Republicans are prepared to postpone Irish unification in return for a show of respect to their tribe while mainstream unionists have moved on

Republicans are prepared to postpone Irish unification in return for a show of respect to their tribe; while mainstream unionists have moved on from the seige mentality of "no surrender".But, in the end, Mr Major was constrained by his party and the parliamentary situation. At one shoulder he had Lord Cranborne, a hardcore unionist, at the other Michael Howard, a hardcore law- 'n'-order-ist Mr Blair has neither And he has the ability to learn from Mr Major's mistakes. One of the causes of the breakdown of the last ceasefire was that there were no concessions on prisoners. Mr Blair has shown flexibility: it is not pretty, but it works.Another lesson the new government has learned from Mr Major is that it pays to listen to advice from Dublin. Now, it is time to look beyond Sinn Fein and the UUP, and to demand movement from Dublin on articles 2 and 3 of the Irish constitution, which lay territorial claim to Northern Ireland.Today what matters is the need to move beyond the symbolism of who shakes hands with whom.

It is time to start talking about some of the thorny details of a settlement based on consent. If that includes rewriting the Irish constitution, so much the better, since that would steal a line from both sets of hard-liners in the north - unionists who want to go on distrusting the Republic, and republicans who want to continue fantasising about union with the South.. "The land of dancing trees". This was a striking phrase I heard on the radio yesterday or the day before, used to describe the Somerset Levels. People who live in that mysterious wet place of eels and tors and Sedgemoor had been asked to speak into Tony Staveacre's microphone about their feelings on the place, and one of them, I think it was a farmer who had moved there from the Mendip Hills, said that when he got there he was told he would be living in "the land of dancing trees". The reason for this was that a lot of the Somerset Levels is no more than a crust over the watery ooze below, and far from being solid land it has all the rigidity of a stretch of duck boards over a marsh. "You can see this when something really heavy comes past," he said "Maybe a big lorry or a herd of cows. They'll shake the ground as they pass, and if there's a line of poplars nearby, you can really see them dancing."The land of dancing trees Nice phrase, that.

He was obviously fond of it, as he used it several times, but it's the kind of phrase that will probably fade away as it is not being used for some kind of tourist campaign and won't be immediately identified Costa Blanca, yes Cote d'Azur, yes. Lake District and the Cornish Riviera, yes, even though nobody has much idea what a riviera actually is. But a fortnight in the Land of Dancing Trees? Sorry, sir - we don't seem to have that on our computer...It is stray, directionless thoughts like these which occupy one's mind on long car journeys. I have recently been driving to some of the further parts of Wales to take part in a BBC Wales TV series about some fine old Welsh families, and a long way it is too. The scenery by itself, though grand, is not enough to keep you awake en route, so I have taken a huge bag of audio tapes with me to accompany and channel my will o' the wisp thoughts. They are all of BBC radio programmes I have recorded over the months, thinking they will one day be worth listening to, and strange bedfellows they make too. On the same tape as the Somerset Levels portrait, for instance, there was someone doing a good reading of a Bertrand Russell essay "In Praise of Idleness" which made the point (quite repeatedly, actually) that there is nothing very good about work for its own sake.He was writing in the 1930s, when it must have required a degree of courage or insouciance to praise unemployment in words like these..."I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organised diminution of work First of all, what is work? Work is of two kinds.