grumpyf1

Worrying news so soon into the new year – my local bakery/coffee shop has closed. Now what am I meant to do? When I moved to Cumbria I left behind a lifetime of knowing where everything was. I’d successfully navigated over 35 years of living within a stone’s throw of where I grew up, so there was virtually nothing I didn’t know about my patch. I could pretty much walk around the area with my eyes shut and still arrive at the exact spot in the pub I was aiming for. But they said I shouldn’t do that, as I was scaring people, so I stopped. Arriving on a dark and rainy December evening to my new locale I suffered an unexpected, and altogether uncomfortable, feeling of not knowing a damn thing about it. Sure, we’d driven up to look at the house and liked the village, but that was months before and I struggle to remember what order to put clothes on in the morning at the best of times. I sort of knew how to get to the nearest big town (but not how to navigate the one way system)...