jamescalumcampbell

Last week I got a reminder from the travel insurance people that I was due to pay my annual surcharge levied upon me because I am so ancient.  But on perusing the small print they seemed to be insuring me, not against falling ill while abroad, but encountering a sudden emergency in my home.  I phoned them up.

We have grown used to hearing that this call may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes, along with a battery of preliminary announcements relating to codes of practice.  I remember when I was a child and I wanted to make a call I would lift the receiver and immediately – immediately – a voice would say, “Number please?”  This was before telephone dials came into use, although we were aware of them because Perry Mason would make a call with them on the telly, and we thought they were terribly sophisticated.  I suppose automatic dialling made all these telephone operators redundant.  The telephone exchange serving the West End of Glasgow was a substantial and handsome building on the corner of Dowanside Road and Caledon Street.  It has been converted into private flats. 

Back on the phone to the insurance company, I listened patiently throughout all the caveats, and the suggestion that I might prefer to conduct business online.  Until recently the next set of hurdles would have been a series of options requiring a keyboard response.  “To make a claim, press one…”  But this has been superseded by Artificial Intelligence.  A robot asked me to state the reason for my call.  I feel rather ridiculous talking to a robot.  There’s no point in saying, “It’s rather complicated.  You see, to let you understand…”  This will be followed by a pause, and then, “Please state in a few words the reason for your call.”

“An enquiry about my travel insurance.”

“I’m sorry.  I didn’t quite catch that.  Do you wish to make a claim?”

“No.”

“Please state, in a few words…”  And so on. 

After a while, the robot cottons on to the fact that this is going nowhere.  You can almost hear the robot sigh.  It must all be my fault.  But finally you are put through to a real live person of flesh and blood.  You might imagine this might be a blessing, but increasingly, this is where your troubles start.  I have a notion that call handlers are being trained to resemble robots as far as possible.  The person I got through to spoke sotto voce, had an accent I struggled to identify, and also spoke incredibly rapidly.  I have a notion that if the constitutional arrangements of these islands are ever radically modified, it will not be because of any provincial disillusionment with centralised government policy, but simply because the people at one end of the nation will cease to understand the people at the other end.  It will be a Tower of Babel moment.

I said, “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you.  Could you speak up, and speak a little slower?”

He said, or I think he said, “I’ll make a note you are hard of hearing.”

“I’m not hard of hearing.  I just can’t hear you.”

We struggled on.  I explained that my travel insurer seemed to be trying to sell me home insurance.  Nothing to do with us, he said.  You’ll need to phone your home insurer.  So it went on.  I could describe the rest of this ghastly interaction in laborious detail, but I’m sure you get the picture.  At the end of it all, I was asked to stay on the line to take part in a short satisfaction survey.  I hung up.  I know I should have stayed on, to tell them how awful it all was. 

Two questions arise.  How has it come to this?  And why do we put up with it?

You need to understand the motivation of the masters of the universe.  They want to automate everything.  Doesn’t it make sound business sense?  Robots are not salaried; they don’t require holiday or sickness pay; they don’t even need a tea break.  What is the point of employing low grade human resources? 

This argument is flawed; fatally flawed.  The masters of the universe are trying to create a perpetual motion machine.  It might look a little bit like one of these gigantic, windowless, dark satanic mills threatening to spring up usually in delectable areas of countryside, beside a river, ideal for cooling.    They want the engine quietly to tick over, creating wealth from its own machinations.  But life, real life, is not remotely like that.  The machine tries to fit real life into a template, an algorithm, but real life is not remotely susceptible to algorithmic analysis.  That is why we endlessly iterate and reiterate these conversations on the telephone:

“Please sate the reason for you call in a few words.”

“It’s rather complicated.  You see, to let you understand…”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that.  Please state…”

So why do we put up with it?  It is because we have been conned.  We think this is the future.  Our politicians are besotted with this madness.  That is why they woo the masters of the universe.  They imagine that if the tech giants moved offshore we would somehow lag behind, and lose out.    

