jamescalumcampbell

Last Thursday in my weekly German conversation class we held a debate.  The question: “Should Scotland boycott the football world cup in America?”  Just for the record: „Sollte Schottland die Fußballweltmeisterschaft in den USA boykottieren?“

There are a dozen of us in the class so we split off into two groups of half a dozen.  I voted Ja.  I can’t say I was all that exercised and could as easily have voted Nein, or, indeed, abstained with a „Jein“.  Just so long as I could get some language practice.  Football as it so happens comes up quite frequently in our class as there are a couple of aficionados.  They usually bemoan the dismal performance of their respective teams on the previous Saturday, but in a good humoured way.  From the outside, it would appear that as a supporter you are less likely to be over the moon, and more likely to be sick as a parrot.  The agony of following a team through thick and thin does not attract me, and indeed I could just about count the number of professional football matches I have attended on the fingers of one hand.  Let’s see now…

My first was in the early 60s, when I went to Ibrox with my uncle and two cousins.  A brief conversation was held sotto voce between my uncle and the man at the gate, as a result of which I was lifted over the turnstile.  I had no idea of the significance of all this.  And I certainly had no idea about the elaborate freemasonry surrounding and infiltrating Ibrox, Protestantism, the City of Glasgow Police, Robert Burns, and, indeed, the masons.  Anyway Rangers were playing Stirling Albion and the result was Rangers 4, Stirling Albion 1.  I don’t remember much about the game, but oddly enough I can still remember the Rangers line-up: Ritchie, Shearer, Caldow; Grieg, MacKinnon, Baxter; Scott, Macmillan, Millar, Brand, and Wilson.  Or something close to that.  Now why on earth should I remember that after all these years?  Jim Baxter was a class player.  I think I could even recognise that at the time.  He seemed to be able to give himself space, and time, to read the game, to send long passes forward with brilliant accuracy and to devastating effect.  But to be honest, I was more interested in the pie and the Bovril at half time. 

My father being a policeman on duty at big football fixtures, he would sometimes take me along and deposit me in some safe enclosure close to the touchline to watch the game.  So I got to the celebrated European Cup semi-final between Celtic and Leeds, and I can recall Billy Bremner scoring for Leeds, though it was Celtic who won in the end.  That match, at Hampden, had a huge attendance, of over 136,000 souls.  Next up, back at Ibrox, I remember the vivid blue and green colours of Rangers and Celtic, and the intense animosity – you felt you could cut it with a knife – implicit, explicit, in the roar of the crowd. 

Then one night I was coming home from Arlington Baths, on a No 59 bus going along Woodlands Road, when I overheard somebody say that there had been an incident at Ibrox.  Rangers and Celtic again.  It turned out to be a catastrophe.  The received wisdom was that, minutes from the end of the match, when people were leaving and surging down the steps at the Copland Road entrance, there had been a late goal, people had attempted to go back up on to the terraces, there had been a crush, and sixty-six people had died of asphyxiation.  By the time I got home, Dad had rung to say he would be working late.

It was a sign of my quite remarkable immaturity and lack of imagination that I, now no longer a child, never thought for a moment that this event could have a profound effect on my father, personally and professionally.  But I was away with the fairies.  And I had form.  A couple of years earlier I was having lunch in the City of Glasgow Police Headquarters in St Andrews Square when a guy in the west end of Glasgow went berserk with a rifle and shot about thirteen people.  Police HQ was buzzing.  A friend of my father’s came into the dining room in a tremendous lather, laid a rifle down on the table and spoke with my father.  I just carried on eating my apple crumble and custard, quite oblivious.  Later, another friend of my father’s shot the guy through a letter box somewhere in north Glasgow.  As you do.  A common feature of the Ibrox disaster and the Glasgow mass shooting was that the subsequent enquiries were very rapidly carried out, and the police were not only exonerated, but commended.  I suppose these associations and recollections might account for the fact that I’m rather wary of football matches, and nowadays when there’s an Old Firm match on either at Ibrox or Celtic Park, I avoid the city centre.  The culture just doesn’t appeal to me.     

I can only remember attending one other football match and it was very much later.  Brighton and Hove Albion v Shrewsbury, at Brighton.  Now, what on earth was I doing there?  I was visiting a pal who was working in hospital in Stoke Mandeville and it so happened she was a friend of the wife of the Brighton CEO.  So we got into the director’s box and watched the match in the company of Des Lynam, I believe a great Brighton fan.  He was very charming.  Brighton won 4 – 1.  Bobby Zamora was man of the match.  Funny the things you remember.  Des said, “Anyone can see he’s the best player.” 

So with this the sum-total of my football experience, you can see I wasn’t going to contribute much to the German class Debatte.  I did manage to quote, or misquote Bob Shankly: Football is not just a matter of life and death.  It’s more important than that.  I have a notion Mr Shankley may have said precisely the opposite.    

Most of the debate centred round the character of Trump’s second administration.  What with tariffs, the activities of ICE in Minneapolis, and the foreign adventure in Venezuela, who would want to go to America?  (And this was before the middle-east erupted.  Events move so quickly.)  No no, said the No camp, as they would.  Sport has nothing to do with politics. I thought at this stage the 1936 Olympics might have come up.  Herr Hitler put on a great show, Dr Goebbels having cleared Berlin of undesirables, and declared the streets safe.  The youth of the world might not have attended, but then we wouldn’t have seen Jesse Owens confound the Nazi’s deranged race theories, and we wouldn’t have seen the great New Zealander Jack Lovelock run the perfect 1500 metres.  The BBC commentator for that memorable race was Harold Abrahams.        

During the course of the debate, I confess I began to change my mind, from Ja to Nein, and thought to cross the floor, not because of the power of the No argument, but because I had remembered that in 1980 Margaret Thatcher had wanted the British Olympic team to boycott the Moscow Olympics.  But I remember that the Scottish sprinter Alan Wells went to Moscow, and won gold in the 100 metres.  The Americans said the only reason he won gold was because they weren’t there.  Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?  But the following year Wells went on to win the World Championships, and the Americans were there. 

So there.                         

To the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, on Saturday evening, to hear the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in a concert of Mozart, Richard Strauss, and Bruckner.  The concert turned out to be very special in a number of ways.  Every season, there is a Sir Alexander Gibson Memorial Concert, in memory of the (then) Scottish National Orchestra’s conductor, between 1959 and 1984.  As Sir Alex was born in 1926, this was a Centenary Concert. 

In his 25 year tenure he revolutionised the Scottish classical music scene, introducing new repertoire (I read in Saturday’s programme that he gave the British premiere of Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto), championing contemporary Scottish composers such as Thomas Wilson and Thea Musgrave, and attracting soloists of international renown, such as Arthur Rubenstein, Mstislav Rostropovich, Janet Baker, and Jessye Norman.  Yehudi Menuhin was a frequent visitor, and I recall his performances of the Beethoven, Brahms, Berg, Bach double, and (twice) the Elgar violin concerti. 

Gibson conducted a wonderful Elgar season in the late 60s, but the composer perhaps with whom he was most identified was Sibelius.  The SNO Sibelius recordings still stand the test of time.  I remember a particularly electric performance of the fifth symphony in Glasgow City Halls. 

All of this took place under the least auspicious of conditions.  The celebrated St. Andrews Halls had burned down in 1962, the year Gibson, undaunted, founded Scottish Opera.  From then, really until the 1990s, the SNO was without a suitable home until the orchestra gained royal patronage around the time of the opening of the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.  The annual season of summer Proms took place in the cavernous Kelvin Hall.  Yet Gibson and the SNO could sell out that venue, night after night. 

