Monday 20 January, Paaris

I made a resolution to write here more regularly, even if it starts to sound repetitive. I’ve been reading Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal, following reading (rereading?) one of Virginia Woolf’s essays about it in her Second Common Reader. DW has replaced Woolf for the time it takes on my bedside table, and its main effect is to make me want to spend some time in the Lake District reliving the cold winter mornings of 1801. Cold and frugal: they seem to be living off the land: apples and giblet pies (but where do the giblets come from?) When they walk (their feet are their only means of transport, aside from the very occasional cart) to the nearest town it is, it seems, mainly to collect their letters. It’s hard for me to gauge how long a journey that is, but they do spend a lot of time walking, in rain and snow and foraging for moss (?) Last night, when William returned from a few days away, Dorothy gave him a steak, presumably from a local cow via the farmer. I would like to know a little more about such household details. I do know a good deal about the weather, their health, often poor, it seems, though there’s no talk of doctors and going to bed and waking up feeling better, the same or worse, usually depending on the news from Coleridge and William’s struggles with his poems and the lovely Molly, the woman who helps with food and laundry.