jamescalumcampbell

Last week, two rather distinguished Roman Catholics voiced strong, and seemingly conflicting opinions on the topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI).  In his “essay” (sic), “The Labour Party Is Playing With Fire Over Its Future and the Future of the Country”, discussing what might be called the State of the Union, Sir Tony Blair said that AI was the next Industrial Revolution, and that if we didn’t embrace it wholeheartedly, the United Kingdom would cease to be a serious power.  By way of contrast, in his Encyclical Letter Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV warned that AI posed a threat to our humanity, and, drawing attention to the fact that he was deliberately using strong language, he said we needed to “disarm” it. 

“Disarm” was an interesting choice of word.  People can be disarming by being charming.  The ability to disarm is part of the armamentarium of the diplomat.  On the other hand, you can disarm by force, by issuing the order, “Drop your weapons.”  Thus you render an opponent powerless.  I have a notion that the Pope was using the word in the latter sense.  If AI is going to play a role in our lives at all, then it needs to be totally subservient, a tool, of itself, powerless.  Otherwise it will be an existential threat. 

Pope Leo has his critics.  Religious leaders are frequently criticised when they are perceived to venture into the political realm.  I was amused that somebody wrote into the papers saying that Leo had no right to “pontificate” on such matters.  I would have thought that if anybody in the world had the right to pontificate on anything, it would be the Pope.  But the Pope exercises a huge influence on a sizeable chunk of humanity, and when people feel their vested interests to be under attack, when they feel themselves in danger of being disarmed, they are liable to respond with an argument ad hominem.  Don’t tackle the issue; undermine the office. 

Of course Sir Tony has his critics too.  I heard an interview with a couple of university literary academics on BBC Radio 4.  They were asked to mark Sir Tony’s Essay.  One gave it 61%, “a low 2/1”, but the other failed it.  Apparently it wasn’t really an essay, but more a polemic, full of clichés and soundbites.  It wasn’t Montaigne.  Reading the essay, which covers a very wide range of current geopolitical issues, I confess I got the sense that Sir Tony – I won’t say doesn’t know what he’s talking about – but rather that he himself is not that interested.  Twenty five years ago when he was Prime Minister he was talking up the dawning age of Information Technology, and I recall somebody close to him saying that the PM himself never used computers.      

What exactly is an essay?  Chambers says it is a written composition less elaborate than a dissertation or treatise.  An attempt; a tentative effort.  I’m thinking of writing an essay and submitting it to the Margaret Brown Essay Competition, run by the Wigtown Book Festival, the closing date being June 15^th, so I’d better get on with it.  I see that the competition organisers reserve the right to say what constitutes an essay.  I read last year’s winner, Firle by Tamara Fulcher, which touches on themes of homelessness and in particular the unaffordability of homes.  I thought it was very good, but I wouldn’t have called it an essay, rather something more along the lines of a memoir.  Another stipulation of this essay competition is that you must not utilise AI to generate the essay, or part of it, or if you do, you will be disqualified, and for good.  The Radio 4 university academics were asked how good the current body of English Literature undergraduates are at writing essays.  In the closed book environment, under exam conditions, apparently they are not very good.  They have become too reliant on all sorts of apps and platforms, including AI.

At school, we studied the English essayists, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele (who published The Spectator between 1711 and 1712), Charles Lamb and so on.  They seemed rather remote from us.  Sir Roger de Coverley, A Dissertation upon Roast Pig, Mrs Battle’s Opinions on Whist, etc.  I think I would have preferred to have been given something by George Orwell, but maybe that was too political.  After all, T. S. Eliot turned down Animal Farm, on behalf of Faber & Faber, perhaps because people didn’t want to offend Uncle Joe so soon after the end of the Second World War.  If I were to give a fine example of the essay form, I would go for Orwell’s Politics and the English Language.  I think we can be certain that Orwell would have abhorred the notion of Artificial Intelligence.  He would have been on the side of the Pope.    

Meanwhile an old colleague of Sir Tony, Alan Milburn, is trying to figure out what to do about “NEETS”, people who are not in employment, education, or training.  It sounds like a definition of the aristocracy.  You might suppose – I dare say many people do – that NEETS are pretty demotivated, but it turns out that many of them have been educated and trained, but nobody will employ them.  I gather from the Radio 4 Public Relations programme When It Hits the Fan, in a discussion between David Yelland and Farzana Baduel, that a distinguished financier, addressing a room of bankers in Hong Kong, talked up AI and spoke of the need to discard “lower value human capital”. 

This is the real threat of AI.  It’s all about power.  It centralises power in the hands of the very few.  I think Pope Leo is right.  It needs to be disarmed.

I believe that at time of writing (mid-morning on the May bank holiday) a temperature record has already been putatively broken somewhere in England – the highest lowest night time temperature, so to speak, for May.  Somewhere down south, it didn’t drop below 19 Celsius.  And it is anticipated that today the highest highest temperature, as it were, somewhere up in the mid-thirties Celsius, will be achieved.  Up here, things are less tropical, and most people are grateful for it.  There was even a threat of rain yesterday morning, though by the time I reached Glasgow for a lunch appointment in the west end, it was a glorious sunny day with temperatures in the low twenties.  Mindful of the adage, “Ne’er cast a cloot, till May is oot”, I duly cast a cloot, because of course May doesn’t refer to the month, but rather May blossom, the hawthorn, which has burgeoned in all its magnificence. 

I heard an Aussie on the radio, saying she couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about.  Right enough, I remember when I was working in Brisbane, Queensland, it was regularly 37 Celsius by about 7.30 in the morning.  I loved it.  I used to go out for a run in the afternoon sun.  A couple of times, before it was considered to be not-the-done thing, I ran up Uluru, in the Hot Red Centre, in temperatures of 44 degrees.  Mad dogs and Scotsmen.  I can only once remember feeling stressed out during a run in the heat.  It was in Albert Park in Melbourne, where they hold the Grand Prix, when it so happened it was very hot and also very windy, a deadly combination.  I remember I just ran through all the water sprinklers in order to keep cool. 

