A trip last week to Walthamstow to visit the William Morris Gallery. Spacious, light, serene - everything so beautifully presented. And I have come home feeling reassured that it is all right to have a finger in many pies. Morris was a master auto-didact, one in a great line of independent thinkers, but the scope of his interests still takes the breath away. And he did not dabble. He tackled all on a heroic scale. One can feel the energy of the man, how leads branch out from his mainstem ideas, just like the verdure in one of his decorative borders. Drawing leads to textiles, to glass, to church architecture; reading, to poetry, to Iceland, to translation of ancient texts, to printing; historical studies to social comment, to lectures, political demonstrations and arrest. A man weaving conviction into tangible form - the shape of William Morris. I remember an extraordinarily gifted Japanese friend once dismissing her ability to play the piano - "Oh anyone can learn that - it's just a skill." Morris the polymath proved his own adroitness with 'skills' but there is more. More even than a towering desire to reinvent the world. And yet a sadness too. One feels that the energy is born of fury and disappointment, a will to repair what is otherwise fatally flawed. The whiteness and spaciousness of the William Morris Gallery give little hint of this. And Morris himself, dreaming of a world washed clean, reclothed, refreshed, hardly allows it. Today he has, in turn, become the victim of his own success - a package, a product. I have seen William Morris wellington boots and garden trowels in garden centres! Everything he would most loathe. The Arts and Crafts Movement which he founded has itself become a museum piece. Where, then, does one turn to find his legacy alive in practice?

Well perhaps within? Morris refuses to be dumbed down. His words, as the Walthamstow Gallery shows to such effect, are still infectious. His delight in whatever is difficult remains an inspiration. Utopia may seem farther away now than he would have believed possible, but the English visionary pastoral tradition never relied on practical progress for its survival.

I think of Blake, sitting under his vine, surrounded by the stench and filth of of Lambeth, or glimpsing the Thames from his beggarly room in Fountain Court and still seeing Paradise.

The energy is irrepressible. If Morris's vines and tendrils have anything to tell us it is surely this.

Can't wait to get back to work...