To be honest, I don’t know where last year has gone. Gone in a flash. The acceleration of the seasons. It seems no time at all since, in the twilit zone twixt Christmas and Hogmanay, 2023, I was drawing up some absurd catalogue of resolutions, a bucket list, while fully conscious at the time that the definition of insanity is to repeatedly indulge in behaviours that have never produced a desired result. There is a first person narrator in a Graham Greene novel – I think it might be Fowler in The Quiet American – who reminisces about a time “when I still took my future seriously”. Evelyn Waugh thought Fowler was a despicable creature, yet I rather identify with him. Michael Caine played him beautifully in film.
I recall I described “the daily bread” under 7 bullet points:
- Pray
- Read
- Write
- Play a musical instrument
- Speak a foreign language
- Get some exercise
- Look out!
Or something along these lines.
Well, how did that go?
Actually, not too badly. I always start the day with a muttered consecration. Here I feel the need to self-deprecate. I don’t wish to be ridiculed for speaking to an Imaginary Friend. But you see, He once sat with me, on Ninety Mile Beach at the outlet of Te Paki stream, and told me that everything was going to be okay.
I read voraciously, if in an undisciplined fashion. This week I read Sarah Rainsford’s wonderful, if harrowing, Goodbye to Russia (Bloomsbury 2024 – signed by the author – it’s a terrible signature, but at least she has dated it, Oct. 2024). Reading it on the back of the late Alexei Navalni’s Patriot, I have the sense of a country that has changed little from the one depicted through the music of Dmitry Shostakovich, the music of a lunatic asylum.
And I’m currently reading Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies (Faber and Faber 2020). It was given me as a gift. I probably wouldn’t have bought it for myself, but is not this the beauty of an unsolicited gift? It offers you something you ordinarily would never experience. It is funny, touching, intensely Scottish, and full of humanity.
And yes, I scribble away. Last year I published The Last Night of the Proms. A friend emailed me the other day and asked, is this worth reading? I resisted the (intensely Scottish) impulse to say “No!”, but informed him that it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. And now I am embarked on publication No. 5 – if spared. People I know kindly ask me what it is all about, but I am coy about that, fearing that giving the game away will in some sense burst a bubble. So the most I tell them is that it is in form “epistolatory” – you know, like Richardson’s Clarissa. Aye, right.
An die Musik. In November, in the Dunblane Chamber Orchestra, we played Quilter’s Children’s Overture, Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, and Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. The conductor, himself a violist, keeps saying to me, “James! Play nearer the bridge! You play like a folk musician.” I took that as a compliment. But I think it may be a bridge too far. Old dog, new tricks. Schwanengesang?
Ich spreche Deutsch. Nur Anfängers Kenntnisse. Aber… I continue to attend the class Deutsch für Alltag in the Goethe Institut in Glasgow. I’m not at all sure that I have any gift for languages, but anyway I enjoy it.
I walk every day, and swim maybe every other day. I need to be a little bit more “aerobic” – as the personal trainers say – when actually they mean “anaerobic”. That is, get out of breath. Sometimes I go on the treadmill, though the joints are beginning to complain. It’s as easily done walking up a hill, or indeed in the pool. I keep exercising because I don’t want to develop atrial fibrillation. Then I’d have to go on an anticoagulant, and no doubt the medics would find good cause to put me on a suite of antihypertensives, statins, and medications for “pre-diabetes”. I would be treated for a whole series of conditions I do not have. I have a deep distrust of the medical profession.
Look out! I struggle to articulate. I mean, stop navel-gazing. (Is that what this is?) I need to do something that is not inward-looking, but rather communal, collegiate, outgoing, even altruistic. Here, I have a bad track record. On the last two committees on which I served, I lasted two hours before I resigned. I guess I’m not a committee man. Sometimes I try to salve my conscience by reminding myself that I am retired, and that I spent my professional life tending the sick and needy. But it doesn’t really work.
Still, at the end of the day, maybe the thing to do is to identify a vocation, that which you are called upon to do, and then to do it with all your heart and all your might. I’d better get on with the epistolatory novel. Love, and do as you will.
jamescalumcampbell 