9 May post by Bess

We had to be ready (dressed and well fed/stuffed to the gills) and on the road to the coach by 7:30. Early risings are a shady business with a group of 30, but we sleepily managed to walk to and board the coach for Coniston. On the drive through the rain we passed a bunch of runners who were doing some sort of wet and nasty race—there was one runner dressed in a puffy blue super-hero costume, and another dude dressed like a stone-age prostitute.

In Coniston we met Mike Humphries at Ruskin’s grave, then went over to the Ruskin and Story of Coniston Museum. We were glad to find seats, toilets, and heaters. The gift shop and museum were also good. From the museum we walked over to the launch, boarded the boat, and rode it around the lake for a touring path to the Brantwood dock. For those of us avoiding motion sickness and sitting out in the fresh air at the front of the boat, it was a very wet and chilly ride. The smug people with steadier bellies were very dry and content when we got off and walked up the hill to the house. We were sent up to the resident artist’s gallery, and he welcomed us there himself. He, John Dugger, said he was “asked to welcome” us, as if this was a great honor for us and a condescension for him. He told us about his process, in which he uses a “rural pen”—a stick he finds in the area, and then applies his “holy grail,” a concoction that bleaches the black banner that is his canvas. He very eagerly told us of his visit to the Dalai Lama—with his girlfriend from Newport Beach with spiky hair who was a real looker—and his question to “His Holiness” regarding a modern-day Tibetan Buddhist iconography. John Dugger, by the way, was wearing a precisely placed red beret and two shirts carefully unbuttoned a few inches and turned crisply up at the cuffs to reveal the black shirt underneath. We were all very grateful when John Bennion interrupted John Dugger to ask about where we could eat lunch, because we were not so interested in hearing about Mr. Dugger’s experiences anymore.

It was still raining pretty fervently, so while the gardens at John Ruskin’s home, Brantwood, are awesome, I was not the only one who hung out inside the whole time we were there. But inside is also cool—especially when Annelise and others created the choose-something-you’d-like-to-steal-and-make-a-plan-to-carry-out-the-theft game. It definitely changed the way I walked through and looked at the collections of rocks and seashells and Ruskin’s sketches of nature and architecture. (I chose an awesome painting of tourists getting off the boats at the Brantwood dock with the ghost of the Ruskin watching them. Hahahha. It was awesome.)

After we’d all devised our plans, and some of us may or may not have carried them out, we walked up behind the house and over the mountain to the Grizedale sculpture park. Some people played on the playgound, others finished off lunches before we all got on the coach to go back to Grasmere.