the news from here in 200 words

'A good planet's hard to find' (bumper sticker). And now they've found one they'll concrete it over, make the water undrinkable, air unbreathable, slaughter the wildlife, starve the already starving. (Oh and keep paying the money-lenders and cutting welfare for the poor.) BUT here the sun still breaks through haze, the equinox spring tide's high and beautiful on the Teign and Exe estuaries, the egrets and herons plentiful, the dunlin flipping and circling as one spectacular, the black swan in the flock of twenty white like a grace note in a piece of music, the fallow deer under huge oaks dreamy and dozing in morning river-mist. And I'm on the train travelling through this paradise, alongside the sea, to do one of the things I like best: running a poetry workshop, for the visionary Prince's Trust (he gets some things right), the aim of which is to take arts to children who might otherwise never feel able to enter the world of words, music, theatre. And it's hot, now, late September; and if I keep my eyes on the water I don't have to look at the thick sash of fine-particle pollution, aka smog, squatting on the hills over Exeter.