No one can help where they were born. I was born in Essex, which has made me, like thousands of my county compatriots, the butt of tasteless jokes about Essex girls and Essex boys and lightbulbs - all designed to show that we are under-educated oiks from the wrong side of London.

For all that, I'm proud of where I was born and brought up. It's a part of who I am.

And the stigmata of Essex has turned out to be no great impediment to the rest my life.

When, following Barbara Castle's retirement as Blackburn's MP, I sought the nomination to replace her as the Labour candidate, I declared my place of birth (just above the section on my criminal record - none), and, despite this I was still selected.

Two years later, in 1979, the electors of the town voted me in as MP, this Essex "impediment" notwithstanding.

As I was neither born nor brought up here, I cannot formally claim that I'm of the town.

This has downsides no doubt, but also upsides.

One of the latter is that I can observe how particular is the character of people born and brought up in the town, and how this is reflected not only in accent but in attitude regardless of whether the person's heritage is Lancastrian, Irish, Polish, or - these days - Indian or Pakistani.

All this came home to me last Friday as I watched a gem of a television programme about Arthur Wainwright, the celebrated Lakeland fell-walker and author of seven best-selling 'Pictorial Guides to the Lake District' alongside scores of other books.

Wainwright was born in Blackburn in 1907, in pretty modest circumstances, attended the "Higher Elementary School", and then went to work in the treasurer's department in the Town Hall.

In his autobiography, he describes how, as a young man, he had heard of the Lakes, but had no real idea of what they were like, nor the money for the train journey.

It's hard to appreciate that in those days - the twenties and thirties - towns like Blackburn were incredibly insular: the furthest most people might travel would be to Blackpool or Manchester.

One day however Wainwright rustled up the fare, got himself to the Lakes, and was he said "utterly enslaved" by the magic of what he saw and felt.

In that he was no different from any of us who have fallen for the Lakes - which in my view have an exquisite form and beauty unparalleled anywhere else in the world.

But then Wainwright did something quite extra-ordinary.

He set himself a 13-year timetable to compile these seven pictorial guides.

Fearing that printers would mis-spell words, he insisted that his handwritten work - beautiful script and engravings - was reproduced directly on the page.

Wainwright met his 13-year deadline with a week to go!

As a lover of the Lake District and of Arthur Wainwright's guides I thought I knew a lot about the man - including the fact of his earlier years in Blackburn.

But I often wondered what gave him the extraordinary single-minded, relentless drive to proceed in his project.

When I saw this programme I finally understood.

It was Blackburn. I think there is something in the water.