Here, it’s a great talking point, the weather.  Characteristically, somebody has already said to me, “Aye, we’ll miss it!”  This is supposed to me the time for fixing leaks in the roof, both figuratively and literally.  In a time of abundance, we are supposed to be laying down stocks in reserve, for a time of scarcity.  But like the foolish virgins, we can usually think of something better to do, later to hold up our hands in dismay at the arrival of the beast from the east.  I’ve forgotten precisely what it was the foolish virgins neglected to do.  Something to do with trimming the oil lamps.  It always seems to be a shortage of oil that’s at the bottom of all human ructions.  Anyway the wise virgins were apparently not inclined to help the foolish virgins out.  You made your bed, now lie in it – which does not seem very christianly. 

Politicians are acutely conscious of the weather, the political weather.  Their current modus operandi is to stick a wet finger in the air, see whence the wind blows, and act accordingly.  There is, for example, current controversy about the apparent leniency of a sentence handed down by a judge upon a group of children found guilty of a very serious crime.  That the public may hold an opinion on this judgment, and express it, is all well and good.  But it seems to me that the last person on earth who should express such an opinion, one way or another, is the Prime Minister.  The Prime Minister is “appalled”.  Is not there supposed to be a clear distinction between the executive and the judiciary?

But people in positions of power court, that is, woo, public opinion.  The police have invited all-comers to submit a complaint, should they so wish, about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.  I have absolutely no opinion about the alleged misdemeanours of the naval officer formerly known as Prince, but the idea that you can invite the public en masse to level accusations against an individual who, no matter how beleaguered, is innocent until proven guilty, is a recipe for disaster, as damaging as the indiscriminate trawling of the sea bed.   You would have thought the police of all people would be well acquainted with the reality of complaints that are both mischievous and vexatious, without actively going out to look for them.  There is already a perfectly adequate mechanism in place, whereby somebody who is the victim of a crime can report the circumstances to the police, just as the victim of a miscarriage of justice can make an appeal. 

The current ructions within the Labour Party seem to me to be largely a response to political climate.  Their malcontents are dismayed, not so much at government policy, as by the polls.  They are terrified of Nigel Farage.  You would have thought the rational thing, indeed the honourable thing to do would be to take Mr Farage on in terms of his policies, take him to task, and present the electorate with something better.  But no.  Instead, they brief against the PM, because they believe he has become an electoral liability.  Well, let’s see what happens.  You might say the only thing that is certain is that come the next general election we will get the government, and the Prime Minister, we deserve.

But you can’t say that up here, where the climate is different.  Quite the opposite.  Down in Westminster, judging from past experience, we are highly likely to get a government we didn’t ask for. 

  One evening in 1963 we sat down as a family for tea, as usual, in the kitchen.  We only used the dining room when we had guests.  I occupied my usual place at the red-topped Formica table, the kitchen cabinet behind me, cooker and the anthracite stove ahead, the radio on my right, where somebody was droning on about the stock market.  We were eating haddock.  Dad asked mum where she got her fish from.

  “The fishmonger at Broomhill Cross.”

  “Mm.  You’ll stop buying fish from him.”

  “Why?”

  Apparently the fishmonger had been heard to cast disparaging remarks about Winston. Something about his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1920s when, allegedly and in some unspecified way, he had fiddled his budget.  Mum listened to this patiently, made no comment, and simply nodded in acquiescence.  But I couldn’t help but notice that in the coming days and weeks I was still being sent round to Broomhill Cross to buy haddock or whiting or mackerel or, occasionally, salmon.  The subject was not raised at the kitchen table again. 

   My father had a great word for Winston, who was still a sitting Member of Parliament.  Of course that had very much to do with the great man’s wartime leadership.  When the war broke out in 1939 Dad had just started as a constable in the City of Glasgow Police.  In 1941 came the Clydebank Blitz.  Everything was flattened.  I think the sight of the devastation had a tremendous effect upon him, because shortly afterwards he volunteered for the RAF.  He went to London for a short period of induction, thence off to train in Canada.  The Battle of the Atlantic was in full swing, and my dad told me that in Sunday morning service on deck, the troops sang “For those in peril on the seas” with great fervour.    

  We had on our shelves the six volumes of Churchill’s History of the Second World War in the rather handsome London Reprint Society publication with its yellow hardback covers.  I still have them.  I didn’t think to attempt to read them at the time, but I was curious enough to leaf through them.  They were obviously conceived and composed on a massive scale, each volume commencing with the “Moral of the Work” – In War: Resolution, in Defeat: Defiance, in Victory: Magnanimity, in Peace: Goodwill.  It almost sounded like a template for living.  I wondered if I should adopt Winston as my hero.  Even amid all the stale statistics about troop displacements gathered in appendices, and the humdrum correspondence with his generals, something of the glamour of the man came through.  I flicked through Volume 1, The Gathering Storm, whose two parts, From War to War, and The Twilight War, each ended on a personal note which I found totally gripping.  Before September 3^rd, 1939, Winston was out of office, but sufficiently prominent in his condemnation of Nazi Germany to know he might be a target for assassination.  That was why he invited his former Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Thomson, out of retirement.

  I told him to come along and bring his pistol with him. I got out my own weapons, which were good.  While one slept the other watched.  Thus nobody would have had a walk-over.

 In my imagination I couldn’t hear Mr Macmillan say anything like that.

  And I was quite captivated by Winston’s account of his acceptance, at long last, of the premiership, the crucial meeting with Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, and the subsequent summons to the palace.  The light banter with His Majesty.

  “I don’t suppose you have any idea why I have sent for you.”

  “Sir, I couldn’t possibly imagine.” 

  So at long last he was asked to form a government.  “I felt as if I were walking with destiny…”  And when Winston went to bed at 3 am, he slept soundly and had no need for cheering dreams.

 Facts are better than dreams.

  And I wondered about that.  Were facts truly better than dreams?  Was so-called “quotidian experience” (by which I think was meant everyday life) truly richer than the life of the imagination?  I had my doubts.

