The Henson Journals
Mon 21 April 1930
Volume 49, Pages 213 to 214
[213]
Easter Monday, April 21st, 1930.
A heavily clouded sky following a rainy night gave no good promise either for the bicycling competition in the Park, or for a motor–journey to Scotland. Certainly one of the problems of practical life is how to employ one's self advantageously on holiday. If you play games, and the games can be arranged, the difficulty is reduced to a minimum: but if you do not, it presents itself acutely. If it were limited to one's own requirements, the problem would not be easily solved: but when (as is often the case) you are bound up with others, it is almost insoluble. It may well be that the most needful holiday that one could plan, the pleasantest & the most refreshing, would just be release from the too–familiar forms and faces, which are inseparable from normal life. But this particular holiday is the most difficult to arrange, so difficult in fact that it is all but impossible to arrange it at all. Married men are, in this respect, particularly ill–placed, for while their wives may easily enough make visits to friends & relations, there is not the same liberty in the case of their husbands. And most people are not very eager about having both!
[214]
We (Ella, Fearne, & I) left the Castle about 10 minutes before 11 a.m., & motored by way of Barnard Castle, Bowes, Penrith, Carlisle, Ecclefechan, Hamilton, Paisley & Bishopton to Dargavel, where we arrived about 6.45 p.m. We lunched by the way side not far from Penrith: & we had tea very comfortably at the Murray Arms, Crawford. Fearne was dropped at Hamilton, where she caught a train by the promptitude of a porter. The weather steadily improved, & we reached our destination in sunshine.
Mr Donald who lives here is a typical Scot, of the pawky, rather mundane, & shrewd kind with which Sir Walter has made us all familiar. He has retired from business, and interests himself with such pottering concernments as are accessible to an old man. He is fond of books, and only concerns himself with religion so far as its ecclesiastical absurdities provide him with amusement. He dabbles in antiquarianism.