He was overtly committed to it in his early exhibitions and sustained the idea of presenting people with a visual chronology of

He was overtly committed to it, in his early exhibitions, and sustained the idea of presenting people with a visual chronology of "Life in the West of Ireland", which was the title he applied to his exhibitions between 1898 and 1914.After that, the enchantment of a local life in Sligo or Donegal or Kerry, and the depicting of individual men and women and the episodes they experienced, were transformed to a universal stage. He painted humanity's struggle, giving it an Irish location, but making its plot eternal. This prevailed from the early oil paintings, just before the First World War, until the final great canvases executed in his solitary studio in Fitzwilliam Square, during the dark and desolate 1950s in Ireland. Yeats's 1,100 oil paintings, some of them vast in size, present us with a seamless picture of Ireland's life and history, of its people and its entertainment, its horse-racing and other sports, its theatre and circus and fairground and peasant life.His brother gave up this task, which in his early years he had assumed with a lofty sense of his leadership, and departed to Italy and then France. His brother, watching the country change, and seeing its fulfilment as something quite different from the expectations of the group led by Willie and responsible for the Literary Revival, simply adapted to it.Quietly, without declaring himself, he took over the representation of this Ireland, more real, more true, more actual. This is why he is revered as no other painter that Ireland has produced. This is why ownership of a Jack Yeats is the beginning of artistic wisdom His skills as a painter were flawed But his energy and his inspiration were flawless.

He dreamed into being the life of his fellow men and women, and it is never false, never archaic, never forced.. I WAS too sunny last week when I wrote about the Greatest Storm Ever. Some readers may recall that I gave the year 4007 as a putative date for Earth to be hit by an obliterating asteroid My apologies. In an update last Monday a group of astronomers told the world that they had now identified an object (they call it SG344), which they calculated to have a 500-1 chance of impacting on our planet on or around 21 September 2030. Though it is true that SG344 may just be a bit of old rocket, nevertheless it does bring forward one possible date for Armageddon by quite a few years. I WAS too sunny last week when I wrote about the Greatest Storm Ever.

Some readers may recall that I gave the year 4007 as a putative date for Earth to be hit by an obliterating asteroid My apologies. In an update last Monday a group of astronomers told the world that they had now identified an object (they call it SG344), which they calculated to have a 500-1 chance of impacting on our planet on or around 21 September 2030. Though it is true that SG344 may just be a bit of old rocket, nevertheless it does bring forward one possible date for Armageddon by quite a few years. Since last Tuesday my complacency about my own hilltop residence has also been knocked by the revelation of the phenomenon of dormant springs. Dormant springs are not, as they sound, a dry-as-bone town in the lizardy Australian outback, but a series of subterranean water-courses ready to gush forth all over high-dwellers should the circumstances be right. And, of course, since I last put digit to keyboard on this subject, several towns and villages have indeed suffered from their worst flooding for half a century. Which is incredibly distressing and unpleasant for those who have found their Axminsters, objets d'arts and small pets floating around in a poo-smelling soup, and whose lives have been so disrupted.

I wouldn't like it at all.But I was right about the language of catastrophe being over-used. After the initial storm turned out to have been far less damaging and apocalyptic than first predicted, there then came the problem of how to describe a situation in which there were now genuine and growing problems. The result has been a breathtaking verbal inflation.For example, we seem to be incapable of using the word "flood" without coupling it to the word "chaos". Now, "chaos" is a good journalistic mot because it only has five letters, and two nice tart-sounding syllables. But have we really had "flood chaos" or have we just had floods? My dictionary defines chaos both in its classical sense of being "formless primordial matter" and the more modern usage as referring to "utter confusion". It does not strike me as being true that there has been "utter confusion" on anything except, possibly, some rail services. People have been evacuated promptly, vital services have continued to operate, the police have guarded empty homes from looters, smiling men in anoraks have appeared driving 1960s amphibious cars.

Chaos is simply the wrong word.Likewise, on Saturday I awoke to discover that - according to the nice Northern woman on the radio - "much of Britain is under water" It wasn't, of course. As a matter of fact she could quite truthfully have stated that "very little of Britain is under water". At the time of writing, something like 10,000 households have been evacuated because of floods out of the 25 million available. But somehow it no longer seems sufficient simply to state the true extent of any tragedy or trial; today it has to be given celebrity treatment, fêted well beyond its desserts, to ensure that the attention is grabbed.That's why this is, we are told, "bad news for the Government".