  I was reminded of all this stuff on Saturday night because the movie Darkest Hour was on the telly (BBC 2, 8 pm).  Believe it or not, this was actually the first time I have switched my telly on this year.  I was slightly surprised the set was still working.  I was supposed to be meeting up with friends at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall to hear Nicola Benedetti play Elgar’s violin concerto, but I’m still recovering from Die Grippe, and I didn’t fancy trying to suppress a coughing fit for an hour.  So I relieved myself of the burden of negotiating the Glasgow roads’ permanent state of “upness” and stayed at home.  What better pastime for the debilitated than to stare passively at the gogglebox?  Even if I’d seen the movie before.   

  There’s much to admire about the film, not least the performances of Gary Oldman, Lily James, Kristin Scott Thomas, et al.  On the other hand I found its pervasive gloom – literally rather than figuratively – to be a pain in the neck, much like mumbled diction.  I suppose the clue is in the movie’s title.  Okay it’s dark, I get that, but I believe this unrelenting use of cinematic gloom is what literary theorists call “the fallacy of imitative form.”

  The historic events of May 1940 are faithfully recorded, insofar as we can be sure, with one glaring exception, when Winston goes AWOL and takes a ride in the London Underground to gauge the sentiments of the people.  Preposterous.  One of his contemporaries once said that Winston had never even ridden on a bus, or if he had, it would have been just for a lark.  One strained voluntarily to suspend one’s disbelief. 

  But a nice conceit of the film was the notion that when Winston tried to articulate the language of political compromise and negotiation that was being thrust upon him by his cabinet, he almost developed a motor dysphasia, a failure both to conceive and to express language, such that his typist Lily James was unable to transcribe the words.  So he stuck to his guns, and finally talked everybody round to his vision, in defiance of every rule of common sense. 

  Darkest Hour is all about political intrigue, and the exercise of the sinews of power.  One cannot help but compare Winston’s plight with that of the present incumbent of that self-same political office.  Whose coat is on a more shoogly peg – Winston or Keir?  Sir Keir might resolve to follow the advice Winston gave to the boys at Harrow.  “Never give in, never give in, never never never never…”

  But he might ruefully remind himself that even Winston was circumspect enough to add a rider:

  “…except to convictions of honour and good sense.”  

Struck down by the dreaded lurgi on Friday night, I’ve spent a miserable weekend doing precious little, barely crossing my door other than to fetch the newspapers from the local shop.  It’s just an upper respiratory tract infection, compounded by a sore back – no big deal.  I’ve got the doctor’s delusion that illness is something that happens to everybody else.  Most doctors are aware of the story of the eminent professor of cardiology who was attending a medical conference I think in Philadelphia, and was found dead in his hotel bed, a bottle of antacid parked on the bedside table.  He clearly hadn’t diagnosed his own myocardial infarction.  I will follow his example and take some ancient proprietary medicament, like the old Askit Powder, which I seem to recall from the ads, “fights off the miseries”.   

The trouble with being poorly is that you can’t get on with anything.  You are really under house arrest.  Everything gets put on hold.  I tried to read an abridged version by Victor Neuburg of John Buchan’s enormous History of the First World War (Lochar Publishing, 1991), even more enormous than Winston’s history, the four volume The World Crisis, but it only depressed me.  It is beautifully written, but do I really want to know how adept the Cameron Highlanders were with the bayonet?  I’d rather read a Wilfred Owen poem, or something really acerbic by Siegfried Sassoon.  So I put the Buchan to one side.

And tried a little German homework for the class on Thursday.  I came across the idiom, (die Redewendung), Jemandem rutscht das Herz in die Hose, literally somebody’s heart slid into their trousers.  I wondered if it was a little like “His heart sank”, or perhaps “He was depressed to his boots”, but I think it has more of a quality of extreme fear and anxiety.  Somebody on safari who turns round in the bush to see a lion a metre away, staring at him – his heart might well slide into his trousers.    

But I couldn’t settle to German, or anything else for that matter, and ended up with that old standby, the crossword puzzle.  I’ve even done the Sunday Times Mephisto, with solutions like Daidzein, Apocope, Duendes, Arew, and Woodburytype.  These household words.  It’s enough to bring on an ague.   

Nights have been tricky.  I seem to have been in a composite dream world the whole time.  I am taxiing a Slingsby Firefly across an enormous RAF airstrip – I think it might have been RAF Topcliffe – and I can’t contact the tower because I have forgotten all the frequencies.  The numbers spin round my head endlessly.  118.5?  119.1?  Can’t remember. 

But there is one aspect of being hors de combat that is curiously liberating.  For a time, you are absolved of that sense of guilt at not having fulfilled a commitment.  It might even give you a new perspective on priorities. That thing that we felt we really had to achieve – was it so important after all?      

Well, what was it Edgar said to Gloucester in King Lear?  We must be patient.  We came crying hither.  Tomorrow will be better.  Even today is a little better.  I aspire to be a glass half full man.  I know some people prefer the outlook that every silver lining has a cloud.  But I think pretty soon I will “fall in”, and report for duty.  I might even sign off my tax return today.

Ah, Death and Taxes.  These great certainties. 

When I was about ten years old my father gave me a birthday or Christmas present – I can’t remember which – (please note these parentheses are em dashes and not hyphens…hold that thought and see below) of an ancient Barlock office typewriter which was being dumped from the Chief Constable’s Office in Glasgow Police HQ, and which he got for £1.  It was the best present I have ever received.  I remember it weighed a ton.  The roller round which you secured the paper upon which to type resembled a gun carriage.  As you typed, the impending end of the line was signalled by the ping of a bell, and you grasped with the left hand a chromium lever resembling the tremolo arm of an electric guitar, hauled the gun carriage back, and started a new line.  It’s all immortalised in a piece of light music, a kind of concerto for typewriter by Leroy Anderson which was performed by Bill Bailey at last year’s Last Night of the Proms.  I suppose to anybody born this millennium it would have been quite incomprehensible.   I loved my Barlock, and got pretty fast, though I lacked the discipline to learn to touch type.  Sadie, a friend of my aunt, who I think was in the typing pool of Wills’ the cigarette manufacturer, gave me a few tips.  For example, you could create an exclamation mark (not available then on the QWERTY keyboard) by typing an apostrophe, then back-spacing, and typing a full stop under the apostrophe.  And always remember, said Sadie, to leave a double space after each full stop.  See.  I just did it. 