I should declare a special interest here.  I had the privilege of playing under the baton of Alexander Gibson in the mid-70s when I was a student or, more accurately, I was between studentships, about to make the great leap from the Arts headlong into the Sciences.  My then viola teacher was the section principal in the SNO and he would smuggle me in for gigs.  Beethoven 5, Brahms 3, the Bartok Dance Suite, the Mendelssohn violin concerto…  It was a steep learning curve.  Some people complained about Gibson’s beat but personally I never had a problem following it.  But then I admired him as a musician, and that’s half the battle.  We played Mozart’s 21st Piano Concerto with Stephen Kovacevich, with its famous “Elvira Madigan” slow movement, in a reduced orchestra; six violas on that occasion.  I was included.  I didn’t really realise it at the time, but I was being trialled.  I got the offer of playing 50% of the gigs, so essentially I would be a deputy to allow people to take a break.  But I was about to start Medical School.  For one crazy moment I thought of doing it, of moonlighting.  But really I had to make a choice.  It was one these “road not travelled” occasions, depicted by Robert Frost as an apparently trivial choice between paths in a woodland walk.  I think I made the right choice.  I don’t think I really had the temperament to be a professional musician.  Sooner or later, Sir Alex would have rumbled me.                       

I wonder what he would have made of the concert, and the orchestra, on Saturday night.  I would guess he would have been delighted.  The RSNO is on top form.  The concert was introduced by Ian Skelly of BBC Radio 3 fame, as it is going out on air in mid-March.  I always enjoy Mr Skelly’s introductions.  He has a lightness of touch.  He asked us to switch our mobile phones off, and said failure to do so would result in the culprit having to pay the licence fee of everybody else on his or her row.  If memory serves me right, this got a round of applause. 

Following Mozart’s Overture to the Marriage of Figaro, Felix Klieser played Richard Strauss’ First Horn Concerto.  This was the next very remarkable element of the evening.  Felix Klieser was born without arms.  It raises the conundrum, how on earth can you play the horn, or any musical instrument for that matter, without hands?  The solution in this case was that the horn was supported on its own stand, and Felix Klieser depressed the valves using the toes of his left foot.  The sound produced was so beautiful, the technique so virtuoso, and the interpretation of the piece so musical, that curiously one ceased to be diverted by the machinations of the delivery.  It was, by any reckoning, a magnificent performance.  The encore, the last movement of Mozart’s Fourth Horn Concerto, was rapturously received.  The warmth of the Glasgow audience was palpable.  The whole performance was quite inspirational.    

After the interval we heard Anton Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony.  The programme note announced a duration of 88 minutes.  I confess to have been slightly daunted by a piece of music lasting two minutes shy of a football match (without extra time), but in the event I was entirely absorbed by the Bruckner world.  These magnificent perorations, in long paragraphs, need space and time.  It occurred to me that this is the ideal antidote to the dystopian world of fast food, fast news, and all sorts of fast knee-jerk responses that we have created, and are obliged to live in.  We could do no better than follow Ian Skelly’s advice on a frequent basis, to switch off our mobile phones and listen to a Bruckner symphony.  I will certainly tune in next month when Radio 3 broadcasts the recording.              

When I read that Alexei Navalny, who died in a prison in Siberia two years ago, had been killed by a poison derived from an Ecuadorean dart frog, I could not help but think immediately of Ian Fleming, and James Bond, and, specifically, From Russia with Love.  On the last page, Rosa Klebb, of SMERSH, Death to Spies, kicks Bond in the calf.  Her shoe has at its point a poisoned dart.  Bond crashes to the floor.  The film has an alternative happy ending when the Bond girl (but perhaps that expression is no longer PC), Tatiana Romanova, shoots Klebb, so chillingly played by the great Lotte Lenya.  In the book, Bond receives the fatal kick, and that might have been the end of a five book thriller series.  Perhaps Fleming decided to kill off his hero before Bond, with his profoundly unhealthy lifestyle, reciprocated.  But as it turned out Bond was resurrected and would appear in nine more books.       

We have to wait until chapter two of Dr No before the world famous neurologist Sir James Maloney tells M what nearly killed Bond.  It was fugu poison, from the sex organs of Japanese globe fish.  It’s a neuromuscular blocker, tetrodotoxin, with the same effect as curare.  As Sir James said, “Trust the Russians to use something no one’s ever heard of.”  

Navalny was not killed by fugu poison, but by epibatidine, naturally found in dart frogs in South America.  Fugu poison makes another appearance in You Only Live Twice, when Tiger Tanaka, head of the Japanese Secret Service, explains how Japanese restaurateurs must have a special licence to prepare and serve globe fish.  But strangely, there is also an amphibian connection.  The dust jacket of the hard-back first edition of You Only Live Twice, so brilliantly designed by Richard Chopping, depicts a toad.  We only meet the toad in the last chapter, and the pharmacological agent derived from its integument is not a neurotoxin, but an aphrodisiac.  Bond, having killed off Guntrum Shatterhand aka Ernst Stavro Blofeld (at least, we assume he is dead, but we can’t be sure) is left profoundly brain damaged.  In addition to losing his memory, he has lost his libido.  Bond girl Kissy Suzuki visits a sex merchant in The Happy Shop in Fukuoka, and buys half a teaspoonful of toad sweat obtained by placing the toad on a hot plate.  No animals were injured in the creation of this product. 

At any rate it works, and Bond recovers his libido (and even, unbeknownst to him, fathers a child), but not his memory.  So when he’s eventually washed up on the shores of Vladivostok, he is really a lame duck for the KGB further to brain-wash and send on a mission… fast forward to The Man with the Golden Gun… to attempt to assassinate M.  It’s all utterly bizarre and fantastical and yet, reading about Alexei Navalny, it seems that the world depicted is completely real.  In 1978 a Bulgarian dissident was killed on the streets of London apparently by a ricin pellet fired from an umbrella tip.  In 2006 Alexander Litvinenko died a lingering death after drinking a cup of tea laced with polonium-210.  In 2020, Navalny was poisoned with novichok.  He survived, and after a period of treatment and convalescence in Germany he voluntarily, and with great courage, returned to Moscow, where he was promptly arrested.  Novichok was used in Salisbury in an attempt to kill Sergei Skripal.  In the event, a British woman, Dawn Sturgess, died because she happened to pick up a phial of perfume, which in fact contained novichok.  I recall Salisbury was essentially in lockdown for weeks.  Prime Minister May was terribly exercised, but unable to do very much about it.  Mr Putin paraded the two suspect killers on television, who denied any involvement, and said they were visiting Salisbury as tourists and for cultural reasons.  Apparently they greatly admired the cathedral. 

Sergei Skripal, a Russian military intelligence officer, was a double agent.  What Fleming said all these years ago in Casino Royale about SMERSH could easily have applied to events in Salisbury.  “Be faithful, spy well, or you die.  Inevitably and without any question, you will be hunted down and killed.”

Bruised by the discovery that Vesper Lynd was a double agent working for “Redland”, who, in an impossible bind, takes her own life, Bond resolves to devote his professional life to pursuing the agents of SMERSH, the terror organisation behind the Soviet spy network.  Clearly, Fleming is setting up a scenario for Bond’s future assignments.  But oddly enough, he never really followed it up.  Granted SMERSH is lurking somewhere behind the activities of a lot of these spectacular gargoyles, like Mr Big, Dr No, and Scaramanga; but really most of them run a criminal private enterprise purely for personal gain, like Goldfinger, the Spangs, and most spectacularly Ernst Stavro Blofeld and SPECTRE.  After Casino Royale, the only true Cold War Bond thriller is From Russia with Love. 

