Author: jamescalumcampbell

When I first heard the term “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS), I thought it was a joke, of the sort you might hear – indeed I did hear – on Dead Ringers (Friday, 6.30 pm, BBC Radio 4).  Turns out it’s dead serious.  When the film director Bob Reiner and his wife were murdered last week, President Trump went on Truth Social, not to express shock, nor outrage, nor grief, not to sympathise with friends and family, nor commiserate, nor soothe the nation, but to attribute the deaths, through some bizarre concatenation of circumstances, to a mental illness.  Apparently Reiner had been suffering from TDS.  It is characterised as a monodelusional psychosis.  People who are in every other walk of life apparently sane, become so angry with the President, that they are literally driven mad. 

It’s not a new phenomenon.  It’s not even peculiar to any particular side of the political aisle.  There was a George W. Bush Derangement Syndrome, and a Barack Obama Derangement Syndrome.  I’m even led to believe – though I’m inclined to think that it surely must be fake news – that it appears in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 5, Text Revision 2022).  And there have been attempts to legitimise it through law. This year, politicians in both Minnesota and Ohio have tried to introduce a bill recognising TDS in medical and legal contexts, and requiring the National Institute of Health to study it and report annually to Congress.  Political interference in medical diagnosis and treatment is not a new phenomenon either.  Gender Dysphoria has disappeared from the US radar, and the current Health Secretary doesn’t think much of vaccination. 

Societally, we tend to be a bit casual about dubbing our fellows, who might stand out from the crowd, as mad.  The English language bursts with idiomatic expressions for craziness.  See that guy?  He’s one sandwich short of a picnic, not the full shilling, out to lunch, bonkers, raving, barking, bananas, daft as a brush, mad as a snake, “a nut job”…  We take offence on behalf of people who are black, Roma, LGBTQI, or a member of many other disadvantaged or minority groups who are frequently disparaged, but for some reason people who have lost touch with reality seem to be fair game.  On the whole, I don’t think we should casually refer to somebody as being one raven short of an unkindness or, more colloquially, “aff ’is heid” unless we really wish to assign him a DSM 5 diagnosis, and even then we, at least among the medical community, should be silenced by the constraints of confidentiality.  From time to time, doctors have been known to render and make public a diagnosis formulated remotely, and it usually lands them in trouble.  It was just something they saw on the telly.  Bad idea.  I certainly don’t think doctors should say, for example, that President Trump has a Narcissistic Personality Disorder, unless the diagnosis is made on the basis of a psychiatric history and mental state examination, and even then, it would be nobody else’s business. 

By the same token, I don’t think people, Presidents or otherwise, should be issuing putative diagnoses post mortem.  Why speak ill of the dead?  Maybe the President didn’t care for Bob Reiner’s movie A Few Good Men, with Tom Cruise, Demi Moore, and Jack Nicholson, a fine legal drama in which a young Tom Cruise exposes in court the corrupt dealings of a crusty and thoroughly unpleasant military commander (Jack Nicholson).  Reiner was politically active, and anti-Trump.  It seems to me that “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is a form of gaslighting.  You deliberately attempt to unnerve a critic, or opponent, by suggesting to them that they might be going crazy.  That’s not a new phenomenon either.  Totalitarian regimes have a long history of incarcerating political dissidents in lunatic asylums.  Their views are obviously so unbalanced, and they are so unhinged, that they clearly need to be locked up in a padded cell for their own protection.  You can see why people have tried to deflect Trump Derangement Syndrome back on those who variously ascribe the diagnosis.  It is they who are unwell or, in other words, the lunatics have taken over the asylum.  This, it seems to me, is the key to the music of Dmitry Shostakovich, a sane man who found himself to all intents and purposes incarcerated in a madhouse.  That is why the music is so sardonic, and often so harsh.    

Seasoned political dissidents know only too well that expressions of anger can be counterproductive.  This is why they turn to humour, especially political satire.  Going back to Dead Ringers, I laughed out loud on Friday at the recurring joke of President Trump (brilliantly impersonated) casting aspersions upon various well-loved persons, from Shakespeare’s Romeo, to Leo DiCaprio’s Jack in Titanic, to Bambi’s mother, all dying a pathetic death.  “Horrible person, evil person…”  It occurred to me on hearing the sketch, that the BBC, faced with an impending lawsuit now inflated to somewhere between $5,000,000,000 and $10,000,000,000, is “doubling down”.  Re Splicegate, the row about Panorama’s editing of a Trump speech, allegedly to make it appear that after his presidential defeat in 2020, he was inciting his supporters to violence, it suddenly occurred to me, and I became convinced, that the BBC are not going to settle out of court.  They are not going to back down.  It’s a bit like the bombardment of the French Fleet by the Royal Navy at Mers-el-Kébir, near Oran, on July 3^rd 1940.  That was the moment during World War II when the world came to realise that Britain had no intention of suing for peace. 

And I can see why.  This is an existential crisis.  Plenty of people on the right, on both sides of the Pond, wouldn’t mind if the BBC ceased to exist.  We all moan about the BBC, but when the threat comes from outside, it is time to circle the wagons.  Personally, I would miss Michael Barclay’s Private Passions, Matthew Bannister’s Last Word, Michael Rosen’s Word of Mouth, Laurie Taylor’s Thinking Allowed, Tim Harford’s More or Less, and a live concert on Radio 3 most evenings.  Oh, and The Briefing Room, with David Aaronovitch.  On Thursday we stepped into the briefing room, together to find out about the US National Security Strategy (NSS).  I pricked my ears up because I’d only just written about it.  The panel of experts highlighted the recent dramatic divergence of US foreign policy, particularly with respect to relations with Europe, and with Russia.  Europe and Ukraine painfully thrashed out a financial package overnight on Thursday – Friday, while Russia and the US have been meeting in Miami at the weekend.  There doesn’t seem to be much of a meeting of minds between the US and Europe.  Europe is, we are told, facing “civilisational erasure”. 

I was critical of the National Security Strategy in this blog last week.  Unlike Dead Ringers, I wasn’t trying to be funny, and I hope my language was not intemperate.  Admittedly I called the NSS “tosh”.  Maybe I’m suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.                                                   

In these strange and troubled times, when the head of NATO is glooming us up for the imminent prospect of war, I thought I would read the National Security Strategy (NSS) of the United States of America, November 2025.  So I printed it off and read it, twice.  It’s 30-odd pages of A4, maybe about 10,000 words.  I’ll try and summarise it. (I’m using English rather than American spelling, eg defence for defense, and also, dare I say, Calibri font, sans serif, which is easier for the visually impaired.  Marco Rubio in the State Department has rejected it in favour of Times New Roman).    

We begin with a message from the President.  “My fellow Americans…”  This year, the administration has brought the world back from the edge of disaster, taken back control of US borders, strengthened the military (and expunged it of “woke lunacy”), got NATO to increase defence spending from 2% to 5%, unleashed energy production, imposed import tariffs, obliterated Iran’s nuclear programme, taken on the drug cartels, and settled eight raging conflicts worldwide.  The theme underlying all this activity is “America First”.  The President signs this preamble with his signature signature, so to speak (so familiar to us from a plethora of executive orders), which looks to me like a long barbed wire fence interspersed with goon boxes.      

The Strategy follows.  It is in four parts.

