By the Herengracht Canal   Seats are threadbare velvet. A lion’s mouth coat-hook grips my dripping jacket in its jaws. In stained glass lit with brown light from behind, a footballer in 1920’s kit bursts through a bolt of blue lightning perhaps onto a floodlit pitch somewhere in Northern England on a winter’s evening.       After the Solstice   The longest day swings on its hinge. Newspapers smoulder with division. The lick of political flames won’t be drowned by this flash summer flood so fierce our enemy rabbits hutch together, fur on fur. We listen to the downpour…