A seasonal lament

This Christmas my thoughts go out to the people of Cockermouth, perhaps my favourite little town in all England, as it was Wordsworth’s. Especially I think of its small shopkeepers, for what makes the town so delightful is its many tiny businesses, selling unusual and curious goods. So well-mannered and friendly are the people who serve in these shops that making a purchase, however modest, is a pleasure in itself. Most of them have been flooded, the stock ruined.

Wordsworth was born there, and ‘fair seed-time had my soul’. He recalls, in ‘The Prelude’, walking, aged five, along the banks of the Derwent, ‘behind my Father’s House… along the margin of our Terrace Walk’. It is all still there, exactly as he knew it, for the floods happily have not damaged the house. He called the Derwent ‘fairest of all rivers’ and ‘beauteous stream’, and recalls its ‘quiet murmurs’ blending ‘with my nurse’s song’.