At a performance of Handel’s Messiah at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on January 2nd, the baritone asked us, “Why do the nations so furiously rage together?”
Good question. Indeed, a question of our time. I gathered on a BBC radio programme last week that Einstein and Freud entered into a correspondence discussing this very question. Freud had notions about Eros and Thanatos but I’m not sure he had an answer to the question posed in Messiah. And Einstein, offered the presidency of Israel, said that he had no head for human problems.
I can’t say I much enjoyed the Glasgow Messiah. But I think that says more about my state of mind on the occasion than about the performance. My companions assured me it was very good, and indeed very à la mode. I just wasn’t very receptive. Partly it was due to the fact that two people on my left coughed, and chatted, and rummaged, interminably, and somebody in the row on front kept videoing the concert on their phone. As well, it seems to be de rigueur to bring drinks into the auditorium. I got into a mood.
Talking of moods, somebody named Mr Smith (not his real name – after all he hasn’t asked to visit my blog) wrote an anti-electric car diatribe to the Herald last week commencing, “We really all must make a New Year resolution to be nicer to the owners of electric vehicles.” He went on to describe how awful these cars were, always breaking down, succumbing to bad weather, running out of power, and going on fire, to the extent that the insurance companies were charging exorbitant fees to underwrite them. Well, as an owner of an electric car, this just didn’t tally with my experience. So I responded, as follows:
If I may borrow Mr Smith’s opening salvo (Thinking of going electric? Don’t,the Herald, January 3rd), we really all must make a New Year resolution to be nicer to the owners of petrol and diesel cars. They have after all been subjected to relentless anti-electric propaganda from the fossil fuel industries. I drive an electric car which I bought second-hand, with 11,000 miles on the clock, at a very reasonable price. It affords me a very smooth, and remarkably silent ride. I drive about 1,000 miles per month, at a cost of about £80. The range on a full charge is about 250 miles in high summer, and about 200 miles in the depths of winter. Snow and ice have presented no problems to the car. I have never had any difficulty locating a charging point, and I have never experienced so-called “range anxiety”. The lithium batteries have yet to go on fire. My insurance premium is less than that quoted by Mr Smith, by a factor of twenty four.
The guys at my local gym tease me about my car. “You live 10 miles away? You’ll have to charge up on the way home.” I don’t mind; it makes me laugh. I don’t think any of them have ever driven an electric car. What I find more insidious is Mr Smith’s notion that it doesn’t matter what we do, because the rest of the world is going to hell in a hand-cart (powered by an internal combustion engine). Many, perhaps most, novel enterprises worth pursuing, were initiated by individuals who were ridiculed for their wackiness. They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, when he said the world was round.
Well! I received a bit of stick. The following day there were three letters in response. I was referred to as “the good doctor”. That’s always a bad sign. Apparently I’m happy that children are being sent down the cobalt and lithium mines. Somebody thought that my claim that my car afforded me a “remarkably silent ride” was laughable. But that was more a critique directed against the state of our potholed roads, than against me personally. I can’t say I was too bothered about the brickbats. Mind you, I never look at the responses on the Herald online. These can be of a more robust nature. I can heartily recommend my disconnect strategy to anybody who feels threatened by social media. Switch your device off. Incidentally, I gather that somebody has been gang-raped in the Metaverse. People are trying to figure out whether this is a crime. Is not the world going mad?
In this season of Epiphany, the minister in Dunblane Cathedral told a very beguiling story about a wealthy man of the ancient Middle-Eastern world whose wealth was measured in camels. He had 17 of them. Towards the end of his life he made his will, bequeathing his estate as follows: half his estate to his son, a third of his estate to his grandson, and one ninth to his nephew. Well as you can imagine, on his death there were ructions. His son was to receive eight and a half camels, his grandson five and two thirds, and his nephew one and eight ninths. But what earthly use are eight ninths of a camel? There was a stooshie. I daresay at this point the lawyers got involved. Apparently the whole thing got out of hand and, because the people involved were all of some power and influence, there was even a suggestion that war might result.
Then a poor man, who only possessed one camel, stepped in and said, “If it will help, take my camel and add it to the mix, and see if you can work things out.”
18 camels. Half is 9. One third is 6. On ninth is 2. Total: 17 camels. Miraculously, everybody got more than they had hoped for. And the poor man got his camel back. The minister added mischievously, “You’ll be puzzling about this over lunch.”
The key to the conundrum is that the rich old man did not bequeath his entire legacy, but only 17/18s of it. You will see this if you are adept at adding fractions by working out their lowest common denominator: 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/9 = 9/18 + 6/18 + 2/18 = 17/18. (As Winston said, “I like short words and vulgar fractions.”) But I don’t suppose the moral of the homily is that you must practise your arithmetic every day. Rather, it is “Blessed are the peacemakers.” The poor man with only one camel saw a way of solving a seemingly intractable problem with a generous act. Perhaps the solution was glaringly obvious to him. He might have shrugged and pouted in wonderment, and asked, “Why do the nations so furiously rage together?”
Two elder statespersons were on Paddy O’Connell’s Broadcasting House on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday morning, Dame Margaret Beckett and Lord Kenneth Clarke. They were both pretty gloomy about the current state of politics, both at home and abroad. Lord Clarke declared that Western democracy was in decline. I wondered about that. The atmosphere might be toxic in Westminster, but is democracy in decline, say, in Scandinavia? Dame Margaret said she never used social media, and got away with it, but wondered if that would be possible for somebody young, coming into politics. Well, why ever not? Just switch the damned phone off. Both Dame Margaret and Lord Clarke seemed to think it quite likely that Donald Trump would be the next president of the United States. Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last Donald.
jamescalumcampbell 