Why bother mining New Zealand? Surely Yorkshire must be up for sale. Imagine it, a patch of New Zealand on the other side of the world, free to mine in at our leisure. Its not like Yorkshire has produced anything of value recently. I'm pretty sure the cloth caps are made in China (and the whippets bred in Wales). The point is, Yorkshire is a terrible place and I'm sure David Cameron will sell it to our homeboy, John Key, for a reasonable sum.
The point to all this is, of course, to do with me being a miserable bastard. I am not always, it might surprise you to know, a miserable bastard. Generally, being a miserable bastard comes with that ultimate demon: fresh air and exercise. Don't get me wrong. I love a good walk. I walk every day (when I'm at Uni) through the Auckland CBD for a good 20 minutes, and that more than fills my quota. I'm refreshed, energised, and not left feeling like I've just been put through a medieval torture chamber with Stalin as my host. Three hours of walking I can also tolerate. I've walked across London (Tower to Oxford Street is no picnic, I tell you) and all with a whimsical smile. So why, I wonder, did walking up Pen-y-ghent make me want to murder the first infant I saw? One of the famous 'three peaks' of Yorkshire, Pen-y, as her friends call her, is just shy of 700 meters high. Or, so a badge in the nearby cafe told me. Might have been miles. It felt like miles. The point is, the thing is tall. Tall enough for me to want to give up all the way. Its about 3 miles from the start of the track to the top of the mountain (I believe this may, however, be purely a to b to c distancing). Ultimately, it boils down to the obvious thing, doesn't it: Don't I feel accomplished? Don't I feel like I've done something with my life for three hours, scaling heights and doing superhuman feats of daring? Wasn't the view spectacular?
To put it bluntly, no. No, I do not feel special. I feel tired. My coat is wet. The view was bleak and depressing. I was like Janet from Rocky Horror: It was wet, it was cold, and with the speed of the wind, I was just plain scared. This, of course, is in the Yorkshire Dales. This is what Yorkshire is known for. Frankly, it can keep its Dales. It can keep its three peaks. It can keep the eeiry sense of foreboding the really quite tiny windows on its farmhouses gives me. But, I still think we should buy it. Nothing says revenge for a miserable day like strip-mining.