1.  Introduction – What is American strategy?

The aim is to ensure that America remains the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful, and most successful country for decades to come.  Previous administrations have gone astray by overburdening the country with overseas commitments not integral to its own interest, becoming embroiled in the activities of international institutions, while attempting to run a massive welfare-regulatory-administrative state.  No more – thanks to “President Trump’s Necessary, Welcome Correction”. 

•  What Should the United States Want?       

At home, survival and safety, protection from hostile attack (in the broadest sense), control of borders, resilient infrastructure, the most powerful military in the world, a modern nuclear deterrent and associated missile defences, the world’s most advanced economy, the world’s most robust industrial base and energy sector, the most advanced science and technology, unrivalled “soft power”, and a restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health, rooted in strong traditional families that raise healthy children. 

Abroad, a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine (a stable Western Hemisphere, supporting critical supply chains and free of hostile incursion), reversal of damage to the US economy from hostile actors in the Indo-Pacific (reliable supply chains and access to critical materials), support for the preservation of freedom and security in Europe, prevention of an adversarial power from dominating the Middle East, with the US leading the world in AI, biotech, and quantum computing.  

•  What are America’s Available Means to Get What We Want?

A nimble political system, the world’s leading economy, financial system, technology, military, and network of alliances, enviable geography, cultural influence, courage, willpower and patriotism. 

In addition, President Trump is re-instilling a culture of competence, rooting out “DEI” (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) practices, unleashing energy production, reindustrialising, cutting taxes, deregulating, and investing in science and technology. 

•  The Strategy

“President Trump has cemented his legacy as The President of Peace…  A world on fire, where wars come to our shores, is bad for American interests.”  The US will cultivate peace through strength, while respecting other sovereign nation-states.  The US will protect its own sovereignty, and not allow any power to become so dominant that it threatens US interests.  America will be pro-worker, and expect allies to treat the US fairly.  America will be a meritocracy with no “favoured group” status, but global talent will not be allowed to undercut American workers.  The era of mass migration is over.  Core rights, freedom of speech, religion and conscience, must never be infringed. 

“The days of the united States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.”  NATO countries must spend 5% of GDP on defence.  This is “burden-sharing and burden-shifting”. 

The President will seek peace deals, even in countries peripheral to immediate core interests, if it increases global interests, and opens new markets. 

The US will work to strengthen the economy, through balanced trade relations, access to critical supply chains and materials, reindustrialisation, and a revival of the military-industrial complex.  American energy dominance will be restored.  America will preserve and grow its financial sector dominance. 

The paper concludes with a discussion of five global regions.

1.  The Western Hemisphere

America will enlist and expand partnerships.  There will be serious pushback to non-hemispheric competitors. 

•  Asia

America will rebalance the economic relationship with China, combating, with the help of allies, unfair and predatory business practices, and while focusing on deterrence of war in the Indo-Pacific.  The US will invest in military and dual-use technology, including undersea, space, and nuclear.  “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.”  The US will not allow a competitor to control the South China Sea. 

•  Europe

Europe’s problems include insufficient military spending, economic stagnation, “civilisational erasure”, the activities of the EU and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, out of control migration, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birth rates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.  “The continent will be unrecognisable in 20 years or less.”  Certain European countries may not remain reliable allies.  Europe needs to regain its civilisational self-confidence.  The US needs to engage diplomatically to manage European relations with Russia, and to mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and the European states.  The US wishes to expedite a cessation of the war in Ukraine. 

•  The Middle East

President Trump’s June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer significantly degraded Iran’s nuclear programme.  Progress towards a permanent Israeli-Palestinian peace has been made.  The US can work with Middle East partners to advance economic interests, and to open up new markets.  The Strait of Hormuz must remain open, and the Red Sea navigable. 

•  Africa

The US will transition from a foreign aid paradigm to an investment and growth paradigm. 

That’s it.  What do you make of it?  I can’t say anything surprised me. It was an iteration, and reiteration, somewhat repetitive, of things we’ve been hearing over the past year, and during the previous Trump administration.  If I had to summarise it in half a dozen words, these would be “America First – make America great again.”  The meaning throughout is reasonably clear, though the language is rather too abstract for my taste.  On page 12, for example, on the topic of the US working with allies, this sentence appears:

“The model will be targeted partnerships that use economic tools to align incentives, share burdens with like-minded allies, and insist on reforms that anchor long-term stability.”

That sentence could have been generated by AI.  Perhaps it was. 

The tone overall is supremely self-assured, and self-confident.  It certainly lacks humility.  The references to the activities of the President are somewhat sycophantic.  Much is asserted, with little underlying argument or back-up.  Then again it is a policy document, outlining a strategy as it now is, rather than how it evolved.  It is quite possible to read it and conclude that it is coherent, plain, straightforward, pragmatic, and reasonable.  It is a rah-rah call to patriotism.  Why shouldn’t people be encouraged to excel, to be the best they can be? 

All well and good.  I should therefore try to explain why I incline to think that the National Security Strategy is tosh, and a load of old codswallop.  Bigly.    

“The world works best when nations prioritise their interests.”  That is perhaps the key sentence in the entire document.  The idea is that if we are all primarily out for ourselves, there will be an international balance of power as if guided by an invisible hand.  But would we support such an idea if it were applied to the individual?  Would we regard as honourable a person who only looked out for “Number One”?  All of the world’s established religions, moral philosophies and codes of ethics argue against selfishness, and regard indifference to the wellbeing of others as being directly opposed to the way in which “the world works best”.  When G. K. Chesterton was asked what was at heart wrong with the world, he replied, “Me”.  He had humility. 

The trouble with prioritising national interest is that it creates a highly competitive, “dog eat dog” world in which powerful nations strive to be “A number one, king of the heap”, happy to sit at the top of what is likely to be a pile of excrement.  That leads on to another key sentence of the NSS:

“We reject the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidise out adversaries.”

This, despite the fact that the scientific world is virtually unanimous in believing that manmade climate change is real, and an existential threat.  The trouble for the current US administration is that recognition of this fact would, and should, rather curtail the ambition to exploit the US’ enormous resources of fossil fuels.  Refusal to face this fact is of itself an ideology.  Climate change cannot be real, because it contradicts this latest iteration of the American Dream.  Once you recognise the imminent threat of climate change, you are obliged not only to curtail mining activities but also to cooperate with other nations, allies and adversaries, in order, for example, to keep the increase in average global temperatures since the pre-industrial age to under 1.5 degrees Celsius.  No nation can do this alone.  Some people argue that there is little point in worrying about climate change when countries like the US, China, and India ignore it.  That is a non-strategy, a strategy of despair. 

The current US administration is happy to cooperate with allies, but only insofar as this serves, or is perceived to serve, the US national interest.  Another key sentence:

“(Previously our elites)… lashed American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty.”

The document does not have a good word for international institutions.  The United Nations does not get a mention, nor the World Bank, and certainly not the Conference of the Parties (COP).  The EU gets a poor press, as does NATO.  The attack on Europe is a contumely, blistering in its contempt.  But there is no criticism of Russia.

