Rowing boats by Lake Windermere ...

I can remember rowing upon Lake Windermere when I was young and untested - the image is a small jewel from my memory hoard - there I am, with my thin wrists and pale skin, dipping the oars into a still lake - when I looked up into the sky, I saw only the promise of happiness -

The boat had a slender hull - it was clinker built, made of light brown varnished wood - the oars fitted into fancy wrought iron rowlocks - I rowed round a small wooded island - I was in my early twenties, brimful of dreams - 

How wonderful, then, to see what seemed to be the very same boat - years afterwards, when so much had happened to me - I felt as though I might see my former self, rowing towards me, with a bright, trusting, face -

Perhaps I was wearing the same tweed jacket as I'd worn that morning - I'd found it, a few years back, at the bottom of a green suitcase - it was the one my dad had bought me, a thick Harris Tweed, drenched once in peaty water - 

The idle boy in the boat hire office said that the lake was too choppy to venture out in a rowboat - we could go out in a motor boat - 

We did so - the wretched craft was the size of a bath tub - it wallowed and lurched about in the waves - but in the lee of Belle Isle, we motored serenely, between lines of yachts - 

I thought of myself again, in the past, being here, under a different sky - perhaps we were all followed by our former selves, bright shadows, just out of sight ...