jamescalumcampbell

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

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

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

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

“We see you’re at the airport.”

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

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

“Where’s Kyle?”

“Kyle of Lochalsh.”

“Can you spell it?”

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

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

Which I did. 

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

DUNG!

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

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

DUNG!

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

Well…

DUNG!

I decided to sleep on it, and hung up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The self-contradiction is apparent.

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

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

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

President DONALD J. TRUMP

April 05, 2026, 1.03 pm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charged with the task of organising an end of term lunch for my German conversation class, prior to the Easter break, I opted for a Scottish restaurant in Hope Street in Glasgow.  Table for 14, or thereabouts.  The restaurant asked me to confirm numbers the day prior, so on Wednesday morning I phoned, and a young female voice asked me in a pleasant Scottish accent how she may help.

“I’ve booked a table for 14 for tomorrow.  You asked me to phone you today to confirm the number, and indeed it will be 14.”

“Just a moment…  No. We have no table booked for 14.  Let me see if I can book you in now.  No, I’m afraid there isn’t a table available.  Would you like to book for an alternative date?”

Something slightly halting – but only slightly – about the young lady’s delivery gave me pause.  I said, “Could I possibly speak to a real person, like, say, the manager?”

“Certainly.  Putting you through.”

I spoke to the manager who quickly confirmed the booking.  “See you tomorrow.” 

So much for artificial intelligence.  I was speaking to a robot.  She was very convincing.  It’s a kind of Holy Grail amongst those whose business it is to perfect these algorithms; to make the robot entirely convincing, so that you can’t tell the difference.  And they are nearly there.  It is Alan Turing’s imitation game.  If you can’t tell that you aren’t speaking to an intelligent being, then, to all intents and purposes, you are speaking to an intelligent being.  It occurs to me that if you are being addressed by a robot, and you do not know it is a robot, then you are actually being scammed.  But the dividing lines in our society between probity, sharp practice, and fraud are becoming increasingly blurred.       

But why would any of us want to go down this AI route?  One can imagine lots of reasons.  We choose the route simply because it is there, or potentially there.  It’s a challenge, a refinement of technology.  One might ascribe to this particular manifestation of Artificial Intelligence the attributes commonly associated with automation; it is “efficient”, and “cost-effective”.  It’s the future; if we don’t grasp it, others will, and we will be left behind.  It will free up professionals in many walks of life from humdrum repetitive activity, and allow them to concentrate on their core business.

AI has already infiltrated the medical consultation in General Practice.  There is an article in the current British Journal of General Practice (March 2026, Volume 76, Number 764) by Roger Neighbour, a past president of the Royal College of GPs.  Two’s company, three’s a crowd: AI in the consultation.  It more or less says that AI is here to stay and we’d better get used to it.  Reading it, I was reminded of the state of General Practice as it was about a quarter of a century ago, when computerisation was beginning to take off.  I expressed misgivings when we went from paper-light, to paperless, and my colleague said to me, “It’s coming, James.  It’s unstoppable.  We can’t play King Canute.”  I was worried that the computer in the consulting room would become a third party disrupting the sanctity of the medical consultation.  Sure enough, the visual display unit began to chip in with chirpy remarks like, “Have you thought of this…  Have you thought of that… don’t forget to check…” etc.  Now, with AI, we will be seeing the same effect on steroids. 

Roger Neighbour asked two AI systems, ChatGPT and CoPilot, what AI’s contribution to the general practice consultation would be over the next few years.  Apparently AI would offer clinical decision support, differential diagnoses, appropriate investigation recommendations, and proposed management pathways (guideline compliant).  The AI role was not to replace, but to augment and enhance.  AI, said Co-Pilot, would free up GPs to focus on patients rather than keyboards.  None of this is new.  All of these things were promised with the dawn of computerisation.  We therefore have the benefit of 25 years of experience to judge whether we are being offered the prescription for a panacea, or for the nostrum of a snake oil salesman.

