It was a beautiful summer’s evening in Cumbria, but my head was banging.

We were on our way back from York after cleaning my son’s student house and picking him up for the holidays.

Already detoured coming across country, we were 40 miles from home when we came across another closed road.

I was exhausted, starving, dehydrated and nursing the remnants of a migraine not helped by the fumes of cleaning fluids, and my husband thought it would be the ideal time to “drive through the Lakes”.

My student son, nursing a hangover, had fallen asleep, on a pile of unwashed bed linen, in the back of the car for three hours. Just as we hit Kirkstone Pass, he woke up saying: “Are we home yet?”.

“No, we are not,” I said. “And that stomach upset you had this morning is about to get a whole lot worse.”

It is safe to say I’m not one for walking in the fells. I last owned a pair of walking boots in 1978 when I joined my primary school’s rambling club. And although rain dominates our weather, I don’t possess any waterproofs.

I can only name four Lake District mountains and five lakes, and have never been to Beatrix Potter World.

However, I know my limitations and am Cumbrian enough to never climb a fell wearing only flip-flops and would die of exposure on Helvellyn before wasting the time of the marvellous mountain rescue teams.

After a total of seven hours on the road, we were all fed up and cranky. My husband reckoned it was at least 20 years since we had driven across Kirkstone Pass.

I had forgotten that around every bend was a sheep which we may potentially wipe out, and shuddered at the horror of being stranded on the pass if we ran out of fuel.

“Stop looking at the damn petrol gauge,’’ my husband said, “and enjoy the view.” Ah, the view. Living somewhere so beautiful, it can be too easy to take it for granted. But the scenery, hit by the evening sun, was enough to make us all go: “Whoa!”

After grumbling and moaning about the extra time it would take us to get home, we were all ashamed of ourselves. “Let’s come back when we don’t all have faces like smacked backsides,’’ I said. “This countryside deserves to be respected, and not by us lot in this mood.”

The second thing which cheered us no end, apart from that breathtaking scenery, was uttering obscenities as we passed Saturday evening drinkers having cold pints of lager in hotel beer gardens.

“We hate you all,” we said in a manner reminiscent of Withnail from the famous film.

Having run out of water two hours previously, and with a raging thirst, I began to view Windermere as a mirage in the distance.

“Do you think we will reach it?’’ I said.

“Well,” my husband said, “we are Cumbrians. If the dehydration gets us, there is no better place to die. Or we could just pull over at the Kirkstone Pass Inn...”