The USA, as I write, is waking up to the day in which “45” will morph into “47”. A butterfly flaps its wings in Washington, and apparently precipitates a hurricane in London. Keep calm, and carry on. The world continues to turn.
Last Thursday was the first day of the new term at the Goethe Institut in Glasgow, and I attended my class Deutsch für Alltag as usual. Not quite as usual. We have a new teacher. Change is always a little unsettling, but as it turned out it was fine, she was good, and as ever there was lots of laughter. We also had some new faces in the class, so as is common in language classes we went round the table each divulging something of our potted autobiographies. A language class must be the only “safe” space left where you can ask prying questions like, “Where are you from?” I seem to recall a lady-in-waiting to the late Queen got into a spot of bother at a reception by asking this question of a person of colour, and following it up with, “Yes, but where are you really from?” That reminded me of another reception, in Buckingham Palace, captured on TV in a fly-on-the-wall documentary, when in response to the “where are you from?” question, the guest mentioned the place in question, an outpost of old empire, and asked the interlocutor if she had been there. “Been there? I gave you your independence!” This particular tin-eared individual was oblivious to the fact that the sole purpose of the programme was to ridicule the aristocracy.
But in a language class you are permitted to be uninhibited, even politically incorrect. Where are you from? Where do you live? Are you married? How many children do you have? It all sounds quite prying, but the get-out clause is that you don’t have to tell the truth. Just make it up. After all, it’s just language practice. The conversation shifted to family attributes, and the person on my right said his family were all musical. I asked him if he played a musical instrument, and he said no, he and his family weren’t musical at all! The teacher gave him a thumbs-up. We went on to family-related idiomatic expressions: it runs in the family; it stays within the family; it happens in the best families… Did we know any others? I thought of the opening sentence to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina:
Alle glücklichen Familien gleichen einander, aber jede unglückliche Familie ist unglücklich nach ihrer eigenen Art.
Or words to that effect. All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. I have a notion that that is not true; in fact, that quite the opposite is true.
Opening sentences to novels tend to stick in my memory. When I was a student I once got a postcard from a friend on holiday, composed entirely of first sentences of novels, and written in stream of consciousness style, after the fashion of the end (as opposed to the beginning) of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Something like:
It is a truth universally acknowledged that it was the best of times it was the worst of time present and time past are both on the 24th of February 1815 there was no possibility of taking a walk that day call me Ishmael
I suppose it was more interesting than “weather lovely, wish you were here.” In fact I lodged it, or something like it, in my memory, and used it in the surreal chapter XXV of my latest tome, The Last Night of the Proms. First sentences stick, last sentences less so. It’s rather like any recurring life experience that turns out to be important – a job, a hobby, the membership of a club, a romantic relationship. We remember the epiphanic first time, but are hazy, even oblivious, of the last. So it is with a book’s end, with the possible exception of that beautiful close to Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
That floats my boat! But then, my boat is definitely going against the current. This Brave New World which we now inhabit seems to me increasingly inimical. I think the Luddites were on to something. Perhaps their descendants will take the sledgehammers to the latter day looms of social media platforms and super computers. The Prime Minister thinks that Artificial Intelligence will be good at identifying potholes. I can’t get enthusiastic. I heard him on the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2 last week and he was quite ecstatic at the potential of AI to solve the problems of the NHS. AI could identify the precise location of a blood clot on the brain so much quicker than a radiologist could. Yes, said Jeremy, pertinently, but is that important if the patient is waiting in a corridor for 50 hours? Good point. I find that Jeremy is rather clued up about health, possibly because his show has a weekly health slot, “Medical Monday”. There is a concept in biochemistry, with respect to biochemical pathways such as the metabolism of glucose, the Embden-Meyerhof pathway, of “the rate limiting step”. One particular chemical reaction will be the slowest; so it doesn’t matter how rapid the other steps are, because everything gets held up at this point. I used to apply this concept in the emergency department to “the patient journey” (odious expression), and if I knew that a particular laboratory investigation was going to hold the patient up, I got the request in as early as possible.
But I get the distinct impression that the Prime Minister doesn’t really have a handle on the machinations of health care delivery, and that some corporate IT/AI whizz kid, perhaps an “influencer”, has bent his ear. AI is a method in search of an application, and it has its baleful eye on the NHS. I hope somebody in the medical profession puts his or her head above the parapet and tells the tech companies where to go. But in the UK, that can be tantamount to professional suicide. They’ll take back your gong. Who cares? I wouldn’t. Ich bin der Welt abhandengekommen.
jamescalumcampbell 