Ten Years (2004-2014)

When I lived and worked in Russia, for a short period of time, as a teacher, I counted

among my friends Stalinist White Russians, Buddhist New-Agers, Kalmyks, and Tartars.


But the thing I loved the most was the tantalising prospect of travelling, across

land, into the far off wilderness of the Siberian North-East.


Now if you asked me where, if anywhere, I would like to live, I should say that I

would like to go and live, for the rest of my days, in the new land of Western

Ukraine.


Let the mafioso scum have the Eastern regions. Let them have their holiday resorts,

their casinos, their nightclubs and prostitutes. Let them have their place in the sun,

while on the line from foreign countries, like Syria and Somalia, their evil minions

do covert deals in weapons of destruction. Let them burn in the sun and debauch

themselves on their nationalistic machismo.


We shall complete the promise of the Orange Revolution; and everywhere renew the hopes

and dreams which were stirred up and then so cruelly broken by the ending of the Arab

Spring.


We shall complete the promise of the Orange Revolution; a permanent revolution; to

inspire the world, by our example of peaceful co-existence, with art and music,

agrarian reform, respect for the land, productivity, poetry and permaculture.


We shall invite Jews from Israel and America to come back again and resettle their

traditional homelands. Yes, we shall invite the Jews and the Gypsies, and gay men and

women from Uganda, the dispossessed from every land, and all transgressive people to

come to us from every authoritarian regime. No visa will be required; no paperwork or

passports. We shall invite all people of good faith. And all shall be made welcome.


We shan't mind at all when rich bankers from the City of London make rude remarks

about the unmanageable level of our sovereign debt.


We shall build a new wall between the East and West; a wall of flowers, laid out to

keep marauding hordes at bay.


There we shall plant holy groves of gentle trees, well tended orchards lying either

side of a crystal stream, in season bearing fruit and fragrant blooms, to mark the

passing of each year, while on either side the gardens grow and children play in the

pastures and meadows, where cattle graze contented; the milk cows and their bull, the

ram and his ewes, the billy goat and nanny goats, the horse and the donkey; and pigs

and chickens, ducks and geese and songbirds gather, round the feet of the farmhand, in

the farmyard every morning, when he brings them their feed.


In this land, once again we say, all shall be made welcome; in this land which, by a

dictator's order, saw rural famine, during the 1930s, in the heart of the bread

basket; in this land which first, alone, and uniquely among all others, chose to

voluntarily and unilaterally give up possession of the curse of its nuclear deterrent,

and yet, which still must suffer the poisonous effects of the Chernobyl disaster for

another thousand years or more.


If I could live in a country like this, this would be a country I would be proud to

call my home.


If they would have me, I'm sure we could make it happen... but it might take some

time. Yes, it might take some.


Oh dear Lord, give us more time.


Ten years should see the difference.