Easy

Until suddenly something I took for granted wasn't any more I'm not sure I've ever been a fan of easy.
Maybe it's just the semantics of an stubbornly awkward personality, possibly a quirk of linguistics or just a contrariness I've always had, but easy has never been my first choice.
Sure I like it when difficult becomes easy, but it has to start out difficult or it always feels less than it should be, that there should be something more.

And yes, I'm just self aware enough to know I have a véritable selection of exceptions to this rule.

Today my group had a very specific aim, Sharp Edge on Blencathra - and sadly I knew from the first time I looked at this week's forecast that any chance of that was slim. Waking this morning to gruesome weather slim had shrunk all the way down to non. Not easy to tell them for a second time in as many years.
We headed instead for Halls Fell Ridge - the day trying it's very best to put us off, to offer an element of challenge we wouldn't rise to. For a while Gategill and Middle Tongue gave a lie to the weather's ferocity, but somewhere around the 650m contour progress became, and I use this word with a wry smile, arduous. Climbing on the lea side of the ridge helped, but the rock was treacherously slippy, geological folds working against rather than for. Easy had a rueful appeal.
At the top only one person slipped, braced to help the others make the last steps to the top, one last squally shout of anger from the wind momentarily lifted me and deposited me where once a trig point should have been. My least graceful summit for a while.
Of all the places I roam the descent from Blencathra along the Scales Fell path has caused me the most pain in recent years. Perhaps that now lies as much in my mind as in my ankle, perhaps truer still there's an easy solution, but beautiful, bold and brash, Blencathra is too good a playground to leave behind. Some things deserve to be hard won.

With the day only half as spent as us, and all feeling thankful for our stolen adventure, it was time for coffee and cake... and a change of clothes.

Cocklakes farm cafe was an admirably easy choice.