WHEN you’ve written a column for years about your life as a travelling radical poet and musician, and the gigs and the travelling come to an end because of a devastating virus, you’re in a bit of a dilemma.

There really is only so much you can say about sitting in your office, broadcasting to the world via Facebook Live, YouTube or Zoom. It isn’t as print-worthy as, say, facing down the far right in a devastated town in East Germany or standing in for Donny Osmond at the Marquee in Soho.

My 40th anniversary European tour was reduced to one big online gig on September 8  and thanks to the many pages, including the Morning Star one, which co-hosted it I reached an audience of thousands.

One of the ironic things about lockdown is that, having learned the basic technology, I’m actually getting in front of more people than I did at my live gigs round the country. But it most certainly isn’t the same.

So what do I do? Well, I shall obviously continue to write about the music and words I make and see around me floating in the ether but I am exploding with rage about what is happening in this country in so many ways I can’t always link my feelings to the world of the arts. So sometimes I’m not going to try, starting now.

An American tech firm called Palantir, notorious for its role in assisting Trump’s drive to expel “illegal immigrants” from the US and headed by a “libertarian” Trump supporter, has been given a government contract to oversee Britain’s post-Brexit border and customs data.

It looks as though the government will break international law, thus ensuring a no-deal Brexit and then attempt to turn our cosmopolitan nation into a pinched-faced, inward-looking episode of Till Death Us Do Part without the satire, with snatch squads pouncing on people who don’t know the words to Land of Hope and Glory as a logjam of lorries full of festering produce crawling with — home-grown, British — maggots stretches all the way from Dover to the M25, quite possibly in the middle of a pandemic.

They won’t succeed in doing so. Because there are millions of caring, optimistic, open-minded people in this country who will keep things together. So many are doing it right now.

So kind are the majority of these people that when the very individuals who voted for this pointless “let’s shoot ourselves in the foot” exercise start turning up at the food banks and the homeless shelters, they won’t be told: “We told you so — piss off,” they will be treated just the same as everyone else.

And the people organising the food banks and the self-help groups won’t be “middle-class do-gooders.”

As now, they will be from the same background, the same community and often in the same situation themselves. They’re different only in the sense that they are full of humanity and have the capacity to form opinions different to those of unelected press billionaire owners and the dark-money sponsored purveyors of divisive social media memes.

There are very difficult times ahead. Solidarity and humanity is all — and not arguing with each other about who is the most left wing, it doesn’t matter at the moment.

To finish: in this world of no live gigs and no meaningful live football matches — no spectators, no point really — I have been helping a bunch of lovely people rescue our local village club from oblivion and campaign to get back into our ground, left to rot by local politics.

Grassroots football is indeed the future of the game and the first match for Southwick 1882 FC is 3pm today  — or Saturday, if you’re reading this online. Top pitch, Southwick Rec, by the bowls club.

From Southwick, to the world!

Take care, folks.