I SEE THE livestock farmers are upset that the Minister for Agriculture, Mr Yates, has "offered them hope - but not pounds, shillings and pence."

This is a disappointing reaction from the farmers. A man who offers hope should not be treated with disdain. Money is not everything. We cannot fumble in the greasy till for ever. It was not for this the wild geese spread the grey wing upon every tide.

The denigration of the gift of hope is particularly sad as we draw near St Valentine's Day. The farmers, particularly the younger ones, would do well to recall Kate Flynn, the darlin' girl from Clare, and of how she was won.

She was not won by Fagin, despite the land he tilled and the cattle he had grazin' and the house he meant to build, and the fat stock feedin' there, and the hens an' the chickens.

No. This boastful display of firm wealth (though there is something endearing in the house Fagin "meant to" build) won neither the day nor the beautiful Kate.

Nor did Sharkey fare much better with his huckster shop. Ms Ryan was not impressed with its geegaws, the curtains on the window an' the old clock on the stair, despite its keepin' time to the minit.

In the words of the poet, wid all yer gold ye'll never hold a hold upon the darlin' girl from Clare.

And who won her in the end? A man with only the bright flame of hope in his heart, who kept wise counsel and did not try to impress with worldly goods. Who late one night when the moon was bright simply asked Ms Ryan to share his joy and his sorra'.

An' begorra on the morra he was married to the girl from Clare.

Of course, there was the usual row with the da over the dowry but that was to be expected.

All right. Say, for example, you don't believe in the Loch Ness monster, but you secretly, perhaps even unconsciously, nurture the hope that it may exist. You then have something in common with Ted Danson, star of Loch Ness the new film about the hunt for the creature.

He was apparently inspired by the romance of belief in the monster's existence: "We must all have something hopeful in life. We must all have something bigger than ourselves to believe in the possibility that there is something magical beyond the everyday . . . I have no fear of being conned, even if proved wrong, as long as I have enjoyed the ride."

I think farmers should seriously consider those wise words. Farmers have practical work to do every day of their lives, but they also run the risk of becoming mired in it. They must now and then look to the sky.

But listen. More than money is at stake in this business of Joan Collins being sued by her publishers for the return of a hefty cash advance.

The mistake Ms Collins really made was to deliver her manuscript too soon, a mere 2 1/2 years after its commission. She should have followed the example of the recently deceased Harold Brodkey.

Brodkey has been described as America's most famous unread writer, and as a man who ruined his reputation as a novelist by publishing a novel.

This was a man who knew much of hope, and of how to instil it in commissioning editors: before finally publishing The Runaway Soul, he kept five publishers in increasingly desperate hope for nearly 20 years, receiving substantial cash advances from all of them.

The book, when finally published, was a flop.

Should Brodkey therefore be reviled? No. There was majesty in his imagination, in his ability to create optimism, however misplaced, in the deeply unimaginative souls of commercial concerns. He held hope high in his own heart and in those of many others, year after year.

I am taken aback then to read somewhere that Brodkey's work, in its attempts to challenge holiness, to make an original god of every man, is vulnerable to English pragmatism and Occam's razor.

Of course, we accepted long ago that nob sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatern - oh, all right, that entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity - but the law of economy is hardly holy writ when it comes to the life of the imagination and the creation of lasting art, never mind what William of Ockham (or his pals the dubious Durand de Saint Pourcain and Nicole d'Oresme) had to say.