All in all, the NSS is all about the accumulation, for the US, of power, and wealth.  The US may not be an empire, but it is certainly an hegemony.  “We should be headed from our present $30 trillion economy in 2025 to $40 trillion in the 2030s.”  The rich get richer.  Money, in fact, is the predominant preoccupation of the NSS.  Everything is seen in terms of a business deal.  There is no reference to any ethical framework or moral code, beyond a couple of references to something nebulous called American “decency”, which, whatever it is, is taken for granted.

Poor Americans!  What a ghastly dystopia awaits them.  Perhaps it has already arrived.  The US reminds me of “Pottersville”.  In the celebrated Christmas movie It’s a Wonderful Life, James Stewart spends a lifetime putting self-interest to one side in favour of helping people who one way or another are in trouble. A series of personal misfortunes leads him to the brink of suicide.  He is not a praying man, but in despair, all that is left for him is prayer.  He believes his life has been futile, but his guardian angel shows him what the world would have been like if he had never existed.  In particular, the small town in which he grew up and lived is turned into a repository of tat, of tasteless kitsch, as a result of the profiteering of one Henry Potter (no relation to J. K. Rowling’s creation).  Pottersville is hell on earth.  America is fast becoming Pottersville.  There is a long tradition in Hollywood of the quiet, unassuming man, or woman, who takes on an adversary not because of a business opportunity, an eye for the main chance, but because something is happening to society which is fundamentally wrong.  Garry Cooper, James Stewart, Tom Hanks.  Who, and where, is such a figure now?

In fact, the idea that there might conceivably be something rotten in the state of the US is entirely ignored in the NSS.  No mention of interpersonal violence against the backdrop of the 2^nd Amendment; no mention of a profound societal rift between Republican and Democrat, with no apparent attempt to “reach across the aisle”; no mention of poverty, and the increasing gap between rich and poor.  All of America’s woes are perceived as external threats, adversarial manoeuvres coming from beyond its borders.  And in terms of foreign policy, other than a belief in the survival of the fittest, there is no consideration of what must surely be the most important, the most critical question of our time: how can we best get along together, without destroying ourselves, and the planet?   

Yet there is hope.  Winston told us that America could always be relied upon to do the right thing, after it has exhausted every other possibility.  I think of President Trump as Shelley’s Ozymandias.  In form, Shelley’s poem is really a sonnet.  I print it in full here because it seems extraordinarily apposite:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said, “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert.  Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

All these years ago In  2^nd MB, in the dreaded dissection room, a cold echoing chamber suffused with the aroma of formalin which never leaves you, Dr Chinnan would blunt dissect with remarkable rapidity through the layers of fascia and muscle, to expose a nerve.  “Here is the nerve. It has a name.  Never mind the name!”  And Richard Feynman as a boy used to go on nature walks with his father, who was not academic, but who had an insatiable curiosity about the world.  He would say the same thing as Dr Chinnan.  This plant has a long Latin name, and people think they know about it because they know the name.  But just because you can name it doesn’t mean that you know anything about it.  And Bertrand Russell wrote a seminal tract on, among other things, nomenclature, On Denoting.  Just because you can name things in a fashion that is syntactically correct doesn’t mean that you are making any sense.  The present Queen of France is dead. 

Yet naming, labelling, seems to have become very important to us.  Are you a woman because, despite your 46XY chromosomal endowment, you know deep down that you are?  Does the activity of Israel in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank constitute genocide?  And, this week especially, do one in four children carry the diagnosis of either autism, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder?  Wes Streeting the Health Secretary in England was minded to suggest that these days such conditions are being overdiagnosed.  On the contrary, said many consultants in child and adolescent psychiatry, they are being underdiagnosed.  The health secretary backed off, to an extent.  He is more than happy to take on the BMA, but less inclined to get offside with the medical profession as a whole.  On Any Questions last week Shami Chakrabarty commended him for eating a large slice of humble pie; something of a morganatic, or backhanded compliment.  I’m not sure he did.  He ordered a review.  He is clearly concerned that once a young person has been labelled with a psychiatric diagnosis, he or she is liable not only to be signed off, but written off, removed from the workforce, and put on benefits effectively for life.     

But is this urge to append a label to everything helpful?  Woman, genocide, neurodiversity… You can debate definitions endlessly, but these debates are purely semantic, and often rather recherché, like how many angels can dance on a pinhead, or how many daughters had Lady Macbeth?  Better put these issues to one side, and go deeper into exploring the fine grain of human problems.  Should a 46XY individual have the right to enter a sport’s dressing room designed for 46XX individuals?  Has the response of the Israeli government to the attacks of October 7th 2023 been proportionate?  Would a young person who cannot sit still and concentrate benefit from some extra help? 

The number of neurodiverse diagnoses has skyrocketed since Covid.  People wait an age, even half a lifetime, for the diagnosis, and another age for any form of intervention.  Have the number of cases really increased, and if so, why?  Are they merely being better recognised, or are people truly being overdiagnosed?  My hunch – and it is only a hunch – is that all of the above are true.  Much has been said about the deleterious effects of Covid, and the associated lockdowns, on mental health.  But, as has been pointed out, the increase in child and adolescent mental health problems started before Covid.  I’m more persuaded by the recognition of the malignant influence of electronic devices.  I remember attending an RSNO concert last year when a mobile phone went off during a performance.  Maestro Sondergard begged the audience not to bring their contraptions into the concert hall.  “They are making us all ill.”  That I think is, literally, true. 

In many ways society is much kinder now than it was when I were a lad.  I recall some of our teachers were very free with the use of the tawse.  One teacher administered a spelling test once a week, the ground rules being that two mistakes earned you two strokes of the belt.  I doubt if he had ever heard the word “dyslexia”; I don’t suppose that at the time, anybody had.  Another conducted forty minutes of Religious Education once a week, in which the class was required to memorise two verses from the Psalms.  At the end of the period he would select a pupil at random to give a recitation by heart.  Failure to be word perfect evoked the same dire punishment, and he was a ferocious belter.  At the time, I don’t suppose ADHD appeared in DSM 1.  Still, I’m glad I attended school then and not now.  I couldn’t bear the integration of the digital world, social media, and information technology into education.  I’m quite sure it would have driven me, literally, mad.

Are the psychiatrists overdiagnosing?  Actually I think the entire profession is overdiagnosing.  Everybody is on the spectrum of something.  No one is normal, and there’s none so queer as folk.  You go to the doctor with your own agenda, only to discover that the doctor has an agenda of his own, and it is a desire to place you somewhere on the spectrum of something.  I wrote the other day in this blog about a lawyer who said to a room full of doctors, “You think when you consult us that you are inviting us into your world.  On the contrary, it is we who are inviting you into ours.”  Nowadays a GP might say the same to a patient.  Before you know it, you are being screened, and vetted, and put on the spectrum of pre-hypertension, pre-diabetes, pre-hypercholesterolaemia, pre-you name it.  I don’t suppose practitioners working in mental health are any different. 

