In the summer of 1797 Samuel Taylor Coleridge…poet, essayist and sage…retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton ‘on the Exmoor confines of Somerset and Devonshire’. The editor of the 1816 edition takes up the tale. ‘In consequence of a slight indisposition an anodyne was prescribed from the effects of which he fell asleep in his chair at the moment that he was reading in Purchas's Pilgrimage: Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were inclosed with a wall.’

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834)

Coleridge ‘continued for about three hours in a profound sleep…at least of the external senses…during which time he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions without any sensation or consciousness of effort.’

‘On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. ‘A person on business from Porlock’ interrupted him and he was never able to recapture more than ‘some eight or ten scattered lines and images.’’

To cut a long story short around this time I was prompted to take up the Poet’s mantle to show that Christ’s Hospital could still produce poets. Coleridge’s poem begins like this: ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree / Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea.’

The poem ends like this…with the rap on the door knocker breaking the connection with the Muse just as you reach the word: His flashing eyes, / his floating hair! / Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread, / For he on honey-dew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise. I make that 54 lines rather than ‘eight or ten scattered lines and images’ but perhaps editors have felt the need to stretch it out and make a little go a long way.

There is more but these opening few stanzas gave me the rhythm for my poem…part of an epic yet to be written…called Ode For The Common Man. It goes like this:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
But lofty thoughts were led astray
By withered minds too blind to see.

Now comes the ancient mariner
With grim tales yet untold
Of troubadours and knights of yore
Cast on a cross of gold.

Their trust they place in graven words
Their sophists speak to lie
But those whom force of law can make
Can law of force defy.

In England’s green and pleasant land
Man thinking heard that Grecian sound
And he allowed that hearth and home
Should n’er be harmed by clerk or gnome.

In truth and justice will we live
With hope and honour in our breast
Out out damn mystics let us be
Farms for people towns for free.

By the end of the 1980s I had figured out that a writer needed to have a book published and had chanced across a short book by Karl Marx about French Politics in the 1840s…two decades before Das Capital. It was a short readable tract that ordinary people could take in a couple of sittings and gave the broad sweep of his Magnus Opus. Others have tried to summarise Marx’ take on the world. But the best job was done by Marx himself before devoting 20 years of his life proving that he had been thinking along the right lines. As there was a chance my scholarly life would tread a similar path I told the gods to dream away to their hearts content…and use me as their scribe.

The initial outline took just a couple of sittings. But for two weeks Swedish politics refused to disentangle itself from two other manuscripts. With hindsight these can be said to have a similar provenance to my Swedish politics book as all three started life as a single manuscript before going their separate ways. One was eventually entitled Maps Mapping & Modelling and the other Green Houses or Blue Moonwaves. My interest in models and climate goes back 15 years and was always mixed up with my interest in the deep politics behind our political parties.