You know what it’s like when occasionally, just occasionally, you cut through all this drivel on the phone and have a conversation with somebody who is not artificial, but who is actually intelligent.  The ability to understand a human problem, to cut through extraneous material and reach the kernel of the matter, and then to solve the problem, has nothing to do with algorithms, and everything to do with human experience, compassion, and, often, humour. 

I have a yen to start a movement against this latest evolution of automation.  It would be a call to eschew endless telephone menus and insist on talking to a real person.  It should have a name, an acronym like LAITY:  Leave Artificial Intelligence to Yuppies.  (Needs work I grant.)  But I’m conscious that the masters of the universe, and the politicians in their pocket, won’t like it.  Somewhere in the bowels of a vast shed on Lammermoor there will be a faint whisper.  LAITY will come to the attention of the Thought Police.  It will be seen as seditious, and banned as a terrorist organisation.

The supercomputers are beginning to sprout.  They will spring up in remote areas, and stand, impassive, watching over us like the ancient ancestral faces of the statues on Easter Island, not looking out to sea, but gazing inward, intently, upon us.  I remember what Jacob Bronowski said of the Easter Island statues.  He was rather fond of them, “but in the end, all of them are not worth one child’s dimpled face.”            

Over the course of the weekend the Prime Minister repaired to Chequers, we are told, to consider his position.  At 9.00 am this morning, at least according to BBC Radio 4, he was still considering it.  But it would appear to be a rapidly evolving situation so while I write this, I will listen into the news bulletins. 

If he goes, we will have gone through seven PMs in a decade, the entire length of Sir Tony Blair’s three terms in office.  After Blair, Gordon Brown took over.  He seemed to be dogged by bad luck; foot and mouth, the global financial collapse and so on.  Early in his term he thought of calling a snap general election to secure a mandate.  But, it is said, he dithered, changed his mind, and when he eventually went to the country in 2010, he failed to gain a majority.  Big Broon was respected, but he was never popular in Middle England.  The 2010 election threatened a hung parliament.  Brown tried to form a government but the numbers just didn’t stack up.  Hence the Tories and the Lib Dems formed a coalition, and David Cameron became Prime Minister.  Gordon Brown had been PM for just under three years.  Cameron lasted six years.  Brown subsequently said that he thought the days of the PM securing a prolonged term in office were over.  How prescient was that?  By current standards, his own term seems quite protracted.  Some of the subsequent PMs toppled like ninepins.  May: 13/7/16 – 24/7/19; Johnson: 24/7/19 – 5/9/22; Truss: 5/9/22 – 24/10/22! (Somebody in the EU said rather unkindly that Liz Truss’s term was shorter than the shelf life of a lettuce.) Sunak:  25/10/22 – 5/7/24; and now Starmer: 5/7/24 – 22/6/26.  It’s all beginning to look quite Italianate. 

But why is Starmer required to go?  He succeeded Jeremy Corbyn as Leader of the Labour Party in 2020, when the Labour Party was widely regarded as unelectable.  He turned that around within a remarkably short period of time and in 2024 he won the general election with a huge majority which should have held him secure at least until 2029.  But a series of misjudgements and policy U-turns, poor PR and a failure to articulate “mission” have made him unpopular in the country.  The polls have turned against him.  This is what is making the Parliamentary Labour Party so disgruntled, and so nervous.  Frankly, they are all terrified of losing their jobs.  And this, at heart, is what has sent Sir Keir to Chequers to contemplate his situation.  He will be looking for support, and counting up the numbers.  But the numbers are not stacking up.   

The event that has brought this situation to a crisis is the convincing victory at the Makerfield by-election of Andy Burnham.  As Mayor of Manchester, Mr Burnham has been very popular.  He is charismatic, down to earth, and very good at fighting for his corner.  He is a “leveller-up”.  And he is due to be sworn in as an MP in Westminster this afternoon.

10.00 am, BBC Radio 4.  That’s it.  Sir Keir has gone.  Or at least, is going.  If Mr Burnham becomes PM by coronation, it will all happen in July.  Sir Keir will take that short car journey to the Palace to resign, and Mr Burnham will follow, and be asked by the king to form a government.  If somebody else, Wes Streeting for example, decides to run, there will be a contest, and an election by September, before the party conference.  Some people favour a contest; it would give Mr Burnham, and any rivals, a chance to articulate policy in greater detail.  But I suspect a lot of labour MPs will hope for a coronation.  Enough “churn”.

