It’s hard to believe it’s day 4 already, time is whizzing by!
Thanks to all for the comments – I only worked out last night how to view them on my phone, so it was a nice surprise to find a few waiting for me. And for the record the bottled  Cumberland beer is from Jennings and is 4.7%.
Whilst sorting out my kit last night I did a brief review, and threw the odd thing away – mostly soggy tissues. One item stood out as being a probable needless carry – the headtorch. Well I’m pleased to say it became very useful this morning, because Grasmere had a big power outage. It proved vital for negotiating the drying room and the windowless shower cubicle. The main downside of the potwer cut was that stuff hadn’t dried properly overnight – boots especially – and we were limited to cereals only for breakfast. Overall though Grasmere remains one of my favourite YHA hostels.
Old habits die hard, and despite the pending short day, I was still off by 08:30. The photo below is looking back at Grasmere from Little Tongue.

The weather was good up to the pass summit and Grisedale Tarn, but at that point the cloudbase was reached and then it started raining. At this point I met a guy from Richmond called Andy, also a Coaster, and we made a mutual decision that the low route was called for. In F1 terms I guess you could say we were also preserving our tyres (legs) to best promote our chance of a podium finish. Andy took the next photo of me at the Tarn’s eastern edge – the good news is that the Paramo reproofing seems to have done the trick.

We arrived together in Patterdale at around 12:30. On the Bradbury DVD eagle eyed viewers might have noted the sign above the local shop’s counter advertising hot bacon butties. The excellent news is that they still  sell them – standard, large, or enormous. Guess which I had! And of course it also felt right to try the “best shortbread in the world”. Not sure about that, but it was still pretty good.
Strangely I then found myself in the White Lion, for a pint of … er … White Lion (Tirrel, 3.8 %, lovely).
Since then I’ve done some clothes washing, and we’re now all waiting for reception to open at 17:00 to get our room keys.