Your adventure playlist

In which I give you my top picks from the films at Kendal Mountain Festival

I got home from Kendal yesterday evening, happy, utterly worn out, and ready to sit in a room on my own for a while. I think my state of mind right now can best be summed up by two piles – one of them being the extensive hotel room picnic on which I dined on the final night, too exhausted to make conversation in a restaurant; the other being the mountain of dirty laundry that I tipped out of my backpack on returning to Sheffield.

And yes, there I am, interviewing Lizzie Deignan, alongside fellow host Ben Dowman. Big thanks to Jenny Graham for the photo.

There’s an amusing tension throughout events like this: so many of the people present are most at home out on the road on their own, or striding across the fells with no one but the sheep for conversation, or paddling solo down a river – or climbing in a pair with someone they’re very close to, or burrowing into a cave system, in the company of a tight-knit and carefully selected team.

Anyway, what I’m getting at is that all of these loners and introverts are suddenly packed into a small town together. The population of Kendal almost doubles over the festival weekend. All of the hotels and B&Bs are booked up months in advance. Vanlifers park on every available patch of ground. There are long queues for the coffee vans and food trucks, and it’s impossible to get a seat in a restaurant. The marquee that hosts Basecamp ends up so crammed with bodies that at times there’s a queue even to get in, and it can take you hours to do a lap, because of the endless distraction of all the stalls and booths, and all the people you recognise – or are recognised by.

You run into everyone at Kendal Mountain Festival. As I left my hotel room on Saturday morning, I locked eyes with a spry old man who happened to be passing, and we smiled and said hello. Then I realised we didn’t know each other at all – it was Chris Bonington. A couple of hours later, at the finish line of the adidas Terrex 10k run, a friend introduced me to someone called Rob. “Hi Rob, nice to meet you!” I said. It was only later that day, when I saw him tagged on Instagram, that I realised it was Robert Macfarlane.

And everyone from every corner of the outdoor industry ends up here. Which means it’s a chance to catch up with people you might not have seen for months or years – and also that there are far too many people to catch up with. I was constantly getting sidetracked by friends I hadn’t expected to run into, and on the final day, realised that I still had so many folks I wanted to see that it would be impossible to fit them all in. Towards the end I found myself at Findra’s stall, debating with the lovely Alex Feechan whether we really count as introverts, because both of us had found it such a joy to spend a long weekend in the company of 20,000 likeminded people – and yet, all we wanted to do now was to spend a day not talking to anyone.

But anyway – I had a wonderful time, and realised afresh how lucky I am to be part of a world that places equal value on society and solitude.

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And judging the film competition took me not only into the worlds of all these different athletes and explorers and visionaries, who experience the outdoors in so many different ways, but also into the minds of the people who make these films.