How is it possible that this beautiful poem was nowhere to be found online? Let's change that. (Potential update: "pressing button A" would now be scrolling and clicking.)

THE INVADING SPRING - Phoebe Hesketh

Man has fenced the wilderness back in the hills;
Tamed in the town he walks on concrete blocks;
And in the park his heart with pleasure fills -
But not at Wordsworth’s school-book daffodils.
No, his delight is catching up with clocks
And turning knobs and pressing button A -
The train is due; there’s half a minute to go
But the lift’s gone down and the escalator’s slow -
Praise God for the Underground this lark-song day!

Breathing, yet dead, his life is caged with steel -
Wire, wheel, and cable - automatic aids
To living - he exists but cannot feel
The slow barbaric beauty that invades
A world at Spring. He moves in crowds and queues
And reads the Morning Star and the Evening News
But cannot read the sky though April beats
A golden fanfare down the dusty streets
And breathes a green breath through the petrol fumes.


Yet a third-floor room is powerless to deny
The feel of leaves, the pollen-smell behind
New flowered cretonnes where a rebel wind
Is strong and blue with ranging through the sky.
And though the files of his mind are entered up
Like office ledgers, unknowing he holds the cup
Brimmed with the light of moons beyond his reach.
The street is thronged with more than he can know -
The Invisibles who know him; without speech
They call him; without form they come and go
And catch him by the sleeve until the slow
Unwilling flesh is beckoned from its task.
Released, he finds the vital stream that spills
A primrose light on sullen window-sills.

THOUGHT FOR SPRING

"Through this estate runs a stream. It is not quiet water running peacefully to the big river, but a noisy cheerful stream. All this country around here is hilly, the stream has many a fall and at one place there are three falls of different depths. The higher one makes the noise, the loudest; the other two are on a minor key. All these three falls are spaced differently, and so there is a continuous movement of sound. You have to listen to hear the music. It’s an orchestra playing among the orchards, in the open skies, but the music is there. You have to search it out, you have to listen, you have to be with the flowing waters to hear its music. You must be the whole to hear it – the skies, the earth, the soaring trees, the green fields and the running waters, then only you hear it.

But all this is too much trouble; you buy a ticket and sit in a hall, surrounded by people, and the orchestra plays or someone sings. They do all the work for you; someone composes the song, the music, another plays or sings, and you pay to listen. Everything in life, except for a few things is second-, third-, or fourth-hand: the Gods, poems, politics, music. So our life is empty. Being empty we try to fill it – with music, with Gods, with forms of escape, and the very filling is the emptying. But beauty is not to be bought. So few want beauty and goodness, and man is satisfied with second-hand things. To throw it all off is the real and only revolution, and then only is there the creativeness of reality."

J Krishnamurti, Letters to a Young Friend

BLAIR'S TRAGEDY

Why has Tony Blair acted as he has over Iraq? I have little concrete evidence for what I write here - it's what I can glean from the facts, as we now know them, and the character of Mr Blair, as far as we can discern any consistency in it.

You can only understand Blair's actions if you understand that people, all people, have "mixed motives". His priority was to do the best thing for Britain in the long term - it was probably a matter of personal vanity too since he knows that history will judge him in terms of the long-term consequences of his decisions; in the end, can we be sure? Don't we often present slightly selfish decisions to others, and even to ourselves, in a favourable light? It's the essence of 'spin', and that's been at the heart of this administration from the beginning. Let's hope God accepts the spun version!

What is clear, and public, is that he decided to adhere to the so-called 'special relationship', in doing so following a consistent strand in UK foreign policy. He thought that the best idea would be to be on the side of the most powerful player in the apparently dangerous new world situation and at the same time to use this, as he thought, perhaps naively, to exert leverage on Bush to reopen negotiations in the Middle East. This decision, in principle to support an invasion of Iraq, was taken days after 9/11, we now know. Blair almost certainly thought long and hard about it, consulted his conscience in the little time he had (hours? days?) then committed. He also seems to have made some effort to bargain at this point and at various other stages along the road to war, though it's clear he had very little influence over the US. After that initial commitment, there was no return - he has had to be disingenuous, and actually to lie, in order to make things happen the way the US wanted. This inconvenience occurred because the UK Parliament has to agree to a war, and we still have our own foreign policy. A more honourable man would have resigned.

A real opportunity for global dialogue post 9/11 was thrown away, there have been thousands of deaths, and the situation in Iraq is a disaster. It may have been better to follow the EU line, as many people advised at the time. All this is debatable, and beside the point here. The point is that anyone who thinks this sits easily with Blair's conscience misreads the man.

He will not be forgiven for not talking to war victims' families. Of course, he would have to tell them that he was prepared to throw away their loved ones' lives to help maintain an important alliance, and probably he should be prepared to do so. It's the least he owes them, though the scenes of confrontation would be simply heartbreaking for all concerned. As for what it has done in terms of tarnishing his political reputation, destroying his popularity, and ruining his ambitions for achieving a more just social settlement in Britain, this is Blair's personal tragedy, a fate which should not be enviable in anyone's eyes, despite his material comforts. These are things that probably keep him awake at night, things that cannot be shared with Michael Parkinson, or with anyone apart from his closest friends for years to come.

Trying to make good decisions as PM, let alone ones that you can also square with your conscience, can't be easy. Blair's belief about God's judging him is sincere, but someone should have told him a long time ago that politics and religion do not, cannot, mix. It should be obvious that someone of a genuinely religious persuasion (i.e. who wants to live according to Christian or any ethical precepts) ought not to be doing a job that requires many decisions to be taken according to utterly different principles. It is these, rather than his religious faith, that Blair has followed to the best of his judgement and history may yet absolve him, as it usually does with realpolitik, as we move into an era defined by political instability and an uncertain oil supply.

GUITAR LOSS

I've been picking up my guitar a bit more lately, and half-heartedly playing some OK cover versions with friends, though what I/we should really be doing is writing writing writing new material. Anyway, in order to kick-start some inspiration, got a lesson from a colleague here who's a kind of latter-day Django Reinhardt, and a bit of a musicologist to boot. So far so good. I picked up my guitar today to restring it, with the idea of practising some of the new chord shapes and bang! The bridge just came off and was hanging there forlornly. I surprised myself that I didn't shout or swear but took the impact very calmly.

I'm very attached to this L'Arrivee guitar - it's the first thing I ever saved up for and I've been playing it for over 13 years. Wrote some good songs on it too, mostly a long time ago, it has to be said. But for it to be broken was a wrench! The 'damage' looks superficial, however - the bridge was just glued on to begin with, so all that's called for is a bit of superglue, right?

I rushed it down to the music shop as soon as I could but when I produced the instrument, the guy there informed me (with a lot of grimacing and sighing) that it should never have been strung with steel strings in the first place! He thinks it's designed to be a nylon-strung instrument, lacking some kind of metal bar reinforcing the neck. I just don't get it - if that's the case, why has it worked so well up till now? Why is it obviously a steel-string design? I've been frantically trying to picture how a metal bar would make any change to the pressure on the bridge (as opposed to the neck) anyway. The neck has shown no signs of strain. Anyway, it's an uneasy wait till Tuesday to see if I can get a second opinion. And the first time I've been without a guitar around the house for years. Maybe I should give it all up as a bad job - it's been fun, at times almost compulsive, but has brought me almost as much pain (in terms of non-recognition) as joy (in creation).

Afterthought: Supergrass just released another well-crafted album at the end of last year. As usual, it sank without trace. These guys, a kind of latter-day ELO, have good melodies and arrangements just pouring out of them. Is it time for an Arts Council subsidy?