The railway station at Windermere is one of the joys of living in this area.

Itss fractionally cheaper to go from Windermere to Kendal by train than it is to drive in (considerably so if you own a 4x4 Chelsea tractor).

You get a nice, comfortable seat. You're in no danger of being caught by nasty speed cameras at Ings. And your life expectancy is considerably enhanced by avoiding the stress of Kendal's parking and traffic mismanagement system.

However, going farther afield is more of an adventure, requiring tenacity, resourcefulness and a stubborn refusal to admit defeat in the face of overwhelming odds.

I quite like railway trips but hate booking the ticket. It is always more difficult than it needs to be. If you queue at the station, there's the psychological pressure of eighteen customers queueing behind you. Go online and you are presented with so many ticket options you enter a state of option shock.

In 1984, I wrote a piece for Hunter Davies' Good Guide to the Lakes: 'By planning ahead, you can take advantage of large savings ... but it can take a large amount of time, working out all the conditions, most of which seem to have been dreamed up for your inconvenience.' Twenty-one years on and we've evolved backwards. I'm about to go to Oxford for the weekend, so I visited virgintrains.com to buy a ticket. Millions of options, but none at the cheaper, 14-day Apex Once-In-A-Blue-Moon Saver Return that I wanted.

The next option, the 7-Day Sagittarian Super Saver (available only whilst Saturn is in transit with the constellation of that name), was more than I wanted to pay.

After that it became more bewildering, culminating in First Class I'm On Expenses So I Can Buy A Whole Carriage.

I had a brief ponder.

Then a considerably longer one, followed by a sustained rant which upset the dog. Then a bright idea occurred. Travel a day early, visit a friend in London and get a return to Oxford. This worked out cheaper than going direct but one shouldn't really have to be so devious just to make a railway journey.

A few years ago I travelled across Holland by train. The cost of the ticket bore a direct relationship to the length of the journey. You could buy it at a railway station on the day that you wanted it. You did not have to be adept at casting runes in order to decipher the ticket options.

A friend recently had to go from Windermere to Exeter. The first part of the trip was easy and cheap enough to manage by train - straight down to Liverpool, no problem. The remaining part of the journey was fraught with financial challenges. In the end she found a ticket which was easy to arrange, didn't have millions of options and was well within her budget. She flew.

I think it's time we all started campaigning for Cark Airfield to be seriously upgraded ...