Author: jamescalumcampbell

I learned a new word in my German class last Thursday.

Entrümpeln

To declutter.

There is a Turkish entrepreneur in Germany, one Ahmet Eroğlu, who will empty your house for you.  Why are you holding on to six broken umbrellas?  Or these ancient family heirlooms stowed in wall cabinets, cuckoo clocks, coffee grinders, plate, like the tea service you never use, vinyl LPs you never listen to but keep in alphabetical order – this, according to Eroğlu, a quintessentially German trait.  Mr Eroğlu’s warehouse is full of porcelain kitsch. He is something of an anthropologist.  He records his removals and posts the videos online.  Back in Turkey, the folks, millions of them, observe German customs and mores with astonishment.  The wealth!  The superabundance!  Why would you buy another television set when there is already one in the cellar that could easily be repaired?    

I’m all for decluttering, and indeed mending is better than ending, but I’m not sure about the attendant voyeurism.  Personal effects are, after all, personal.  And getting a stranger to tell you what is worth hoarding, and what is worth dumping, seems odd to me.  Some items have a sentimental value.  But maybe this is precisely why a professional declutterer can be so helpful, because he is dispassionate.  He is rather like a conciliator and arbitrator called in to settle an industrial dispute; or a facilitator, a diplomat, chairing peace talks between nations squabbling over a contested border.  Problems always appear so much easier to solve from the outside.  Your attachment to some dog-eared school prize you will never read again is as useless to you as your adherence to some outworn custom or tradition whose ancient historic provenance you have long forgotten.  Yet still you beat the antique drum.

Actually I’m not too bad at decluttering.  I visit my local tip relatively often.  It used to be run by a very nice wee man who would survey my discard pile, pick out an item he admired, and ask if he could have it.  Well, yes of course.  Recycling is a much better option than landfill.  He was a Dickensian figure.  Sometimes I would espy an old clock of mine on the mantelpiece in his Portakabin office, or a picture of mine on the wall.  But he has retired now, and his successor is a slightly intimidating man with the demeanour of a French customs officer, un douanier demanding if you have anything to declare, and then observing whether or not you will nervously lick your upper lip.

My most recent visit to the tip was merely to drop off the bracket of a kitchen ceiling strip light which had, literally, gone on the blink.  I would switch it on and it would flash repeatedly like a strobe.  It had lasted for 21 years so didn’t exactly owe me any favours.  I found a replacement with some difficulty, and tried to fit it myself, but only succeeded in breaking it.  My DIY prowess is lamentable.  At least I didn’t fall off the ladder.  Then, because I have a phobia of hanging around waiting for tradesmen, I lived for some weeks in a culinary twilight, making only occasional visits to the kitchen guided by the light of an open fridge door.  Finally I thought, this is ridiculous.  I got an LED strip light from B & Q, and an electrician fitted it for me with great facility, and now my kitchen is bathed in soft yet incandescent light. 

It’s good to dump stuff you don’t need.  Some neurophysiologists believe that decluttering is the stuff that dreams are made of.  Dreams are essentially our brain’s way of filtering out junk, rather as we might flick through ancient photographs stuffed into a shoebox, discarding most, but filing a few, assembled in order, in an album.  Maybe this is why dreams seem so disjointed, irrational, and bizarre.  There is some evidence that sleep deprivation can be a causative factor in various forms of dementia, and that this in turn might be related to lack of dream time.  The brain hasn’t enough time to declutter.  In other words, dementia might not be an inability to remember, but rather an inability to forget. 

Nowadays, of course, people don’t keep old photos in shoe boxes.  Rather they store them on their phone.  You might say this is the ideal solution to the disposal of junk; but in the context of neurophysiology, is this not just another hoarding habit?  People obsessively curate their lives with their devices.  They take a photo of their entrée in the restaurant, and put it online.  I’d rather occasionally rummage in the shoebox.  There’s a poignancy about looking briefly at the past, and realising that you were too busy at the time to notice its preciousness.  Vonda Shepard, who worked in the bar downstairs from the lawyer’s office in Ally McBeal, sang a wistful song about looking at old photographs, and realising she never knew she was in love, until the object of her affection left the neighbourhood.            

Books are my Achilles’ heel.  Frankly, I inhabit a library.  I try to adhere to the “one book in, one book out” rule but I don’t always succeed.  At least I don’t hoard newspapers.  I don’t suffer from Diogenes Syndrome.  I once visited a patient in a cottage in a rather remote rural setting.  I think it may have been the most bizarre house visit I ever conducted.  He was sitting beside a naked flame, in a room filled virtually floor to ceiling with newspapers.  A tinder box.  He had beside him a loaded rifle.  I asked him what the purpose of the rifle was, and came to discover that he inhabited a strange alternative universe.  I asked him if he would like to be removed from this situation and “sorted out” in hospital, but he assured me there was nothing to sort out.  I took my leave, and then I phoned the police.  One of the skills of referring a patient to a professional colleague, usually a hospital doctor but in this case the police, is to press the right buttons, to emphasise the particular aspect of the patient’s presentation which indubitably falls within the purlieu of the colleague’s expertise.  In this case it was the loaded rifle.  The police could not ignore that.  They kindly arranged the psychiatric referral on my behalf. 

I could as easily have received last week a visit from my own GP, who might have glanced appraisingly across my packed bookshelves, who might have chanced to espy my deadly Papua New Guinean bow and its quiver of arrows, given me by the lepers at Yampu, barely discernible under the flickering half-light emanating from my kitchen.  Would I care to escape from this situation, and spend a few days in a secure facility, while Mr Eroğlu wird meinen Schuppen entrümpeln?        

Vielen Dank, but I can assure you, there is nothing to sort out.                                  

I much enjoyed hearing Any Questions, from St Matthew’s Church in Perth, On BBC Radio 4 on Saturday afternoon.  I was pleasantly surprised.  Normally I catch the first ten minutes of this weekly political knockabout, and get exasperated by the incessant carping and sniping, the bad temper, the party political posturing, the din of people talking over one another, and the constant interruptions of the chair who, keen to steer the debate in a particular direction, becomes a fifth member of the panel.  I can’t bear it, and generally switch off before the end of the first question.  Question Time on the TV is even worse, and I haven’t watched it for ages.  Come to think of it, I haven’t turned the telly on for about a month. 

But this time I listened to Any Questions from start to finish.  I was in the car, and when I reached my destination I remained seated and heard the programme out.  This is how radio can enthral you.

