The delightful and gorgeously pretty Victoria Hoe came to the Riverside Hotel today to film a piece for ITV’s “Lookaround” about whether people should be penalised for owning a second home in the Lakes. Our MP, Tim Farron, has proposed that second home owners here should pay double council tax, a policy which I strongly oppose. We filmed the piece on the new balcony at the Riverside with the river raging a torrent below. As a prop I used the latest edition of Cumbria Life which has articles by Stuart McConie, the Radio 2 DJ, Hunter Davies, the author and Kevin Roberts, the head of Saatchi and Saatchi, all of them second home owners here and all of them great ambassadors for the Lakes . Victoria, who works for cash-strapped Border TV does everything herself (in contrast the BBC news teams invariably go around in gangs of three- a presenter, a cameraman and a sound recordist)- and she does it with great panache. As I haven’t got a recording of today’s piece, I’ve accompanied this post with a recording of Victoria at the opening of the Lakes Hospitality March Show where she set up the camera to record herself riding a Segue. The same clip has a brief shot of me with Paul, our Wagyu bull, who tragically died last week (see entry for November 4th).
Jonathan Denby’s Slow Life blog from the Lake District