Yet the Cold War is always lurking in the background, and the last sight we have of James Bond is in a stinking smashed up Berlin flat at the corner of Kochstrasse and the Wilhelmstrasse, overlooking the site that was later to become Checkpoint Charlie.         

The Russian Embassy in London has described the dart frog thesis as “feeble-mindedness of Western fabulists”.  They might as easily have said that it read like a James Bond book.  But the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands have reported the Kremlin to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.  Perhaps Mr Putin will echo the words of one of his predecessors, Joseph Stalin, and ask, “How many divisions does the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons have?”  In the new world order of Might is Right, our international institutions are becoming increasingly fragile.  The US has diminished the influence of the United Nations, and dismissed the climate crisis as a hoax, fake news.  Once you elect to disregard the truth, anarchy reigns. 

Alexei Navalny was a great champion of the truth.  In his remarkable memoir, Patriot, he encouraged us all to tell the truth, and spread the truth.  I wonder if Mr Putin has read Patriot?  In the long run, the truth is the most powerful weapon of all.  Amidst all the darkness that enshrouds the Russian Federation, Navalny’s memoir offers a ray of hope, and spreads a little of the Living Daylights.             

Every Sunday I take the Sunday Times.  After a week’s perusal, day by day, of two Scottish newspapers, I feel the need to acquaint myself with the thoughts of our cousins south of the border.  And besides, the prize crossword is very inventive.  I’ve been submitting it for months now, so far with no success, which makes it all the more astonishing that the one and only time I sent in the Financial Times crossword, which indeed was the only time I ever did it, I won it.  The FT sent me How to Sound Really Clever by Hubert van den Bergh (Bloomsbury, 2013), a lexicon of unusual words and phrases that I suppose was considered would be of interest to the cruciverbalist.  Actually the words therein are not that unusual.  I’ve just opened it at random and come across farrago, a hodgepodge, apparently from the Latin farrago, farraginis, a mix of grains for animal feed.  Mostly now it is used figuratively, hence (Chambers) – a disordered mixture; a confused mass of objects or people.  Now it so happens I’ve been acquainted with the word farrago since I was a child, because my father had a colleague who was terribly fond of purple language, and I remember him making reference to “a farrago of heterogeneous irrelevancies”.  I think my father would have called it “a load of old codswallop”.  I don’t remember which example of waffle, obfuscation, or frankly bullshit he was referring to, but nowadays when I hear a politician on the Today programme dodging a question by answering another one of his own choosing, I’m inclined to mutter into my muesli, “That’s another FHI.”  I won a prize at the end of Primary School, and on my father’s colleague’s recommendation I got Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases which is a much longer version of How to Sound Really Clever, a compendium of synonyms and, arguably, something of a farrago. 

So I’ve always been interested in dictionaries, lexicons, thesauri, and encyclopaedias of one sort or another.  I acquired the complete Encyclopaedia Britannia in the early nineties, and supplemented it with the annual year books, and associated publications, up to 1999 which must have been around the time Encyc. Brit. stopped appearing in print.  From a similar era I’ve got the complete Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in a single volume, the perusal of which requires a magnifying glass.  Then I have Chambers, the thirteenth edition and also the fourth edition crossword dictionary, Bloomsbury, the shorter Oxford, Collins German dictionary, and Churchill’s medical dictionary.  I so much prefer leafing through a tome to searching for something online.  It just seems a much more human, and humane, activity, than staring at a screen.  Granted what you read is a snapshot in time, but at least you have the sense it is peer reviewed.  Lexicography online is the Wild West of total anarchy, you might say a farrago.

I’m frequently impressed not only by the exactitude, but also the imagination of dictionary definitions.  It can’t be easy to sum up succinctly the many-splendoured connotations of a word, for example, like love.  It might be an idea to incorporate the skill of definition into the school curriculum.  You would have to manifest clarity of thought to define, in a closed book exam setting, words of an abstract nature.

Words carry baggage.  It’s never a wise thing to utilise a new addition to one’s vocabulary, based on a dictionary definition, without first acquiring a feel for its use.  OED is most useful here, in basing all its definitions on usage from literature.  But I venture to say, it is salutary to find that the dictionaries don’t always get it right. 

Salutary (Chambers) adj promoting health or safety; wholesome; containing, bringing etc. a timely warning

And Chambers Crossword Dictionary, itself a kind of Roget’s Thesaurus, provides synonyms:

Salutary good, timely, useful, healthy, helpful, hygienic, sanitary, valuable, practical, wholesome, beneficial, profitable, refreshing, advantageous, health-giving, invigorating.

But these definitions don’t seem to me to capture the chastening effect of any salutary experience.  A salutary lesson is like a rap on the knuckles. 

Another example where it seems to me the dictionaries fall short is “invidious”.

Invidious (Chambers) adj likely to incur or provoke ill-will or resentment; likely to excite envy; enviable; offensively discriminating (L. invidiosus, from invidia envy).      

If somebody says “You have put me in an invidious position”, such a position is far from enviable.  Quite the opposite, it is unenviable.  And it is unenviable not only because it is likely to provoke ill-will or resentment, but because the position has the nature of a “damned if you do damned if you don’t” Catch 22 situation.  You are on the horns of a dilemma, and it doesn’t matter what you do; there is no escape.         

Such musings tend to imply that each and every word carries a resonance that extends beyond its dictionary definition.  The resonances change with time, place, and person, and perhaps that is why we so often founder in our efforts to communicate with one another.

But why this preoccupation with words, and why has my perusal of the Sunday Times restricted itself to the prize crossword?  Why have I returned to this my cobbler’s last?  What, amid the other column inches, is making me fretful?

Well, the Sunday Times seems unusually preoccupied.  Headlines will suffice:

Page 1 Payoff of tens of thousands for Mandelson

Page 4 Running out of road… Keir Starmer is a dead man walking…

A holdover from a dying politics, Starmer can only watch as life drains from his premiership

Page 5 The solution to the crisis can’t be a soft-left coup.  Voters won’t stand for it.  Starmer is done…

(continued from Page 1) Mandelson secured pay-off of tens of thousands of pounds

Page 6 “I’m scared (Epstein’s) around every corner”: forgotten victims relive their agony

Ghislaine Maxwell inherited millions from secret trust set up by her father

Page 7 Charles pays for Andrew’s new home to “contain” him and keep him out of trouble

Andrew “ruthlessly” exploited trade role

Page 12 McSweeney blamed for Mandy job

Page 17 What drove Epstein…  He charmed and blackmailed the venal elite

Page 20 Shorn of its moral purity, what is Starmer’s Labour now for?

Page 21 (cartoon) Sir Keir Starmer “Withering Heights”

For once the PM dared to think outside the box and it may end him

The Tale of Keir and the Tarnished Peer – no, not that one

Page 23 They were meant to be the nice party but Labour can’t maintain that pretence now

Page 24 (at last) Puzzles page

There appears to be only one show in town.  ’Nuff said.  I’m sure Sir Keir is finding it all a salutary experience.  But he finds himself in an invidious position. 

