When I was about nine years old, my father gave me a present, either a birthday or a Christmas present – can’t remember which – of a typewriter. It was an ancient office Barlock that weighed a ton. I think it was being thrown out of the Chief Constable’s Office in the City of Glasgow Police, where he worked, and he got it for £1. It was, and remains, the best present I have ever received. It was astute of him. He knew I had a fascination with words, and I loved “composition”, an opportunity every Friday afternoon in Primary School to wax eloquent in prose. On many other occasions as a present he would give me, and my many cousins, a book. When I won a prize at the end of Primary School he suggested that I ask for Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, a tome I still possess. He had a friend, one Elphinstone Dalglish, who loved exuberant language; he described any form of humbug, or waffle, as “a farrago of heterogeneous irrelevancies”. For better or worse, I collected expressions like that.
I got quite adept on the Barlock typewriter. I was quite fast, though I can’t say I could touch-type. But I started writing stories. They were of course extremely derivative. They were modelled on Ian Fleming’s Bond novels, and I can blame my father for that as well. He borrowed Dr No from Partick Borough Library. I opened it, read that first astonishing sentence, and was immediately hooked.
Punctually at six o’clock the sun set with a last yellow flash behind the Blue Mountains, a wave of violet shadow poured down Richmond Road, and the crickets and tree frogs in the fine gardens began to zing and tinkle.
Waow!
I suppose it was unusual at the time for somebody to be so familiar with the QWERTY keyboard at such a young age. You might say now that I was way ahead of my time. But no. It really was a different age, the age of carbon paper and Gestetners. Now anybody with a mobile phone is familiar with a QWERTY keyboard, but may be less skilled in calligraphy, or what used to be called “real writing”. It could even be that the habit of putting pen to paper is dying out. The scrawl has given way to the scroll. Perhaps paper will become obsolete, as people spend untold hours staring at smart phones, ipads, and computer screens. I resist this. I love the ritual of reading the physical entity of my broadsheet morning paper.
Talking of The Herald, I wrote in on Friday. Two articles caught my eye, and they seemed to me to share a common thematic thread. A software company supplying IT systems for GPs has gone into administration. Meanwhile another company is currently wooing the NHS with promises of the enormous potential benefits of robotics. I was moved to write.
Dear Sir,
I don’t think our GPs should get too upset if they can’t transition from EMIS to Vision (Software supplier to Scots doctors goes bust, Herald, December 13th). Personally while in practice I was never so happy as when the computers crashed. We never really needed them. All a GP needs is a quiet room, and the ability to take a history and conduct an examination.
Of much more concern is the latest threat to the sanctity of the medical consultation – robotics (Robotics could transform our NHS, Agenda, Herald December 13th). Robotics are “the arms and legs of AI” according to the Tony Blair Institute, in delivering “real world impact”. This is a mirror image of the rise of Information Technology 30 years ago. It’s not that a doctor is seeking a technical solution to a clinical problem; rather that a new technology is seeking a market place. AI has its baleful eye on the NHS. It’s a hard sell. If we don’t embrace the new technology, we will be overtaken by competitors. That sort of argument is why teenagers are addicted to smart phones – fear of missing out.
But do we really want the kettle of an isolated, elderly patient to inform an enormous data base that it has not recently boiled, so as to send a robot round to make a cup of tea? That sounds like hell on earth to me. We are not robots. I don’t doubt they have a place; some of them are good at certain surgeries, albeit under supervision. But what the NHS really needs to invest in is people, doctors, nurses, and allied professionals who don’t think algorithmically but who utilise knowledge and skill with wisdom and compassion, who adopt a technology when it is needed, but will, I trust, refuse to have one imposed upon them.
Yours sincerely…
So there you go. All these years later, still typing away. We will see if it appears in tomorrow’s Herald. I have this theory that I continually write to the papers because I have a perverse desire to be castigated, to be told to wake up and smell the coffee. Dr Campbell’s latest Luddite tirade is nothing more than a farrago of heterogeneous irrelevancies…
jamescalumcampbell 