Coniston...

There are many kinds of silence. There's the embarrassed silence you find during breakfast in a lakeland boarding house, which makes the tinkling of tea-cups seem deafening by comparison. There's the blissful silence when a migraine-inducing car alarm finally drains the battery and whines to a merciful stop. There's the brooding silence at the heart of a marriage when love has died. But best of all are those moments when the chatter of the mind abates, when memories, ambitions and everyday worries evaporate like puddles on a hot pavement, and - however briefly - you are blessed with stillness.

The world seems to have been washed clean by overnight rain, leaving Coniston looking its best. There are a few precious days each year when the leaves on the trees glow with hypnotic shades of green, as though lit from within. When the swallows, swifts and martins race and scream over the lake, seemingly for the sheer joy of scything effortlessly through the sky. When almost anything seems possible. And today is one of them.

It's June, early summer, and there's no better time of the year to skive, loaf, dawdle, dally, hang loose, take things easy, stand and stare, shoot the breeze, twiddle our thumbs, kick our heels, and generally let the grass grow under our feet. Yes, here in lakeland we’ve learned the lexicon of leisure.

Sulphur-yellow wagtails chase each other along the water-margins. Startled moorhens skitter into the reeds. Dragonflies flash by: vivid blurs of electric greens and blues. The air is still and soporific. Let your problems melt away; there’ll be time enough to deal with them later on. Slip into that silence, with the same ease as a dipper, leaving barely a ripple.

We lead our lives at such a lick; no wonder we’re stressed out most of the time. We complain there aren’t enough hours in the day, and then settle down for an evening in front of the TV, watching celebrities eating grubs in the jungle. Being over-stimulated - like kids who quaff too much fizzy pop - we need bigger and bigger doses of eye-popping sensation. If we are to respond to the quiet lure of the countryside, where excitements are subtle rather than blatant, we need to take stock and recalibrate our senses.