...as was suggested sometime in the Dark Recesses of Exam Term, and subsequently repeated after the all-night pnuting due to us being high on adrenaline and so wanting to get wet and muddy and frozen again.
So we did.

The story begins at Lancaster Station, where we sadly lost three members of our party in an avalanche on the North Face of our Luggage. Fortunately, Virgin Trains ('Our trains have never been through a tunnel') provided us with a specially fortified carriage so that we could transport everything to Penrith and, sixty taxi journeys later, we stood in a field by the side of Ullswater.

And ate cheese. And some smarties which my mummy packed for us.

Slightly later, we discovered that one of our tents was lacking poles and another resembled a binbag, but this was OK as it was All Part Of The Experience(tm), and quite compensated for by the Good Hills and the sheep.

Remembering that we were, after all, the Sheila and her Dog Society, we sat in a circle that evening and read a book together. Sometimes it just happens that the only book that comes to hand is a pornographic bondage tome and, well, you can't do anything about it really. Long live plums, I say. The Tarot cards say that I'm an upside-down sheep.

On Monday morning, we invented Decomposing Tiger Sandwiches, which have stripes of Golden Syrup and Chocolate Spread. Ed entered a cave near the summit of the luggage and returned with a boat, which Mark and Maria used to sail to a mysterious land on the other side of the lake.

In the afternoon we were abducted by aliens, but they wiped our memories so that we'd just think we'd forgotten what we did. Ben and Catriona arrived with a Sensible Tent and an Icebox and were briefly abducted as well, before retiring to the Sensible Tent with a book.

Maybe we wandered off, with torches, down to the shore at night and sat and read stories of ghost dogs and towers and the new alphabets of Dr. Seuss, in the dim light with the waves lapping at the lake's edge behind us. My memory's not quite right on the matter. Anyhow, we returned to find purple glittery slime all over our campsite - a sure sign of alien infestation...

The next day, we went to the Stone Circle, high on the hillside, to discover the strange power that it held over us all. Sometime or other, Vee and Casby announced the onset of Sheila Relationship Saturation.

Taking our chocolate in hand, we ventured past the piper at the gateway to the hills, avoided the man-size black slugs which began to ooze out of the bracken with the threat of rain, and finally found our way to the Roman Road. The Roman Road was very straight in a side-to-side way, but not in an up-and-down way, and it led to the place we had all been seeking.

Casby was the first to succumb to the power of the circle. Its strange powers seem to be transmitted via the hair, and alas! Casby is of large hair.

It was not long before the rest of us were similarly afflicted. One by one, we began making dramatic gestures. Some of us felt the need to climb up on the stones themselves. A curious wind began to blow, of exactly the right sort to make our hair stream out behind us...

In order to put a stop to this, we sacrificed Alan the Penguin. It began to rain, and the wind went away.

We squelched our way home.

Later on, Mark made a saucepanful of salt with pasta on. I believe, though I could be wrong, that it is still at the campsite, having lain through storm, flood and fire untouched by human hand.

Speaking of storms...

The wind and rain continued all night. The dead bird in the tree above our tents flew away. The alien spaceship which had been hovering over the tree developed steering problems and was forced to return to the mothership. Ed and Rob went out in the height of the storm, and were sadly lost to the dreadful weather conditions.

Ed managed to throw us some giant smarties as he was sucked into the core of a giant whirlwind, which was very nice of him.

In order to keep Eve's feet on the ground, we tied her to the Teletubbies kite, which (in Cambridge) had shown a remarkable tendency to dislike heights. Alas! things are different in the Lake District. The Teletubbies kite wrenched itself free of its handle and flew off into the distance.

We followed it to the home of an evil black sheep mastermind and fought an army of sheep infantry to get it back, but we were home in time for tea, so we were cured of all our injuries by lashings and lashings of ginger beer. Oh yes.

In the evening, we sat around a big blazing wonderful campfire on the beach and toasted marshmallows and had a coronation ceremony and awards and went *boing* lots and lots and lots.

And then Chris and I went off to the darkest deepest depths of rural Cornwall and went past them all into even stranger regions, and if you want to hear how the other campers fared, you'll have to ask them...

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