I was never taught to practise in this way.  Medicine used to be clear cut.  Patients either evinced a clinical sign, or they didn’t.  They either had a diagnosis, or they didn’t.  Of course you might argue that the concept of “diagnosis” was, is, entirely a human construct.  In reality there must be a spectrum of normal to abnormal, from health to a sickness which is mild, moderate, or severe.  And there must be, temporally, a point at which normal becomes abnormal.  You might argue that pinning a diagnosis on somebody is the same as pinning a label on them; it’s a semantic exercise.  The truth is that the diagnosis, the label, is not the end of the story.  Here, practitioners in somatic medicine can actually learn a trick from their psychiatric colleagues.  In the template of the classical psychiatric consultation of history and mental state examination, the diagnosis is immediately followed by an entity known as “formulation”, a reasoned application of the diagnosis to the unique circumstances of the individual patient.  This is what we need to do; apply the data extracted from the “case” to the unique individual before us.  Every diagnosis, and every ensuing treatment or management plan, is custom-made.  But individuals are in danger of being anonymised and swallowed up within populations.

So Dr Chinnan and Prof Feynman were right.  What’s in a name?  It’s only a heading.  What matters is the underlying formulation.  We might all learn from the psychiatrists, not just other doctors, but politicians, “influencers”, polemicists, culture warriors…  Ask the question, what’s actually going on here?  Think pathophysiologically.                                                                 

It’s official.  The Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year.  Actually they are two words.  Rage bait.  Surely it should be one word.  Doesn’t ragebait look more digital?  Ragebait has been described as the evil twin of click bait.  As you surf the net, or a million and one social media platforms, something catches your eye that is going to put up your blood pressure.  The curious thing is that, knowing that something is about to make you very angry, nonetheless you click on the link.  Of course, ragebait works.  You do click on the link.  That is the reason why ragebait is word of the year.  All the clicks have been counted, and cannot be ignored. 

Although it’s a phenomenon of the digital word, there is really nothing new about ragebait.  For as long as newspapers have existed, sub-editors have conjured provocative headlines to draw your attention to something that is bound to cause outrage, to make you splutter into your cornflakes.  What that outrage might be depends upon the political leanings of the newspaper, and its readership.  Single mum on benefits has twelfth baby.  Buckingham Palace pays less council tax than 20 Old Kent Road.  The headlines resonate around, but do not cross between two disconnected echo chambers. 

There are other manifestations of rage.  Now that we have moved into the season of Advent, we may shortly expect to see trolley rage in the supermarket.  To anybody who has lived for the last couple of years in the Gaza Strip, trolley rage must seem absolutely inexplicable.  Then there is road rage.  Every motor vehicle is fitted with a horn, a means of drawing attention to one’s presence, and to a potential hazard.  But car horns are usually sounded, often protractedly, in order to express outrage at another driver’s perceived infringement, real or imagined.  Sometimes the driver under attack responds with an equally prolonged blast of his own horn (the driver is usually male), and suddenly we are in the midst of a contretemps, as unseemly as the spectacle of two men brawling in the street.  The other day I saw a guy being tail-gated by a horn-blasting Audi around the skirts of Stirling Castle.  He was so irritated that he slammed his brakes on, causing the Audi to crash into his rear bumper.  Two men emerged from their respective cars, but I didn’t hang around to observe the outcome. 

I’m not sure where to find my car horn on my Skoda Enyaq.  Somewhere on the steering column.  I really must find out.  But I’ve never had cause to use it.  Temperamentally, I like to think I incline more towards placidity than rage.  But I don’t fool myself.  I too get tail-gated, through our village’s 20 mph zone, and sometimes feel inclined to stop dead, get out and take a baseball bat to the Audi’s windscreen.  It could all turn on a dime.  There but for the grace of God…

And for sure, I’m susceptible to ragebait.  My least favourite radio programme is When it hits the fan (BBC Radio 4, Wednesdays, 4.02 pm.)  I say “least favourite”.  So why do I bother listening?  It’s a programme about PR, Public Relations, a world which I frankly detest.  Yet I listen in, regularly, with sickly fascination.  Ragebait, you see.  It’s only for fifteen minutes, I tell myself.  (The podcast is longer.)  On one level it’s good listening.  Two PR gurus, David Yelland and Simon Lewis, have worked in the field at the top level.  They are clearly masters of their brief, and they are very good at having a blether.  November 26^th’s programme was entitled Power, PR and the “Epstein Class”.  Now that President Trump has allowed access to the late Jeffrey Epstein’s emails, there has been a media feeding frenzy over their content.  Apparently they are a window on the world of the great and the good.  This is how the top drawer communicate with one another, in succinct sound bites.  The more top drawer you are, the less you need to say.  This has nothing at all to do with Epstein’s sexual exploitation and criminality.  Yelland and Lewis were at pains to acknowledge how grotesque all of that was, and then to lay it to one side.  No.  The emails were a demonstration of how power works.  Epstein made himself a multimillionaire by building up a network, and trafficking information.  We thought we knew where power resides, over here, for example, in Westminster, or the British Establishment.  We thought we knew who runs the world.  But no.  These emails, this exclusive chat room if you will – here reside the people who run the world.

This world is very mobile.  Many of the emails start, quite simply, with the question, “Where are you now?”  Somebody on the New York Times has described these exchanges as “nomadic bat signals”. Then there is the exchange of information.  Or at least a taster, much like click bait.  I know why so-and-so met DJT (the president elect) at such-and-such golf course.  Apparently this piece of information gives the bearer something known in the PR world as “edge”.  Anyway, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, apparently the age of the email is over.  All the movers and shakers have ditched it, gone under cover, and moved over to obscure platforms where their succinct messages can be encrypted.      

It occurred to me that “edge” could easily have been word of the year.  Perhaps it would be sexier in German.  Vorsprung.  You know.  Vorsprung durch Technik.  But how hellish it must be to have one’s life dominated by the constant pursuit of “edge”.  You can never be out of touch, off line, whatever the obscure platform you are using, for fear of losing edge.  That is precisely why adolescents are addicted to their devices.  In their own social world, they are in constant fear of losing edge.  It’s a PR disaster to be out of the loop.  The Australian Government, which recognises that the influence of social media upon young people has been malignant, is trying to ban ten specific platforms for use by people under the age of 16.  Of course teenagers are much more tech-savvy than their elders, and will find a way round it, if they want to.

But that’s the trouble with living your life through a smartphone or a computer screen.  The pursuit of edge is fundamentally puerile.  It’s quite a thought that the people who – at least according to Yelland and Lewis – run the world, have been infantilised. 

One of the most depressing images in our political life is the sight of an MP sitting on the green benches, or an MSP in the chamber at Holyrood for that matter, staring, preoccupied, at their smartphone.  I wish our politicians would dump social media, the preoccupation with image, dump their SPAVS, log off, and speak truth to us directly, in syntactically correct sentences with principal and subordinate clauses, and not in emoji-strewn nomadic bat signals.  The medium is not the message.  A pox on your PR.         

In the 1970s, when the French film director Bertrand Tavernier filmed the cult movie Death Watch, starring Romy Schneider and Harvey Keitel, he chose Glasgow as a backdrop to his nightmare vision of where Reality TV might take us.  He filmed in the West End, and I recall a panning shot of Romy Schneider walking past my aunt’s house and around the crescent that joins Crown Road North to Crown Road South.  In fact, Tavernier visited my aunt, looking for a location for some internal shots.  In the end he didn’t opt for 4 Crown Road North, and I suppose my aunt should have been gratified that M. Tavernier remarked, “The ’ous – it is not sufficiently… decayed.” 

