Alan Brownjohn

Something Audenesque for a conclusion?    In dignified, indented, limestone lines? But in Wystan’s geology hills were permanent,    Whereas human geography constantly changes, That being its only constancy. We reach plateaux in life    When friends seem likely always to be there, Changeless features in the landscape. And then –

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The young man from the Russian Republic who had come to the Stockholm election wake had also, rather surprisingly, witnessed the final days of the Walton by-election in Liverpool. ‘Well, I am confused,’ he replied bemusedly to the obvious question. ‘I thought democracy was one style, and it is many.’ He would not be drawn on which he preferred, or on whether anything he had seen in the West could be adapted to his own circumstances. He was still digesting the differences between British and Swedish elections, from the door-step activity at the grass roots all the way up to the manner in which campaigns are presented and reported on television.

In a cold October twilight, down towards An estuary beach of mud and stones, Three lifelong friends lurch and scramble over banks Of red soil, fallen from cliffs which one afternoon, Fifty years ago, broke and carried the whole of a church, Its churchyard and half a road to the shores below.

They plunge headlong on crumbling cakes of earth Where tipped-out garbage has mingled with the rubble,...