Within the PLP, high hopes rest on Mr Burnham.  He is a magic bullet; a deus ex machina.  But is the replacement of one PM by another – No. 7 within a decade – really the answer to the woes, not just of the government, but of the United Kingdom as a whole?  It is said that the definition of insanity is the hope that by repeating the same action over and over again one will achieve a different outcome.

Sometimes I think it would be better if we ran the country the way we run a golf club, by electing individuals, for one term only, who might be persuaded to sit on a committee, not for any personal ambition or craving for self-aggrandisement, but, perhaps somewhat reluctantly, out of a sense of civic duty.  They might be shopkeepers, garbage collectors, plumbers, teachers, doctors, even lawyers or, God help us, hedge fund managers, all men and women of independent mind, striving under no whip.  They might form a government in a collegiate fashion.  (Call me naïve.)  The government wouldn’t “run” the country.  Rather they would introduce new legislation and repeal old; and from taxation assign a budget to public services, largely allowing the people running the services to make policy. For in truth it is you and I, the shopkeepers, garbage collectors, plumbers, teachers, doctors and so on, who run the country.  The prosperity of the country, in every sense, arises from a Grand Integral of personal endeavour.  MPs, government ministers, and Prime Ministers are here to serve us, but for a season, and then leave the stage.    

I listened to the Prime Minister this morning, giving his statement from Downing Street on the banning of social media for under sixteen year olds.  I thought he spoke very well.  He clearly had a lot of support within the room.  It must have been an unusual experience for him, to be greeted with prolonged applause, and even a few whoops.  Sometimes I think he must be the loneliest man in the UK, certainly the most beleaguered, constantly being written off by the right wing press, constantly the butt of criticism not only from His Majesty’s Opposition, but from within his own party.  I hold no brief or remit for the Parliamentary Labour Party, but I find all the intrigue, the backstairs jobbery, the jockeying for position and the ministerial resignations “on grounds of principle”, deeply distasteful.  I rather admire Sir Keir’s doggedness.  He must have a core of steel.  His people underestimate him.

With respect to the proposed social media ban, he, the father of teenagers, was clearly speaking from the heart.  He only wants his children, everybody’s children, to be happy, and safe.  We all know of the tragedies of teenagers who have been bullied on line, who have been repeatedly exposed to harmful content, and who have taken their own lives.  He wants children to log off, to read a book, to go outside to see their friends in the real world, and to go to bed at a reasonable hour.

It is perhaps surprising that some of the bereaved parents of these children oppose the ban.  But their opposition is quite coherent.  They feel the ban puts responsibility on the shoulders of children, and parents, while letting the big tech companies off the hook.  After all, if there is a problem with content, shouldn’t the problem itself be fixed?  We may anticipate that such contentious issues will be hotly debated over the next few months, until the legislation is put in place, probably next spring.

Some people think the outright ban will be futile, because tech-savvy teenagers will merely find a way around it.  But that, pointed out the PM, is not a reason to abandon the legislation.  After all, he said, we don’t allow children to drink alcohol, just because some kids manage to get served in the pub.  Good point.

But I think there’s an aspect of this debate that has been overlooked.  If social media are inherently bad for children, why are they not also bad for adults?  Perhaps they are like cigarettes, poisonous and addictive.  We don’t sell cigarettes to children.  And if we adults are reckless enough to buy them, well, on our own heads be it.  We put a label, perhaps atop the image of a diseased lung, stating that this product will kill you.  We are even seriously considering incrementally banning smoking across all ages, by making it illegal for anybody born after a given year ever to purchase tobacco products.  Such legislation seeks to avoid the recognised difficulties of prohibition, by seeking to ensure that successive cohorts never become addicted.  But then there are vapes.  And vapes are attractive to children.   

But on the whole, the government, and society in general, does not believe that social media per se are bad for adults.  In fact, the government is greatly enamoured of the products of Big Tech.  They see the commercial possibilities.  Big Tech, and “Growth”, are inextricably bound.  The government is fearful of missing out on the economic possibilities of Artificial Intelligence.  They don’t want to get offside with the big companies who might take the huff and move offshore. 