The trouble is, the post period double space convention has gone.  I’m not sure when it fell out of favour, but it was long after I moved on the Barlock and replaced it with a more nimble Lettera 22, akin to moving from a desk top to a laptop, you might say.  I still have the Lettera 22.  Then came electric typewriters, word processors, and eventually, personal computers.  I think it was computers, or IT generally, that didn’t like two spaces after a period.  But I persist, through a lifetime’s habit.  

I’m currently preparing a 75,000 word MS for a putative publisher, and I note that in their guidelines for submission, they ask for, nay insist upon, the single space convention.  I thought, am I going to trawl my way through 75,000 words deleting a space after every sentence?  Of course there must be an automatic way of doing it.  I interrogated the computer. 

Can I change double space to single space after a full stop throughout an entire document?

Yes, you can, using the Find and Replace feature.

1.  Open your document in Word.

2.  Press Ctrl + H…

Etc.

It hasn’t worked.  At least not yet.  I’m sure I’ll figure it out.  It is both the blessing and the curse of electronic word processing systems that editing and reediting can be so easy.  You can carry on tinkering forever, inserting a comma, and taking it out again.  But I shouldn’t complain.  The modern keyboard offers so many different options.  For example there is the umlaut option.  Where would I be if I could not use such amalgams as Vergangenheitsbewältingung, or Zusammengehörigkeitsgefühl?  These household words.  So I will grit my teeth and expunge that redundant post-period space. There. Do you suppose that looks okay? The trouble is, there are other conventions to which I must adhere; for example, single and not double quote marks; paragraph indents created by paragraph options and not the space bar; differentiating hyphens and em dashes; double-spaced and not single-spaced lines of course.  Didn’t Winston bite the head off of some young lady who was “taking down”?  I seem to recall it was immortalised in film by Gary Oldman and Lily James.  Darkest Hour.  What else?  Three dots per ellipsis, without spaces; and a host of other conventions so prolix I will not weary you.  You may have noticed I have reverted to the double space.  Old dog, new tricks.    

This fastidious attention to detail is not peculiar to the publishing world.  For about a decade now I have been unable to kick start my annual tax return simply by dropping by my accountant’s office with the written information and supporting documents; I must load it all on to an electronic system, access to which is achieved by utilising a series of passwords, PINS, and time-limited security numbers sent to my mobile.  In addition to all this, in order to communicate with my overseas bank, I need an App.  It might be easier to enter a high security penitentiary.    

All of this takes time.  Like everybody else, I have my own highly original theory as to why, these days, in this Brave New World, “nothing works”.  It is because we are all grappling, not with a creative task, but with all these electronic conventions, under the illusion that we are doing something useful.  My experience is that when things actually do “work”, it is often because all the white noise emanating from the machinery that controls our lives is being quietly ignored by a compassionate human being.  I recently had cause to visit my GP with a minor ailment.  It was an encounter that might have taken place fifty years ago.  An exchange of courtesies; a history elicited; a few questions of clarification; an examination; a diagnosis; a treatment; and even, God bless him, an open ended question: is there anything else I can do for you today?  And all of this without a computer in sight.                

On Saturday night in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, John Wilson, the most musical man on the planet, conducted the RSNO in Vaughan Williams’ London Symphony.  As ever with Mr Wilson, the music was approached with profound respect, and close attention to detail.  All the clichéd barnacles of performative tradition were stripped away.  The symphony was preceded by a prolonged silence while the conductor waited for all the rustlings and shufflings in the audience to settle down.  If he showed the music respect, he expected it also from the audience, and he got it.  The symphony was followed by an equally prolonged, and even more intense silence.  In the intervening fifty minutes the great city in all its vivid colours came to life, arising out of silence, the contrabassi almost inaudible, perhaps depicting a view from Westminster Bridge at first light, and then bursting forth with all the vitality of the streets’ vendors and town criers, the hustle and bustle of the metropolis.

The second movement is more contemplative.  Its central theme seems to evince an immense moral power.  The viola and cor anglais solos were beautifully played.  The movement died away with the solo viola, unconducted, drifting to silence.  The third movement returns to an atmosphere of vitality and ebullience.  Yet its coda has a wistfulness, and perhaps even a hint of a sense of foreboding.  So we arrive at the opening to the last movement, and we can be taken aback by its severity, perhaps looking forward to the atmosphere of the fourth, and of the sixth symphonies.  John Wilson conducted its principal theme at a slower tempo perhaps than is usual.  The London that is depicted is the London before the Great War, yet perhaps there is a hint that the city is about to endure a prolonged agony; still the chimes of Big Ben, tellingly reiterated in single notes on the harp, tell us that somehow the great city will survive.

In a preamble prior to the concert, a second violinist told the audience that in her 22 years of playing with the RSNO, she had never played the London Symphony.  It made me wonder why RVW, this towering figure of English music, despite his enduring popularity, is really not that often played by British orchestras.  That made me think of my own exposure to the nine symphonies.  I have played the London (second in the canon), and the fifth.  I can vividly remember the first time I ever heard the fifth, when it was played by a schools’ orchestra in Prestwick, maybe around 1964.  The symphony opens with a C-D octave pedal in the lower strings, upon which a duet horn motif is superimposed.  It made an immediate and lasting impression. That same year I was on holiday in Hampshire.  I noticed the intense green of the gentle English pastures and I remember thinking, this is what RVW 5 is all about.  Adrian Boult expressed a profound sense of gratitude for RVW 5 because it appeared in 1943, when the country had most need of it.  Like the Pastoral Symphony, No. 3, RVW 5 is a war-time symphony, its atmosphere of peace, and its affirmation of spiritual values made all the more poignant despite, or perhaps because of the circumstances of its creation. 

