Even a morning without clouds

I went up to Lanchashire for the weekend at the start of September, just as it was starting to get dark earlier, with the rain dripping down the windows and no desire to leave the house. We stayed inside with homemade bread, ginger beer and wine, scaring ourselves with talk of horror films and the future. The next morning, we walked through the drizzle and I took these pictures that I'd been thinking of ever since I found this new mackintosh in Paris the month before.

They have turned them away on the mountains

At the end of the Easter term we drove from Cambridge to Yorkshire - passing Godmanchester, Retford and Thirsk along the way - for a weekend of picnics in the wind and bottles of ale drunk beside the sea. We climbed over stiles and waded through expanses of heather, lost our way on the map, and retreated in the cold to pubs to read the papers and have endless debates that always seemed to escalate into argument, with all of us refusing to back down. On Sunday we drove to Whitby, happening to coincide with the biannual goth festival there, which was both horrifying and very funny. On the final evening we ate spaghetti and drank whisky in front of Withnail and I, which after the weekend of comically bad picnic weather and lost routes felt appropriate.

A song of ascents

At the end of the summer Arturo and I took a spur-of-the-moment ten hour coach journey to Betws y Coed in North Wales, where we swam in lakes and rivers every day and went for long walks, always mis-judging our route back and ending up far too far out. One day we climbed over Mount Snowdon, stopping at the top to drink the fizzy wine they were selling, and then had to stumble down the other side, chasing sheep along the way, before it got too dark. We ate a cooked breakfast every morning, tried ales in countryside pubs, and spent our evenings watching re-runs of James Bond films on tv.