So a trope you often hear is that Social Media are inherently neither good nor bad.  What matters is how they are used.  If, for example, they are used to disseminate misinformation, as appears to have happened in Southampton and Belfast last week, then clearly this is an abuse of the facility.  On the other hand if my German conversation class chooses to chat in German on WhatsApp, then this is surely pretty harmless and might even be quite useful.  (Though I have to say I opt out; I don’t want my phone to be pinging all the time.)   

I would question this notion of the amorality of social media platforms.  You have to look at a social entity, not as it might be in theory, but as it exists in practice in the real world.  The harms inflicted upon adults are not that different from those experienced by children.  The algorithms designed to addict, the fatal attraction of doom scrolling, the deliberate dissemination of lies, the channelling of specific content designed to lure the most vulnerable, the ready availability of violence and pornography, the anarchic, wild-west lack of editorial control in what are essentially online publishing houses, what’s possibly to like?

I’m aware of a certain irony in that I am making these comments on an electronic blogsite.  I think of my weekly blogs much as I think of my occasional letters to the newspapers.  They are publications.  I must take care what I say.  Most of all I must believe that what I say is true.  I have professional indemnity in case I get it wrong.  Currently it is up for its annual renewal, and this year my insurance brokers are asking me some questions.  Do I write or publish any religious or political content?  Well, yes.  Do I write biography/autobiography?  Well, I often write about people, and I have just sent a memoir to a publishing company.  Do I actively disseminate content in the USA?  No.  But I’m sure over the course of the last 11 years blogging I must have said something less than complimentary about the current resident of the White House.  Heaven forfend!  Nowadays, these things can be picked up by immense computers, using up vast amounts of water and energy, scrolling for data, in these dark satanic mills cropping up all over the country.      

I’m not sure whether to be reassured or intimidated by these questions.  The world is becoming more litigious.  But I write, much as I used to practise medicine, hopefully in good faith.  You decide upon an action that you think is right, commit to it, and then move on.

But of course as a doctor I also I took out professional indemnity.  I still have it.  Just in case I’m called upon to be a Good Samaritan.                              

The trip down the M80 from the Kildean Service Station at Stirling to the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall should take abut forty minutes.  On the edge of Glasgow the M80 merges with the M8 and I like to time this with the Shipping Forecast on BBC Radio 4.  “Dogger…Fisher…German Bite…”  Then I know I will swing into Concert Square car park just after the six o’clock bongs and thus take advantage of the Saturday night reduced parking fee.  However this cunning plan has been scuppered by the roadworks on Cathedral Street, where you must attempt to follow a bundle of self-contradictory diversion signs likely to propel you into a bus lane and a hefty fine.  I decided on this occasion to come off the M8 at Charing Cross and approach the Concert Hall from the west.

The best laid schemes…  In fact I encountered the de rigueur traffic jam, which usually starts abeam Glasgow Royal Infirmary, about twenty miles to the north east.  Had there been a crash?  I switched from Radio 4 to Radio nan Gàidheal in the hope of picking up a traffic report.  No crash.  It was simply roadworks, in the vicinity of Cumbernauld.  

The trouble with the M80 is that once you are on it, there are few options to get off again.  At an average speed of about 5 mph, I calculated I wasn’t going to make it, though I did notice it did wonders for the range of my electric vehicle.  I would get over 300 miles on a full charge.  I pulled on to the hard shoulder and made a phone call.  Don’t worry if I don’t get there.

I was indeed tempted to get off, if I could, and go home.  Why attend an orchestral concert when my right ear’s full of wax, and everything’s going to sound mezzo-piano?  At least, I think my right ear’s full of wax.  Self-diagnosis is always a dodgy pursuit.  Following my recent upper respiratory infection, I reasoned, I could have a middle ear effusion.  So the olive oil I’m religiously applying to the external canal might be useless.  Moreover, I’ve got earache, with lancinating “stouns” of pain, we call them north of the border, keeping me awake at night.  Am I being cavalier?  I’ve organised to see an audiologist tomorrow morning, who might at least, with the aid of an auroscope, confirm that I’m waxy.  In the meantime I feel like Beethoven, somewhat remote from my fellow man. 

