Monday, September 29th
Monday morning is blog morning. I wrote about railway trains, around the 200th anniversary of the inaugural Stockton to Darlington run. As is often the case, I had no idea what I was going to write about until I started blethering away. (I dare say it shows.) I’ve been blogging weekly now since January 2015, so there are nigh on 600 blogs somewhere out in the ether. It has been a great boon for me, this discipline, so much better than keeping a private diary.
To Arlington Baths in Glasgow in the afternoon. I came here as a child, and a little over a year ago I renewed my membership. It is the nearest thing to time travel that I know. Generally I have a Turkish bath and a swim, but just occasionally I venture on to the travelling rings, and trapezes. In my advanced years I do feel a bit of a prat, but on the other hand I feel it’s good for my back, hanging about in mid-air. One of these days I will perform the transfer between trapezes, known as “the fly”, for the first time in fifty years. I will certainly blog about that.
To Little Italy on Byres Road (excellent lasagne), thence to the Sir Charles Wilson Building of Glasgow University for the annual Bowman Lecture, when a distinguished speaker talks about the application of statistical methods to some field of human endeavour that is in the public interest. On this occasion Paul Johnson, erstwhile director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, now Provost of The Queen’s College Oxford, gave a talk on wealth inequalities. His slides were packed with data, and I had to concentrate. Surely it has become a given that in our society the gap between the rich and the poor is widening? But the data would suggest that if anything, over the past decade or so the gap has somewhat narrowed. “Nothing to see here.” No, it was back in the 80s that the gap suddenly appeared, and skyrocketed, a process from which one may say there has not been a recovery. Was Mrs Thatcher selling off the family silver? But the name of the Iron Lady was never mentioned, and indeed Paul Johnson said he would present data and refrain from political interpretation. Let the facts speak for themselves, or, as Burns put it, “Facts are chiels that winna ding” – by which I think he meant that an exposition of the truth should not give rise to any cognitive dissonance. But I immediately regret my translation. Abstraction is the curse of modern discourse.
I was actually surprised at how narrow the gap between rich and poor, for most of us, actually is. By and large. On an ascending scale of affluence, and if memory serves me right, a household – not even an individual, but a household – taking in about £12,500 per annum sits on the 10th percentile; £25,000 – 50th percentile; £50,000 – 90th percentile; £150,000 – 99th percentile. No, it’s only above the 99.9% mark, the top 0.001%, where people start earning the really big bucks. I suppose this rather bolstered a notion I’ve long entertained, that, around these airts and pairts, the elite really are elite.
Another slide sticks in the memory. If you want to be upwardly mobile, go to a private school.
Tuesday, September 30th
I’m rationing my exposure to politics. It’s the Labour Party Conference this week. They say that the PM’s coat is on a shoogly peg, and that Andy Burnham is manoeuvring. Sir Keir had to give the keynote address of his life, or go under. I only caught the briefest soundbite. As he proclaimed a litany of government achievement, an apparently enraptured audience, all waving patriotic flags, drowned it all out with the white noise of prolonged applause. They resembled the audience of the politburo.
Wednesday, October 1st
October 1st is a poignant day for me, my father’s birthday, and the day of my mother death. I and a family member met at Falkirk Crematorium, as we do, to lay flowers where our parents’ ashes are buried. It is a beautiful space, lovingly tended. We lunched in Falkirk. Last week I believe the town was bedecked with saltires on lampposts, an expression of disapproval at the extent of uncontrolled immigration. But I only saw one flag.
Thursday, October 2nd
Yom Kippur. There has been a terrible incident in Manchester.
To Glasgow and my German class. I drove in. Driving into Glasgow can be something of a nightmare. The M8 has been “up” for years. Maybe six or seven years, I do not exaggerate. Since before the Covid lockdown, a mile east of the Kingston Bridge, westbound, the road narrows to two lanes. This has nothing to do with roadworks on the M8 itself, we are told, but roadworks under that part of the M8 which is a flyover. My theory is that the M8 now has to take a volume of traffic never imagined when it was opened in the 1960s, and that structurally it has become dangerous; and that, moreover, as my mother used to say of people with chronic terminal illness, “there is no betterment”. We’re stuck with it.
