England’s third-highest mountain, we figured that we might as well top that by going for the second-highest. But that’s another story… 

The coronavirus diary, or continuing to read...

What with being on furlough, I have been continuing to get through the unread novels on my bookshelf…

I was rather looking forward to The Shadow of Doctor Syn. This was the last of Russell Thorndike’s  adventures about the Reverend Doctor Christopher Syn, that fascinating fictional character who is a vicar by day, a smuggler leader by night and a former pirate captain; sadly they have long been out of print (my version is a paperback from the Sixties that originally sold for two-and-six). Although it’s the last published Doctor Syn novel, the action takes place shortly before the events of the original novel, Doctor Syn: A Tale of the Romney Marsh (all of the follow-up ones were prequels). It’s the time of the French Revolution, and the talk in fashionable London is of two things – the Terror in France and the continuing exploits of the Scarecrow, that smuggler extraordinary who is still able to bring bootleg brandy over the Channel and whose reward has gone up to £1,000 (the reader is, of course, aware from the start that this the Scarecrow is Doctor Syn’s alter ego). Captain Foulkes, a bully of a man who cheats at cards but gets away with it because his opponents are afraid to challenge him to a duel, makes a bet that he can bring the Scarecrow to justice; when he makes his way down to Romney Marsh, he’s in the same horse-drawn coach as a certain vicar…

What follows is all rather fun, up to a point. There’s the usual hapless troop of dragoons down on the marsh trying and failing to beat the smugglers. Jimmy Bone, the highwayman who’s in league with the smugglers, is at one point obliged to don the Scarecrow costume so that smuggler leader and vicar can be seen together. Doctor Syn goes across to France and, as L’Épouvantail – the Scarecrow’s French alias – he gets the better of Robespierre himself (as The Scarlet Pimpernel was an inspiration for Doctor Syn, I presume Thorndike had been toying with this one for a while). Lord Cullingford, a young nobleman impoverished by Captain Foulkes to the point where he goes to Romney Marsh to try and capture the Scarecrow himself (and thus claim the reward money), is talked out of this course of action by Doctor Syn and ends up joining the dragoons before they get posted abroad.

And yet. This is one of the later books and it shows, for Thorndike is not just going through the motions but actually repeating himself. The officer in charge of the dragoons is Major Faunce, a name that has been encountered before although this one is actually the brother of the original. Captain Foulkes’s nickname, ‘Bully’, has been used before (it was applied to a character in an earlier novel whose fate was, as it happens, the same as this one’s). Finally, a major plotline of The Shadow of Doctor Syn is the story of the squire’s youngest daughter Cicely, who falls in love with the vicar while becoming fascinated with the Scarecrow, a repeat of what happened to another daughter of the same squire in an earlier adventure, Doctor Syn Returns. Much though I like the Doctor Syn books, the fact that Thorndike ended up re-hashing old plots means that this was ultimately not as enjoyable as I’d hoped.

Following that, I tackled an archaeological thriller from the Seventies which has (also) long been out of print but which I was able to find going cheap (on the £1 stand outside my local second-hand bookshop; back in 1976, it went for £3.75 brand new). The Pontius Pilate Papers is a novel by Warren Kiefer, an American film director who also wrote a few novels but who is rather obscure given that he often used an alias. The main character (and narrator) is Jay Marcus, a somewhat unlikable millionaire playboy who trained as a doctor but is content to spend his time (and money) indulging in his passion for archaeology. He’s endowed a museum in Jerusalem and the adventure starts when an archaeologist who works for that museum gets murdered; the dead man had previously discovered some Roman papyrus scrolls while excavating a site at Caesarea and had been rather secretive about the content of these, which shed new light on the actions of a Roman official stationed in Jerusalem during the first century AD. There are no prizes for guessing who – the clue’s in the title – but this new evidence will inevitably call in to question the Biblical account of the events leading up to the Crucifixion. The scrolls have of course been stolen, and by the end of the third chapter our hero has managed to get lucky with Nicoletta, the dead archaeologist’s beautiful Italian assistant. Everyone else – the museum director, another benefactor who appears to be just as rich as Jay and a seemingly shifty museum employee – is a suspect.