Anyway I stuck with the M80, motivated as much as anything by a sickly fascination as to the nature of the hold-up.  There were indeed roadworks, in the region of Castlecary.  They only covered a distance of about 50 metres, and indeed they occupied the opposite carriageway, but a contraflow system was in operation.  The sheer volume of traffic more or less brought everything to a halt.  I don’t suppose we should be surprised that an arterial route should be so compromised by, as it were, one single little atheromatous plaque. 

After Castlecary, things got moving again, and the Charing Cross strategy worked well.  I took my seat in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall with about two minutes to spare.  Then the hall was plunged into darkness, and cellist Kian Soltani played the short “God-music” from Black Angels, by George Crumb, accompanied by twenty wine glasses whose moistened rims emanated an eerie tone. 

Then, un coup de théâtre.  The entire Royal Scottish National Orchestra was suddenly illuminated, exactly in time with a low pitched pedal and a thump from the tympani.  And we were into Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem.  I’m not generally fond of segues and attacas from one piece to another, but this seemed to work, perhaps because there was a thematic overlap.  When Crumb composed Black Angels in 1970, the Vietnam War was at its height.  And Britten composed his Sinfonia da Requiem under the looming shadow of the Second World War.

Next up, Kian Soltani returned to play Elgar’s Cello Concerto, and you might argue that the thematic link, the shadow of war, remained.  Elgar composed it after the end of the Great War, and it is suffused in sadness.

After the interval we had another segue, between Wagner’s Prelude to Act 1 from Tristan and Isolde, and Scriabin’s Poem of Ecstasy.  I’d noticed that during the Elgar, the audience clapped after its second movement.  So we have this odd contrast in concert manners, custom and usage, in which a work, a single musical entity, can be interrupted by applause, and two works, two disparate musical entities, cannot.  Strange. 

Personally I’m for no applause between movements, and applause at conclusions.  Call me old fashioned.  The thing to do is to watch the conductor.  The conductor is not simply in charge of the orchestra; he, or she, is in charge of the hall.  We too, in the audience, are being conducted.  Watch the stick.  Maestro Patrick Hahn, for example, wanted to hold a silence at the end of the Sinfonia da Requiem, but precipitate applause denied him the opportunity.  I was recently very amused by a remark of Antonio Pappano, conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra.  In his experience, virtually all audiences applaud at the end of the third movement of Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony, with two exceptions – the audiences in Vienna, and in Weston-super-Mare.

Re the Tchaik 6 conundrum, I’m not terribly exercised, so long as people switch their mobile phones off.  I see that last week a thespian in London addressed the audience at the end of a performance to say how distracted she had been by somebody in the audience sending a text during the play.  It completely destroys the suspension of disbelief, both for actors and audience.  And it’s the same, the actor pointed out, for the performative arts generally – music, opera, ballet.  It is surely the case that in our social-media-dominated culture people are finding it harder and harder to switch off all the white noise that surrounds us, and give themselves over, heart and soul, to a shared communal experience.    

Talking of white noise, the muffling tinnitus and “stouns” of pain in my right ear continue.  Fingers crossed it’s a temporary phenomenon, and I can hold off writing my Heiligenstadt Testament.  I will seize fate by the throat.  I’m eternally optimistic that episodes of unwellness are self-limiting.  Sooner or later of course, one must encounter the pathological entity for which, as my mother used to say, “There is no betterment.”

While I was recovering from my recentest rheum, I was getting these vivid dreams.  I took a taxi, and a loquacious cabby, as was his wont, said, “I had that Jacqueline du Pré in the back last night.  With her cello.  It’s a Strad, called David.  I said, ‘Give us a tune, luv.’  So blow me, she did!  Bach.  It were beautiful.  Then she says, ‘What’s the fare?’ and I say, ‘Jacqueline du Pré, you don’t owe me a thing.’  So she left her beloved David on the seat.  Maybe she knew there was to be no betterment.” 

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.