The Lake District in Mist

I needed to get away this Christmas. Too many unpleasant things pressing in on me all at the same time. The poet William Wordsworth dealt with it by drawing on the solace of the natural world. I needed his thoughts and decided that this Christmas would be a time for the Lake Poets.

Armed with a copy of the Prelude and a thin volume of Shelley and not much else, I bundled Sally the Psycho Dog into my newly acquired VW Campervan, bought in defiance of all logic of how I should be spending my time, and headed North.

Calling on the way at my friends, I again apologised that this Christmas, for the first time in a long time, I would not be joining them. The truth is that my friend Philip had died during the year. He was head of the family, a doctor who had eschewed all personal gain for a life dedicated to the exploration of specialist geriatric patient care. I simply knew him as a man who befriended me on a mountain at a time when I needed friends. Only at his memorial service did I learn the full nature of his dedication to his work. I didn’t really need to know the detail; it was evident in just meeting him that he was an exceptional man. Christmas without him there for dinner would be a reminder of the loss of a friend. So I hugged his daughter and granddaughter and exchanged gifts with the whole family and continued my journey onto the motorway and up through Lancashire to the edge of Morecambe Bay.

Christmas Day came slowly. A mist hung over everything and the hills were hidden from view. It is one of the moods of the Lake District that I love. The laptop remained unopened. The ugliness, that has crept into so many of our Internet sites of late, remained locked away. The angry voices were quietened. I had one purpose in mind. It was to go to Grasmere and visit Dove Cottage, where Wordsworth had written the Prelude.

I passed Lake Windermere. Normally it is so busy with tourists that it is a place I avoid. It was quiet and the weak sun struggled and failed in its wan attempt to part the mist that hung so heavily over it:

Driving past the lake, I continued up to Grasmere and parked in the empty car park just below where Wordsworth had lived and written his epic poem. The short narrow lane to his place was empty as I made my way to it. I passed by the wall of the cottage dwelling in which had lived the woodcutter, whose wife looked after Wordsworth and his sister. It is a detail, but Wordsworth felt keenly that the loss by the woodcutter of his land had denied him the dignity that he believed was the right of every man.

As I walked up the narrow lane, pressed in by cottages on either side, it was the detail also of the small ferns with their delicate fronds and dark stems growing in the old stone wall that took my attention. They caught the moisture of the mist in the air and turned it into droplets of water:

Just beyond the wall, was Dove Cottage itself. Unbelievably for such a heavily visited place, I had it entirely to myself. The museum was closed, the noisy tourists did not queue outside the teashop and the walkers did not trudge past with their backpacks and heavy boots. The place was exactly as it would have been in the early nineteenth century and Sally the Psycho Dog and I had it entirely to ourselves. For half an hour I just stood there, trying to recall bits of Wordsworth poetry and feeling as close to him as I had ever felt.

The thing about Wordsworth is that we share something of an emotion in common – or at least an emotional detachment. During those heady days in France, when he witnessed the French Revolution, he could share the hopes that sprang from the chants for Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité . He would write later in The Prelude: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive But to be young was very heaven!” The truth was that he was never totally engaged in events. It was not that he did not always feel keenly the plight of the common man, but he never fully trusted the instinct of the common man. He was to write:

...'Twas in truth an hour
Of universal ferment; mildest men
Were agitated; and commotions, strife
Of passion and opinion fill'd the walls
Of peaceful houses with unquiet sounds.
The soil of common life was at that time
Too hot to tread upon; oft said I then,
And not then only, 'what a mockery this
Of history; the past and that to come!
Now do I feel how I have been deceived,
Reading of Nations and their works, in faith,
Faith given to vanity and emptiness;
Oh! laughter for the Page that would reflect
To future times the face of what now is!'

It is strange, because there is much of what he writes that can be seen in our outrage at the events of the last few years: the manipulation of the truth that sent us to war, our disgust at the calm debate of torture by our agents, at the acceptance of the collateral loss of civilian life in Iraq, the abomination of the removal of Habeas Corpus and the incarceration of people in Guantánamo Bay and the overwhelming fear of the loss of civil liberties. Yet, now I see our frustration turned into a rejection of those very leaders of the Democratic Party in whom we have put our trust. Every element of our society from large industrial corporations that created our wealth, the laws that govern our relationships and capitalism as an economic system and even our trust in our nations are being rejected. Do I have confidence in the alternatives or do I, like Wordsworth, feel ill at ease at what may simply, in anarchy, become the rule of the guillotine and the rise from the dissension of another set of tyrants?

I will not linger too long with these thoughts, nor did I on Christmas Day. I returned to the Campervan and rummaged among the Christmas presents. I found what I was looking for in the unopened newly roasted ground coffee that Anne had bought for me from a shop in Lancaster. The small Italian percolator bubbled on the gas stove and the aroma filled the air and I drank the finest coffee that I had tasted for a long time.

Then, again like Wordsworth, I let nature work its magic and Sally and I walked for a long time in the woods around Grasmere lake:

And afterwards? Ah, it was tea time, at the edge of the woods. Time to cut the first slice of the Christmas cake that Jo had baked and decorated for me. Then another slice, accompanied by a large sigh of genuine contentment.

An unusual Christmas Day and maybe, to many tastes, a slightly solitary one. Yet, it was somehow perfect – perfect for me at this time and perfect at that place where I found myself.