The action of The Pontius Pilate Papers flits from Israel to Paris, Vienna, London and Oxford, during which Jay and Nicoletta have to contend with an array of (mostly) two-dimensional characters. There are cops from several countries who aren’t sure what’s going on (not helped by Jay and his uncle Aaron choosing not to keep them fully in the picture), bitchy academics, bitchy academics’ wives who like to start drinking early, a somewhat ridiculous antiquarian book-dealer and private detectives who are either reckless, incompetent or who moonlight as international film stuntmen and provide Jay with an extra woman when he has to spend the night away from Nicoletta. One of the British cops was called Sergeant Battle, which I presume to be a nod to Agatha Christie who had a recurring police character in some of her books called Superintendent Battle.

I had originally bought the book because I like thrillers which revolve around a potentially very dangerous secret – and, given when this one was published, it would be not so much sub-Da Vinci Code as pre-Da Vinci Code. But it never quite takes off. Jay, the protagonist, is both unsympathetic and unconvincing. There are a few sequences that rather jar, being either implausible or long-winded. There are also parts – descriptive sequences as well as character descriptions – that have not aged well at all. By the time the villain of the piece was revealed I no longer cared (although the fact that I had guessed, and guessed correctly, at said villain’s identity before I was half-way through may have had something to do with this). Finally, the wrapping-up of the plot was spoilt a bit by a final twist on the last page. Here, I think, is one to forget.

There followed much better fare courtesy of Agatha Christie. Sparkling Cyanide is an enjoyable murder mystery which centred around the murder of an upper-class heiress by way of cyanide administered in a glass of champagne at a dinner party (hence the title). This method of murdering someone, by the way, is identical to the murder in the Nero Wolfe mystery Champagne for One, although a quick bit of research told me that Sparkling Cyanide was first published in 1945 and Champagne for One in 1958. Thus, Rex Stout was copying Agatha Christie, not the other way round. 

Everyone initially assumes it was suicide, the victim having been depressed for some time prior to her death. However, a few months later her husband starts to receive anonymous letters hinting that it was murder. He therefore decides to repeat the dinner party with the same guests at the same place on the anniversary of his wife’s death, only to meet the same end as his wife. It falls to Colonel Race (a military intelligence officer who’d previously assisted Hercule Poirot in Death on the Nile) and the original victim’s sister’s boyfriend to work out what’s been going on and try to prevent a third murder. A good read, in which all of the supporting characters are well fleshed out, each of them with a convincing reason for wanting the original victim dead. Recommended.

A Tuscan tower

While in lockdown my thoughts turned to travel. Being unable to go anywhere other than my immediate neighbourhood when doing my permitted daily exercise or running errands for people who can’t get out of their homes, I found myself looking at photos from old trips. I never did get around to writing about trips abroad over the last couple of years, which is not good for someone who once aspired to be a travel writer! Now seems as good a time as any to remedy that.

In late April of last year, we went to Montepulciano – a lovely old hilltop town in southern Tuscany. The house we rented out was actually in the old town itself, located in the narrow streets that are a short walk downhill from the central piazza. 

There were some lovely wine bars within very easy walking distance from our front door which was a great way to try the local wines, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano and Rosso di Montepulciano – the main difference being that the former must be aged in a barrel for three years while the latter only has to be aged for one year (rather like the difference between Brunello di Montalcino and Rosso di Montalcino). On warm days, these wine bars are very useful as they often make use of the cellars where the temperature is much cooler, as if we needed an excuse for visiting them! 

Neither of the Montepulciano wines, of course, are to be confused with Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, a wine with which I am very familiar thanks to it having been included in the ‘two bottles for a fiver’ deal that used to be a major reason for shopping in the small grocery that Allison and I used to live above.