I have a routine of listening to the news on the radio just before I post this blog, just in case events have moved on.  When I started writing this, one senior staff member at No. 10 had just resigned; and now as I end it, another.  It’s a House of Cards.  What a farrago.    

In Dunblane Cathedral this morning, the minister preached on the Beatitudes, taking a text from Matthew chapter 5.  Jesus used the word “blessed” nine times.  The litany of the blessed seems highly unlikely: the spiritually poverty-stricken, the mournful, the meek, those deprived of justice, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted, especially those reviled for Jesus’ sake.  How can you possibly be blessed when you are down and out?  What can it possibly mean?

It occurs to me that it might mean something similar to Kipling’s poem If, which challenges us to rise to the occasion if we are blamed, and hated by those bearing false witness against us; if we are patient in adversity; if we entertain hope without recourse to delusion; if we are resolute both in good times and bad; if we are misrepresented; if we see our life’s work destroyed; if we are undaunted by adversity; if we have nothing left but fortitude, yet we remain the same to all men, and despite everything we keep going…       

Listening again to the Beatitudes, through the prism if you will of If, I thought of an incident that occurred in the Royal Opera House Covent Garden during the week, in a performance of Puccini’s Turandot.  During the evening, the principal tenor took ill.  There was a short intermission, while the performers decided what to do.  In the end, a back stage staff member, not a professional singer, volunteered to sing the role from the wings, while a mute player acted out the character on stage.  When it became evident that the substitute singer was not going to sing the very famous aria Nessun Dorma, no doubt made more famous by its performance by three certain tenors during a certain football world cup, the theatre audience showed extreme displeasure with a series of catcalls and boos.  Well, not the whole audience.  At least according to an account on Broadcasting House (BBC Radio 4, Sunday 9 am), the expressions of disgruntlement were coming mainly from the posh seats.

I must say when I heard this, and no doubt this expresses some of my own hard-wired prejudices, I thought, “That figures.”  I’m not an opera buff.  I don’t really get it.  I like a lot of the music, and the arias, but I’m no longer prepared to sit in the stalls for four hours.  Life’s too short.  They played an extract on Broadcasting House of Luciano Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma, and the audience went absolutely wild.  It’s all completely over the top.  There seems to me to be a deep core of unpleasantness about it, a touch of the Fascisti.  That’s what I thought when I heard all these nobs, or snobs, booing and jeering.  I just hope the stand-in singer said quietly to himself,

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…

Talking of Auntie, the BBC are looking at the licence fee again.  Apparently they are short of cash, and finding it increasingly difficult to rival the bigtime global competitors who gain huge revenue from multinational companies who advertise.  One possible source of income that has been mooted is to charge us for listening to the radio.  Currently we can listen to BBC radio programmes for free.  If we want to watch the telly, it costs us £174.50 per annum.  That allows us to watch live television, or programmes on BBC iPlayer. 

I pay the licence fee, although I haven’t actually switched on the TV this year.  It has crossed my mind to stop paying the licence and get rid of my TV set, but I’m not sure I want the hassle of getting letters, and perhaps even doorstep visits, from prying officialdom who frankly would not believe that my house is a television-free zone.  So I cough up, and remind myself that I’m sponsoring the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and the BBC Concert Orchestra.  So if radio listeners who didn’t own a TV were suddenly obliged to subscribe, it wouldn’t materially affect me as I already pay.  But for some reason I’ve got a deep-seated aversion to the whole idea.   

Still, Public Service Broadcasting has to garner revenue from somewhere, but if there are no adverts, from where, precisely?  Actually it isn’t exactly true to say that there are no ads, even on the radio.  There are lots of ads, but they are all inward looking, for the BBC itself, advertising forthcoming attractions.  I find them increasingly irritating with each iteration, and reiteration.  The trailers for radio drama are particularly tiresome.  Everything is gritty.  Even The Archers are gritty these days.  I recently heard a trailer for something called The Night Manager which was such a litany of noir clichés that it could have been compiled by Artificial Intelligence; perhaps it was. 

But how could you possibly enforce, and police a radio licence?  Would we have to pay to listen in the car, on the phone, or in an earpiece while out for a jog?  We might have to go under cover, like members of the Maquis, tuning into the BBC somewhere in Normandy, in 1944.  “This is London calling.  This is a message for Pierre in Caen.  The foie gras is in the oven.  The foie gras is in the oven…”

I have a notion that if the BBC Radio Licence goes live, I will do largely what I’ve done with the telly, and switch it off, not so much as a matter of principle, but because the content (with a few notable exceptions) is growing increasingly uncongenial.  The preoccupation, nay obsession, with the multi-media landscape is oppressive.  “And now, on line, on digital, on your smart speaker and on 88 to 91 FM, this is BBC Radio…”  There is a constant reference to “content” that is “in your feed”.  In the real world, the news is so bad that it has become common practice for people to switch off, or retreat into an echo chamber that has been designed, algorithmically, to broadcast that which they want to hear. 

I suppose this is what it means to advance in years.  Life qua relinquishment.  Ich bin der Welt abhandengekommen. I’ve given up the telly, and the opera, and now it would seem, radio.  Whatever next?  Newspapers?  There is a particularly irritating article in today’s Sunday Times by Jeremy Clarkson on the topic of net zero.  Net zero is unhuman.  Who wants to be cold and sad?  The burden of the piece is that all human progress has been characterised by a move from discomfort towards comfort.  But Ed Miliband (referred to sequentially as Sillyband, Stupidband, and Millipede – talk about an argument ad hominem) is taking us in the other direction.  Chickpeas and bamboo cutlery are why Milliband’s crusade will fail.  I suppose in a way it’s quite amusing, but the trouble is, it fails to address the central issue of climate change, just as the US National Security Strategy fails to address it with its simple assertion, “We reject the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘net zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidise our adversaries.”  That is an assertion without any backup.  So it is with Jeremy Clarkson’s piece.  You cannot write about this issue without answering the questions – (a) Is climate change real?  (b) Is it man-made?  (c) Is it potentially catastrophic?  (d) Can the catastrophe be avoided or attenuated?  If you’re not going to address these issues, there’s really no point in expressing contemptuous derision, and cracking a few jokes.  I’m surprised the Sunday Times’ editor’s blue pencil wrote “stet”.

And as for the media frenzy over Mr Mountbatten-Windsor…

Go placidly amid the noise and haste.               

President Emmanuel Macron is fast tracking a French ban on the use of social media, and of mobile phones, by children under the age of 15, so that the legislation may be in place before the start of the school year in September.  He has said, “The brains of our children and our teenagers are not for sale.  The emotions of our children and our teenagers are not for sale or to be manipulated, neither by American platforms, nor by Chinese algorithms.”  I thought President Macron looked very cool in his ray-bans.  (Other shades are available.)  I don’t know, but I assume he had suffered a subconjunctival haemorrhage, which sounds, and looks, frightful, but is entirely benign.  Naturally, the Donald mocked him. 

The expression “not for sale” has a certain potent currency.  Mark Carney has said of Canada, and Mette Frederiksen of Greenland, that they are not for sale.  In the social media context, the implication is that powerful forces target a vulnerable market with a commodity that is addictive.  The cigarette companies did the same, and still do.  Vapes are colourful and flavoursome, targeted at children the way supermarket confectionary is sited, or sighted, at toddlers’ eye level beside the checkout counter.  The social media companies utilise algorithms that are designed to keep the user hooked, by providing what has been erroneously described as a “dopamine hit”.  Don’t shoot the messenger. All over the world, children are spending hours staring at their smart phones.  You hand children a book and they attempt to interact with it by tapping the page, or scrolling down.  On social media, most of the content they devour is aptly puerile, but at the sinister end of the spectrum, unbelievably, children can be encouraged to do away with themselves.

