A Ukranian Spring

Thank you, Justin Webb, for reminding me in Friday’s Times of what Trotsky said:

“You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you.”

Friday was chilly but with a brightly blazing sun in Brighton. The stridently yellow daffodils fluttered in the breeze muttering: 

“all’s well, Spring is coming, relax …. all is well.” 

The daffodils were wrong.

In Kyiv it was raining, cold and about to get much colder. War was being declared. No, not “declared” so much as “visited upon us” and the world was waiting aghast as the missiles flew. We were living in a world gone mad. After 77 years Europe was once again a warzone.

I recalled Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy written after the Peterloo Massacre in 1819.  The second stanza stuck in my head, now slightly re-written (sorry Percy):

I met Murder wildly shooting 

He had a mask just like Putin

Very smooth he looked, yet grim;

Seven blood-hounds followed him.

The most unlikely people have suddenly become militaristic. Quentin Letts, political sketch writer, observed with astonishment that the Liberal Democrats, of all people, were in the Commons with a bellicose “Come on Vladimir let’s be having you” attitude.

How did we let this Russian thug and our own greed get us to this ultimately predictable point? Chelsea football fans lament your ownership. Estate Agents in Knightsbridge be very ashamed. But despite my initial horror and anger something else has replaced it. The courage and the spirit of the Ukrainian people in slowing down and in places thwarting the Russian advance made me feel just a bit better. There was something epic about the tragedy of Snake Island in the Black Sea where 13 Ukrainian Soldiers and their families were slaughtered after refusing to surrender to a Russian Warship … “Go f*** yourself Russian Warship” were their last words. Courage and resilience are an enviable epitaph. And it’s their resilience that heralds the Ukrainian Spring because it is Springtime that characterises resilience.

Keats didn’t manage an Ode to Spring. Pity. The best we can find is, nonetheless, terrific.  Either the beginning of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales – “sweet showers” - or Gerard Manley Hopkins will do – just these glimpses from him:

    “Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –         

    When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush” 

  

And “the racing lambs too have fair their fling….”

     

   

 And then     

“What is all this juice and all this joy?         

     A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning

     In Eden garden…..”

“Long, lovely and lush …all this juice and joy” – yes that does it for me …that’s my kind of Spring. And this year’s Spring is delivering already – primulas and violets vigorously doing their thing and tiny tête ά tête daffodils laughing in the chill.

Spring is about innovation, new beginnings and a simple celebration of growth. A blitz of Russian missiles can’t change that. Spring cleaning is one of the most useful of occupations discarding the unused and unusable, simplifying our possessions and cleaning our shelves, our cupboards and our minds. 

I for one have spent too many seasons worrying about newspaper headlines about which I can do nothing. My mind is full of “stuff” -  much of it negative. Time for a good Spring-Clean. Time to think positively. Time to walk through woods where buds are bursting and birds are finding their voices.

It's too late to stop the stupidity. But never too late for hope. Nature always helps our perspective. Flowers grow out of rubble. Juice and joy cannot be blown away by a bomb.

HOW DO YOU FEEL?

Everyone I know is wandering around saying they’re  miserable, weary and off-colour. So it was surprising to discover we’d shot up the league table in a recent global “Happiness Index.”  It isn’t as though this was after we’d beaten the Czech Republic 5-0 with a team of young stars which  cheered me up.

But then I read the Sunday Times and the political analyses and I got miserable again. I called a friend who’d been a senior civil servant and he patiently explained “You must understand that politicians are not like us. They don’t think or behave like us.”

Well if these blogs I write are going to have any value at all (and you must realise I intend them to have the same effect on you as a large, exceedingly cold dry martini) then I had to find some cheerful ingredients. This means this’ll be a very short piece or something strange will have occurred like me drinking dry martini. Slurp! … we are lucky to be alive in “sush” times. 

First I read that many Germans think they are watching real democracy at play in the UK right now. Profound out-in-the-open debate. Unashamed arguing about who, what and why we are as a country. Sacred cows are lying slaughtered beside our potholed roads. Why can’t everyone have a voice rather than being muffled by the EU? Well that’s an amusing take.

Then there’s the Danny Devito of Westminster,  John Bercow. Throughout the world he’s becoming a rock star. In Germany (again) he’s been given Wagnerian status (that’s saying something.) They claim he doesn’t say or even shout “ORDER!” He sings it. After this is over Little John will be the highest paid one-man show ever on the global stage.

Jacinda Ardern PM in New Zealand with whom everyone has fallen in love not least because unlike nearly all politicians she is like us and she thinks and behaves like we wish they all would. She’s done more to change global gun laws than anyone else has done by reading the timing right and just saying “banned”. She really has put New Zealand on a new thought-leading map.

And of course it’s Spring.  A week ago there was an article about Spring by Caitlin Moran that made me roar with laughter – that moment of levity didn’t last too long (obviously). She said it’s the best of all seasons not least because it’s fresh, exciting and comic. Things grow where they shouldn’t and at an enormous rate. I thought about Keats and his eulogy of Autumn. How dare he not write one about Spring instead of leaving it to Wordsworth.

Here is Wordsworth lounging about as poets do “in pensive mood” recalling those daffodils

“And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.”

But it’s their boisterousness I love. Like a rowdy football crowd shouting “Yellow. Yellow. Yellow.”

 There you are then. Another injection to the Happiness Index- it’s zooming on up. Hurrah!