Cockermouth | Zeb Bakes

Grasmor from Harris Park, Cockermouth

19th March 2013

As you can see it is pretty wintry still in England this week. This view of the fells from Harris Park in Cockermouth gives you a feel for the raw and unsettled weather we have at the moment.

Windfarm on Cumbrian fields Today we drove in search of Dad’s opthamology appointment to two different hospitals as he wasn’t sure which one it was in, which added a certain frisson to the proceedings, but all went well and we had a lovely drive over the fells, waved at the sea at Whitehaven, and passed the windfarms on the fells as the snow and sleet gusted around us.

We returned via Thornby Moor Dairy Cheese Farm (as recommended by our friend Andrew Auld of the Loaf in Crich) where we sampled and bought some wonderful cheeses.

Thornby Moor Dairy

Cumberland Farmhouse Cheese from Thornby Moor Dairy, Carlisle

Cheeses made with unpasteurized milk from shorthorns, delicious goat cheeses and artisan farmhouse cheeses.

Before being unwrapped and cut

We admired the timeline of cheese on the shelves and then returned to Cockermouth for lunch. Edit: In view of some of your comments I will try and add a bit more here – I may not have understood this in its entirety but the cheese maker who came out to help us expalined that the rows of cheeses on the shelves were all the same cheese, the small version of the farmhouse cheese at different points between 0 – 3 months. The mould gathers on the outside of the cloth the cheese is wrapped in, which is removed before being presented for sale. The dairy produces a blue cheese but this wasn’t it. I apologise if I haven’t got this quite right.

Maturing cheese at Thornby Moor Dairy Cheese Farm

This afternoon we popped out to the New Bookshop for coffee and cake.

Coffee and Gingerbread

The New Bookshop alone has sold more than 200 copies of The Cockermouth Poets, which I think is pretty impressive for a poetry anthology!

The Cockermouth Poets

Zeb has been not very well but we hope he is finally on the mend. He loves it up here usually and he has been very miserable. We love the out of hours vets who gave him pain relief on Sunday night at 10 30 pm when he couldn’t stand up without twisting and turning. Yesterday he managed to produce part of the bag that he ate 12 days ago which has somehow managed to travel through his digestive tract and re-appear as a gigantic Cuban cigar of rolled leather. So lets hope that he recovers fully. He slept in the middle of the bed last night.

Now it’s time to cook supper again: roast vegetables and chicken pieces I think, and maybe sharpen the kitchen knives before I start.

Cockermouth Poets cover published 2012

Michael (my Dad) will be 84 on Christmas Day and has just got delivery of his latest anthology, The Cockermouth Poets. It’s an eclectic collection of poems from Wordsworth to schoolchildren. Many of the poems appeared on a poetry trail as individual posters put up in shop windows in Cockermouth following the bad floods they had there in 2009. As the rain pours down over the country once more and many people are suffering with floodwaters this year, it is a reminder that life is unpredictable and yet full of joy and creativity. You can hear Michael reading some of his own work on Listen up North. I am particularly fond of his poem about writing to Rita Hayworth.

The Cocker, Cockermouth,

He has popped one of my poems in there as it was included on the original poetry trail. If you visit Cockermouth you will find the poems on the walls of the New Bookshop on Main Street and be able to pick up a copy there and I think in Keswick at the bookshop too. All profits are going to the Cockermouth Mountain Rescue and Save the Children charities.

My attempts at poetry are usually kept separate from this blog but I thought I would give my Dad a little puff of publicity. He works so hard at his books and it has been a long year. He often torments me by asking me to do a little typing and I end up scouring the internet for poems and information about the poets, but it is always a pleasure to help out and argue about words and the provenance of poems with my Dad.

Here is my poem as it appeared on the Trail in the window of the wine bar in the poem. When the floods came Michael was on the other side of the world…

Cockermouth Poets, Poetry Trail

Some places where people are writing about The Cockermouth Poets:-

Martin Wainright’s Guardian Northerner Blog about’ The Cockermouth Poets’. He makes me smile when he writes about how Baron is very good at getting people to do things….

The wonderful Listen Up North mentions the book here and links to us too, most honoured!