Here en Grande-Bretagne, the government is closely watching events in Australia, where the social media ban for under-sixteens is already in place.  In Australia, the platforms Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube and Twitch are banned.  The British Government is minded to follow suit, but the Lords are introducing their own amendments and the whole thing could easily be stymied by parliamentary procedure.  The last word you could use to describe the Mother of Parliaments would be “nimble”.  And interestingly, many of the parents whose children have taken their own lives as a result of exposure to harmful content on social media are not convinced of the wisdom of an outright ban.

But it seems to me that an important question has not been asked by, and of, the body politic.  If social media are harmful to children, why are they not also harmful to adults?  If children need to come off social media, should not adults do the same?  Should not, in fact, adults be an example, lead the way, and show their children how to log off?  We elders, after all, are as prone to addiction, and to manipulation, as anybody else.  If I were going to impose a social media ban on any segment of society, I would target politicians.  Is there any sight more depressing than that of a Member, seated on the green benches, staring at a mobile, impervious to the debate that is going on? 

But of course, politicians would not dream of coming off social media.  They are terrified, much like children, of being out of the loop.  So they don’t communicate directly with one another, or with us, by word of mouth, or in print.  They post on X.  Or the Donald posts on his own Truth Social, an oxymoron if ever there was one.  His Board of Peace is Orwellian.  Didn’t the Ministry of Truth say “War is Peace”?  

The fact is, the whole of society is in the vicelike grip of an addiction.  You only need to turn on the radio to be swamped with society’s overwhelming obsession with the virtual world.  The reference to “your feed” never stops.  We seem to be bombarded by a welter or information, or misinformation, or disinformation, from a multitude of sources.  And yet direct communication between human beings is becoming increasingly rare.  We have all been faced with the problem of trying to communicate with a multinational conglomerate, or trying to negotiate on the phone with an endless algorithm, or to talk to a robot who does not understand our accent.  I see that when the National Executive Committee of the Labour Party decided to ban Andy Burnham from standing in the by-election in the Greater Manchester seat of Gorton and Denton, they never told him.  They said they tried to contact him but couldn’t.  Incidentally, I have an idea that the decision made by the committee will come back to haunt them.  I predict David Yelland and Simon Lewis will talk it over on When it Hits the Fan, and I reckon will pronounce it a PR disaster. 

Of course we’re all addicted to something.  I’m addicted to books.  What is the difference between an interest, or an enthusiasm, and an obsession, or an addiction?  Interests and enthusiasms good, obsessions and addictions bad, I suppose.  But why bad?  Bad, presumably, because bad for our health, physically, mentally, and spiritually.  I don’t suppose my book addiction is doing me much harm, other than by cluttering up my house, but all the same you know you have a problem when you buy a book you already have.  Last week in Waterstones I picked up Goldeneye by Matthew Parker (Hutchinson 2014), read it, thought it was terribly good, and put it on my shelf only to discover I already had it, and had already read it.  I did exactly the same with Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam, and it won the Booker Prize.  Bit of a worry.

Other people’s addictions are incomprehensible to those of us who don’t share them, like gambling, or indeed like social media.  New Zealand Gewürztraminer yes, but then again may I smugly crow I’m having a dry January.  Twenty five days down, six to go.  I’m tempting fate; races are often lost at the last hurdle, but I celebrated Burns Night last night with a cuppa tea, so bar the totally unforeseeable I should make it.  I might even stay on the wagon, who knows?  Not drinking is as much of a habit as drinking.  Poor old Ian Fleming, in his Goldeneye hideaway on the north shore of Jamaica seemed to be hooked on gin and nicotine.  Gin makes me sad.  I call it the Juniper Blues.  No wonder the melancholy Old Etonian was, well, so melancholy.  And, like Bond, he smoked sixty sticks of cigarette a day.  His alter ego killed him.

Sugar is another addiction targeted at the vulnerable.  We are back at the supermarket checkout, with the sweeties two feet off the ground.  And this also takes us back to France.  There was recently an “aux barricades” moment in a French supermarket when customers, frustrated at the lack of staff at the checkout counters, took matters into their own hands, loaded up trolleys with goods and gridlocked the aisles until the checkouts were appropriately staffed.  It could only happen in France. There was communication about this in The Herald, which prompted me to write this short missive, published today:

On the subject of supermarket checkouts (Herald Letters, January 24), the French have a nickname for the checkout lady… la beepeuse.

And the Germans have a word for the item, often shaped like a well-known Swiss chocolate bar, that separates customers’ shopping on the checkout conveyor belt… die Kassentoblerone.  Here en Grande-Bretagne, if we’re stuck with automatic checkouts, I have an idea to make the process more amusing.  Why not make the scanner a Dalek?

I would love to hear it say, in characteristically harsh tones: “UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGAGE AREA!”  The kids would love it.                                                                     

President Trump has written a letter to the Norwegian Prime Minister, Jonas Gahr Store, which contains the following sentence.

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace.”

He goes on to say that he intends to focus on “what is good and proper for the United States of America”.  This included having “complete and total control” of Greenland. 

In his reply Prime Minister Store pointed out that the awarding of the Peace Prize had nothing to do with him, nor with Norway, but is solely in the gift of the independent Nobel Committee.  Or, as we say in Glasgow, “It wuzznae me.  A big boy done it, and ran away.”  But seriously, we should take President Trump’s beef seriously.  He is stepping back from his role as peacemaker, because he has not been handed a gong.  Well, at least, not first hand.  He got one from FIFA and one from Maria Corina Machado.  But that’s not quite the same.

As gongs go, Nobel Prizes are about as prestigious as they get.  A sure fire way of not getting one is to make application for it on one’s own behalf.  You are supposed to be surprised by that early morning telephone call, and in your acceptance speech in Stockholm, express humility, avowing that you have merely sat on the shoulders of giants.  But this is not President Trump’s style.  I think we can now be sure that he will never receive a Nobel, unless he carries out a compulsory purchase of Norway, and takes over himself as the Committee’s Chair.

Most people would regard the idea of turning your back on Peace because you have not received an honour as being utterly farcical.  You wouldn’t make it up.  Is it conceivable that the President bases his foreign policy on what he perceives as a personal snub?  That would certainly go a long way to explaining why so many world leaders fall over themselves in an effort not to offend the President in a personal way. 

But irrespective of all these diplomatic efforts, President Trump intends to acquire Greenland, one way or another.  Russia and China have their baleful eyes upon the world’s largest island, and Denmark can do nothing about it.  No doubt Denmark, alone, could not defend Greenland, but Denmark is not alone.  Denmark is part of NATO, and NATO comprises 32 member states, including the USA.  But the USA has taken to denigrating NATO, and Europe.  When Denmark, and some other NATO countries, recently sent some troops on exercises in Greenland, somebody in the Trump administration remarked that Denmark had sent along a sledge with a pack of huskies, or words to that effect.  It was a typical remark from the strong to the weak.  When during the 1930s the Pope was critical of Stalin and his purges, Stalin purportedly asked, how many divisions does the Pope have?       