The high point of Montepulciano – the wine aside – is Piazza Grande, the central square/piazza on which are to be found the cathedral and the town hall. The cathedral – the duomo – is striking for its unfinished façade which makes it look very different from most Italian churches and cathedrals (inside, the must-see thing that the guidebooks all mention is an ornate triptych behind the altar, although when I had a look inside there was merely a screen showing what I presume to be a representation of said ornate triptych which was presumably covering up some restoration work).

Both the cathedral and the town hall have bell towers, and this interested me a lot because I am always interested in the prospect of climbing towers. The cathedral’s bell tower, alas, is not open to the public. However, you can walk up the tower of the nearby Palazzo Communale, the medieval town hall which still performs its original function! It looked slightly familiar, which I found odd given that I’d never been to Montepulciano before, but then I realised that that’s because it looks like the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.

For five euros I jumped at the chance. Funnily enough, none of my travelling-companions – Allison, my parents and my mother-in-law – fancied coming along too. My guidebook (Lonely Planet’s Florence & Tuscany) stated that there were “67 narrow stairs” following which I could enjoy “extraordinary views” of the town and the surrounding countryside.

What the guidebook hadn’t mentioned was that in order to get to the narrow stairs I had to go through the council offices – up the main staircase and through what looked like the civic archives! Quite what the people who work for the council make of this I do not know (the way to the tower clearly goes right past someone’s desk) but I guess they must be used to it, or maybe not as I did not encounter anyone else on this particular tower adventure.

These stairs led onto the main roof, from which I could look out over the Piazza Grande, and from there I could access the tower itself with its narrow wooden steps leading up to the big bell.

Fantastic! The views from the top are truly stunning; from there, tiled rooftops of Montepulciano simply fall away down the hill, and on a clear day there are wide views of the southern Tuscan countryside to be had. Lucky me, with a tower to myself and clear blue skies...

The cathedral bell tower opposite (slightly lower than my new look-out point, I smugly noted while wondering what this said about relations between the church and the civic authorities) had what appeared to be a couple of plastic chairs which led me to wonder who might be able to access and use these – junior priests sneaking off for a smoke-break was my guess, although they could have been using the tower as a means of getting away from the numbers for more spiritual purposes.

Back down, it was time, I felt, for something red and refreshing in one of those wine bars...

The coronavirus diary, or things to do at home: gardening and birdwatching

What with the weather being so nice, we’ve been devoting some of our time to our garden. Coronavirus or no, we were planning to plant a few things in our vegetable patch anyway – we always do! We were lucky with our timing, though, paying a visit to the garden centre to buy some vegetables for planting the weekend before the government advised against non-essential travel.

It’s been interesting to see how there has been a push (well, a few feature articles in the papers) about encouraging people their own food in these uncertain times – I suspect that if people have really gone for this in a big way (and it looks as though people have, echoing perhaps the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign during the War), it’s probably as much about doing something (a something that, it must be said, does appear to have some positive mental health benefits) as it is to make sure we’ve got something to eat if we have problems with the food supply chain later on.

We’ve planted carrots, cabbage and kale in the main bed, in addition to which there are some onion plants which have somehow survived the winter, some asparagus plants doing their thing at the back (who knows, with those?) and the ever-present rhubarb plant. 

Then we have some more kale in a couple of the bigger pots and lettuce in three other pots. 

The troughs have peas and mange-touts growing in them, although at present these have yet to see the light of day!

On a visit to Homebase just before Britain went into lockdown (the primary purpose of which was to get a new gas-bottle for the barbecue), I also picked up a little bag of seed potatoes which I held off planting in the compost-bags until last weekend. Not that it takes particularly long, but I thought I’d spread the work out. Last year, we did get some potatoes but they were mostly on the small side, probably because we planted too many in the bags so this year I deliberately planted less.

A problem we’ve had in the past is one that many gardeners face – slugs. We still had some slug pellets in the shed from last year and they were put down as soon as I’d planted our vegetables, but that was the extent of our supply. Therefore, I’ve fallen back on a more old-fashioned method which may or may not work – eggshells. Opinion as to whether or not these actually work in terms of deterring slugs is mixed on the Internet, but in the absence of anything else right now it’s got to be worth a shot, right?