Well, we all know how that went.  You can’t even get an appointment.  Maybe a receptionist with a nice Scottish accent is saying to you, “No, you haven’t made an appointment.  Let me re-schedule you.”     

It seems to me that we need to ask who will benefit from the imposition of such systems, not just in medicine, but in every conceivable walk of life, education, policing, transport, social care, the law, and, God help us, warfare.  The answer is the same as it was in 2001.  Information Technology as it was then, and Artificial Intelligence as it is now, are technologies in search of markets.  The people who will benefit are the people who are peddling their wares.  The seductive attraction of the product is that users will be empowered to set up a system which will run itself.  Why employ somebody, when their function can be taken over by a bot?  Ultimately, the marketing of AI is all about power, and the acquisition of power by a remarkably few number of people.    

AI systems work by using up vast amounts of energy to trawl vast amounts of information looking for patterns.  But Roger Neighbour quoted T. S. Eliot at the head of his BJGP article: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?  Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” (Choruses from the Rock.)  I really don’t want anybody to scan my retina and tell me what my chances are of developing dementia. But our political masters are utterly beguiled and enthralled by the promise of AI.  At long last, the problems of the NHS can be solved by turning it into a perpetual motion machine.  But there is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine, and life, real life, is not remotely like that.  We, Homo sapiens, at our best, don’t remotely think algorithmically.  We are not robots.    

Lunch in Hope Street was very good.  I’m so glad I didn’t take the bot’s word for it, and book elsewhere. 

Chancing to be in Glasgow on Friday morning, having parked in Buchanan Galleries I took a turn down Buchanan Street, hung a right on to Argyll Street, and passed under the “Highlander’s Umbrella” which is the enormous bridge carrying the main lines emerging south from Glasgow Central Station.  From here I was able to walk round Central Station, clockwise, via Hope Street, and Gordon Street, thus to get a view of the destruction, by fire the previous Sunday evening, of a beautiful Victorian building at the corner of Gordon Street and Union Street.  The fire apparently erupted in a vape shop, and there are various theories about the hazards of lithium batteries in vapes, but the cause of the fire to date is purely speculative. 

It was a sorry sight.  Most of the building has been destroyed, and I believe what remains is now due for demolition.  Glasgow Central was closed, though by Thursday the lower level was running trains.  It crossed my mind that the political opposition in Holyrood would find a way to make capital out of a disaster – “We knew they couldn’t run the ferries.  Now they can’t even run the trains” – sort of thing.  In fact they concocted a narrative about the fire brigade being unable to control the blaze because of underfunding.  Actually the fire brigade did very well to protect Central Station.  I always find it disheartening when our parliamentary representatives try to make political capital out of a mishap.  It’s a reflex to point the finger of blame, especially if your raison d’être, sine qua non, is to hound the government out of office. 

But I’m hardly exempt from such a reflex response.  As soon as I heard of the fire I put it into the context of St Andrew’s Halls and the Glasgow School of Art, and started to concoct a kind of inarticulate, rambling conspiracy theory.  They have a saying in Chicago, said Goldfinger to Mr Bond.  “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action.”  My own immediate thought on hearing of the disaster was to link it in some non-specific way to the disgraceful scenes that took place at Ibrox Park after an Old Firm match on the Sunday afternoon.  Maybe some disgruntled supporter got careless with a cigarette butt, just as happened following a boxing match in St Andrew’s Halls sixty four years ago.  There have been so many “disgraceful scenes” over the years at Ibrox Park, or at Celtic Park, that I confess I didn’t take the trouble to find out exactly what had happened.  I believe the match went to a penalty shoot-out, which Celtic won.  It may be that for the fans, losing by a whisker is harder to bear than getting a sound drubbing, though in the rugby on Saturday France beat England in the Stade de France by a single point, and with the last kick of the ball; and I don’t believe there was a riot.  Everybody seemed to agree it had been a magnificent game.  One thing I’ve noticed about a contest, in any sport, closely fought at a high level, sportingly played, and culminating in a tight result which could have gone either way, is that it actually ceases to matter who the winner is.  It turns out that the tired old cliché, wrongly attributed, I seem to recall, to E. C. Bentley by Alan Bennett in Beyond the Fringe, and mockingly lampooned,  shows itself to be true.  It matters not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.  This attitude however did not seem to pertain at Ibrox, where there was a pitch invasion.  Who invaded first seems to be a moot point.  One of the journalists on The Herald wrote a piece about it.  He had to declare a special interest, not necessarily because he was of the Roman Catholic faith, but because he was a Roman Catholic.  It matters less what you believe, but rather what school you went to.  I don’t believe people who put great store in these cultural divisions in Glasgow take a particular stance over, say, the doctrine of transubstantiation.  I think, if I understood the journalist correctly, he was implying that the Celtic support constituted a persecuted minority, by stating precisely the opposite.  This isn’t just irony; it’s sarcasm.  You really have to be Glaswegian to appreciate such nuance. 

