An update from Kilnacre Cottage: remembering friend holidays and first drafts

My friend Ellen’s parents own a cottage in the Lake District. Although it has an official name – the one you look for on maps and give out to taxi drivers – its real name is Kilnacre Cottage. That’s what the owners christened it, and that’s what’s written on the wooden sign beside the front door.

I went to Kilnacre Cottage for the first time when I was nineteen. There was a big group of us, all around the same age and all in our second or third years of university. In hindsight, we barely knew each other, but at the time I considered them to be my best friends, in the way I tended to do in my first few years living away from home, when I regularly mistook instant connection for the ingredients of a long-term friendship. That first trip wasn’t perfect; there were spots of conflict here and there, to do with money and cooking responsibilities and the sandpaper edges of incompatible personalities rubbing against each other, but characteristically, I remember the good parts brightest. I remember playing boardgames, walking up to the stone circle and lying down on the biggest rocks to appreciate the September sunshine. I remember splurging on £6 bottles of Pinot Grigio in the food shop and making iced lattes with the solidified instant coffee powder we found in the back of the cupboard. On the last night, a few of us went out into the garden and sat on the bench, pointing out the stars to each other and making up names for the invented constellations. We were all giddy for most of the trip: the novelty of being able to holiday somewhere so beautiful without paying for the privilege caused high spirits, although that first trip I think the free part was more relevant to me than the beauty.

Since that weekend in 2018, I have been to stay at the cottage five times. The group has changed from trip to trip as old friendships fall away and new one’s spark, but the fixtures of the first trip remain unchanged: big food shop, plenty of paperbacks and crossword puzzles, board games, and a decent Bluetooth speaker. Ellen is a mainstay, of course, seeing as the cottage technically does belong to her. Despite this fact, I fear that I’ve staked ownership of the place in my heart and have come to love the cottage as if it was my own. I love the log burning fire, the esoteric mug collection, the guestbook full of jokes, the countless snapshots of my best friend throughout her childhood. All the boardgames are essentially family heirlooms (The Broughton-Hart’s take trivia as seriously as some families take religion) and if you rifle through the notecards and trivia pads you can find notes from Ellen’s parents and family friends that go back decades. I feel lucky to visit a place that feels so much like a home, and to be able to treat it like my own home for a couple of nights once or twice a year.

Kilnacre Cottage has also been the backdrop for several important moments in my creative life: I wrote some of my favourite parts of Gender Theory here (committing the cottage forever to fiction in the vignette Kilnacre Cottage) and celebrated my German publication deal in the garden, drinking from strange funnel-shaped champagne flutes and ignoring the judgemental gazes of several sheep. There have also, of course, been many creative flops at the cottage: namely preparation for an ill-fated zine and a frustrating week spent rewriting the same one hundred words of a fiction project I eventually scrapped. This week – because yes, I come to you live and wifi-less from Kilnacre Cottage near the end of my sixth visit! – I’ve spent most of my time in front of the fire making up elaborate murder mystery novel-plots with my boyfriend and barely any time working on my manuscript.

It’s the first time we’ve come to Kilnacre Cottage without Ellen and receiving her parents’ permission to visit just the two of us felt of almost equal importance to receiving one’s in-laws marital blessing. The week has been near perfect; full of biscuits and sour beer and the kind of stillness that can only be achieved by walking to the top of a big hill and letting the cold wind turn your cheeks pink. On these walks, I’ve been reminiscing on the highlights of other Kilnacre Cottage trips; meals, jokes, group dynamics, and in doing so, I inadvertently began reminiscing about all the other stuff. There is the break from life that holidays provide, but there is also life itself: jobs, degrees, health scares, everything that changed and everything that stayed the same. Despite plenty of mistakes and bad parts, I feel grateful for almost everything.

The first time I visited Kilnacre Cottage, Matt and I had been going out for a month or so, and my trip to the lakes marked the first meaningful amount of time we’d spent apart since our second date. We texted back and forth the whole time and I remember strange specifics of those messages; he had a cold and I tried to cheer him up by sending him detailed updates on Ellen and I’s attempt at cooking veggie spag bol for everyone (In the end, the carrots were underdone). When I came back to Glasgow, Matt met me from the train station, and we went straight back to his flat to drink margaritas. That was six and a half years ago, and now I live in the flat too, with our dog and cat and impressive collection of knitwear. Somewhere along the way we built a whole life together! It feels miraculous, but also not. I knew that I loved him almost immediately. When we first met, my life felt so uncertain, but his presence made me feel quiet and sure. Even though I was nineteen and foolish, I picked him without hesitation. And I guess I was right to do so because we got engaged a few days ago, at the same stone circle I mentioned earlier. Surprise!

Recently, Matt and I were eating dinner with my family, and I told a joke that nobody laughed at but him. My brother-in-law shook his head and said, “you’re so lucky you found Matt.” He was teasing me, obviously, but he was also spot on. I feel so lucky to have found someone who thinks I’m funny, who wants to sit by the fire and read for hours and then go for a walk and talk about the same things we always do. Someone who is in favour of morning celebrations and afternoon pyjamas and way too much wine before dinner. Lucky is right! Without me noticing, this piece has turned into a bit of a love letter, and although usually I would corral my sentimentality and edit the mushy parts out, I think this time I’ll leave them in. Getting engaged is more fun than I thought it would be, honestly. See you later xo