Author: jamescalumcampbell

On Private Passions on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday, Olivia Harrison spoke very movingly about two of the great tragedies of her life – the murder of John Lennon in 1980, and the premature death of her husband George, in 2001, who died at the age of 58 from lung cancer.  Also, she spoke of the night an intruder broke into their home and attacked her, and George, with a knife.  You think you are a man, or woman, of peace, like John, and then all of a sudden you are under attack, and in the blink of an eye you need to forget all that and resort to violence in order to defend yourself, and those you love. 

This dilemma is encountered at a personal level, but also nationally, and globally.  What do you do if your neighbour attacks you?  Turn the other cheek?  But if you do, you will be exterminated.  Our Lord knew this perfectly well.  When his disciples said they would follow him to the ends of the earth, he shook his head and said, you don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for.  Or words to that effect.

Michael Caine, now 90, has made a film, with Glenda Jackson in her last role before her death, about a veteran who breaks out of his care home in England in order to return to the beaches of Normandy for the 70th anniversary of D-Day.  The Great Escaper.  When the title caught my eye I first thought it might be a film about Roger Bushell, because I have a book of that same title, by Simon Pearson (Hodder & Stoughton, 2013) all about Bushell, “Big X” of Stalag Luft III.  Incidentally, I see that David McCallum, “Dispersal” in The Great Escape, also of Ilya Kuryakin fame, has died aged 90.  He was the son of David McCallum, the leader of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, in its heyday under Sir Thomas Beecham.  They provided the soundtrack, along with Yehudi Menuhin, for a film about Paganini, The Magic Bow.  Menuhin screen tested for the starring role (at least they wouldn’t have had to dub Paganini’s violin playing) and there is a rather ridiculous photograph of Menuhin dressed for the part in his autobiography Unfinished Journey.  He didn’t get the part, which went to Stewart Granger.  Granger had to learn at least to look like a fiddle player, and McCallum Sr. was his tutor in this regard.  Now McCallum played a Stradivarius, and it is a measure of his magnanimity that he handed the instrument over to Granger during rehearsals with the LPO.  So Granger dreamed up a gag.  He surreptitiously substituted a cheap fiddle for the Strad and, during rehearsal, apparently frustrated at his own incompetence, he had a fit of temper and proceeded to smash the fiddle to pieces.  McCallum went as white as a sheet.  If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a practical joker.

(This reminds me of another story about an actor trying to look as if he could play a musical instrument.  James Stewart played the part of the band leader Glenn Miller, who played the trombone.  You can watch the late Michael Parkinson’s interview with Stewart, in which the actor recounts the anecdote, in his laconic style, about a trombone teacher brimming with enthusiasm at the prospect of teaching him the trombone, and then proceeding to have a nervous breakdown.  It’s hilarious.) 

But I digress.  Somebody on the film set of The Great Escaper took a look at the endless memorials to the war dead in Normandy, and remarked that it was such a waste.  But no, said Michael Caine.  Not a waste.  Hitler had to be stopped.  So we return to the dilemma, what do you do if your neighbour attacks you? 

I see that the Doomsday Clock, specifically with respect to a nuclear holocaust, has been moved forward to ninety seconds to midnight.  Ironically, it might have been Herr Hitler himself who dreamed up the Doomsday Clock.  Alistair Cooke of Letter from America fame once heard Hitler speak at a rally in a German village during the 1930s.  For some unaccountable reason, Hitler had a nurse in attendance.  Perhaps he felt members of his audience might succumb to emotion.  If so, he was probably right.  He kept saying, “Fünf Minuten vor Mitternacht!” 

Anyway I caught up with the latest Doomsday time-check in an extended article in the Sunday Telegraph (I only take it to attempt the fiendish crossword Enigmatic Variations), Inside the world’s new nuclear weapons arms race, by Lewis Page.  Page is rather dismissive of the latest time check, and indeed employs an argument ad hominem.  The board of 18 members which sets the clock is not made up of atomic scientists, but political scientists, a lawyer, US Democrats and so on; no Republicans. 

The numbers are interesting.  9 countries possess nuclear weapons, the global nuclear stockpile is 12,000 weapons, 90% of them belonging to the USA and Russia.  China has 400, the UK has 120, 40 of them “actively deployed”.  The weapons are becoming increasingly sophisticated, especially in terms of their ability to approach a target undetected, and with extraordinary rapidity.  Lewis Page seems to be quite sanguine about all this.  Apparently we will need nuclear weapons to destroy encroaching asteroids.

