The Map

The birthday celebrations were over. Charles was preparing his boots for his walking holiday in the Lakes.  His wife was upstairs, packing for her luxury spa weekend. Searching for her slippers, she found a package at the bottom of the wardrobe.

“Charles!” she called, “You haven’t opened all your presents. Look! You missed one!” she called.

 “No,” he answered, “I’m leaving that one as a treat.  I’m going to open it on the top of Scafell Pike.  I know what it is, I asked Annie to send me a new laminated map of the area, phoned her last week.”

Charles loved the Lake District. The sheer beauty of the place, the wildness, when you got off the accustomed pathways, the quiet. Here there were no political demands, no necessary meetings, no nagging wife. Even in the rain it was a place of glory.

And rain it did. First vertically, finding its way into every corner and crease of his sturdy anorak, seeping through the many layers of sock into the very corners of his boots, then horizontally, temporarily blinding him as he stumbled off the path to hug the outcrops for a particle of shelter. It was time to look for the quickest way down, to a hot bath and a whisky at the inn.

The rain turned to sleet, laced with a cutting wind. His old map, sodden and ripped, was wrenched from him in a sudden swirl of storm. He was left holding half a sheet. It wasn’t the half he needed. Ah well, time for the new one. A little earlier than he had planned, but needs must.

 Settled in the crook of a rock, he opened a packet of Kendal Mint Cake, savouring its sweet pepperiness and opened his birthday package.  His fingers trembled a little.  How he loved new maps, the new worlds they seemed to open, even when the paths they showed were well known. There was almost something exotic about a new map. And this new lamination was a great thing – could have been invented just for a day like this lamination.

As he tore off the cheery birthday wrapping paper he stared in disbelief at the folded paper in his hand. Map of the Lake District, it proclaimed, Limited Edition.  Limited, not laminated. It must have cost a mint.  It was utterly beautiful.  And equally useless.  He stared over the wild hills now shrouded with the breath of the storm, and thought he could hear his dear sister Annie, on one of their many telephone calls.

“I do wish you would speak up, Charles,’ she was saying. ‘I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”