h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Just saw at BBC2 the documentary about a man called "Alfred Wainwright". I did not know the man and neither his books.

For the rest, I got frightened, because his weird, unhappy way of living came very close by. A continuous suffocating loneliness within his marriage that could only become worse every day of their lives.
At least the same can be said for his extremely loyal wife who even made notes for him so he could take care for his own while she had left the house after rumors about a new woman he was meeting.

It is my conviction, that in most cases, both parties/persons have about the same weaknesses, but is often shown clearly by just one to the outside world. I agree with our Dutch choreographer in modern dance, Hans van Maanen, that it’s very, very often a fifty-fifty situation.

Alfred Wainwright (1907–1991) was a British hill walker and wrote a guidebook in many, many chapters about the Lakeland Fells, published between 1955 and 1966. The books - beside many others - were and still are a great success.

While copying it at my video, I many times halted. Things were irritating and really frightening for me. Soon I discovered why.

His suffocating loneliness in an even more suffocating marriage, in a time and culture where men and women were not educated by examples in society who speak their minds openly ,let alone their emotions and not to speak about neurotic feelings and obsessive thoughts.

So to me, his wife had any better life. I estimate her suffering was even more, because she had no status and above all, she could not escape by following an obsessive goal, as far as I know.

As I wrote, some moments in this TV program frightened me, to imagine the sheer hell of silence in their house, in them, without ever been able to reach out just one inch to each others. I recognize that from my early childhood. Silence, almost as a killer.

Alfred Wainwright worked since 1941 at the Borough Treasurer's office in Kendal and every weekend he went to the lake district and walked in search for peace of mind by feeling the wind, seeing the clouds and enjoying the views.
Everything in his life was going according to his extremely detailed plan, as if their was a war going on, and to me, there was a war going on.

Because of his incapability to do something about it with his wife and only son, he turned a new born passion for the mountains in the Lake District into a complete obsession to walk and describe and publish any detail of what he'd done and seen in the lake District. A German clerk could not have done it better, just now looking at the bureaucratic aspect of it all.

His obsession became his survival, as nothing disturbed his plan for fifteen years ahead (!) while his writings were even all being published.

I hate to say it, because it feels almost like a camp in the Second World War, but all went according to his 15 year-plan, while he was finally finished writing one week ahead of his own 15 years-timetable.
I just got sick to hear that. Not as a statement, but as a reaction.

I did and do recognize a lot; the marriage, ultimate loneliness, forceful neurotic behavior, almost autistic personality and the first sunshine in his life by seeing the mountains in the Lake District.

I guess, he experienced for the first time in his life a feeling of
connection, of alliance and that sensation became the key for his emotional survival route in a life he experienced as close to death.

It made me more relaxed to see him in the end of the program in some family movie pictures rather relaxed with his second wife who was fifteen years younger and was also interviewed in this TV program some time ago. Yes, in those latter days he became more open towards the world and love around him.

(I hope his first wife had the same kind of final destination. I did not hear anything about her anymore in the program, but it was a program about him and not about their marriage).


Alfredo, July 2007 Amsterdam

I've always wondered whether he would have regretted publishing his books. He was such a solitary man, who loved being alone on the fells and the direct effect of his books is such that on a hot summers day, there's a solid line of people almost queuing to get up Haystacks (the mountain on which his ashes are spread).

In fact, the same thing happened with the series of TV programmes that were recently broadcast. My mother happened to be climbing Castle Crag the weekend after a programme was broadcast about Wainwright's route up it, and she told me she actually had to queue to get onto the top.

Rather sad really.

(I must get round to finishing this entry one day!)