Inside, we have some micro-greens on the windowsill which are growing at differing speeds; some of these clearly do better than others.

And what of the birds? I was enthused by the RSPB’s new Breakfast Birdwatch initiative (encouraging people to take some time to watch the birds when they’d usually be commuting and/or doing the school run) but a consequence of not having to go to work at the moment is that I have been sleeping in for much longer than I usually do – such is life on furlough-leave! But I’ve still been keeping an eye out for feathered visitors to the garden – as I type I can see out to the feeder on our front lawn – and over the last few days I have seen a wide range of birds either visiting us or flying overhead: pigeons of the wood and feral varieties, ring-necked parakeets, starlings, blackbirds, blue tits, great tits, goldfinches and the occasional wren. The nuts are popular with birds of all sizes, but I am particularly impressed by the agility of the parakeets!

The coronavirus diary, or things to do at home: re-arranging books and reading them

Looking for something to do, and feeling that it was about time I off-loaded some surplus books (never a shortage of those in our house!), I went through my bookshelves last week and came up with a dozen or so that I read ages ago and have no plans to re-read again, especially given that I still have plenty of unread ones. So, such classics as The Day of the Jackal, Royal Flash and The Wench is Dead went to the communal bookshelf at East Finchley Tube station, for the delight of those essential workers who are still relying on public transport and those who pop into the station during their out-of-the-house daily exercise breaks to pick up a copy of Metro.

I then sorted out my remaining books, looking for the ones that I have acquired over the years but not got around to actually reading (everyone has this problem, right?). Now I have all of my unread books ready to go – this picture merely shows the fictional ones! 

Depending on how long this lockdown business lasts, I might finally get around to reading Lorna Doone and Bleak House – although I’ll probably go for The Shadow of Doctor Syn and at least one of the Agatha Christies before either of those...

I started on my unread books with a point of order – regarding the John Buchan book, The Strange Adventures of Mr Andrew Hawthorn & Other Stories (which I had myself picked up from the communal bookshelf at the Tube station). This recent Penguin Classics Buchan anthology contains 18 of JB’s short stories, eight of which I already have thanks to my owning both volumes of The Best Short Stories of John Buchan so I felt that this one was a bit of a cheat. None of these volumes, by the way, contains the Buchan short story that made it into The Penguin Book of the British Short Story from Daniel Defoe to John Buchan; all I can deduce from that is the obvious observation that JB wrote a lot of well-regarded short stories! My plan here, I decided, was to read through the JB short stories that weren’t in the books that I already own (if that makes sense). I particularly enjoyed the titular one, a very Buchan-esque piece about a man who steps out of his house one morning ... and is neither seen nor heard of for the next five years.

As for The Penguin Book of the British Short Story from Daniel Defoe to John Buchan, this is an anthology covering the British short story from the age of Swift and Defoe to the early twentieth century, with works by 36 authors. I’ve been dipping into it at leisure. Some names are familiar to me, others less so. Having enjoyed some of Rudyard Kipling’s short stories in the past, I made a bee-line for his one, ‘The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat’ (a lively read, and a story that I feel has great contemporary relevance in the age of fake news and concerns over the extent of the influence of the media; worth comparing, I feel, with Buchan’s ‘The Last Crusade’). I then chose an unknown (to me) author at random, and thus found myself enjoying ‘Holiday Group’, the tale of a vicar and his wife taking their young family on a holiday to the seaside by E.M. Delafield.