Since then, Glasgow has become a favoured location for film directors, not just because, no doubt, the price is right, but because the architecture within the grid system of Glasgow city centre can reasonably easily be converted to resemble somewhere like Philadelphia.  Brad Pitt filmed World War Z here, and I recall crossing a George Square full of zombies smoking cigarettes and waiting for the next take.  Now Batman, aka Robert Pattinson, is haunting the Necropolis; plenty of decay there.

George Square is currently fenced off, apparently being refurbished.  The statuary has (temporarily, we are told), been removed.  There is a rumour that they might not all be replaced on their pedestals.  Not so long ago there was a proposal that all the statues be placed in museums, with accompanying plaques apologising for Glasgow’s links with the slave trade.  Sandy Stoddart, Sculptor in Ordinary to Her Majesty, wrote a blistering critique of what he saw as an act of philistinism, perhaps not unlike the proposed demolition of the Red Road flats which was to take place during the opening ceremony of the last Glasgow Commonwealth Games.  The destruction of people’s homes was to be turned into un coup de théâtre.  Stoddart’s scorn for this proposal was expressed in I think the finest letter to the Herald I have ever read.  You sense a common theme.  A dumbing down.

Glaswegians are inclined to mock statues.  The Duke of Wellington sits on a horse outside the Gallery of Modern Art, a traffic cone permanently on his head.  (Actually, I have a notion the cone has been replaced by a chicken, a smaller cone on the chook’s head.)  Apparently Banksy admires the traffic cone.  It’s a reflection of Glasgow’s anarchic bravado – dead gallus.  I don’t.  The statue is, after all, a work of art.  Would you deface the Mona Lisa?  Even some people in Extinction Rebellion have stopped pouring tomato soup over Rembrandt and Van Gogh.   

There is an article by Philip Rodney in yesterday’s Sunday Times, “Glasgow desperately needs an intervention”, with its subtitle, “Andrew Neil was right about the city being mired in managed decline”.  Naturally, as a Glaswegian, I bridled.  Didn’t Glasgow shine last week, at Hampden Park?  Four glorious goals.  I particularly admired the last one, lofted into an empty Danish goalmouth from the halfway line.  Wha’s like us?  Dam’ few, an’ they’re a’ deid. 

But you know, Mr Rodney is right.  The city centre is a mess.  An obstacle course of mud, bollards, and barricades.  It has been like that for so long, certainly since the Art School went on fire, perhaps even since St Andrew’s Halls went on fire, that it feels permanent.  The tragedy is that the decayed environment conceals those elements of which Glasgow should be proud.  On Saturday evening, for example, I attended the RSNO’s concert in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.  Quite magnificent.  The RSNO is on top form.  In the first half we heard George Antheil’s A Jazz Symphony, and then George Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F, arranged for Jazz Trio and orchestra.  Conductor Patrick Hahn swapped places with pianist Frank Dupree for the Antheil, and there was a bit of dumb crambo as the pair swapped Hahn’s black dress shoes for Dupree’s white sneakers, apparently the dress code for the jazz trio, including Jakob Krupp on bass, and Obi Jenne, on drums.  Then they swapped back for the piano concerto.    

I was initially a bit ambivalent about the prospect of hearing the Gershwin in the guise of Frank Dupree’s arrangement.  But I was completely won over.  The jazz idiom, in the context of Gershwin’s fusion of jazz and classical styles, was completely convincing, both within the trio, who included a cadenza of dazzling virtuosity, and within the orchestra itself.  As an encore, the trio was joined by the RSNO’s percussionists, and an array of bongo drums etc, for a rendition of Caravan which brought the house down.  Follow that!

Well, they did, in the second half, with Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony.  I love late Rachmaninov.  Such nostalgia.  A five star occasion.  It was recorded, so you can catch it on BBC Radio 3 on December 4^th. 

There is no crit in today’s Herald, which I think is regrettable.  The attendance at the concert was, shall we say, modest, and I wondered if a cold night, plus the obstacle course of mud and bollards, had put people off.  But in Glasgow, of all places, we need to trumpet our successes. 

I can draw another contrast, with my latest visitation to the Far East.  Last Thursday was my medical school class’s 44^th reunion, in Edinburgh.  It was the first one I ever attended.  They have been held more or less every 10 years, and for the 10^th anniversary I was in New Zealand, for the 20^th, in the Isle of Skye, which strangely felt more remote.  By the 30^th, I’d just got out of the way of it.  Then the 40^th was postponed, due to Covid.  So we reconvened last week, and I thought if I didn’t go, I might not get another chance.

I’m so glad I went.  We met in the afternoon at the entrance to the old Edinburgh Royal Infirmary on Lauriston Place.  It closed early this century, moving to a new site in Little France.  The medical wards at the back of the Infirmary, overlooking the Meadows, were converted into flats, but the surgical wards went to rack and ruin and could well have been demolished.  Instead, they were converted into a learning hub, the Edinburgh Futures Institute.  What a transformation.  It was surreal, to pace these well-worn corridors.  I had a coffee in the Canopy – the old Emergency Department.  No sense of decay here.  No managed decline.

In the evening we met in the City Chambers, on the Royal Mile just opposite St Giles, for dinner.  A sweet occasion.  On several occasions I chatted with people whom I had not seen for over 40 years, and it was as if we were resuming a conversation from last week.  How could this be?  I think we must have all been bonded by a shared experience which was certainly intense.  A baptism of fear and intimidation.  We seemed to hold simultaneously in our heads the notions that we had been institutionally bullied, yet we had experienced a Golden Age, before computerisation, digitalisation, and managerial pseudoscience tore Medicine apart.  We had each been asked to supply an anecdote, a reminiscence of undergraduate days, for publication, and I was struck that the majority of us, myself included, recalled something from 2^nd MB.  That gruelling year.  I remarked to a friend that we must all be suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  PTSD.  He laughed, and didn’t disagree. 

These hoary old snake oil salesmen, Messrs Cut & Splice, have landed the BBC in trouble.  Apparently they joined up two of President Trump’s remarks, fifty minutes apart in a political speech, to make it appear that he was inciting his followers to storm the Capitol, after he refused to recognise the result of the 2020 presidential election.  This happened a year ago, but has only now come to light, thanks to the investigative reporting of the Telegraph.  President Trump has signalled that he intends to sue the BBC for “between one and five billion dollars”, and, on board Air Force 1, he thanked a Telegraph reporter for his paper’s exposure of “fake news”.

During the past week the BBC has spent an inordinate amount of time introspectively mulling over the whole saga.  In News, it’s always a problem when the reporter becomes part of the story.  But it’s clearly a big story, because the Director General and the Head of News have both resigned.  Allegedly the cut and splice episode is merely the tip of the iceberg, and apparently the BBC is, culturally, deeply dysfunctional.  Run by a bunch of liberal lefties, according to some.  That would certainly imply that the Corporation would be anti-Trump.  Biased.  Not so, says an opposing faction.  Look at the amount of air time they afford Mr Farage!  Champions of the BBC often point out that if the charge of bias is being laid from all sides, then the BBC have probably got the balance about right (by which I mean correct, rather than politically conservative).  There’s a massive Conspiracy Theory doing the rounds, that the current scandal is merely the culmination of a prolonged concerted attack on the public broadcasting service by its competitors in the private sector, jealous of the clout that the licence fee affords the BBC.