But whatever the cause of the fire at Central Station, it has to be asked, are we getting careless of our magnificent architectural heritage?  A loss on a parallel with the St Andrew’s Halls was that of Charles Rennie Macintosh’s magnificent School of Art, which went on fire not just once in 2014, but for a second time in 2018, with devastating consequences.  In 1962 there was a proposal that St Andrew’s Halls be rebuilt.  But they never were, and it took nearly thirty years to construct an adequate replacement, the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall in its present day site at the top of Buchanan Street.  Whether or not the Art School will be rebuilt remains an unanswered question, but if it is, it seems likely it will take another thirty years. 

Glaswegians tend to take Glasgow city centre for granted.  That is because we have poor posture, and tend to look down rather than to look up.  We don’t appreciate the magnificent buildings that form the grid system wedged between the M8 to the north and west, the river to the south, and High Street to the east.  And yet Hollywood chooses to film here, not just because it’s cheaper than Philadelphia.  And they get the RSNO to provide the film soundtrack, not just because they are cheaper than the Los Angeles Philharmonic.   

But it seems that the roads that form the Glasgow grid are permanently “up”.  The M8 has been “up” for a decade.  It just can’t take the volume of traffic.  Our city fathers in the 1960s didn’t see it coming.  They chose not to rebuild St Andrew’s Halls, but rather to build the M8.  Fatal error.  And now we are paying for it.  The whole of Glasgow city centre is in danger of looking like the corner of Gordon Street and Union Street. 

Yet all is not lost, and Glasgow flourishes, in a kind of way, despite itself.  While the fires raged, I, blissfully unaware, was attending a concert in St John’s Renfield Church, three miles to the west, given by Glasgow Chamber Orchestra.  Larsson, Haydn, and Brahms.  Terribly good.  And I will be back within the grid on Thursday with my German conversation class colleagues, to lunch at Ardnamurchan, opposite the Theatre Royal.  Where there’s life, there’s Hope Street.                                                           

President Donald Trump’s invocation of Sir Winston Churchill in his recent disparagement of Sir Keir Starmer has all sorts of historical resonances that the President may not have intended, far less appreciated.  What did he mean when he said that Sir Keir is “no Winston Churchill”?  Insufficiently warlike?  Over-concerned with legalities?  On the face of it, he meant that Sir Keir was failing to nurture “the special relationship”.  He referred to the UK as “our once great ally”, implying that the special relationship was over.  Having suggested that the US attack on Iran might be illegal, and having refused permission to let US forces use British bases from whence to launch the attack, the PM partially altered his stance after a drone struck RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, and he allowed the use of British bases for defensive, rather than offensive purposes.  He also ordered the preparation of HMS The Prince of Wales to be in advanced readiness for despatch to the region. 