We shouldn’t be surprised by any of these developments.  They are all written out, in black and white, in the National Security Strategy (NSS), published last November.  It is remarkable how completely devoid the NSS is of any moral code or ethical framework.  The NSS is entirely concerned with the acquisition of power, wealth, and territory.  I remember when Gordon Brown, a son of the manse, was British Prime Minister, he made reference to a “moral compass” which he had been bequeathed.  At the time he was ridiculed for this remark.  Tony Blair once invoked the Almighty in a draft speech, but the Almighty was expunged by his press secretary Alastair Campbell, who said, “We don’t do God.”  Realpolitik is Machiavellian.  The electorate, it is said, is not interested in what is right, rather in what pays the bills, and what amuses.  Bread and circuses.  It’s the economy, stupid. 

It is seldom useful to invoke the spectre of the Führer when examining current affairs, yet it is impossible to ignore the similarities between US expansionism and Nazi Germany’s desire for Lebensraum during the 1930s.  That was achieved, initially, little by little.  The Rhine, the Austrian Anschluss, the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, Poland…  What comes after Greenland?  Iceland? Scotland?  The President has a bridgehead here already.  It will all be done in the name of global security, this formation, in Orwellian terms, of Oceania, and Airstrip One. 

Keir Starmer made a statement from Downing Street this morning.  President Trump is applying 10% additional tariffs on imports into the US from the UK on February 1^st, to be increased to 25% by June 1^st, if Greenland is not yet under his control.  But Sir Keir will not reciprocate.  He does not intend to start a trade war.  He has stated that the President’s desire to take Greenland is wrong, but he still hopes to keep onside with the US, and to provide a bridge between the US and Europe.  He is looking increasingly like Mr Chamberlain. 

All last week I listened to BBC Radio 3’s celebrations of the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, showcasing some of the great American orchestras, and then at the weekend, opera from the Met; in other words, everything that is good about America.  I heard a performance of Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait.  Sometime before Lockdown I had heard the Cincinnati Symphony perform it at the Edinburgh Festival, the words of the 16^th President spoken by the actor Charles Dance.  The world premiere of Lincoln Portrait was given by the Cincinnati, so it is in the blood.  The effect was overwhelming.  So much of the text seems applicable now.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.  The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise to the occasion.  As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.  We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. 

I have a notion that Sir Keir needs to think anew.  Diplomatic-speak is all very nice, but there comes a point when you have to call a spade a spade.  At the time of the 250^th anniversary, it is hard for us to call it out.  The President doesn’t seem to be much concerned with the opinion of the Greenlanders themselves over their own future.  Doubtless he thinks he knows what’s best for them.  We ought to remind him of Lincoln’s resolve that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”  We have thought of the Trump administration as being merely a blip.  We say he is “unpredictable”.  He will do diplomacy his own way.  We may say that he is touchy, narcissistic, chaotic, and that he is making it all up as he goes along.  We say, disparagingly, that he is a joke.  Yet the one thing that we have stopped short of saying thus far is that he, and his administration, are malignant.  We will only say that when the USS Gerald R. Ford anchors off Nuuk.  We may not have long to wait.                            

During the southern hemisphere’s summer of 1997 I visited Antarctica.  I wasn’t a tourist; I was a ship’s doctor.  I wonder now that I had the nerve.  If anybody were to fall ill, seriously ill, I would not have the option of referring them to the nearest district hospital.  Healthcare-wise, I was it.  Fortunately, nobody came a cropper.  Most of my patients were suffering from mal de mer.  I’m pretty sure one patient, incongruously, had malaria, but she had just come back from a trip to Vietnam, and fortunately she had brought her anti-malarials with her.  For myself, prone to motion sickness, I knew there would be nothing worse than trying to manage patients if I myself felt like death.  So I dosed myself up with my antihistamine of choice, and was walking on air. 

I flew from Auckland across the International Date Line to Buenos Aires, courtesy of Aerolineas Argentinas, thence to the most southerly city in the world, Ushuaia, at the bottom of Terra del Fuego.  The crisp air of the Patagonian mountains reminded me of Scotland.  In the streets of Ushuaia I was menaced by a vicious looking dog and I wondered if it could be rabid.  I had no idea.  But I wasn’t bitten. 

Down at the dock, there was a billboard looking out to sea, designed after the fashion of a gilded picture frame you sometimes encounter, encapsulating a beautiful view; but the vista was cut out in the shape of the Malvinas, the Falklands.  Quark, who organised global adventure tours, had advised me not to advertise my origins.  Memories of 1982, of the General Belgrano, of Goose Green, were still very raw.  Best say I was a New Zealander, which was true. 

The ship was The Professor Multanovskiy, formerly a Russian spy ship.  Indeed the ship’s captain and crew were Russian.  The passengers were all Belgian, and the lingua franca on board was Flemish.  The only English native speaker was the barman, a French Canadian, with whom I played chess.  I conducted most of my consultations in schoolboy French. 

It was a ten day trip, two and half days spent crossing the Drake Passage, two and a half back, with five days on and around the Antarctic Peninsula.  Aside from the penguins and the seals, we largely had the place to ourselves.  This was just before the dawn of the age of mass tourism.  Now the great and the good, the very rich, go down on their cruise ships, anchor off Deception Island and semaphore to one another, because while they have their gin and tonic, with ice, no lemon, they have run out of Perrier water.  But ours wasn’t merely a sightseeing trip.  There was a film crew on board, making a documentary about the hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the Gerlache Strait, which separates Brabant Island and Anvers Island from mainland Antarctica, by a Belgian explorer, Gerlache, whose grandson, the Baron, was present.

Of the trip itself I have written elsewhere.  There remains in my memory only a collage of impressions.  Admiralty Bay, Hanna Point, Telephone Bay, Pendulum Cove, Whaler’s Bay, Melchnikoff Point, Melchior Island…  And some of the bases – Arctowski (Polish), Bellingshausen (Russian), Argentinean and Chilean bases whose names I can’t remember, and of course the British Base at Port Lockroy.  There was a lot of joshing and banter at Port Lockroy, and I realised after days at sea (in more ways than one) conversing in French, how much I’d missed irony.  I think I sent a post card from there.  To whom I sent it, or whether it turned up, I can’t say.

We were very lucky with the weather.  The seas were calm, aside from the pronounced swell across the Drake Passage, the skies blue.  The sun shone and the ambient daytime temperature was about three degrees Celsius.  I actually managed one day to sunbathe, after a fashion, on deck, and I made a point of dawning shorts and running vest and going for a run on the Antarctic beach. 

But I bring all this up today to provide a backdrop to a very vivid experience I had, which left a lasting impression, towards the end of the return trip to Ushuaia.  The good weather held and the ship’s captain made a diversion in order to go round Cape Horn.  I remember seeing, on the Chilean coastline, a stone’s throw away, green grass, and experiencing a tremendous sense of relief.  I was returning to an environment where I belonged, having been a visitor to a region which was totally inimical.  Visiting Antarctica is not that different from visiting the moon.  You can’t go there without a substantial backup of life support.  The penguins, sociable cobbers, Adelie, Gentoo, Chinstrap, are right at home, but we are only there under sufferance.  Antarctica definitely changed my world view.  I had thought of the whole of planet Earth as our home, yet in fact our natural habitat is even more circumscribed, within certain latitudes.    