Bias (Chambers) n a one-sided mental inclination; a prejudice; any special influence that sway’s one’s thinking.   

Speaking as a doctor, erstwhile emergency physician, I can’t help feeling it’s all a storm in a teacup.  Nobody died.  (Well, I say that, but people did die, on January 6^th 2021, at the Capitol.)  But now, unless there is a settlement out of court, we have the prospect of hearing the case of Mr President versus the BBC, perhaps in the jurisdiction of Florida.  Teams of lawyers will “deploy arguments”.  What a ghastly, dismal prospect.  It could run for months, perhaps years.  Irrespective of who “wins”, it will cost a fortune. 

I have a rule of thumb about going to law: don’t do it, unless you absolutely have to.  Don’t get enmeshed in that imbroglio.  I’ve read my Dickens; I’ve read my Kafka.  The endless case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.  Joseph K., spending an eternity before the door to the court, waiting for it to open.  When working in New Zealand I was required, on a number of occasions, to give evidence in court, thankfully only as a witness (but there but for the grace of God go I), usually in cases of medical “mishap” or “misadventure”.  On some of these occasions, somebody did die, or on other occasions incurred life-changing injuries.  On one occasion, for example, the case involved a child who had been sent home from the emergency department with a diagnosis of “tension headache”.  In fact, the child had meningitis, and succumbed shortly afterwards.  You see, that puts the charge of cutting and splicing a tape into some sort of perspective.

I never felt that the combative nature of legal procedure, with a prosecution, and a defence, was a particularly effective way of getting to the truth of a matter.  The procedure of the hospital Morbidity & Mortality (M & M) Meeting always seemed to me to be far more informative.  Here, the facts of the case were presented, and then discussed.  Doctors tried to formulate a coherent account of everything that had happened, chiefly in order to learn, and in order to avoid a recurrence of the episode in question.  Of course, if there is a stark difference of opinion, particularly with regard to a burden of guilt, then a combative scenario becomes inevitable. 

Another anomalous feature of court procedure with regard to medical misadventure was the stark contrast between the constraints of time suffered by a usually harassed and overworked emergency physician, and the temporal latitude enjoyed by the court.  The court might take a week to consider a critical decision that a doctor had felt obliged to take during a fifteen minute consultation.   

If I happened to be taking part in the “Cut’nSplicegate” M & M Meeting, I would want to hear the facts of the case.  What is the error?  Who committed it?  What was the motivation?  Was the cut and splice a slipshod editorial happenstance or was it designed to mislead?  Was there editorial oversight and if so, what was the chain of command?  Did the alleged misdemeanour actually cause harm?  What, indeed, was its resultant morbidity, and mortality?

Call me naïve, but I would suppose that men and women of good faith and good heart could answer these questions during the course of a morning.  Why is going to law so expensive?  I don’t remember ever being recompensed for attending an M & M Meeting, or a court case, or a hearing before the General Medical Council.  What is so expensive in law?

Obfuscation.

Then there is the question of compensation.  Has somebody been damaged to the extent they need $5,000,000,000 to make up for it?

I always remember the advice I heard from a lawyer speaking at a meeting in, of all places, the Ayrshire hotel that was to become Trump Turnberry.  He said, “When you seek the help of lawyers, you imagine you are inviting us into your world.  But it is quite the opposite.  We are inviting you into ours.”

And it’s a different world altogether.  To most of us, it is unrecognisable.                                 

Republicanism has been very much to the fore recently in the letters column of The Herald.  The catalyst for this seems to have been the coincidentally simultaneous publication of a book about Andrew Mountbatten Windsor entitled Entitled (another one word title – it’s such a cliché), and the memoir of the late Virginia Giuffre.  There seems to be a widespread disgust at the perceived royals’ sense of, well, entitlement.  Somebody wrote in to suggest that the monarchy be abolished, as well as the House of Lords, as well as the devolved governments, as well as Westminster, the latter to be replaced by a new Parliament built right at the geographical epicentre of the isle of Great Britain.  To this I responded:     

Dear Sir,

I was very interested to acquaint myself with your correspondent’s vision of how Great Britain might evolve constitutionally, were the monarchy to be abolished (Could this be the beginning of the end of the monarchy? Herald, November 4).  The abolition of the House of Lords and the devolved governments, and the relocation of Parliament to Lancashire, all sound quite logical and rational, but the proposed model doesn’t seem to me to take national culture, or cultures, into account.  This reallocation of powers is a table-top exercise, rather reminiscent of the Sykes-Picot agreement between the UK and France in 1916, the Balfour Declaration the following year, or the Stalin-Roosevelt-Churchill carve-up of Eastern Europe at Yalta in 1945.  Remember how well they all went.  You can’t redraw the map in a national-political-cultural vacuum.  Moving Parliament to Dunsop Bridge is not much different from throwing a dart at a map, blindfold. 

Like it or not, the only thing that glues Great Britain together as a national entity, is the monarchy.  If King Charles receives his P45, or as we say north of the border, his jotters, then I think the likeliest outcome would be that Scotland, England, and Wales would become independent countries, and the island of Ireland would unite.  Whether or not such an outcome would be propitious, nay felicitous, I lay to one side.  But the Establishment at Westminster understands it, and that is why it will do everything in its power to protect, preserve, and maintain the monarchy.  This is the real reason why the naval officer formerly known as Prince has been so ostracised, and vilified.  It is not merely the monarchy which is in danger of foundering; it is the entire Ship of State.  

Yours sincerely…

The Herald kindly published me, under the headline Why we need the monarchy.  As a seasoned writer to the newspapers I have grown used to the fact that the editorial headline is beyond one’s control.  So I wasn’t much fazed.  But I thought the headline was ill-chosen.  My stance was neither royalist nor republican, just as it was neither unionist nor nationalist.  My topic was rather the modus operandi of the Westminster Establishment.  Its deepest instinct is for self-preservation.

Robert Harris wrote a novel about Captain Dreyfus, which won the Walter Scott prize for historical fiction.  Dreyfus was accused, unjustly, of being a spy, found guilty, and banished to Devil’s Island.  In a scene at the beginning of the book his epaulettes are ceremoniously, unceremoniously, removed.  This is essentially what has happened to Andrew.  He has been “de-epauletted”.  He has lost his naval rank.  But I don’t think he is required, thus far, to return his military campaign medals.  That would surely be a step too far.  It is said that he served in the Falklands War with distinction. 

I thought of him yesterday on Remembrance Sunday.  I take it he wasn’t present at the cenotaph, though, not having turned my telly on for weeks, I wouldn’t know.  I attended the service at Dunblane Cathedral.  The cathedral was full.  There was a strong military presence.  The two minute silence was introduced by a bugle playing the Last Post.  The lessons were read, most eloquently, by the Deputy Lieutenant for Stirling and Falkirk, representing HM the King.  The Old Testament lessons was from Micah.

And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

The New Testament lesson was from St. Matthew.

But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also…

Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.