“Too little, too late,” said the President.  We don’t need your help in a war that has already been won.  You can keep your boat.  But we will remember.  Or words to that effect.  Sir Tony Blair seems to have backed him up.  If you’re going to be an ally, he said, you’d better show up.  I suppose he meant show up in the way that he showed up in 2003 for George W. Bush.      

President Trump might have remembered that, on and after 10/5/40, when Winston became PM, it wasn’t a case of the US requesting help of the UK, but the opposite.  He wooed President Roosevelt, much as Sir Keir has wooed President Trump.  He needed US financial and military assistance, and ultimately he wanted the US to enter the war.  President Roosevelt had a sympathetic ear, but Winston knew the President was constrained by an isolationist Congress, and limited in what he could offer.  He entered into a long correspondence with his US counterpart, under the nom de plume, so to speak, “formal naval person”, and culminating in their meeting at Placentia Bay in August 1941, to sign the Atlantic Charter.  In the lend-lease agreement of March 1941, Winston had already acquired assistance, including some somewhat outdated naval vessels in return for the US lease of multiple British bases.  It was a hard-nosed bargain.  The UK didn’t pay off the debt until 2006. 

And still the US was not in the war.  That did not happen until 7/12/41, two and a quarter years after the war had started in Europe, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour.  And even then, the US only declared war on Germany, after Hitler had declared war on them.

Winston’s successor, Sir Anthony Eden, was not so successful in wooing the United States.  He needed their help in 1956 when Britain, France and Israel attacked Egypt after Nasser had nationalised the Suez Canal.  But President Eisenhower declined.  Eden might have said, “Ike is no Franklin D. Roosevelt.”  The British withdrawal and humiliation might be said to have signalled the end of the British Empire.  But the US stance cannot be regarded in any sense as a volte-face.  The US were anti-British Empire from the time of the American War of Independence.  FDR had a profound distrust of the British Empire, and was quite happy to see it begin to fall apart. 

Then, of course, the Americans asked for our involvement in Vietnam, and Harold Wilson declined.  He got a lot of stick at the time, but surely history has gone on to vindicate his position.    

Another big difference between 10/5/40 and 28/2/26 is that, while Winston waged a war for survival, the current war is discretionary.  The US wasn’t under imminent threat of attack.  If Iran was trying to build a nuclear bomb, its aim had already been frustrated – Trump said as much – by the bombing of nuclear facilities.  So why did the US attack Iran?  It might be said that a cowed populace, many thousands having died in public demonstrations against the regime, asked for help.  But there are plenty of repressive regimes around the globe that the US have not, thus far, attacked.  What are the US war aims?  They want the Iranian population to rise up and install a democratic government.  But what will the US do if Iran descends into chaos, as Iraq once did?  Do they have a plan? 

I never cared for the old wartime propaganda newsreels of Pathé News with their hearty reportage rendered in faultless RP, against an incessant background of martial music.  But in terms of distaste, they are as nothing compared to the swaggering braggadocio currently emanating from the White House against a background of heavy metal.  It’s like Apocalypse Now.  “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”  The inescapable conclusion is that there are people occupying high office who actually revel in war.  When a war is discretionary, it implies that people actually like violence, and utilise violence in the same way that they might utilise diplomacy, soft power, or tariffs.  It’s just another part of the armamentarium of foreign policy.    

I recently heard Nick Robinson interview Emily Thornberry on BBC Radio 4’s Political Thinking.  She said that Trump was no FDR.  What would Winston have made of Trump?  Ms Thornberry said she wold love to sit down with Winston, over a glass of Armenian brandy, and ask him.  Of course counterfactuals are impossible.  There used to be a programme on Radio 4 in which celebs conjured up an ideal dinner party inviting guests from the past, and reconstructing the peri-prandial chit-chat from archival recordings.  We cannot guess at Winston’s policy vis-à-vis Trump, but if I were constructing the chat for the dinner party, I would have Winston expound his policy, whatever it might be, then remark:

But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will slip into a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

Let us therefore brace ourselves…   

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.