Yes, really. Grow up.

It's Cockermuth. Locals will tell you that once, then stare at you until you stop sniggering. Georgian streets, a castle on the hill, hardly any crime and anti-social behaviour so low it barely registers. Locals call it Cocky, and it is.

The Cocker and the Derwent meet in the middle of town, and so, going by the figures, does everyone's sewage. Storm overflows round Cockermouth spilled for 5,427 hours per 10,000 people a year, nearly twenty times the typical town. The pretty rivers on the postcards are full of shit.

And it rains. You get rain on 165 days a year, more than Workington or Whitehaven, and nearly 1,200 mm of it lands, 1.6 times the typical town's. The sun manages 1,417 hours. All that water goes in the same two rivers as the sewage, and Cockermouth still looks down its nose at Workington and Whitehaven. It's got 14 hairdressers and two Greggs, so everyone's well groomed and well fed while they wait for it to stop. It won't.

The editor, who sniggered