Naturally I hunted for more RVW, and I recorded the Fourth Symphony from the radio – I think it was a London Prom – on to an ancient tape recorder, and I replayed it endlessly.  I was taken aback by its atmosphere of violence.  At the time, the BBC had just screened The Valiant Years, a resumé of the events of the Second World War narrated by Richard Burton, and I well understood the underlying meaning of the fourth symphony.  But RVW was dismissive of the idea that the fourth remotely had any kind of programmatic meaning.  He dedicated the symphony to somebody who was much later to become a great musical hero of mine, Sir Arnold Bax, Bax himself famous for downplaying “meaning” in music.  RVW famously said of the Fourth, “I don’t know if I like it, but it’s what I meant.”  For all its acerbity, and indeed brutality, it is very traditionally constructed, it seems to me overtly modelled on Beethoven’s Fifth, with a recurring four note motif, a bridge passage between third and fourth movements, and a finale that is almost a parody of the triumphal theme of the last movement of Beethoven 5.  I remember first hearing the symphony in the concert hall, when the BBC Scottish performed it in the old BBC studios in Queen Margaret Drive in Glasgow.

I’ve always made a point of attending those rare concerts which feature the symphonies.  Stéphane Denève, erstwhile conductor of the RSNO, championed the Sea Symphony.  The first London Prom I ever attended I think was supposed to have been conducted by Sir John Barbirolli and was to include the eighth, which is dedicated to “Glorious John”, Barbirolli himself.  But Barbirolli had passed away and in the event the concert was conducted by Sir Charles Groves.  I was greatly taken by the first movement and its immediate immersion into the Vaughan Williams world, then the second movement for winds, third for strings, and its finale with its great array of percussion instruments.  I remember Sir Charles holding up the score at the end of the performance, in homage both to Sir John, and to RVW.  That concert also featured Sibelius 6 – the first time I ever heard it.  It was clever programme planning.  RVW had dedicated his fifth symphony, without permission, to Jean Sibelius.    

Talking of the London Proms, in 2008 I attended the fiftieth anniversary concert of RVW’s death in 1958.  The BBC Symphony played RVW 9.  I remember having heard it in Glasgow, and the Herald critic took a mood, not at the RSNO performance, but at the symphony itself.  I regret that at the time I didn’t write in to express disagreement.  I love the ninth, and its Hardyesque atmosphere much evoked by the innovative use of three saxophones.  I’m delighted that the symphony is being performed this year at the London Proms.

I also heard No 7, the Sinfonia Antarctica, performed most beautifully at the London Proms, the wordless soprano reaching our ears from the Gods in the Royal Albert Hall. 

The Pastoral Symphony, looking back at pastoral England from the trenches in Flanders, also features a wordless female voice.  I think I’ve heard it in concert, but I’m not sure.  And I know I have never heard a live performance of the sixth.  Perhaps its last movement, so reminiscent of RVW’s friend Gustav Holst’s Neptune, and never arising above pianissimo, is just too much to bear.  Music for a nuclear winter.  I think RVW would have scoffed.  I have the Boult recording, in vinyl, which is followed by a short expression of thanks in the mellifluous tones of the great man himself. 

Why don’t we hear these wonderful works more often?  Why, come to think of it, do we never hear one of the wonderful seven symphonies (eight, counting the early symphony in F), of Arnold Bax?

It would make a change from Mahler.               

Having reason to travel to Skye for three days last week, I went on line to check there was an adequate electric vehicle infrastructure at my destination.  All was, apparently, in order, and I set off.  I haven’t been up since 2018, when I attended my cousin’s funeral in Portree.  I’d heard the place was greatly changed.  It has certainly become exorbitantly expensive.  A hotel I used to frequent is now charging £750 a night. I would gladly pay £750 for a week’s accommodation, but not for a night.  I opted for a modest establishment in Broadford. 

I had various reasons to travel.  I wanted to lay aside the tome I’ve just written, for at least a few days, have a change of scene, and do something completely different.  Then I might reread it with fresh eyes.  And there were some people, as John Buchan would put it, I badly wanted to see.  Also, it would be nice to escape the doom scrolling that has recently defined the news.  At this I didn’t entirely succeed.  “Mandelgate” dominates everything.  The usual questions: who knew what, and when?  I have a notion that if I sat and listened to the news from dawn till dusk I would never find out.  I wonder if the Civil Service, or the Foreign Office, told Mandelson himself that he had failed the vetting process.  Perhaps they told him he had failed, but not why.  That would truly be Kafkaesque. 

It rained throughout my trip.  I didn’t really mind.  On the way up, Glencoe was extraordinarily atmospheric.  Up at Loch Alsh, I noticed they’d closed and fenced off Eilan Donan Castle, where the carpark was chock-a-block with trailers.  Clearly, they are filming.  I drove up to Skye on a single electric charge.         

Conveniently, there was a charge point a stone’s throw from my hotel.  But I discovered that ChargePlace Scotland no longer covered Skye; indeed they no longer had a presence throughout the entire Gàidhealtachd, having been taken over by another company.  Said company indicated you could fire the charger up with a credit card.  But it didn’t work.  I phoned them up.

“We see you’re at the airport.”

Airport?  Not unless they count the disused strip at Lower Breakish.  I said I was in Broadford. 

“Oh, Broadford.  That machine’s not working.”  I asked if they had another one nearby.  In Dunvegan, apparently.  But I didn’t have enough charge left to get to Dunvegan.  How about Kyle?

“Where’s Kyle?”

“Kyle of Lochalsh.”

“Can you spell it?”

I drove back over the bridge to Kyle but had no success there either.  Back to Broadford.  It turned out the machine at Broadford was working perfectly well, but the person who was just unplugging her car advised me I’d need to download the App.  I grit my teeth and set about downloading the App.

Then my mobile phone went berserk and I got an urgent text from my bank.  Apparently I was being scammed and they were blocking my credit card.  Please phone the bank’s fraud squad. 

Which I did. 

I was offered an option.  Did I wish to listen to music while I waited, or silence, occasionally interspersed with a tone to let me know I was still on the line?  I went with the tone.  Bad idea.  The tone turned out to be the doom-fraught chime of the clock in Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death. 

DUNG!

Nor did it punctuate silence, but rather a series of dire warnings about the increasingly sophisticated operations of cyber criminals.

