The old home town looks the same…
I travelled down and back to Kendal a couple of times in the last two weeks so that I could collect the family matriarch for a short stay in Aberdeen and then return her home.
Both trips re-introduced me to the sort of fine, mist-like rain that Kendal specialises in. It’s not heavy rain, but it envelops you; it soaks and chills with effortless ease. Brollies are impotent against its permeating tendencies and it makes the limestone of which the auld grey town is built look even greyer.
I don’t know if the Cumbrian word for this kind of rain is a portmanteau derived from mist and drizzle (it could easily be), but Cumbrians know it as mizzlin. And in my recent trips south, mizzlin it was. Of course ‘mizzlin” is not solely Cumbrian or, maybe even northern (I believe it has also crossed the Atlantic with the migration of Ulster Scots).
Anyway, to borrow from that old joke about Manchester, if you can’t see Kendal castle from me mum’s house, it’s mizzlin; if you can, it’ll be mizzlin tomorrow!
Hmmm! A limerick comes to mind…
Visitors never stop grizzling
In Kendal, ‘cos t’weather ain’t sizzling.
Instead, they just frown
And loup about town
And learn what we mean by “It’s mizzlin”!