I always find the Service of Remembrance a very moving occasion, but, you know, it contains a fundamental cognitive dissonance which every minister of the church must struggle with, preaching Christ’s gospel to people who are training for war.  Such dissonance seems especially resonant, or perhaps to clang, to reverberate, in our own time. Jesus said, “Resist not evil.”  Really?  Our culture, the culture of western European and dare I say American democratic tradition, is founded on the notion of resistance to evil.  Popular culture, the movies, are shot through with it.  Gary Cooper resists evil in High Noon, when everybody else has backed down and turned a blind eye.  In The Man who shot Liberty Valance, John Wayne advises Jimmy Stewart, “You’d better start carrying a handgun, pilgrim.”  In The Magnificent Seven, Yul Brynner says to the villagers who have hired him and his men to protect them from evil (I paraphrase), “You need to kill, and carry on killing, even when you’ve forgotten the reason.”  In The Untouchables, Sean Connery says to a colleague, “You carry a badge?  Then carry a gun.”  And to Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness, “You wanna stop Capone?  He puts one of your men in the hospital, you put one of his men in the morgue.  That’s how you stop Capone!”  Then, for two minutes in every year, we silently resolve to turn the other cheek.              

Most apologias for Christ’s teaching emphasize the distinction between the evil deed and the evil doer; hate the deed, but love its perpetrator.  In Victory, as Winston put it, Magnanimity.  (But first, Victory.)  I’m not sure about such interpretations.  President Reagan once said that if you need to explain yourself, you’ve lost the argument.  I have a notion that Our Lord was moving on an entirely different plane, one of deliberate self-sacrifice, and when his disciples said they would follow him to the ends of the earth, he gently told them that they didn’t know what they were letting themselves in for.

My generation has been incredibly lucky.  No call to arms.  We have all read our Wilfred Owen and I believe that we have not, by and large, been seduced by the faux-attractiveness of war.  But that which we have taken for granted is looking increasingly fragile.  The drones have reached Belgium.  The sabres are rattling.     

I know it’s curmudgeonly, but I don’t care for Halloween.  As a child I remember going guising – now referred to as “trick or treating”, surely an import from North America – in Glasgow’s West End.  We called in at the tenement flat of, as it so happened, the newsagent at Broomhill Cross.  “Please can weez have wur Halloween?”  “Can you sing a song?”  “Aye.”  “Well don’t bother.  Here’s threepence.”  I have turned into that man.  Even worse.  No threepence.  I just got out.

And went into Glasgow.  The Scottish Chamber Orchestra were playing in the City Halls.  What a boon!  October 31^st is often starved of cultural opportunities.  But here we had a programme of Mozart – Webern – Mozart.  I jumped at it. 

Not without encountering some minor impediments.  I booked online, and was promised an e-ticket within five days of the event. It never came.  Instead I got an email to inform me that the method of issuing tickets had changed, and that all I needed to do was… well, quite a lot actually, in terms of entering a site, scrolling down this and that…  It seemed unnecessarily complicated.  I abandoned it, and, since I was in Glasgow last Thursday for my German class, went into the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall to see if I could pick up my ticket.  The concert hall was not officially open but, stroke of luck, the lady at the desk heard my plight, instantly solved my problem, and issued me with a ticket.  God bless her!  It is wonderful, and increasingly rare, to encounter somebody who listens to you in a humane way, and is not merely scrolling down an algorithm.       

So, on Saturday, off to Glasgow.  I wasn’t fazed by the fact that there was an enormous traffic jam on the M8, westbound, en route to Glasgow city centre.  That has been there for years.  But as I negotiated the city itself I was to discover that the entire area is a mass of bollards and one-way streets.  I could only find my destination by negotiating a series of ever diminishing circles.  Buchanan Galleries, the central carpark in Glasgow, has for some years now been closing at 9.00 pm.  What earthly use is that?  I found my way, with some difficulty, to Concert Square carpark, a dank venue suffused in a dank ammoniac aroma. 

And made my way to Candleriggs, a ten to fifteen minute walk via George Square.  If I had thought to avoid Halloween, I was sorely disappointed.  Glasgow city centre was extremely busy, full of foul fiends and flibbertigibbets.  The air was thick with the sickly-sweet stench of marijuana. I had thought that Halloween was a preoccupation of children, but, seemingly not.  Everybody was dressed as some sort of witch or warlock. 

It was a relief to arrive at the City Halls.  They are very familiar to me, although these days my visits are rare.  But it was not always so, and the arrival at the venue usually sparks off in me a surge of nostalgia for a past age.  Here it was again.  The Scottish Chamber Orchestra accompanied Yeol Eum Son at the piano, playing Mozart’s concertos 21 and 24.  She was wonderful.  It was only when she embarked on the second movement of the 21^st concerto, that I remembered I had played the viola part in this concerto, in this same place, with the SNO, accompanying Stephen Bishop Kovacevich.      

Between the concertos, the orchestra performed Webern’s Symphony.  Conductor Andrew Manze took some time to explain the structure of this twelve note work, with musical illustrations.  He had some violinists play a major scale with its eight notes, followed by a chromatic scale with its twelve notes.  He described the notes extraneous to the diatonic scale as “relatives”, perhaps a “close cousin”, or perhaps a “dodgy uncle, formerly known as Prince.”  I groaned.  A cheap gibe.  I have absolutely no opinion about the alleged behaviour of the former prince in question.  I haven’t seen the apparently notorious car crash of an interview with Emily Maitlis, and I have only the sketchiest notion of what the former prince is alleged to have done.  But I find the current media feeding frenzy, or blood fest, to be completely obnoxious.  Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.   I remember during the financial crisis of 2008 that the chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland was pilloried for financial mismanagement and, as a result, that his knighthood was revoked.  I remember at the time thinking that this revocation of an honour was not really an act of censure, but rather an act of social distancing; that the person once the darling of the Establishment was now disgraced, and therefore had to be dropped like hot coals; simply because the Establishment, who love to associate with the glitterati, cannot abide to associate with the disgraced.          

I’m not sure about the Webern.  It’s very ingenious, but is it music?  I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with it, because I have Webern’s complete works on CD – six of them – conducted by Pierre Boulez.  I can’t say I understand them, but I rather like them.  They seem to invoke in me a sense of calm.  That can’t be bad.

But it’s not Mozart.  That reminds me of a scene in a Gerard Depardieu film, Green Card, in which Depardieu, a man who has found himself in a situation not unlike that of the former prince, plays the part of an illegal immigrant to the USA who forges an unlikely relationship with a woman named Brontë, played by Andie MacDowell.  She is visiting the home of some very up-market people in Manhattan when he unexpectedly calls.  He is a musician, a composer, and when asked, he sits down at the piano and plays the most appalling cacophony you have ever heard.  Afterwards, he says, apologetically, “It’s not Mozart”, and the lady of the house replies, “I know.”  He then proceeds to break everybody’s heart by accompanying himself while intoning, in exquisite French, a plea to offer succour to destitute children, while the lady of the house, much moved, translates.

My computer’s still playing up.  It keeps telling me the system is viraemic, but I have a notion that all these alerts are, themselves, the virus, since my anti-viral package insists the system is clean.  In my tome Click, Double-Click, it crossed Dr Alastair Cameron-Strange’s mind that his firewall was manufacturing the viruses it purported to protect him from.  My astute copy-editor pointed out to me that the fictional name I had given to his anti-viral package did, in reality, exist.  I kept making up names and kept discovering that they were already out there, trading.  Eventually I settled for Zareba-abattis.  That was obscure enough.  So now I have this notion that anti-viral packages actually constitute a protection racket, and that in this instance two rival mafia families are vying for control of my computer.  “This is a beautiful system you have.  It would be a pity if something were to happen to it.”

