We loved the human touch. We loved the dresses ...

A new year's poem

'Lo! where this silent marble weeps,

A friend, a wife, a mother sleeps ... '

Thomas Gray was pretty good on death

but no one quoted from his Elegy,

not even the Earl, who stopped a nation's breath

with perorations on the Life of Di

and veiled threats to the royals to desist

from stifling every son and heir with "duty",

to shed their medieval carapace

and open up to a little natural beauty,

e.g. flowers, the deep language of the heart

(with abominable verses, teddy bears,

all kinds of kitsch, that pitiable art

of crying out in communitarian tears).

And yet ... the sea of flowers rose and rose.

Not even the Duke could play at King Canute.

Queen II struck a slightly less rigid pose.

The flag came down. The courtiers were mute.

Five walkers walked. The piercing Requiem

was effortlessly upstaged by Elton John.

The costly, sitting case of Us and Them

is up and running, again and again and again...

Earl Spencer was a hero for ten minutes. Ten

minutes later both his feet are clay -

a sort of post-modern Duke of Wellington,

the fearless voice of the aristocracy.

And Di? Poor little rich girl, martyred to

the Sloanes and thrones of England, plc.

We loved her glamour and the derring-do,

but Dodi and the playboys? Pretty tacky.

We loved the human touch. We loved the dresses.

And if Wham! moved her more than Mozart - well!

at least she took some note of real distresses

and knew about the marriage of heaven and hell.

The Ritz, for instance, and the underpass

in Paris, city of dreams, of Notre Dame.

The black Mercedes as the river Styx.

The bodyguard as implacable ferryman.

We bend to watch the ads, the news, the soaps.

'Just a perfect day...' The Beeb's in on the act.

And while we goggle, Virgil's and Dante's scripts

blow off the froth, and dance us down to the crypt.

New Britain, touchy-feely, good for a cry

like Gazza, Paula, The Governor of Hong Kong?

Or just the latest spice - hysteria?

A backward nation going for a song?

You pays your money ... like Al Fayed, pere,

Neil Hamilton, the Man in the White Suit.

It all adds up to a very British affair:

money and class and justice an each-way bet.

In Islington the populace grew hot

about the rights of man, of women too.

It all comes down to legalising pot,

who does the ironing, and who cleans the loo.

(WHO? WHO? I'll tell you. Mrs Mop,

from Kingston. She earns as much, per diem,

for sluicing out the media talking shop

as a poet on a work replacement scheme.)

Hale-Bopp enthralled us with its fiery tail

and silly name. It spoke of things not dreamt -

ambiguous endings to a fairytale,

the birth of a bran'-new Labour government.

You thought Shane Warne had taught us how to spin,

and Greg Rusedski how to nail a serve?

Rank amateurs! compared with Mandelson,

and Tony's skill in how to hit a nerve.

New Labour washes white, it washes red,

it washes wishes faster than a shogun,

tumbles Tories out of their sleazy bed

and cleans up Ulster's U-bend with Mo Mowlam!

No joking matter, true, but what a hoot

to watch our Tony wave the Union Jack

and cluster round the Gerry Adams suit

and pat the Union on its beefy back.

That reminds me. Cows went mad - official.

They cannibalised themselves from top to tail-o.

Men in white coats now live on their own offal.

Ain't science great? Eat your heart out, Galileo!

The great big Cambridge University Press

biography of Lawrence (3 vols, 3 authors)

landed like a meteorite on my desk,

heavier than the Booker of all Bookers.

Talk about a fat one, or a fatwa

by other means, a reverence for words.

Rushdie's still on the run, while Winnie Mandela

sings about freedom, free as the bloody birds.

Dolly the Sheep was one of the Top Ten Women.

Woodward, Louise, had the common man on fire.

Mother Teresa passed Go, and went to heaven.

Five cleavages took the pop song ever lower.

The Little England party had a choice:

Ken Clarke, mad Redwood, or young master Hague,

a Rover scout, with Yorkshire in his voice

and Thatcher's virus deep inside his head,

caught when he was a boy. The brief is now

re-branding; catch the People's Party up;

hate Brussels; milk the multinational cow -

caring Conservatism is a baseball cap!

Meanwhile, by some forgotten village green,

John Major's reading thoughts into his beer,

moss on his specs ... I think I hear him hum

a little ditty. This is what I hear:

Cricket and sleep have got me through

the worst of sixty years.

I hope they'll do the same for you.

Goodnight, goodnight my dears.