In the chair, Alex Forsyth.  On the panel, Dame Jackie Baillie MSP (Labour), Murdo Fraser MSP (Conservative), Alyn Smith MP (SNP), and Joyce McMillan, freelance journalist and theatre critic for The Scotsman.  Five questions were asked.  All the panellists and questioners had Scottish accents; not that that matters, except in the sense that an extra character in the line-up was the City of Perth herself.  Perth City Hall, a magnificent building near the banks of the River Tay which until recently was threatened with demolition, has been refurbished as Perth Museum, which will house the Stone of Destiny and is due to open next month.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Any Questions will prove instrumental in increasing the footfall to the museum, and Perth city centre.

Listening to the programme, I had the sense that the panellists knew, and perhaps even quite liked, one another.  There was mutual respect, good humour, sometimes jocularity, and none of the toxic hate-filled rants, now so familiar on social media, of people deaf to the opinions of others who do not occupy a particular silo, or echo chamber.  The first question related to the advisability of political parties espousing tax cuts at a time when public services, such as the NHS, were struggling.  Murdo Fraser perhaps predictably favoured wealth creation as a means of supplying the prosperity necessary to improve public amenities. I can’t say this is an argument that attracts me, but at least I was able to hear its exposition uninterrupted, and to hear various counterarguments, of which Joyce McMillan’s was perhaps the most nuanced. 

Second up, alcohol minimum pricing.  Good or bad?  The Scottish Government is increasing the minimum unit price from 50p to 65p, which apparently will make a bottle of wine cost at least £6.09.  (Goodness.  When I think of the cost of a bottle of NZ Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc, I blush.)  I’ve grown used to the dismissive tone of frequent letters to The Herald.  Unintended consequences! Another example of the SNP government’s incompetence!  The alcoholics will just stop eating in order to finance their drink habit.  But no.  The panellists were inclined to follow the medical evidence base, and monitor events.  How refreshing.  But there was puzzlement as to why potential increased revenues are not taxed, far less hypothecated, but flow straight into the coffers of the supermarkets. 

The third questioner pointed out that the lower age limit for standing to be US President is 35.  Should there also be an upper limit?  Well, Trump is 77, Biden 81.  People are saying that Biden is losing his memory, while Trump’s apparent encouragement to Mr Putin, that he attack NATO members who don’t put 2% of GDP into defence, has been described as “unhinged”.  They say Trump is looking at Tucker Carlson as a potential running mate.  Jackie Baillie had a good gag, that Gordon Brown has apparently said he is too old for British politics, and too young for American.  Apparently she stole this anecdote from Alyn Smith.  There is cross-party collaboration after all.  What a contrast between this conversation, and the stand-off between the Democrats and Republicans across the Pond.  Far from “reaching out across the aisle”, the last outgoing party staged an insurrection when things didn’t go their way.

The fourth question brought the impending opening of Perth Museum into the spotlight, and asked for an evaluation of the importance of the Arts in the regeneration of decaying city centres.  Apparently Melvyn Bragg has been expounding the importance of the Arts in the House of Lords.  There was agreement and consensus within the panel, which I didn’t think was mere lip-service.  Alyn Smith gave a special plug for the Smith Museum (no relation) in his constituency in Stirling.  He’s quite right.  It’s a great resource.

Fifth question.  Just time for a quickie.  Football is introducing “blue cards” for consigning badly behaved players to the Sin Bin for ten minutes.  Who would the panellists put on the naughty step?  Alyn Smith sin-binned Jackie Baillie for stealing his Gordon Brown joke.

Great programme.  It was a fine exemplar of what could be achieved in public life, if people were kind and courteous to one another.  It was also a great advert for Perth.  It’s a great town, only 45 minutes up the A9 from where I am, and I often visit.  Generally I park in the carpark by South Inch, and sometimes pop into the nearby Fergusson Gallery.  From there I take a walk by the footbridge beside the railway track across the River Tay, and then follow the east bank of the Tay to access North Inch, and its neighbouring golf course.  The round trip brings me back into the city in the vicinity of the magnificent Concert Hall, much favoured by renowned musicians from all over the world, for its fine acoustic.  Perth Theatre, itself recently refurbished, is two minutes away.  And I can’t resist popping into Waterstones, a stone’s throw from the new museum.

I can’t wait to visit.        

Ian Fleming

The Complete Man

Nicholas Shakespeare

Harvill Secker 2023

When The Spy Who Loved Me, the tenth James Bond book in the canon of fourteen, was published in 1962, it proved to be commercially less successful than its predecessors.  Ian Fleming told Roy Plomley on Desert Island Discs that this was most likely due to the fact that he had departed from his usual formula, and made his female protagonist, Vivienne Michel, the narrator.  Fleming was rather dismissive of the work, with the old Etonian’s predilection for the Anglo-Saxon, litotes tradition of understatement.  It didn’t help that James Bond only made his first appearance two thirds of the way through the book.     

The same charge might be levelled against the latest Fleming biography, by Nicholas Shakespeare.  In a book with 70 chapters and over 800 pages, Fleming doesn’t get round to rolling a sheet of paper into his “battered Royal portable typewriter” at Goldeneye, until page 453.  The name’s “Secretan, James Secretan.”  If Fleming had stuck with that, I don’t suppose we would have heard any more about it.  But we can hardly blame Nicholas Shakespeare for delaying Bond’s debut.  He has after all written a life of Fleming, not of Bond.  And unbelievably, Fleming squeezed the entire Bond canon into the last 12 of his 56 years.              

When this very substantial biography of the creator of James Bond hit the bookshelves, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to avoid reading it.  I think I’ve read most of the Fleming retrospectives that have appeared throughout the last 60 years.  John Pearson’s seminal biography appeared in 1966, two years after Fleming’s death, published by Fleming’s own publisher, Jonathan Cape, who published the last Bond book, Octopussy and The Living Daylights, that same year.  Cape also published the first substantial critical analysis of Bond, The James Bond Dossier by Kingsley Amis, in 1965.  Other significant memoirs over the years have included Ivar Bryce’s You Only Live Once, Matthew Parker’s Goldeneye, biographies by Andrew Lycett and Robert Harling, and a collection of Ian Flemings’s letters (The Man with the Golden Typewriter) edited by Fergus Fleming.   

What does Shakespeare add to the mix?  His is a scholarly work, carefully annotated, indexed, and referenced, and as such is a fund of information.  Critics of Ian Fleming over the years have said that his books are charged with sex, sadism, and snobbery, arguably the characteristics that turned them all into bestsellers.  Certainly the snobbery is much in evidence throughout this latest memoir.  The upper class world it depicts is, frankly, repugnant.  Another aspect of Fleming’s character that comes through very strongly is his melancholia.  All his life he wanted to write the spy story that would end all spy stories; yet when he finally achieved his goal, he seems to have derived little satisfaction from it.  Having smoked sixty cigarettes a day all his adult life, he suffered a series of heart attacks.  His last days were, by all accounts, miserable.           