Yet we are reliant upon Antarctica.  We need it, in its pristine state, for the equilibrium of our ecosystem.  This has been recognised in the – somewhat fragile – international agreement that Antarctica should not be mined, should not be exploited.  Precisely the same can be said for the northern, polar regions.  And yet look at what is now happening up there, and with extraordinary rapidity.  President Trump wants to exploit Greenland.  If he doesn’t, the Russians or the Chinese will.  It is therefore imperative, he says, that he have control of Greenland.  He says he doesn’t want Russia as a neighbour.  Doesn’t he realise that Russia, fifty one miles across the Bering Strait from Alaska, is already his neighbour?  He is already a close ally of Greenland, through NATO, and is welcome to increase his military presence there.  But apparently this is not good enough.  Complete commitment only comes with complete possession.  This is going to happen.  We can either do it the easy way, or the hard way.  In this blog I’ve previously compared President Trump to Harold Potter, the wheeler dealer in the film It’s a Wonderful Life who changes peaceful Bedford Falls into the grotesque, dystopian Pottersville; and to Shelley’s Ozymandias, he of “wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command”, the haughty and disdainful king who eventually is rendered extinct in a barren wasteland.  Yesterday I heard somebody compare the President, appropriately enough in this season of Epiphany, to King Herod.  Such is his paranoia. 

The irony is that all this rapacity, this compulsion to extract every last fossil fuel, mineral, and rare earth from the earth’s crust, is being unleashed at the same time that the Arctic ice is melting and the Northwest Passage is opening up.  That which looks like a business opportunity is actually the intimation of a dire threat.  President Trump might well be advised to leave 57,000 Greenlanders alone.  They are looking after their island very well, as their ancestors have done for thousands of years.  But no.  President Trump is going to “double down”.  It’s all there in his National Security Policy:

We reject the disastrous “climate change” and “Net Zero” ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidise our adversaries.

We can’t say we weren’t warned.  In this 250^th anniversary of the founding of the United States, we may ask, what does President Trump stand for?  For the past eighty years we have thought of the US as the house on the hill, a beacon of light.  But there is no reference in the National` Security Strategy to whatsoever things are good, whatsoever things are true.  President Trump stands for national aggrandisement, and the accumulation of wealth.  He says so, quite explicitly, and proudly.  Last week, almost unnoticed, he pulled out of 66 institutions of international cooperation, some UN, for example, the Peacebuilding Commission, and the Peacebuilding Fund, some non-UN, for example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  He has little interest in the United Nations, or NATO, or the World Health Organisation, or the Conference of the Parties.  He is only interested in cooperation with allies if it will swell the Federal Reserve, whose interest rates had better be controlled by him.  When the USAF used RAF Mildenhall, and then Wick John O’Groats Airport, en route to commandeering an oil tanker between Iceland and Scotland, I couldn’t help recalling that, once more, Orwell saw it all coming.  Britain was a satellite of the US, renamed “Airstrip One”.  Now imagine threatening to attack an ally of 57,000 peace-loving people.  You could hardly conceive of a victim who posed less of a threat.           

He needs to be told.  He is quite explicitly, after all, threatening to destroy the planet.  He needs to be confronted with the truth.  It won’t be pretty.  He won’t like it.  He could make things very unpleasant for us all.  But sometimes you have to rise to a challenge, because the alternative is so unthinkable.  As Ernest Shackleton once said, we all have our Deep South.              

“If you don’t have a Sphere of Influence, then you are in one.”  According to Sir Alex Younger, former head of MI6, the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov said that.  It is an arresting aphorism.  A characteristic, perhaps the defining element of any form of subjugation, say, that of the abused spouse, the decrepit elderly relative being gently coerced towards Dignitas, the bullied, the gaslit, the downtrodden, the despised and rejected, is that, unless confronted, the controlling behaviour of the strong over the weak is invisible.  Customs officials have politely enquired of me, when passing from Portugal to Spain, or from Canada to the United States, “Why on earth do you want to go there?”  It’s a form of passive aggression, the only mode of expression available to the underdog. 

I wonder if Garry Kasparov was thinking in terms of chess strategy when he passed his remark.  People often liken international politics to a game of chess.  The Masters of the Universe look down upon the field of play, conjure scenarios of “if this, then that…” into the future, and make their move.  The balance of power is all important; either you are evenly matched, or you are in a dominant position, or you are being dominated.  But the trouble is that real life is not remotely like a game of chess.  Chess can be played, and won, by a computer, because there is always a demonstrably optimal move, available to those with a big enough brain.  Chess can be played out.  Real life is more like a game of poker.  There is the element of chance, both in not knowing what is in the mind of your opponent, nor in having any control over the hand you’ve been dealt.  How can you play for a grand slam if you’ve been dealt a chicane?  As President Trump memorably said to President Zelenskyy, “You don’t have the cards.”  Then again, real life isn’t like poker either.  The stakes are too high, or, as President Zelenskyy replied to President Trump, “This isn’t a game.”

It’s hard to comprehend that, almost, but not quite, within living memory, Great Britain in its Empire controlled the greatest, or at least the biggest, Sphere of Influence the world has ever seen.  It was an accident of the amalgamation, or conglomeration, of the industrial revolution and the rise of naval power.  We had command of the high seas.  As God made us mightier yet, we exported a kind of swashbuckling Christianity.  We were self-confident.  We ruled the waves, and were quite sure we would never ever be slaves.  We espoused noble causes.  We even abolished slavery.  We were happy to bestow upon others the Pax Britannica, so long as it was not challenged.  By the time of the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, it looked as if the empire upon which the sun never set would indeed last a thousand years.  George Orwell did not take such a sanguine view.  As a young man, working as a policeman in Burma, he came to the conclusion that Empire was essentially a money-making exercise.  

What went wrong?  Within a single generation, it seemed likely that Great Britain would be invaded and occupied.  The Royal Navy would have been requisitioned by the Kriegsmarine, and the Empire would have ceased to exist.  This was certainly the prediction of the US Ambassador to the Court of St James, Joe Kennedy, at the outbreak of the Second World War.  The US might have, to borrow a recent expression Sir Keir Starmer, “shed few tears”.  This might have happened, but for the pigheaded bloody-mindedness of a maverick PM, and the valour of a handful of airmen.  As it happened, we survived, but although Winston said he had not become PM to preside over the dismantling of the Empire, that, like it or not, became his role. 

So the Empire became the Commonwealth and, for his second term, Winston devoted himself, insofar as his failing health would allow, to the formation of international institutions and the cause of world peace.  He didn’t get very far.  He tried to organise a “summit” – he even coined the term – of the three great powers who had periodically met in conference during the war.  But the US and Soviet Russia weren’t interested, and Winston quietly resigned during a newspaper strike. 

Still, there remained close ties with the US, the Commonwealth, and Western Europe.  Out of the ashes of the League of Nations arose the phoenix of the United Nations.  The idea of a “rules-based international order” took root.  The stakes were very high because two opposing ideologies were nuclear armed.  They glared at one another across the “Iron Curtain” that stretched from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic.  But at least there was an international forum based in New York, and a “permanent security council” originally formed by the allies of World War II.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was even more spectacular than the demise of the British Empire.  For no apparent external reason, German youth climbed on to the Berlin wall, and started to demolish it, without fear of being shot.  Two years later, the historians pronounced “the end of history”.

But it seems to be easier to win the war than to win the peace.  Russia was arguably taken over by the mafia, the oligarchs who were content to send their children to the English public schools, and flood the City of London with laundered money.  Mr Putin deeply regretted the eclipse of Russian power.  He kindly laid out for us a blueprint of his conception of the Russian Federation’s “Sphere of Influence”, and prepared to attack Ukraine.  He advised us not to interfere in this sphere, lest he, if we understood him correctly, unleashed nuclear weapons. 