You might imagine the road into town would be okay if you came off at Glasgow Cathedral and the Royal Infirmary, thereby missing the bottleneck down to the Clyde. Not so. Along Cathedral Street, the road is, again, “up”. It’s been like that for weeks. The usual thing, bollards, and a temporary traffic light. I have no idea why. Nobody is working there.
I park in the Buchanan Galleries. I rather like the Buchanan Galleries, as shopping malls go, but apparently there are moves afoot to tear them down. I have no idea why. They are barely older than the current century.
Then on the way out, to get back on to the M8 eastbound, for several weeks now, you encounter another set of bollards and another temporary traffic light.
The German class was great. Much talk, and laughter. I have talked myself into presenting a musical quiz. I’m slightly wary of it, because music is an enthusiasm of mine and I know I could easily make the whole thing quite recherché. So I’ve deliberately kept it light and, I hope, amusing, and have structured the questions in such a way that you could have a bash even if you were tone deaf. Now it’s not so much the quiz itself that preoccupies me, rather the technical question of how to grapple with the IT and present music and pictures, son et lumières. We’ll see how it goes.
We read a piece by Jette Poensgen, a fifteen year old girl living in Lauchhammer, a small East German town in South Brandenburg which lies, as she puts it, somewhere between the past and stagnation. Zecke? Nehm ich als Kompliment. Tick? I’ll take it is as a compliment. The point is, she gets harassed by fellow students whom she calls out for expressing far-right extremist views. Apparently it has become quite cool to give Nazi salutes in the school corridor, or to bully somebody by writing a concentration camp number on their forearm. Jette says that for a while she was silent, through lack of self-confidence, but now she calls it out. I take my hat off to her. Such insight, and eloquence, at such a young age. And such courage.
Friday, October 3rd
Storm Amy due this evening. I got out early to walk, and went to my other baths club, the Stirling Highland Hotel. Somebody said, “Amy doesn’t sound very threatening.” The two baths clubs I belong to could hardly be more different. In Arlington, people tend to keep themselves to themselves. In the Stirling Highland, conversation is incessant and uninhibited. We know one another. When people wax intemperate, they are called out. A group of us meet up in the pub twice a year. I value it. There are plumbers and miners and shopkeepers. Such a relief to inhabit the real world.
Saturday, October 4th
To go, or not to go, to the inaugural concert of the new RSNO season in Glasgow. Mahler 7.
I thought of all the traffic jams, and didn’t go.
Sunday, October 5th
Scrumptious lunch, and warm hospitality, at my cousin’s in Bearsden. But first, the 125th anniversary of the founding of the Boys’ Brigade in Dunblane. I attended the service in Dunblane Cathedral. The cathedral was full, the BB band excellent. I hadn’t realised that the BB, started in Glasgow in 1883, now extends across the whole world. I enjoyed the service, though as an outsider. To quote Cary Grant, I’ve never been a joiner. I’ve never belonged to any of the para-military organisations. I only went the whole hog, into the RAF volunteer reserve.
Talking of anniversaries, I gather today is International James Bond Day. 63 years ago today, the first James Bond film, Dr No, was released. What a tremendous stroke of luck for Ian Fleming, who always had his eyes on the big bucks, that Sean Connery should have been cast as Bond. At first Fleming was doubtful, but he was won round, and even wrote Scottish ancestry into his hero when he wrote his obit, albeit prematurely. And at the end of the whole saga, when Bond turned down his knighthood, he sent a telegram to M: “Eye am a Scottish peasant and eye will always feel at home being a Scottish peasant…” Evidently the old Etonian had mellowed.
Monday, October 6th
Blog day. What shall I talk about?
jamescalumcampbell 