 Bond has become a kind of specialist interest for me; not the films; the books.  If I had to face an inquisition on the Mastermind chair, I would probably choose as my subject the novels of Ian Fleming.  I’m not proud of it.  I don’t think the influence of these books upon me has been particularly benign.  Yet the fact is they have been a presence in my life for almost as long as I have been able to read.  I can remember vividly my first encounter with 007.  My father borrowed Dr. No from the local public library.  The original hardback cover showed the silhouette of a naked woman amid tropical shrubbery, holding up her hands perhaps in distress, perhaps in horror.  Dr. No sounded like a monster.  I opened at chapter one and read its remarkable opening sentence, a distillation of Fleming’s unique world. Look it up.  Dr. No, the whole book, is itself a distillation of Fleming’s themes of exotica, menace, and the bizarre.

I also vividly remember the day Fleming died, in hospital in Canterbury, in August 1964.  Oddly enough I wasn’t that far away, holidaying in Midhurst.   

The first Bond book I read cover to cover was the second in the canon, Live and Let Die.  I incline to think now that I had better had let alone a book with such a title, and stayed with Louisa M. Alcott.  After all, the mantra Live and Let Die is probably going to kill us all.  And indeed, Live and Let Die is in many ways a pretty disgusting book, what with people getting eaten alive by big fish.  Yet I was fascinated by another monster – Mr. Big.  I could see that Mr. Big and Dr. No shared certain characteristics.  I could discern that the Bond books followed a pattern:

A blip on the periphery of the intelligence world.

Bond’s summons to the anonymous grey building in Regent’s Park, to be briefed by M.  He is introduced to a mystery, and a “mistery” – a professional world, of gold, of diamonds, of heraldry, of toxic flora.

An exotic location.  A girl.

A preliminary skirmish with an outlandish monster, a megalomaniac.  Perhaps a card game, or a game of golf. 

Researches, in the exotic location, into the activities of the monster’s empire.   

Discovery, and apprehension.

A severe lecture, akin to the admonition of a headmaster, prior to a caning.

A supreme ordeal.

Bond’s survival, and the grotesque monster’s gruesome demise.

Relationship with girl consummated. 

It’s pretty racy stuff.  You can see why Mrs Ann Fleming’s arty friends read the books aloud and chortled over them, while Fleming avoided their company and retreated to his library in the attic.  I suppose Ann’s friends thought they were John Buchan’s “shilling shockers”, formulaic.  Yet it is clear from Book 3, Moonraker, which lacks an exotic location, and in which Bond doesn’t get the girl, that Fleming is continually breaking the mould.  Moreover, Fleming’s own physical, and perhaps psychological, deterioration is reflected in the later books.  We first pick up on the arc of Bond’s own mental and physical decline at the opening to Goldfinger, when Bond sits in Miami International Airport and muses morosely on the sordidness of his own professional life.  From there on, each book starts with Bond in a state of depression, that can only be lifted by his taking on a gargantuan task.  At the start of Thunderball the cigarettes and spirits are beginning to take their toll.  He is full of self-loathing.  By the opening of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service he has decided to jack it all in and resign.  At the start of You Only live Twice he has lost his wife, his capacity to function, and his will to live.  And by the start of The Man with the Golden Gun, he has lost the plot.  He attempts to murder M.

Against this background of decay and disintegration, the world he inhabits becomes increasingly bizarre, and increasingly absurd.  Fleming himself grew morose because he felt he was running out of ideas.  And yet the worlds conjured in the later books are the most imaginative, and the most fantastical.  Fleming developed the power, utterly unique, of being simultaneously menacing and farcical.  We see it in the Ernst Stavro Blofeld trilogy of Thunderball, OHMSS, and You Only Live Twice.  In Thunderball, two extremely ruthless men conduct a feud on a diet of carrot juice, weaponising the paraphernalia of a Health Farm.  In OHMSS, Blofeld reveals his own Achilles Heel, snobbery; he wants a title.  And in You Only Live Twice, Blofeld retires to Japan “to cultivate his garden”.  And what a garden!  At the end of the day, in a strange way, the Bond books are absolutely hilarious.

It’s just a pity that the oeuvres were produced at such a cost, and perhaps also that effective interventions in cardiology in the 1960s were virtually non-existent.  Today, a catheter lab and the modern pharmacopoeia might have saved Ian Fleming’s life.  But would he have been able, or willing, to quit smoking?  Somehow I doubt it.    

One of the great curses of the virtual, digital world we are increasingly obliged to inhabit, is that we have all been rendered liable, and vulnerable, to the Scam.  With monotonous regularity, for example, I receive emails that just don’t look right.  Some of them are rather amateurish.  I am told, for example, that my television licence is about to expire and I must pay the fee ASAP to avoid prosecution.  Well, I happen to know my TV licence is current.  So I delete the email.  Sometimes I delete emails with dodgy subject headings without even bothering to open them.  Then there are the telephone calls preceded by a silence, followed by an automated voice, often with an overseas accent, telling me that my banking details have been compromised and I urgently need to do such and such.  I hang up.  Mostly I hang up during the initial silence.  If it isn’t going to be a scam, it’s going to be an unsolicited cold call.

Some scams are more sophisticated.  I got a letter from my bank the other day congratulating me on renewing my insurance (for something unspecified), and offering me a £20 reward which I could reclaim by visiting a certain website.  It all might have been quite bona fide.  But there was no postal address given.  And it just didn’t look right.  I binned it.

I dare say at some point I have been scammed without even subsequently realising it.  The problem here is that, nowadays, there is no firm demarcation line between a scam which is blatantly illegal, and a business practice which comes within the letter of the law, but which might be described as “sharp”.  This occurred to me: is it possible that we are all of us currently embroiled in an Enormous Scam?

It would be a hideous notion, would it not, if all our most cherished institutions were conjured, designed, and maintained, with the sole purpose of ripping us all off?  There is an article in today’s Sunday Herald entitled Learning made easy PC?  Why Edinburgh Uni is blazing a trail harnessing ‘life-changing’ power of AI.  Above the headline is a picture of a robot typing on a laptop.  Beside the robot is a young student looking utterly dejected.  He probably senses he’s being sold a pig in a poke.  Who’d be a young person nowadays?  Education is a cyber nightmare; he can’t get on the housing ladder; and now, apparently, he is going to be conscripted.  Despite the “levelling up agenda”, both at home and abroad, the gap between rich and poor is widening.  The rich and powerful, the great and the good, are running the show.  Who are these people?  They may be politicians, or captains of industry, or entrepreneurs.  Are they peddling a scam?  Are they selling us something they only persuade us that we need? 