Well, this ancient machine is not Windows 11 compatible, so I guess it’s time to update.  I’ve been using a computer in my local library, and it occurred to me, why bother updating?  Isn’t this enough? Why not eschew the digital life, and take the machine to the dump?

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.     

I was a “quiz inquisitor” at my German class last Thursday.  I had prepared, and then delivered, a musical quiz.  I kept it reasonably brief.  There were six questions.  It didn’t go particularly well.  Then again, it didn’t go particularly badly.  My German was okay; I had taken the precaution of running it by an Austrian friend of mine beforehand.  The class engaged, got some answers right and others not.  I was well prepared, and the visual aids and the brief musical recordings were ready, although, absurdly, I got caught up in the chat and sometimes forgot to play them.  I had “ripped” and “burned” a CD.  The tech worked well.  The quiz proceeded apace.  One member of the class did particularly well and won the token prize, aus der Schweiz, a bar of Toblerone.  At the end there was a polite smattering of applause.  But I felt that I didn’t really connect.  I’m used to coming away from any presentation with a sense of flatness, but on this occasion that feeling was unusually intense.  I don’t really have a performer’s temperament.  I decided to blow away the cobwebs by taking a walk round the Milngavie Reservoir, of a beautiful afternoon.  The autumn colours were intense.  My fretful thoughts were a jumble of recollections of the quiz questions, interspersed with other preoccupations of the day.

Question 1 was an ancient recording of Bertolt Brecht singing, with his remarkably guttural rrrrrrs, Kurt Weill’s Mack the Knife or, more correctly, Die Moritat von Mackie Messer, from Die Dreigroschenoper, the Threepenny Opera.  Question 2 was a follow-on, Weill’s Bilbao Song sung by Lotte Lenya.  Who was the singer?  Clue: a picture from the film From Russia with Love, of Sean Connery pinning Lotte, playing the part of Rosa Klebb, to the wall, using a chair, in order to avoid being kicked by a winklepicker, so to speak, laced with Fugu poison, a neurotoxin.

Lotte Lenya had a beautiful voice, so fragile, tuneful and musical.  She was Weill’s muse, as well as his wife.  He heard all his early songs, imagined them, sung in her voice.  It’s a soprano voice.  Incidentally, have you noticed the way that ladies who use their voice in the public arena, in politics, in the media, are pitching their voice down, from soprano to mezzo to contralto?  It is said that Margaret Thatcher trained herself in this way, in an attempt to avoid a hectoring, badgering tone.  But this tendency has descended to a new level.  It is particularly evident on the radio, and with speakers from the United States.  It is the antithesis of Antipodean “upspeak” which is often thought of, particularly by those who naturally use it, as evidence of “cringe”, a tentativeness, a kind of built-in apology for whatever it is you are saying.  This new phenomenon may be called “downspeak”, where the speaker ends the sentence not merely at a low pitch, but with a kind of amphibian croak, reminiscent of Henry Kissinger in his later years, when he sounded like an inscrutable Sphinx, or an oracular cicada.  Listen out for it.  Once you’ve spotted it, you begin to hear it all the time.  Perhaps it is the newest version of the 1980s Dallas-Dynasty version of padded shoulders, when power-dressers looked like American footballers.

Question 3 was a picture of a concert hall in Vienna.  Which one?  I played the opening to Strauss’ The Blue Danube, which disappears in audience applause.  What happens next?  This was a recording of the traditional first encore from the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year Concert from the Musikverein.  What happened next was that Daniel Barenboim and the orchestra wished everybody a Happy New Year. 

Talking of voices on the radio, and “downspeak”, I’m intrigued by the latest predilection, on BBC Radio 4, for “crashing the pips”.  In a previous age this was considered anathema.  Now it’s de rigueur.  Radio apparently abhors a vacuum – dead air.  Even a second of silence is too much.  This is rather in keeping with the tendency to embellish documentary programmes with background “music”.  I say “music”, but really I mean musical drivel.  I have the sense that programme makers are being guided, misguided, by managerial SPAVs who think they can effect an improvement.  Some of the best of radio is pure silence.  I particularly enjoy the silence at the commencement of the six o’clock news.  After the tolling bells of Big Ben (themselves beguiling because, unlike RVW’s London Symphony, they are not straight crotchets but somewhat syncopated) the newsreader says, “This is the six o’clock news, read by —- ——.  Good evening.”

Protracted silence.  Longer than you’d think. 

BONG…

Question 4 was a picture of the frontispiece of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.  Why was it damaged?  (Hint – the opening to the symphony’s funeral march.  I forgot to play it!)  Beethoven had originally dedicated the Eroica to Napoleon, but when Napoleon declared himself emperor, Beethoven lost his temper and gouged his name off the page. 

Question 5 was multiple choice.  It showed the quotation above the last movement of Beethoven’s last work, the String Quartet Op. 135.

Must it be?  It must be!  It must be! 

What must be?

• I have run out of musical ideas, and must retire.
• Death is inevitable, and I must face up to it.
• My deafness is incurable.
• I really ought to pay the bill for my dirty laundry.

Of course the answer is (d).  But this is probably apocryphal.  In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera has a slightly different version.  Beethoven was insisting that someone pay him money he was owed.  But the important point is that the “es muss sein” quote was not hifalutin, but quite mundane.  Heaviness to lightness, Kundera would say, and not the other way around.

Question 6.  I had a montage of composers’ portraits – Vaughan Williams, Dvorak, Schubert, Bruckner, and Mahler.  What did they have in common with Beethoven?  Hint – the solo horn opening to Schubert’s Great C major.  Answer: they all write nine symphonies.  (More or less.)   

Anyway, it’s all done and dusted.  Fret not.  I find this a difficult time of year.  The clock jiggery-pokery has been effected, and the ghastly prospects of Halloween and Guy Fawkes loom.  I’ve got a ticket for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in Glasgow City Halls on Friday so can dodge the tricker-treaters.  Mozart – Webern – Mozart.  Not musical drivel.  But maybe that’s why I’m fretful.  Maybe the quiz was too hifalutin.  Am I a musical snob?       

Where were we?

Oh yes, the other piece of biblical advice. Something like, “If thy right hand offend ye, cut it off.” This morning I really did feel like hurling my computer through the window, but I suppose in the end I did persevere. That is why I am now in my local library. I borrowed a computer and negotiated various difficulties (I won’t bore you with the details) to the extent that I was able to post a chunk of blog before my one hour time slot expired. And I’ve now negotiated a few more difficulties to continue.

As you can probably tell, I am an analogue man living in a digital world. Next Thursday I’m presenting a musical quiz to my German class, half a dozen questions with associated pictures and music. I took great pleasure in devising questions which were zany rather than erudite, but I took no pleasure at all in “ripping” and “burning” musical chunks, to compile a CD. I downloaded a piece of software with accompanying instructions of such prolixity that I just ignored them and did it by trial and error. Anyway it’s done, a thoroughly thankless task. It brought me no joy.

Anyway I’ll let you know how it goes, assuming I’ve found a way to exorcise all these gremlins. But enough already. I’ll quit while I’m ahead and log off.

Bis nächste Woche!