Your bank will never ask you for your PIN number.  Anybody who asks for your PIN number is a criminal.

DUNG!

If there is anything unusual about this message, hang up immediately.

Well…

DUNG!

I decided to sleep on it, and hung up.

Next morning bright and early, and fortified by a hearty breakfast, I phoned up the charge company and, using my debit card, credit card being now kaputt, trawled through the endless menus and finally set myself up with the App.  It worked.  I charged up, and drove to Portree, thence to Dunvegan, visiting cousins.  Then I took the Dunvegan – Sligachan road back towards Broadford, pausing at the Sligachan Hotel, at dusk, to make a phone call, looking out at the Cuillin Ridge which, despite the dreich weather, was clear of cloud.  It’s an overused word, but the Cuillin Ridge really is awesome. 

I had no further charging issues throughout my stay.  As they say of all things digital, they are great when they work.

Skye has changed.  Not, of course, geologically.  The escarpments of Trotternish are exactly as they have always been, but they are why Skye has changed.  They have been rendered famous on film, and sightseers flock by in droves to take a look.  Consequently, there has been a hike in prices.  Skye has been turned into a theme park.  Back in Portree on Friday, I took a walk past my £750 a night hotel, and saw within, matrons at breakfast with their obese husbands, devouring the Full Scottish without removing their baseball caps.  I left them to it and went over to Camustianavaig, where I used to stay when I worked in Skye, and climbed Ben Ianavaig.  My cousin’s old croft looked just the same. 

But there is another sense in which Skye has not changed.  I sensed it as I visited cousins who in turn were constantly being visited by neighbours dropping by.  I sensed it in the shops in Portree.  The Skye folk are just the same, welcoming, courteous, slightly reserved, getting on with their lives.  I have a sense they are waiting, quietly waiting for the film crews to move out, for the hysterical enthusiasm for the Fairy Pools to burn itself out, for the silly prices to subside, and for life to get back on to an even keel. 

I thought of coming home via Sleat, taking the Armadale ferry to Mallaig.  But the ferry is off, being replaced by an open boat that accommodates four vehicles.  And all the crossings were booked up.  Ferry palaver, a tale with origins as inscrutable as Mandelgate.  But that’s another a story.

At my local fitness centre, I am detecting a change of tone in the locker room banter with respect to my electric car.  I used to be joshed.  “Where do you live?  That’s ten miles away.  You’ll be looking for a charger on the way home.”  Or, “It’s a bit parky today.  Wrap up, because you daren’t turn the car heater on.”  Such remarks never bothered me.  In fact, they amused me, because I knew that the petrolheads are on the wrong side of history, and, from that perspective, each gibe just sounded ridiculous.  I used to experience the same sense of private satisfaction when I lived in New Zealand, and people used to cast remarks about Eotearoa being a parochial, anachronistic backwater.  They’d never visited.  Billy Connelly came to realise that such received wisdom with respect to NZ protected its beautiful unspoiled nature.  He would say, “Dinnae tell anybody!”    

But the remarks about my car have stopped.  As a matter of fact, quietly, one of their chief proponents, and exponents, has just bought an electric car.  I believe the decisive factor has been the situation in the Strait of Hormuz, leading to the increased prices of both petrol and diesel at the pumps.  Depending on the latest utterance of Mr Trump, the price of a barrel of oil is either above or below $100.  I don’t know if these day-by-day fluctuations matter much.  I recall from the dim and distant past the stock market report on the BBC “Home Service”, which seemed to be an exercise in how many synonyms the announcer could dream up for either “increased” or “decreased”.  “Gilts eased, commodities slumped, futures rallied…”  I suppose it is the investors who pay close attention to such details, who closely peruse the small print in the newspapers, who decide whether the price of a commodity will daily rise or fall, but perhaps the prevailing trends over a longer period only become evident when “the man in the street” is affected, when, for example, he finds himself unable to fill up the tank. 

So I can tell that the markets are definitely jumpy, now that the guys in the sauna are no longer teasing me.  Hormuz remains, at least for most shipping traffic, gridlocked.  I don’t know that anybody seriously expected the Veep, J. D. Vance, to fly home to Washington with a deal.  There was rather just a sense of relief that talks didn’t entirely break down in a spirit of acrimony and animosity.  It is said that J. D. never favoured the actions of February 28^th in the first place.  But I guess he must sing from the same hymn sheet as his President.  The real test was, is, what the President will do given this impasse.  Will he agree to a prolonged series of negotiations over months, perhaps years, or will he react?  Will he, as he has threatened, destroy a civilisation?  At the moment, he seems to be content with a tit-for-tat response that some people might regard as “proportionate”.  He is going to blockade the Strait.  

When I first heard this, I thought, wait a minute.  Aren’t the Iranians doing that already?  Mr Trump’s beef seems to be that yes they are, and what’s more, they are making money out of it.  He doesn’t like to miss a business opportunity.  So he wants to deter shipping companies from paying Iran a fee, in millions of dollars, to ensure safe passage.  We have this paradoxical situation that the President, having urged the world to do what it takes to keep the Strait open, is now going to close the Strait.  The effect of this policy will certainly be felt at the pumps. 

There is no discernible end in sight to this impasse, because both sides have their “red lines”.  In particular, the US wants guarantees that Iran will not attempt to build a nuclear weapon.  They would like to confiscate however many kilograms of enriched uranium the Iranians possess.  Here is another paradox.  The US would deny the Iranians a commodity which they themselves possess in superabundance.  There are, I gather, about 12,000 nuclear warheads extant in the world today, somewhere around half of them in the possession of the US.  Russia, China, the UK, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel hold the rest.  Israel doesn’t like to talk about it.  Nuclear powers justify such ownership in terms of “deterrence”.  You might think twice about attacking a nuclear power.  So, if such ownerships guarantees such security, why don’t the nine nuclear powers encourage the remaining 184 nation states (186 including the Holy See, and Palestine), to have at least one?  The US could quite easily gift a warhead to every nation state without materially affecting the size of their own arsenal. 