I put forward seven postulates, currently bankrolling the world, which are, in essence, a swindle.    

1.  Entrepreneurs “create” wealth. 

This notion is often espoused by political parties to the right of centre, who believe in low taxation.  Rather than dividing up “the pie” more equably, you increase the size of “the pie”.  You do this by creating wealth.  As “the pie” gets bigger, so do the sectors that are sliced off for the poor and needy.  Some people call this the “trickle-down effect”.

It’s a scam.  You can’t “create” wealth.  You might find a means of accessing, and of distributing, the wealth that is already there, but you cannot conjure it out of thin air.  That would be a violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics. 

• You can create a perpetual motion machine.

You can’t.  That would be a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  And yet, this is what the managers of many institutions strive to do.  They strive to automate their systems, and make their employees redundant.  When you try to interact with these institutions, you are faced with lengthy delays on the telephone, culminating, if you’re lucky, in a conversation with a robot who cannot understand your accent, and in any case cannot cope with the unique nuance of your problem.  Consequently we are all tearing our hair out.  The managers have not constructed this “provider-client interface” for our benefit.  They have tried to construct a magic money tree that does not need to be tended, cultivated, and nurtured. 

•  In order to recruit the “best” people, you need to pay top dollar. 

This is a scam.  How often have the “best” people, faced with an unexpected crisis, proved to be woefully inadequate?  The system, whatever it may be, recruits the person who is most likely to perpetuate the system.

The next three swindles are closely related to one another.

•  We are machines.

There is a widespread assumption that there is no qualitative difference between a computer and a human being.  This harks back to the work of Alan Turing at Bletchley Park and “the imitation game”, made famous by the film of the same name.  Turing posited that, if you were playing a game, like chess, against a computer, and you could not tell, from the moves of the computer, whether or not your opponent was an intelligent being, then to all intents and purposes your opponent was an intelligent being.  (In my student days I used to play chess against a computer, the size of a warehouse, located in East Kilbride.  I once beat it, and, when it found itself to be in checkmate, it passed a self-deprecatory remark.  For a moment, but only for a moment, I thought I was interacting with a sentient being.)  I have a notion that Turing’s statement may have been widely misinterpreted, but it so happens that it forms the basis of our concept and understanding of “artificial intelligence” (AI).  If a computer can resemble, indeed be, a human being, then a human being can be a computer.  One of the reasons why AI is so feared, is that these machines may become so sophisticated as to supplant us.  They will be superior to us. 

I have never bought into this notion.  We are not machines.  We do not solve a problem in the way that a computer solves a problem.  I don’t believe we have the first idea as to what intelligence, or consciousness, or self-awareness, or experience, or identity are. 

•  Because we are machines, we think algorithmically. 

No we don’t.  And yet, we have algorithms thrust upon us.  Many institutions would have employees function algorithmically because their behaviours will leave an audit trail that can be subsequently evaluated.  During the pandemic, our senior school pupils were subjected to an algorithm which modified their exam results sometimes with devastating consequences.  I can tell you that medical students are often taught by algorithm.  If this, do that.  Algorithms appear as a tree of options with a series of binary bifurcations.  But medical consultants don’t remotely think like that.             

•  Artificial intelligence can do what we do, only better.

There is no doubt that some automated systems perform tasks, often of a laborious and repetitive nature, better than we do.  But this can hardly be described as “intelligent”.  My own feeling is that the term “artificial intelligence” should be scrapped.  It’s a con.  Call it number-crunching. 

•  It’s coming.  No point in playing King Cnut to an unstoppable tidal wave.

This notion that the little person can do nothing to stop “the inevitable”, the quantification of human souls, is the most scurrilous scam of them all.  We’ve all been subjected to it.  So the High Street is finished.  Live with it.  Go online.  Politicians are all in it for themselves.  What did you expect?  Individually you can’t do anything about climate change.  So why bother? War is inevitable.  Why bother being a peacemaker?    

Because the fate of the world is dependent upon the grand integral of the thoughts and actions of every individual, the man, or woman, in the street.

When I was putting all these scams together, and noticed they added up to seven, I couldn’t help but think of As you like it, so, with apologies to the Bard, I give this précis in sonnet form:

The Seven Dodges of Man

All the world’s a scam,

Its movers and its shakers merely fraudsters

Whose smoke and mirrors hide their obfuscations,

Their propaganda being seven dodges:

Wealth’s energy is conjured from thin air,

Thence grown upon a magic money-tree,

Atop this Ponzi scheme the filthy rich,

(You need to pay “top dollar” for “the best”);

The rest, below, are binary machines

Too wee, to poor, too stupid to discern

Their shackles, cast by algorithmic laws,

By artificial intellect construed.

Thus the elite, gonged, ermined, Upper-Housed…

And us, sans house, cash, health, sans everything. 

Grant Shapps, the Defence Secretary, rendered a tub-thumping, swashbuckling performance at Lancaster House last week, when he gave a speech reminiscent, to me, of the propaganda in the Pathé Newsreels of World War II, which used to glorify in faultless BBC RP our deeds of derring-do on land, at sea, and in the air, in defence of the realm, to a background of stirring and patriotic orchestral music of the sort you might encounter in a war movie like Okinawa, or The Longest Day.  Mr Shapps even utilised the word “patriotic”, or its opposite.  Apparently, if we did not feel inclined to prepare to intervene militarily on the world stage, we were “unpatriotic”.  I couldn’t help remembering the words, I think of Samuel Johnson, that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Most of Mr Shapps’ speech was quite predictable.  After all, defence secretaries are always on the lookout to increase the defence budget.  We live in a dangerous world, and we must prepare for the next cataclysm.  Did not Winston say as much in the 1930s?  We must rearm!  Preparation for war was the sole guarantor of peace.

All well and good.  But I was struck by remarks passed towards the end of Mr Shapps’ speech.  Something I’ve noticed about speeches, committee meetings, and conferences: you must always sharpen your attention towards the end, at the precise moment when your alertness is inclined to flag.  The most significant remarks, ergo the most critical decisions, are likely to occur during “Any Other Competent Business”. 

And we have come full circle.

Moving from a post-war to a pre-war world.

An age of idealism has been replaced by a period of hard-headed realism.