All of this was arguably quite predictable, but could we have predicted the attack upon Caracas?  Well, yes.  The build-up of naval power in the Caribbean was a hint, and President Trump did tell us that he wanted to purge the area of “narco-terrorists”.  In fact, in his recently published National Defence Strategy, he gave us a blueprint, much like Mr Putin, of his conception of his own particular Sphere of Influence.  This is described as the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.  President Trump wants the US to dominate the entire Western Hemisphere.  When he said he wanted to make Canada the 51^st State, and to take over Greenland (not ruling out the use of force), we all thought he was joking.  Donald just being Donald.  Now it doesn’t seem so funny. 

Some people think that untapped Venezuelan crude, the largest oil resource in the world, is the real reason for President Trump’s preoccupation with Venezuela.  Not the traffic in fentanyl.  After all, if it were all about drugs, why not attack Mexico, or Bolivia?  Some people think – are they being uncharitable? – that the accusation of “narco-terrorism” resembles Mr Putin’s accusation, levelled at Ukraine, of “Nazism”.  A pretext.   

When President Trump was asked on board Air Force One whether President Maduro had been kidnapped, apparently he nodded and said, “That’s a good word.”  The rules-based international order has gone, to be replaced by the Rule of Might, the Big Beasts with their Spheres of Influence. 

Should we have seen this coming?  Orwell did, as far back as 1948.  He thought there would be three spheres, three great “superstates” – Oceania (the absorption of the British Empire by the United States), Eurasia (the absorption of Europe by Russia), and Eastasia (China and the countries to the south of it, Japan, and parts of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet).

Each New Year, the political pundits on the BBC have a radio programme where they make predictions about the coming year.  What will 2026 bring?  The irony is that this year, they recorded the programme the night before the US bombed Caracas.  This was not foreseen.  As Mr Macmillan said, “Events, dear boy…”  So it would be a wise man, or a foolish one, who predicts how events are to unfold.  But let us suppose Orwell was right.  We would have to conclude that President Trump would, at least for the time being, stay out of other people’s Spheres of Influence.  So we might expect the war in Ukraine to grind on, and Russia to continue pushing west into Europe.  We would expect Mr Xi to carry out a Caracas-style copy-cat manoeuvre on Taipei.  And we would expect that the British PM, when asked to criticise President Trump, might shrug and say, “I’m not going to shed tears over Mr Maduro”, because after all, if you don’t have a Sphere of Influence, then you are in one.                                                      

Somebody wrote into The Herald the other day in praise of Prestwick Airport.  I have a soft spot for Prestwick because it was the destination for my father when he undertook a rather hazardous journey by Dakota, from Canada via Greenland and Iceland during the war.  He visited my granny, ten miles up the road in Saltcoats, for the first time in years, before being posted on to England.  Prestwick Airport gets a bit of stick.  It’s a political football, because its financial viability has been called into question, and the road and rail links to Glasgow are not that great.  (Same could be said of Glasgow Airport.)  On the other hand, it’s essentially fog free, and, according to the Herald correspondent, has the longest runway in the UK.

Wait a minute!  That’s not right.  I fired off a rejoinder.

Dear Sir,

Prestwick is indeed a terrific airport, but at 2,987 metres (9,801 feet), its runway is not, as your correspondent states, the longest in the UK (“Flying High”, The Herald, December 18th.)  The runway at Machrihanish, two miles west of Campbelltown, is 3,049 metres (10,003 feet) long.  I believe it was extended during the Cold War to accommodate Avro Vulcan bombers.  I see from my logbook that on December 6th, 2002, I landed a Cherokee Warrior there, and I remember touching down at the start of the enormous stretch of tarmac, and coming to a halt before I had reached the black and white “piano keys” signalling the start of the runway.  Happy days.

Yours sincerely…

The rejoinder got a rejoinder.  Machrihanish may have the longest runway in the British Isles, but, being at least three hours away from Glasgow by road, it’s a white elephant.

Wait a minute!  Not the British Isles.  The UK.  Shannon is longer.  Thus do the army of nerdish Herald correspondents fight like bald men over a comb, or look for a fight the way other people look for their dinner.  Well, I thought, if we built a bridge between the Mull of Kintyre and Antrim, Belfast would be just round the corner.  We could open up the Celtic world!  But I didn’t write back. 

It’s a fretful time of year, or it can be if you have a predisposition to bah-humbuggery.  I remember in the world of emergency medicine that Christmas was the most miserable day in the year.  People would present throughout the day to the emergency department with all manner of human wretchedness in mind, body, and spirit.  As the evening wore on, the incidents of interpersonal violence would increase in number and severity.  Amid all the blood and thunder, I remember one particularly patient individual finally reaching the head of the queue, only to request access to abortifacients.  It seemed a bizarre request on the day of a nativity.       

The newspapers are only too well aware of readers’ fretfulness.  This is why they are full of giant crosswords and multifarious brain-teasers designed to keep one occupied, or preoccupied.  I did the Sunday Times giant prize crossword last night, all but one clue, a 23 x 23 box monster.  I’m not sure if I’ll hunt up the last solution.  Didn’t Persian carpet makers deliberately leave one flaw in the weft, because only God is perfect?  Besides, the prize is a 530 piece wooden jigsaw from the Puzzly Company, depicting Claude Monet’s Woman with a Parasol.  I’ve never done a jigsaw in my life.  Perhaps this is my opportunity.  (530 pieces.  I can’t help noticing that 530 is just one more than 23 x 23.  There’s a jigsaw piece for every square of the crossword, and one to spare.  Only a fretful nerd would spot such a thing.)

The hiatus twixt Xmas and Hogmanay reminds me of a long haul journey by air.  It’s like suffering from jet lag without even getting off the ground.  But you feel as if you are stopping off in Singapore en route to Auckland, dozing off in the Sheraton Towers, 39 Scott Road, and waking at some unimaginable hour to stare stupidly at the TV screen, where a fish in an aquarium ogles you right back.  There’s some ghastly minimalist background music.  So it is now, this Limbo.  Have another mince pie, do another crossword, har har. 

I’ve kept New Year’s Resolutions to a minimum, otherwise they’d be liable to be the same as last year.  Having a lengthy bucket list is the same as being completely demotivated.  I really must read Proust.  I really must learn Wagner’s Ring, or Maxwell’s equations.  Repeating the same resolutions year on year is the definition of insanity.  You resolve, and then go off at a tangent.  Life, according to John Lennon, is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.  I really must visit Munich.  If you don’t know where you’re going, according to George Harrison, any road’ll take you there. 

So: one resolution.  Finish Tome No. 5.  It’s currently 70,000 words long, but the words aren’t necessarily in the right order.  Should I get AI to do it for me?  No thank you.  I have a notion that on a previous publishing exercise my copy editor was a robot, and it lacked a sense of humour.  That’s how I knew it was a bot.  Now there’s a white elephant.  Artificial Intelligence is the latest infatuation of our politicians.  It’s the deus ex machina that’s going to solve all the problems in the NHS, and in social services.  The lonesome will be consoled by AI.  Bots are really good at empathy.  Count me out.

But talking of fretfulness, I see that today the Chinese are exercising around Taiwan, rehearsing a blockade.  I wonder if the South China Sea is going to be the flashpoint of 2026.  It’s being so cheery keeps me going.

Every good wish, when it comes, for a happy and prosperous New Year

JCC.