If this is an absurd proposal, it is worth analysing the nature of the absurdity.  There is a general consensus that nuclear proliferation is a Bad Thing, and that a diminution of nuclear stockpiles worldwide would be good.  The big sticking point is whether nuclear-powered nation states should disarm unilaterally, or bilaterally.  The governments of nuclear-powered nations are not unilateralist, and indeed it may be said that in the current international situation they only pay lip service to bilateralism.  We recognise the tropes: we are in dire straits; we live in a very dangerous world; now is not the time…

Another reason why Iran should not be permitted to have a nuclear weapon is that they, or at least their government, are a thoroughly bad lot.  This may well be so, but the US are not in a good position to make the case, having been the only nation in history to cast atomic bombs, twice, in anger, against targets that were essentially defenceless. 

I miss Brian Quail.  He died a few months ago.  He used to write letters of great eloquence to The Herald, in support of nuclear disarmament.  He wasn’t an armchair theoretician.  He used to lie down in front of nuclear convoys in central Scotland, get arrested, and go to jail.  In one of his last court appearances, charged with breach of the peace, he pointed to the inherent absurdity of the charge.  It was the government who threatened a breach of the peace; he was trying to preserve it.  He must have argued most eloquently, for the judge found in his favour.

I think if Mr Quail were alive today, he would see the current world situation as presenting an ideal opportunity to take Trident out of Faslane, and Coulport, and transport the whole shebang down to the Thames, or perhaps across to the Hudson.  You can hear these familiar tropes reverberating once more.  “Dire straits… dangerous world… now is not the time…”  But it never is the time.  I would certainly like Scotland to join the 186 nations who do not consider it necessary to have a bomb.  I have a notion that, eventually, we would find ourselves on the right side of history.  No doubt our political masters in Westminster would ridicule us, but sooner or later even they will not be able to remain tin-eared to a swell of public opinion, the opinion of the man in the street.

Who was it said that there is no such thing as the man in the street?  But that there are only immortal souls who, from time to time, need to use streets.                          

In the April edition of the British Journal of General Practice, Luke N Allen, Co-Director, Global Primary Care & Future Health Systems, Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford, asks, “Why is everybody so transfixed by ambient voice scribes when the potentially transformative impact – for good or ill – lies in GenAI clinical decision support?”  (GenAI and clinical decision making in general practice, BJGP Volume 76, Number 765, page 151). 

Speaking personally, far from being transfixed, I don’t actually know what ambient voice scribes are.  They sound like attendant medieval scriveners, charged with the task of recording the utterances of spirits, hallucinatory or otherwise, heard by people touched by the gentle hand of God, like Joan of Arc or Hildegard of Bingen, or perhaps by the mailed fist of acute paranoid schizophrenia.  Is it the voices, or the scribes, that are ambient?  Which are hallucinatory, and which are real?    

I would guess they are just automated stenographers, not very good at their job, but on a steep learning curve.  They just make me very glad that I got out of practice when I did.  This stuff was just beginning to take off, and I knew it was going to get worse, but I didn’t realise that HAL, the successor to IBM (or predecessor at least alphabetically), the computer in 2001, was going to take over the consultation room.  But apparently these phantom shadowy scribes are unstoppable, as we move from the “dyadic” doctor-patient consultation towards the “triadic” doctor-patient-AI consultation.  “The genie,” says Luke Allen, “isn’t getting back into the bottle.”  This trope is never missing from any paper on AI.  The highlighted quote subheading Luke Allen’s paper states “GenAI isn’t good or bad in itself; it is a tool with known flaws that we need to learn to apply with expertise.”  This statement, or something like it, referring to the amorality of automated systems, is, like the “genie” trope, almost universally attached, like a disclaimer, to any discussion of the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in almost any walk of life.  It always crops up, the way the BBC constantly reminds us that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor or Peter Mandelson vigorously deny any charges levelled against them. 

There are a couple of sentences buried deep within Luke Allen’s paper that I find deeply disturbing.

…it could soon become morally indefensible not to consult GenAI when making clinical decisions.

 At the same time, using GenAI as a backdrop for clinical reasoning will probably lead to degradation of cognitive and clinical skills…

The self-contradiction is apparent.

I see that today the doctors in England are about to start another six day strike for the umpteenth time.  They say the dispute is about pay, and career opportunities, but I have a notion that no amount of pay, no incentive to get further embroiled in the dystopia that clinical practice has become, could ever compensate for the obligation to share the work space with ambient voice scribes.  When talks broke down, the government withdrew the offer of further training places.  Surely this was vindictive.  Creating a training place for a doctor keen to hone his or her craft is either a worthy pursuit, or it is not, irrespective of any dispute over pay and conditions.   

But talking of dystopias, I watched Donald J. Trump give his televised address to the American people a couple of days ago.  He is going to bomb the Iranians “back to the Stone Ages (sic) where they belong.”  Since then, he has come out with a barrage of expletives deleted (my father would have said to him, “kindly refrain from bringing the language of the gutter into my house”).  I was curious to know exactly what he tweeted, or “truth-socialed”, so I looked it up.

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran.  There will be nothing like it!!!  Open the F*****’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be in living Hell – JUST WATCH!  Praise be to Allah

President DONALD J. TRUMP

April 05, 2026, 1.03 pm.

As Miss Elizabeth Bennett enquired of her father re the Reverend Collins in Pride and Prejudice, “Sir, can this man be sensible?”  But I should add that I can’t independently verify that this is message was ever posted.  I enquired of the net, and this is what I got.  But it might have been recorded by an ambient voice scribe for all I know.  Come to think of it, I saw the President’s address to the nation on the net as well, and I guess that the soundtrack and image could easily have been cobbled together by the spectral stenographers in the room.  But if the post is the real deal, the general consensus among international lawyers seems to be that to carry out such threats would constitute a war crime; indeed the very threat, of itself, may be a war crime.  But President Trump doesn’t give a fig for international norms, or the international rules-based order.  Indeed, it would appear that the international rules-based order is already scuppered, and a relic of the past. 