Mr Shapps was harking back to 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a speech Mrs Thatcher also made in Lancaster House, ushering in a new age of optimism.  We may look back on it now as a moment of unparalleled opportunity.  Three people, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Michael Gorbachev, in the depths of the Cold War, somehow managed to forge a rapport.  When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was the possibility of creating a more stable, ordered world.  It never happened.  To all intents and purposes, the USSR was taken over by the mafia.  But the West’s attention was diverted elsewhere.  The next game-changing event on the world stage was 9/11, which ushered in, for whatever reason, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  And now, we are where we are.  Russia has attacked Ukraine; China threatens Taiwan; Israel bombards Gaza; we bombard Yemen.  There seems to be a general consensus that a discretionary solution to many of the world’s problems is to drop a bomb on somebody.  Mr Shapps has, essentially, predicted the imminent arrival of World War III.

Running in parallel with all this in the news this week, is a story from Germany.  Apparently in November there was a secret meeting of far-right groups, in a villa beside a lake in Potsdam, to discuss the possibility of deporting millions of German citizens whose “Germanship” may not be of the highest order.  I picked up on this because I happen to watch „Tagesschau“, a much revered newscast of German television, every day.  Chancellor Olaf Scholz is not best pleased. 

You cannot hear of this, without recalling another secret meeting, in Wannsee, not so far from the Potsdam meeting, in 1942, when the Nazis decided upon “the final solution”.  The Potsdam meeting has even been dubbed “Wannsee 2”.  That specific connection is probably why so many Germans have taken to the streets to demonstrate against the alt-right.  During the same newscast that covered the secret Potsdam meeting, Tagesschau did a piece on Mr Sunak’s latest attempt to get his Rwanda Bill through the House of Commons.  This was relatively unusual, because Tagesschau seldom covers UK affairs.  And why should it?  Naturally, the political focus is on the Bundestag in Berlin, a spacious chamber full of light beneath Norman Foster’s magnificent crystal cupola.  In fact, the contrast between the airy Bundestag, and the dark, cramped, claustrophobic, pokey chamber in the Palace of Westminster, with its adversarial green benches, was striking.  Three individuals bowed to Mr Speaker as they presented the count from the latest division in the lobbies.  “The ayes to the right… the noes to the left… the ayes have it.  Unlock!”  Take a pinch of snuff at the Commons’ door on the way out, the snuff box made from the charred remains of the old chamber door, bombed by the Luftwaffe.  We are stuck in a time warp. 

Talking of things German, on Thursday we had our first meeting this term of our class, that has been rebranded “German for everyday life”, back at the Goethe Institut in Glasgow.  There was great fun, and lots of hilarity.  For homework, we had to identify 20 words on the basis of a series of definitions, somewhat like a crossword puzzle.  Then we had to take the first letter of each solution, in order, to spell out a phrase in Latin.

Spoiler alert…

Ne sutor supra crepidam.

It so happens, I remember being taught this at school, actually in the form Ne sutor ultra crepidam, literally, something like “Never cobbler above sandal.”  The conventional translation is “The cobbler should stick to his last.”  From this has arisen a word in English: to “ultracrepidate”; that is, to criticise above the sphere of one’s knowledge. 

It occurs to me that our Defence Secretary, in his critique of the world situation, is an ultracrepidarian.  He has moved beyond his remit of shouting for his own corner in order to assure a state of preparedness.  He is telling us to prepare for war, because war is inevitable.  Anything less is “unpatriotic”.  The trouble with resigning yourself to a specific future is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.                   

I felt a bit queasy when I heard our recently ennobled, unelected Foreign Secretary explain, in mellifluous tones, why it was necessary for the RAF to drop bombs on Yemen.  We cannot allow trade to be disrupted.  If container ships continue to be attacked in the Red Sea they will have to sail the long way round, via the Cape of Good Hope, and prices in the supermarkets will go up.

Well, it’s not the first time we’ve interfered, militarily, in this neck of the woods.  Anthony Eden, who himself was Foreign Secretary for a very long time, and PM rather briefly, once explained to the nation, in similarly mellifluous tones, why it was necessary, in concert with Israel and France, to attack Egypt, in order to keep control of the Suez Canal.  But on that occasion, Mr Eden did not have the support of President Eisenhower, and it all went hideously wrong.  Then Mr Eden’s biliary tree, thanks to a botched op, started to play up.  He went for a rest to Goldeneye, courtesy of Ian Fleming, but failed to recuperate, and his premiership came to an end.  

It has been said that one of the chief causes of the Great War was the nature of railway timetabling across continental Europe.  If the Big Push was to occur, the troops had to board the requisite trains.  Similarly, much of what happens in the modern world is directed by the “just-in-time” nature of globalised trade.  Any disruption causes a knock-on effect.  We see this on land, at sea, and in the air.  Incidentally, Heathrow recorded its busiest December ever, last month.  6.7 million people passed through its terminals.  Everybody is on the move.  When it goes wrong, trains and boats and planes get stuck in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Produce is left to rot on the wharf.  Goods are trafficked at maximum capacity, and if there is a glitch, the whole system starts to teeter.  The world is run by a flamboyant music hall showman of The Good Old Days, a juggler on the World Stage who runs himself to exhaustion spinning a series of plates on wobbly poles, reacting to each crisis as the rotation of the plate slows, the crockery tilts dangerously, and threatens to smash itself to pieces.

There is an assumption amongst the political class that the people are primarily content, or discontent, according to the depth and variety of the produce on the supermarket shelves.  It’s the economy, stupid.  We may put this theory to the test this very year, an unusually busy one across the globe, at the polling booths.  Populism thrives on promises of milk and honey.  The notion is not new.  Mr Eden’s successor, Mr Macmillan, told us that we’d never had it so good.  And wasn’t Caligula a great fan of bread and circuses?  A cynic, or perhaps a realist, mighty say that it is necessary for the government to order the bombing of Yemen (without first consulting Parliament) in order to win the next general election.  I’d like to think that it is not true; or, that if it is, then the electorate could confound the politicians by voting for something else, be it justice, tolerance, peace, and humanity, albeit at the expense of having to tighten our belts.   

At least we still have the right to cast our vote.  I see that Beijing is very displeased with Taipei, because the people of Taiwan chose to elect a president China doesn’t like.  I wonder how the wobbly plates on the World Stage are going to stack up, or smash up, this year.  Perhaps Mr Trump will return to the White House, and inaugurate a new age of US isolationism.  Ukraine will run out of munitions, and while the West is preoccupied with Eastern Europe, China will make its eastward move across the Taiwan Strait. 

What a mess we are in. What’s to be done?  You stop an Irishman in the street and ask for directions, and he says, “If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.”  Yet you have no alternative but to play the hand you are dealt.

I await this evening’s Iowa Caucuses, with apprehension.                                      

At a performance of Handel’s Messiah at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on January 2nd, the baritone asked us, “Why do the nations so furiously rage together?”