Then it was an immersion into the murky world of Tudor politics courtesy of Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel’s sequel to Wolf Hall. At just under 500 pages it’s a long read even though it covers a short time-frame, from September 1535 (the point at which Wolf Hall left off) to the execution of Anne Boleyn the following year. I do like the revisionist portrayal of Thomas Cromwell, particularly how he deals with the ever-fascinating and ever-dangerous Henry VIII; the part where the King is knocked unconscious during a joust and everyone fears that he has died – this at a time when it was considered treason to speculate on what would happen in the event of the King’s death – is a particular highlight. Then there’s Cromwell’s interaction with the courtiers who think that the low-born Master Secretary (the son, as is often mentioned, of a Putney blacksmith) is beneath them, just like they thought the same of Cromwell’s former mentor Cardinal Wolsey whose ghost haunts the life of his protégé. Oh, how they underestimate him! It’s no coincidence when, as Cromwell moves to bring down Anne Boleyn once it becomes clear to him that the King’s now got eyes for Jane Seymour, he makes sure to take down four noblemen who openly mocked Wolsey after his downfall. Heavy going? Yes, for there is much detail here. That it is very well-researched and very well-written I do not dispute, but although I enjoyed parts of Bring Up the Bodies I do feel that, when it comes to intrigue in the reign of Henry VIII, the Shardlake novels are probably more to my taste.

A lighter read, next. Well, physically lighter at any rate, for Rasselas (full title: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia) by Samuel Johnson comes in at 150 pages and about a fifth of that is the introduction (this being the early Eighties Penguin edition, original retail price £1:60). I am something of an admirer of Samuel Johnson, having volunteered at Dr Johnson’s House in the City (and even visited his birthplace in Lichfield) but I had never previously read this, his only novel which I bought – if memory serves – from the 50p shelf of a second-hand bookshop in Winchester. According to Boswell, Johnson wrote Rasselas in a week in order to pay the costs of his mother’s funeral, although unfortunately some scholars have cast doubt on whether this was actually the case. The story features characters from Ethiopia (formerly known as Abyssinia) which also piqued my interest (since I went there myself on my African odyssey); Johnson himself was not entirely unfamiliar with this country, one of his earlier works being the translation of a book by a Portuguese missionary who’d been there in the seventeenth century. 

The titular Rasselas is a young and idealistic prince, raised in a comfortable-yet-isolated community in the mountains known as the happy valley. He is, for want of a better word, bored with his pampered and carefree existence in the valley and desires to see the wider world and find what it is that makes people happy and contented. So, in the company of his sister Nekayah, her servant Pekuah and a well-travelled poet-philosopher called Imlac who acts as a mentor to the others, Rasselas escapes from the happy valley and travels to Cairo. They meet various people from all levels of society, among them a hermit (who, far from extolling the virtues of a life of solitude as might be expected, decides that he wants to go back to the city), a philosopher who disappoints Rasselas by failing to practice what he preaches (“be not too hasty, said Imlac, to trust, or to admire, the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men”) and an astronomer who, although initially taken to be wise, is in fact mad (“perhaps”, opines Imlac, “no human mind is in its right state”). A visit to the Pyramids goes badly when Pekuah, who hadn’t wanted to join the others by going into the Great Pyramid, gets kidnapped – leading the others to reflect on guilt and loss before she is returned to them. Eventually, in the final chapter (entitled “The conclusion, in which nothing is concluded”), they decide to return to Abissinia after realising the futility of their search; complete happiness is, they have found, elusive.

It would be a mistake to assume that Rasselas is a travel story, though. It’s an examination of the human condition, with particular reference to the pursuit of happiness and the age-old question of whether (so to speak) the grass really is greener on the other side. Somewhat cynical about optimism while also reflecting on mankind’s seemingly infinite capacity for hope, it’s definitely worth reading, and I feel that it’s a book that can be returned to again and again. And there are, of course, some great Johnsonian pearls of wisdom to be had here, among them:

“A man used to vicissitudes is not easily dejected” (ch. XII – yes, he used Roman numerals for the chapters!)

“Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content. No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting is scent with the flowers of the spring: no man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile” (ch. XXIX)

“Our minds, like our bodies, are in continual flux; something is hourly lost, and something acquired … do not suffer life to stagnate; it will grow muddy for want of motion: commit yourself again to the current of the world” (ch. XXXV)