10 days to the Winter Solstice. I said to my local newsagent, “It’s dreich.”
“Aye. Gey dreich.”
I got my overseas Christmas cards off at the beginning of the month, and blitzed the UK ones last week. I’m told that the practice of sending cards at Christmas may be dying out, just like the practice of “taking” newspapers printed on paper. Circulations are ebbing and prices rising as people seek their news, be it real or fake, in their preferred echo chamber online. And the BBC licence fee is going up. These are parallel trends. As people eschew pen and ink in favour of, first, email, and now any number of social media platforms, the Royal Mail has struggled to achieve targets for the delivery of both first and second class letters. That seems paradoxical. If the work load diminishes, should not the target be easier to attain? I suppose the Royal Mail employs fewer people; after all, if everybody has gone online, we don’t need posties. It’s the same with local branches of the bank. Apparently everybody prefers online banking. You might say they are voting with their fingers. But surely it’s a chicken and egg situation. Perhaps people went online because they lost their local branch. As the presence of banks on the High Street diminishes, along with everything else, so cash is disappearing. There’s been a backlash to that, and now banks will be required to provide an ATM within a mile of city dwellers, and three miles for people out in the sticks. I can think of large tracts of the Gàidhealtachd where banks will struggle to hit the rural target. Then perhaps they will be fined by the Financial Conduct Authority, and their liquidity will be even more compromised. Similarly, Ofcom have fined the Royal Mail £5.6m for failing to deliver 93% of first class letters within 1 day, and 98.5% of second class letters within 3 days. Fining institutions for failing seems to me to be almost as perverse as rewarding executives with bonuses for failing. The same thing happens to hospitals that have been put into “special measures”. This is incomprehensible to me. If you’re struggling as an institution, you don’t need a fine; you probably need a cash injection.
(Incidentally, I’m kind of glad I have resisted the overtures of my banks, both here and in New Zealand, to use automatic voice recognition as a secure means of identification on the telephone. It turns out that AI can pretty much reproduce anybody’s voice so accurately that even the owner of the voice is fooled. It might slowly dawn on people that the best way for a bank teller to identify a customer, and vice versa, is face-to-face, across the counter, in a High Street bank.)
I will be interested to see if I receive fewer cards this Christmas than usual. Thus far this year I have sent 41 cards. I think that number is less than my average, but that may be because some friends and relatives have departed the world. When somebody dies, I find myself loath to score their name out of my address book. I just need to be careful not to send a card to the deceased, particularly if their spouse is still alive. That would be a faux pas, would it not? I confess I have sent one overseas card to somebody who I am not sure is still with us. But perhaps that is precisely the value of sending cards. It’s a way of saying to people one knows but seldom sees, “I’m still in the land of the living.”
Other Christmas rituals I greatly value. I went to hear The Nutcracker in Glasgow on Saturday night; not the whole ballet, but a selected suite, played by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and joined for one number by the magnificent RSNO Youth Chorus. The concert was very well attended, and I had the sense that the audience was not the usual crowd turning up for Shostakovich and Mahler. There were lots of mums and dads, and it was an early Christmas night out. Drink was brought into the auditorium, which does not usually happen. I wasn’t inclined to object; I like the buzz of a packed hall. But I’m not sure the audience particularly enjoyed the first half of the concert. Certainly Victoria Vita Polevá’s Nova had an impact. Polevá is Ukrainian, and Nova is a martial piece, much as Holst’s Planet Mars is a martial piece. When the brass fanfares and the machine gun rat-tat-tat of the percussion ceased abruptly at the peak of a crescendo, the silence was deafening. The conductor Andrey Boreyko put his hand on his heart, gestured to the score, and then made a gesture of holding out two fists with thumbs enclosed. I think this might have been a mime for the German “Daumen drücken” – to press thumbs – the German equivalent of fingers crossed.
By contrast Tchaikowsky’s Concerto Classico for violin and orchestra was, despite a large orchestra, lightly and delicately scored. I should point out that this was the Polish Jewish composer André Tchaikowsky (1935-1982), and not the Tchaikovsky of The Nutcracker. He was born Robert Andrzej Krauthammer. He entered the Warsaw Ghetto in 1939, but he was smuggled out in 1942 under the name Andrzej Czajkowski. He studied music in Poland, and emigrated to the UK in 1956. He died in Oxford, at the age of 46.
He was very keen on Shakespeare and, bizarrely, he bequeathed his own skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company, specifically so that it would appear as Yorick in Hamlet. He played opposite, as it were, David Tennant. When the RSNO’s principal trumpeter recounted this macabre tale at the opening to the concert, the audience gave a gasp. The trumpeter said, “I know.”
The solo part of the concerto was played, most beautifully, by Ilya Gringolts. I thought I could hear reminiscences of Alban Berg, Bartok, and Stravinsky. The applause was polite, and ceased as soon as conductor and soloist left the stage. I suspect the audience had turned up expecting to hear Tchaikovsky and not Tchaikowsky, and were disappointed. Personally I was disappointed because Ilya Gringolts didn’t have the opportunity to play an encore. I don’t remember a soloist not receiving at least one additional curtain call.
But back to the other Tchaikovsky. It was wonderful to hear all these famous melodies, played by three flutes, by celeste, by harps, by celli, and so on. It’s an antidote to the dreich nights. Similarly, I look ahead to a Ceremony of Nine Lessons and Carols I am taking part in, in the West End of Glasgow on December 22nd. By then, we will have passed the still point of the turning world, and can begin to look forward, with buoyancy and hope, to 2024.
jamescalumcampbell 