Good question.  Indeed, a question of our time.  I gathered on a BBC radio programme last week that Einstein and Freud entered into a correspondence discussing this very question.  Freud had notions about Eros and Thanatos but I’m not sure he had an answer to the question posed in Messiah.  And Einstein, offered the presidency of Israel, said that he had no head for human problems. 

I can’t say I much enjoyed the Glasgow Messiah.  But I think that says more about my state of mind on the occasion than about the performance.  My companions assured me it was very good, and indeed very à la mode.  I just wasn’t very receptive.  Partly it was due to the fact that two people on my left coughed, and chatted, and rummaged, interminably, and somebody in the row on front kept videoing the concert on their phone.  As well, it seems to be de rigueur to bring drinks into the auditorium.  I got into a mood.                  

Talking of moods, somebody named Mr Smith (not his real name – after all he hasn’t asked to visit my blog) wrote an anti-electric car diatribe to the Herald last week commencing, “We really all must make a New Year resolution to be nicer to the owners of electric vehicles.” He went on to describe how awful these cars were, always breaking down, succumbing to bad weather, running out of power, and going on fire, to the extent that the insurance companies were charging exorbitant fees to underwrite them.  Well, as an owner of an electric car, this just didn’t tally with my experience. So I responded, as follows:

 If I may borrow Mr Smith’s opening salvo (Thinking of going electric? Don’t,the Herald, January 3^rd), we really all must make a New Year resolution to be nicer to the owners of petrol and diesel cars.  They have after all been subjected to relentless anti-electric propaganda from the fossil fuel industries.  I drive an electric car which I bought second-hand, with 11,000 miles on the clock, at a very reasonable price.  It affords me a very smooth, and remarkably silent ride.  I drive about 1,000 miles per month, at a cost of about £80.  The range on a full charge is about 250 miles in high summer, and about 200 miles in the depths of winter.  Snow and ice have presented no problems to the car.  I have never had any difficulty locating a charging point, and I have never experienced so-called “range anxiety”.  The lithium batteries have yet to go on fire.  My insurance premium is less than that quoted by Mr Smith, by a factor of twenty four.

The guys at my local gym tease me about my car.  “You live 10 miles away?  You’ll have to charge up on the way home.”  I don’t mind; it makes me laugh.  I don’t think any of them have ever driven an electric car.  What I find more insidious is Mr Smith’s notion that it doesn’t matter what we do, because the rest of the world is going to hell in a hand-cart (powered by an internal combustion engine).  Many, perhaps most, novel enterprises worth pursuing, were initiated by individuals who were ridiculed for their wackiness.  They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, when he said the world was round.         

Well!  I received a bit of stick.  The following day there were three letters in response.  I was referred to as “the good doctor”.  That’s always a bad sign.  Apparently I’m happy that children are being sent down the cobalt and lithium mines.  Somebody thought that my claim that my car afforded me a “remarkably silent ride” was laughable.  But that was more a critique directed against the state of our potholed roads, than against me personally.  I can’t say I was too bothered about the brickbats.  Mind you, I never look at the responses on the Herald online.  These can be of a more robust nature.  I can heartily recommend my disconnect strategy to anybody who feels threatened by social media.  Switch your device off.  Incidentally, I gather that somebody has been gang-raped in the Metaverse.  People are trying to figure out whether this is a crime.  Is not the world going mad?          

In this season of Epiphany, the minister in Dunblane Cathedral told a very beguiling story about a wealthy man of the ancient Middle-Eastern world whose wealth was measured in camels.  He had 17 of them.  Towards the end of his life he made his will, bequeathing his estate as follows: half his estate to his son, a third of his estate to his grandson, and one ninth to his nephew.  Well as you can imagine, on his death there were ructions.  His son was to receive eight and a half camels, his grandson five and two thirds, and his nephew one and eight ninths.  But what earthly use are eight ninths of a camel?  There was a stooshie.  I daresay at this point the lawyers got involved.  Apparently the whole thing got out of hand and, because the people involved were all of some power and influence, there was even a suggestion that war might result.

Then a poor man, who only possessed one camel, stepped in and said, “If it will help, take my camel and add it to the mix, and see if you can work things out.”

18 camels. Half is 9.  One third is 6.  On ninth is 2.  Total: 17 camels.   Miraculously, everybody got more than they had hoped for.  And the poor man got his camel back.  The minister added mischievously, “You’ll be puzzling about this over lunch.” 

The key to the conundrum is that the rich old man did not bequeath his entire legacy, but only 17/18s of it.  You will see this if you are adept at adding fractions by working out their lowest common denominator: 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/9 = 9/18 + 6/18 + 2/18 = 17/18.  (As Winston said, “I like short words and vulgar fractions.”)  But I don’t suppose the moral of the homily is that you must practise your arithmetic every day.  Rather, it is “Blessed are the peacemakers.”  The poor man with only one camel saw a way of solving a seemingly intractable problem with a generous act.  Perhaps the solution was glaringly obvious to him.  He might have shrugged and pouted in wonderment, and asked, “Why do the nations so furiously rage together?”

Two elder statespersons were on Paddy O’Connell’s Broadcasting House on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday morning, Dame Margaret Beckett and Lord Kenneth Clarke.  They were both pretty gloomy about the current state of politics, both at home and abroad.  Lord Clarke declared that Western democracy was in decline.  I wondered about that.  The atmosphere might be toxic in Westminster, but is democracy in decline, say, in Scandinavia?  Dame Margaret said she never used social media, and got away with it, but wondered if that would be possible for somebody young, coming into politics.  Well, why ever not?  Just switch the damned phone off.  Both Dame Margaret and Lord Clarke seemed to think it quite likely that Donald Trump would be the next president of the United States.  Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last Donald.                      

Hogmanay.  The moment to be highly resolved is back.  I’ve tried to avoid making a bucket list for 2024.  I suspect it would contain the same content as that drawn up on Hogmanay 2022.  I really must learn the Ring Cycle.  I really must read Remembrance of Things Past.  I really must understand Maxwell’s equations.  The longer the list gets, the more absurd it becomes.  Some people say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.  There is a languid character in an Aldous Huxley novel – Antic Hay I think – whose father chastises him for a lack of focus.  Being interested in everything is the same as being interested in nothing.  We flit from one pursuit to another and give each one our briefest attention span.  We dabble in freemasonries, like Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace.  But if you really want to turn your life upside down, you need to focus on that one thing.  What is it?    