It occurs to me that it is Donald J. Trump himself who is bombing us all back to the Stone Ages.  There was a time, just after the Berlin Wall came down, when it appeared that Humankind might just conceivably be able to turn its back on violence as a means of conducting international affairs, but we seem to have blown it.  But it is surely the critical and abiding question of our time.  How can we set about abolishing war?  It seems to me that we should be encouraging our best minds to tackle and to solve this conundrum.   Yet our best minds are preoccupied perfecting the next generation of ambient voice scribes, so that we can hand over all our responsibilities to them.     

No wonder there are a plethora of programmes on the radio designed to help one to chill out.  It is the nearest we earthbound mortals can get to taking a trip round the far side of the moon.  Listening to them is rather like staring at the goldfish in an aquarium while in a state of jet lag.  I must retire to my sandbagged bunker, and listen to the latest podcast of Ultimate Calm.                              

Coincidental with the clocks springing forward, I’ve “finished” my latest tome.  76,000 words, 260 pages. It’s a memoir.  People ask me, “What are you up to these days?”  And I reply, “I’m writing my memoirs.”  And they think it’s a gag.  I say “finished”, in quotes, because to say it’s all done and dusted is a bit arbitrary.  I could go on tinkering forever.  What makes me think it’s finished?  I can hardly imagine it has reached a state of perfection.  No doubt it could be much better, but maybe I have the sense that further tweaks will only make it worse.  I haven’t so much done with it, as it has done with me.  So I need to lock it away in a drawer for a week or two, and then read it again with less jaded eyes, and make a final edit. 

Of course it won’t be a final edit at all, if I am lucky enough to get the thing published.  Somebody else will become the editor.  That which was a lonely undertaking becomes a collaboration.  I’m no use at it; not a team player.  From past experience, the editor will like the bits I’d thought to ditch, and cut the bits I most cherish.  There must be a golden mean somewhere between throwing a Beethovenian fit and saying “Don’t change a note!” (or a word), and accepting all advice in a sullen mood of passive aggression.  Yet I hope to be faced with the quandary, even though I had a recent experience of working with a copy editor and realising that the editor was a robot; or at least, was using an algorithmic piece of artificial intelligence.  That was a dispiriting episode.

Yet it’s delightful to have reached this stage precisely at this, my favourite time of year.  The daffodils are in full bloom, the tulips will shortly arrive, we have passed the spring equinox, the clocks have sprung forward, and British Summer Time is with us for the next seven months.  Glorious.  I can fulfil my resolution to get out more.  Admittedly it was gey dreich here yesterday, and to add insult to injury the boiler in Dunblane Cathedral has packed in.  I said to the minister’s wife, “I am taking a turn about the room in order to keep warm”, and she obliged by handing me a hot water bottle.    

So for the time being I must relinquish this preoccupation with the past, and return to the present.  I turn on the news with some reluctance.  President Trump says he is thinking of seizing Kharg Island, while simultaneously saying that talks with the Iranians are going well.  Talk about cognitive dissonance.  Perhaps it’s a sign of the precarious times in which we now live, but it seems to be impossible even to try to absent yourself from the constant drumbeat of the news, but that something drags you back in the direction of its harsh reality.  There I was in the calm oasis of the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday evening, listening to Paul Dukas’ L’apprenti sorcier (The Sorceror’s Apprentice), the tale of a trainee magician who casts a spell over a broomstick which proceeds to go rogue and create chaos and mayhem.  Perhaps you remember it from the 1940 film, Fantasia. The trouble is that the apprentice doesn’t know how to break the spell and restore order.    In other words he is out of his depth.  He has opened Pandora’s Box but he doesn’t know how to shut it again.  Now, who does that remind you of?  

And it gets worse.  In the second half of the concert we heard, and saw, Ravel’s stage work L’enfant et les sortilèges (The Child and the Magic Spells), the tale of a spoiled and bad-tempered brat who, in a sulk, inflicts injury upon everything and everybody around him.  Now, who does that remind you of?

But enough already.  I abjure the doomscrolling tendency.  I’m rationing myself.  I catch the news headlines and then turn the radio off before the speculation and punditry starts (unless it’s Jeremy Bowen, Lyse Doucet, or Steve Rosenberg).  There may be trouble ahead, but while there’s music…  Of course you can’t escape harsh reality in the concert hall any more than you can in the cathedral, especially this week, the week when the fickle mob turned, and powerful vested interests found a way to remove somebody who had become inconvenient.                    

In between the Dukas and the Ravel, Ethan Loch played Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.  Born in Blantyre in 2004, he has phenomenal pianistic, compositional, and improvisatory skills.  I had the sense that the cadenzas in the Gershwin were original and spontaneous, appropriate to the mood of the piece, and entirely successful.  He played as an encore a cadenza from his own First Piano Concerto in C sharp minor, Rachmaninoff’s key, and indeed a performance reminiscent of Rachmaninoff both musically and technically.  It brought the house down.  The critic in today’s Herald gave the concert a ***** review.  Incidentally, Ethan Loch has been blind from birth.  How he can learn, let alone play, music of such complexity seems beyond comprehension.  Four weeks ago in the same hall, Felix Klieser, born with no arms, played Richard Strauss’ First Horn Concerto.  How can that be possible? 

Such people are inspirational.  They inspire us to put aside any petty preoccupations of our own and think, what can I do, albeit in a small way, to make the world a better place?  How dare I carp about today’s bad news headlines, or some putative imaginary nit-picking editor, while I have hands and eyes?  I suppose therein lies the meaning of the parable of the talents.  We are taught that we ought to use them, or it, if we only have one, no matter how modest, to make a contribution to the community.   

But is it true?  This week Matthew Syed, in his BBC Radio 4 programme Sideways, talked about a New Zealand musical protégé who became the conductor of the Nova Scotia Symphony, and then suddenly packed it all in to become a computer programmer.  It kind of rang a bell with me.  All your life you take it as a given that your talent must be honed and utilised.  But what happens if it all starts to drag you down?  You think, is this worth the candle? 

That’s where it behoves the writer to take the “finished” article, temporarily stick it in a drawer, and get out into the sunshine.  I actually found the volte face of the NZ conductor incomprehensible, not because she gave up conducting, but because she took up computer programming.  Computer programming?  God help us.