To my enormous relief, Part 3 of the trilogy concerning the life of the troubled doc is being published, with a fair wind, maybe around Christmas or New Year. We’ve signed the contract, and now I am busy offering suggestions for a cover design, blurb, author bio and so on. I’m not very good at multi-tasking. A friend and fellow viola player remarked the other day that she tends to do things in clumps. (I think she used the word clump.) So she has a viola clump, or a gardening clump, or a Scottish politics clump. I’m the same. I need to focus on one thing at a time. At school, I was never any good at flitting from class to class, eight times a day, switching off French and switching on Mathematics. I was in a constant state of preoccupation. The teacher would say with evident exasperation, “Campbell! What planet are you on?” I have this notion that people who excelled at school did so because they had this capacity to compartmentalise, focus and re-focus.
But life goes on. Yesterday I rehearsed with the Antonine Ensemble, a string chamber orchestra, for a concert we are giving next Sunday in St Michael’s Parish Church in Linlithgow. “Shades of Baroque”. The music is beautiful, but some of it is also technically quite demanding. I need to stop composing literary blurbs in my head and concentrate on the notes. We are playing Purcell’s Chaconne from Fairy Queen, Corrette’s Organ Concerto No. 1 in B flat, Britten’s Simple Symphony, Chossudovsky’s Phases de Doute, and Respighi’s Suite for Strings and Organ. Another musical friend, erstwhile fiddler with the LSO, remarked that the second movement of the Britten, Playful Pizzicato, reminds her of the tune to The Archers, but I incline to think it more like “Campbeltown Loch I wish you were whisky”:
The price of the whisky was grim!
The Loch was full up to the brim!
Absurd. The Respighi concerto is wonderful, very passionate.
And at a very convivial luncheon in Bearsden on Friday, a group of us reminisced on the great good fortune we had, at least in one respect, to be educated in Glasgow at a time when great emphasis was put on music, and the opportunity to learn a musical instrument, with both the instrument and the tuition supplied for free. But I fear classical music has become a pastime of the elite. We should remind the education ministers that there is some evidence that learning a musical instrument in early life is protective against the later development of Alzheimer’s disease. Politicians are more susceptible to that sort of argument than the assertion that Purcell’s Chaconne from Fairy Queen is beautiful. Whenever economic times are hard, music seems to be the first thing to suffer. I noticed that at the Prom last night on BBC Radio 3, Sir Simon Rattle went out of his way to talk up the BBC Singers, whom the BBC were inclined to disband earlier this year. They’re not out of the woods yet. Sir Simon conducted Mahler 9 from memory.
Talking of convivial luncheons, last Tuesday I met up with some friends from St Andrews. We met halfway between our respective domiciles, in the Kingdom of Fife, at a vegetarian farm shop and café improbably named The Pillars of Hercules, in Falkland. Highly recommended. It is situated in an extensive, wooded regional park, also containing Falkland Palace. We dined under a Perspex awning resembling a polytunnel, effectively a greenhouse. It wasn’t a particularly warm day, but under the awning it was sweltering. Our accompanying dog chose to sit outside, and pant. My vegetarian tikka masala seemed super-hot. Delicious. I’ll certainly make a return visit. My friends are moving house in order to downsize. They are trying to get rid of a ton of books. Knowing my interest in Churchilliana, they brought along four bagfuls, so I took them off their hands, and said I would probably be arrested later that day for fly-tipping in Loch Leven. Actually the books are rather good. Some I’ve read, so they went to Oxfam, but I’ve held on to Winston’s four volume treatment of the Great War, The World Crisis. In the 1920s, people remarked that in The World Crisis, the author depicted the First World War as a kind of Winston bio-pic, such was his ego. I dare say. But he does write very well.
And following another convivial luncheon in Glasgow on Saturday, I was treated to a private piano recital, and heard Ballad from the Lyric Pieces by Grieg. A melody, quite simple, somewhat severe, repeated with a series of harmonies whose poignancy seems even beyond the capacity for expression of music itself. For a moment, I stopped trying to compose a cover blurb for Part 3 in the life of Dr Alastair Cameron-Strange.
jamescalumcampbell 