Fortunately I’ve been too busy this week to navel-gaze.  The proofs of my latest tome were couriered to me just before Christmas, and I have spent the twilit zone between Christmas and New Year going through them.  The typesetter has wielded a particularly fine-toothed comb, and given the closest attention to minutiae.  That comma (,) should be italicised (,).  Who would spot that?  Typesetters have their own language, or at least, orthography, somewhat of a cross between Kanji, ancient runes, and hieroglyphics.  I haven’t attempted it.  I’ve accepted pretty much all the alterations, and added a few suggestions of my own.  I’m not too exercised about the length of a hyphen as opposed to the dashes round a parenthesis, and nobody at this stage has asked me radically to rework my theme.  So the tome, Part III in the life of the troubled doc, is on the cusp of delivery.  It has been a long and winding road. 

But is it any good?  Don’t ask me!  I’m up too close and lack perspective.  I guess I would claim that it is, like the curate’s egg, good in parts.  I’d be terrible at a book launch.  Don’t read chapter X!  Cliché-ridden, sags in the middle, mawkish and sentimental.  At the book fair, Jim Naughtie would ask me, “Why should we read this book?”  And I would reply, “I can’t think of a reason in the world.” 

It’s quite long, over 100,000 words.  It’s in three parts. There are 29 chapters bookended by a prelude and a postlude.  I take consolation in the notion that a perfect novel has never been written.  Novels, by their very nature, tend to ramble.  Some chapters are bound to be stronger than others.  If there’s a chapter in there that doesn’t work, I’m not going to say where it is.  Besides, the reader might well take a different view.  But I will stick my neck out and say I’m fond of chapters I, IX, and XXII.  I like to think chapter XXII is original; but maybe that just means it’s weird.

But does the book work as a whole?  Does it “come off”?  I cannot say.  Structurally it’s okay, but a novel needs to be more than 29 chapters that happen more or less to make some kind of chronological sense. There has to be a synergy.  The whole needs to be greater than the sum of the parts.  And this is where I find myself up too close.

At any rate I’ve de-italicised the last italic, and composed a letter in response to the typesetter’s specific queries.  Time to let it go.  When the Post Office opens again in the New Year, I will send the manuscript back to the publisher, and then I can return to Wagner, Proust, and Maxwell.

I don’t think so.  Time to live a little, in the big wide world, scarier than ever though it is.  The Minister of Dunblane Cathedral said on Christmas Eve, that in life, the biggest risk of all is not to take a risk.  So that is my resolution for 2024.

Take a risk. 

Guten Rutsch!                        

Browsing the bookshelves in Waterstones in search of a Christmas gift, I could not help noticing the preponderance of books bearing one word titles.  Kelly Holmes’ bio is Unique, Tim Peake’s Limitless, and of course Prince Harry’s Spare. I always felt the choice of Spare was unfortunate.  Of course there is the heir and the spare, but “spare” for the most part has a pejorative connotation: a redundant Priapus at nuptials; that sort of thing.  I would have preferred Remaindered.  Then there are titles like Eve, and Ovum, or perhaps Ova, and Unbreakable.  The one word title has become a cliché.  I’m certain this trend is editor-driven.  I could imagine Marcel Proust submitting Remembrance of Things Past and being advised, that will never do.  How about Flashback?  Or Goethe and The Sorrows of Young Werther.  Too unwieldy.  How about Gutted?  Or, perhaps, Gutted!

But all of modern “culture” is ridden with cliché.  On Radio 2 you will hear any number of songs of a diatonic nature, sung by a breathless chanteuse – the inhalation prior to each line is part of the soundscape – songs annotated by the composer (if Artificial Intelligence can be so denoted) as semplice, the last verse sung without accompaniment and coming to an abrupt end.  Cinema is perhaps the most cliché-ridden genre of all.  I tried to watch Oppenheimer, a figure about whom as it happens I know a little, but I found the endless cut and paste techniques of modern cinematography absolutely unbearable, and quit after an hour.  If a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end seems unduly prosaic, cut the celluloid into little pieces, cascade them on to the cutting-room floor, pick them up and reattach them ad lib, and see whether the resulting montage hides all the production’s creative faults. 

Come to think of it, Oppenheimer is another one-word title.  It’s as if our attention span has become so truncated that we need to be hooked by a single word, or we are lost.  The implication is that the book trade actually thinks rather badly of the public it purports to serve.  Apparently we need to be spoon-fed.  So if a writer comes along and completely overturns all the accepted conventions, not only of the book trade, but of people’s common understanding of life, then that writer will struggle to get into print.  The bottom line is not originality, but the dollar.                           

Talking of commercialism, this is the time of year when, retail-wise, we are all inclined to push the boat out, at least if we can afford so to do.  It’s a kind of panic-buying, not unlike that of the lockdown, when there was a run on toilet rolls; now it’s mince pies.  I can’t be snooty and pretend I’m above the battle.  I too was adding exotic delicatessen to my basket in Morrison’s.  The aisles were crowded.  Trolley-rage lurked around the cheese counter.  I tried to diffuse the situation with a disarming smile.  I remarked, “Madness!”  And the lady behind her stacked trolley smiled back and replied, “Why do we do it?”  Why indeed.  It’s a kind of obverse of retail therapy; retail neurosis. 

Christmas is the temporal manifestation of retail neurosis.  There is also a spatial manifestation.  It occurs in airports, when people are similarly gripped by a mad impulse to spend spend spend, and acquire stuff they don’t really need.  Vendors, conscious of the fact that people about to board an aircraft are possessed by the compulsion to empty their pockets of currency shortly to become useless, hike the prices.  Everything in an airport is expensive.  Even getting there is expensive.  Take the Edinburgh tram.  You can make the half hour journey from Edinburgh City Centre to Edinburgh Park & Ride, abutting the airport, for less than the price of a cup of coffee.  Stay on the tram for one more stop to the terminal building, and the price is hiked by nearly a factor of four.  Similarly, you can park your car at Park & Ride for free, but venture into airport-land and you will pay an exorbitant tariff just to park for five minutes. 

Duty free is the biggest rip-off.  You might imagine goods divested of tariffs might constitute a bargain.  But I can buy a bottle of single malt Scotch whisky in my local supermarket at a far better price than in airport duty-free.  Everything is exorbitant, clothing especially.  But people will snap up designer labels as gifts for loved ones, wielding a credit card without a qualm, as if taken over by the premonition that their ship is about to go down, and that the bank balance is not going to matter.  People transiting airports are possessed.  They are in a trance, just as people in the supermarket trolley aisles on Christmas Eve are in a trance.  

