Always room for poetry
Poets laureate have frequently struggled. Some have found it hard to deliver, to versify to order.
Other poets, despite their evident skills, have been over-looked for the post, often because of their dubious reputation.
They have been, as was said of Byron, "mad, bad and dangerous to know".
These twin factors - exclusion and writers' block - have generated some stupendously awful poetry down the decades. However, against stiff competition, the prize must go to Alfred Austin.
Bewailing the illness of the Prince of Wales, he intoned: "Across the wires the electric message came; He is no better, he is much the same." Oh, dearie, dearie, me.
I thought of the bold Alfred when I scanned the information in the latest Bank of Scotland Purchasing Managers' Index. (Trust me, one can find poetry in anything.)
According to the PMI, economic activity in Scotland was "broadly static" during the period under survey, October.
Economy 'slowed'
Donald Macrae, the chief economist at the Bank, added: "Scottish firms continued to add to their workforces during October."
Lest we became over-excited, he went on to note that the "rate of job creation remained weak".
Mr Macrae concluded: "The Scottish economy has slowed but not gone into reverse."
The laconic Mr Macrae - who, for all I know, may have poetry in his soul - has summarised perfectly the gloomy message we are hearing from politicians in Scotland as we await John Swinney's pronouncements on public spending.
Scottish government ministers, in particular, have taken pains to stress that such recovery as there has been is frail and fragile.
Which might argue, if Mr Swinney had but world enough and time, for measures to attempt to protect those elements of public spending which tend to bolster the economy, including capital investment, skills training and higher eduction (or, to be frank, the more productive parts of HE.)
Prosaic concerns, inevitably.
However, even in such troubled times, there is always room for poetry. Even A. Austin.
I'm 
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