But Bethlehem has cancelled Christmas.  At least, Commercial Christmas.  There will be no Christmas tree in Manger Square.  Yet parturition can be neither postponed nor cancelled.  Therefore there remains the image of a baby, wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a heap of rubble.  Just as it was two thousand odd years ago, it remains necessary to attempt the Rafah Crossing into Egypt, in order to avoid the massacre of the innocents.  The reality of a real Christmas rather puts our festive excesses into perspective.  And yet I don’t resent the endless renditions of Christmas songs on the radio.  I didn’t even mind being ambushed by Wham’s Last Christmas, and I’m rather sorry to say that thus far I have not heard Chris Rea driving home for Christmas, stuck in a traffic jam.  I abjure the Bah Humbug Constituency.  I heard a reading on the radio of a part of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and was completely transfixed.  The reformed, perhaps even redeemed, Scrooge observes Bob Cratchit coming in nearly half an hour late for work, and rather winds him up, doing an impersonation of the intimidating persona he has so recently sloughed off.  Then he festoons his employee with benisons, and all is well. 

Brings a tear to the eye.

Chums, by Simon Kuper (Profile Books, 2022)

Orwell’s Island, by Les Wilson (Saraband, 2023)

I read these two books in quick succession this week.  I’m always fascinated by the way that books read in parallel, or closely in series, seem to inform one another.  Chums’ subtitle is How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK, and Orwell’s Island’s surtitle is George, Jura and 1984.  Although both books deal with politics in the widest sense, and indeed are concerned with the biographies of Old Etonians, they have very little in common in terms of the attitudes of the protagonists, if such they be, depicted, and the worlds they inhabit.  Of Chums I will have little to say.  I wonder what Orwell would have made of the world it describes.  The dreamy spires.  Brideshead Revisited.  He would probably have been reminded of the reason why it was a world he chose to reject. Of course Orwell’s world and the world of Chums are seventy years, a whole lifetime, apart.  Orwell published Animal Farm in 1945, and the seminal event of Chums, Brexit, was kicked off in 2016.  There is a single point of intersection in the narratives of the books; it concerns Burma. 

Orwell attended Eton, but instead of going up to Oxford, he joined the police service in Burma.  It was the experience of imposing rule upon a subjugated people that helped formulate his attitude towards imperialism.  Yet he could not but admire Kipling’s poetry, including Mandalay, and its lines:

For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say,

‘Come you back, you British solider, come you back to Mandalay!’

Years later, the British ambassador to Myanmar had to stop Boris Johnson from quoting these lines while visiting the sacred Buddhist Shwedagon Pagoda.

“Not appropriate!”

This vignette appears in both books.  And in a sense that single point of intersection sums up the glaring disparity between two world views, the nostalgia of the Oxford Tories for former imperial glory, and George Orwell’s gradual but complete disillusionment, expressed as it was experienced in real time, with Empire. 

Orwell’s Island may be read as a short biography of the man born Eric Blair.  Like Mr Johnson, and Mr Rees-Mogg, Lord Cameron et al, he attended Eton, but on a scholarship because his parents were poor.  He belonged to the “lower upper middle classes” – of the nuances and niceties of social division he was all too acutely aware.  He had already received an excruciating education in class distinction, and in snobbery, at his preparatory school, which he describes in the long essay Such, Such were the Joys.  Perhaps it was a sense of social inferiority that led him to eschew Oxford and travel to Burma, essentially to protect a colonial authority he shortly came to loathe.  You see the disillusionment setting in in such essays as A Hanging, and Shooting an Elephant.  He quit the police, came home, and deliberately submerged himself in an underworld, the world of the destitute, as described in Down and Out in Paris and London.  He wanted to understand poverty from within, so he deliberately became poor.  The conscious decision to do this, and to carry it through, seems almost Christ-like.  It was not the sort of life-style choice that your average Oxford Etonian would necessarily find attractive.   

By this time, Mr Blair had resolved to become a full-time writer.  He had to work very hard just to make ends meet, so he had to undertake a lot of “hack work” such as book reviewing, while simultaneously trying to write political articles, and novels.  Then he volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War, where he was shot in the neck and nearly died.          

Apparently he disliked the surname Blair – felt it was too Scottish – and chose a nom de plume that was quintessentially English.  He seems to have had a visceral dislike of Scotsmen.  He called us “Scotchmen” because he knew it irritated us.  He could be dismissive of Scottish Nationalism, and of the Gaelic language.  Yet he mellowed.  Doubtless this has to do with his final years, particularly the time he spent at Barnhill, the remote croft house at the north end of the island of Jura, where he wrote 1984.  He came to like, and admire his neighbours, who were kind and helpful.  And he must have needed some help.  The wet, wild, and windy climate could hardly have been less suitable for a heavy smoker with advanced tuberculosis.  To this day, Barnhill is without electricity, and sits remotely at the end of six miles of rugged track.  Orwell had another narrow brush with death when out at sea one day he lost the motor of his boat, and nearly lost his adopted son, in the notorious Corryvreckan Whirlpool north of Jura.  But it was TB that finally did for him, at the early age of 46.  He had been admitted to Hairmyres Hospital in East Kilbride and treated with the experimental drug streptomycin to which, unfortunately, he was allergic.  His chest consultant’s junior doctor was James Williamson.  Professor Williamson taught me, at Edinburgh Medical School.  It was during a subsequent admission to hospital in London that Orwell died. 

I don’t think George Orwell would have the huge reputation he now has, without his last two significant works, Animal Farm, and 1984.  Animal Farm was rejected by no less a figure than T. S. Eliot, a reader for Faber & Faber, it is said because it was critical of Britain’s old wartime ally, the Soviet Union.  Anti-Soviet sentiment was not popular in the 1940s.  Churchill received the same cold shoulder, at least at first, when he gave his Iron Curtain speech in Fulton Missouri.  So it is quite possible that Animal Farm might never have seen the light of day.  And it was also a possibility that Orwell might have died before he finished 1984.  In that event, he had given instructions to destroy the manuscript.  We might never have known about Big Brother, the Two Minutes Hate, Room 101, and Newspeak.  The world is divided into three great superpowers – Eurasia, Oceania, and Eastasia.  Information is so tightly controlled within these realms that there is no access from within, to the outside world.  Everybody is forced to live within a bubble.  That might have been written, to describe contemporary events, this week.  Meanwhile the Westminster Bubble, and its occupants, prepared for high office by the elite educational system depicted in Chums, seems hopelessly inadequate to rise and meet the challenges of the contemporary world. 

1984 is one of these books that changes everybody’s world view.  But I don’t think I would care to read it again.  Absolutely terrifying. 

During his earlier life, Orwell gave himself an education that he judged would fit with his ambition to become a writer, and specifically to develop a unique style of political writing.  Presumably the Oxford Etonians opted for PPE, the Union – a kind of training ground for the House of Commons – then perhaps a research position under the auspices of the Tory Party, while in search of a safe seat.  I wonder who in the event received the better education.