I read all this with a gathering sense of dismay, especially as I am currently reading Mike Rossiter’s The Spy who Changed the World (Headline, 2014), all about the scientist Klaus Fuchs who worked on the UK’s nuclear project Tube Alloys, then on the Manhattan Project in the US, and subsequently on the UK’s development of its own bomb, all the while spying for the Soviet Union.  I’ve reached 1949, and I have a sense he is about to be nobbled.  I find him rather a sympathetic character, rather like Mark Rylance’s character Rudolf Abel in the film Bridge of Spies, whom I recall Tom Hanks’s character James B. Donovan also rather took to.  I’m still not clear on what Fuchs’ motivation was, other than that it must have been born of his early life in Germany, and the realisation that, as Michael Caine said, Hitler had to be stopped.  Which brings us back to Olivia Harrison’s dilemma.  What are you to do when you come under violent attack?

I’m afraid I don’t share Lewis Page’s apparent complacency.  And I don’t think our current crop of political masters spends too much time thinking about global issues.  As James Donovan might say, they don’t seem worried – to which Rudolf Abel might reply, would it help?  They are too busy trying to win the next general election.  I’m getting an attack of the vapours.  I need to be attended by the Führer’s Krankenschwester, with a dose of smelling salts.     

The Herald published two letters from me during this past week, so I suppose that must qualify me, for the time being, as a frequent contributor.  I scribble away.  People will be saying, “Not him again!”  The most frequent contributors to the letters pages of the Herald tend to write, almost exclusively, on the Scottish constitutional question.  Supporters of Scottish independence (the Unionists call them “separatists” because they want to “rip apart” the UK) tend to think that the Unionists are universally morose and consider Scotland “too wee, too poor, and too stupid” to be an independent nation, while the Unionists consider that the “separatists” have a massive chip on their shoulder, an endless and insatiable grievance, and continually deflect criticism of the SNP by using the technique of “whataboutery”, and casting aspersions on Westminster.  For myself, I tend to avoid the constitutional question, not because I don’t hold views, but because I always remember the advice of a former President of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine: “Don’t be seduced into entering an argument with somebody whose views cannot be changed.”  Besides, there is much else to write about.  For example, the debate about Assisted Dying is back before the Scottish Parliament, which prompted my first letter:

In the ongoing debate around the Assisted Dying Bill currently before Holyrood, it occurs to me that in our age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it would be theoretically and indeed practically possible to remove human agency entirely from any end of life procedure, which could be undertaken by robots, thus obviating any requirement for new legislation.  It is after all not against the law to end one’s own life, merely to assist another so to do.  The terminally ill patient, should he or she so choose, would instruct the robot to conduct a home visit, arriving by driverless car, to administer a lethal cocktail.  I don’t mean to be facetious about this, far less vexatious.  Robotic surgeons already carry out operations far more complex than this. 

Of course there would be a flurry of parliamentary activity as our MSPs practised catch-up legislation.  Doubtless it already exists in draft form.  The science fiction author Isaac Asimov introduced the Three Laws of Robotics in his 1942 short story Runaround (part of the 1950 collection I, Robot), presented in the fictional Handbook of Robotics, 56^th Edition, 2058 A.D.  The laws are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders could conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

To these three laws, Asimov subsequently and retrospectively added a Zeroth Law:

• A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. 

The ethical issue that arises is whether or not the termination of a life deemed intolerable by the person living it constitutes a “harm”.  It is said that if you chance to see a distressed individual in a railway station about to fall in front of an approaching train, a useful question to ask is, “Is it living, or the pain that you want to stop?”  I can’t say I would relish AI moving into the field of thanatology, which sounds like something out of a dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley, but at least the medical and nursing professions could keep their distance, and concentrate on the day job.   

I was amused to find that Asimov considered it necessary to concoct a Zeroth Law to precede his Three Laws of Robotics.  I suppose he must have modelled this on the laws of thermodynamics, to wit, in brief, that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, there is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine, absolute zero (-273C) can be approached but never attained (thus flouting Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle)… and then, in retrospect, something that was first appreciated by James Clerk Maxwell, that if A has the same temperature as B, and B has the same temperature as C, then A has the same temperature as C.  I suppose that is why we believe in thermometers.  Maxwell’s insight was that this statement is, as our philosophers would say, a posteriori, rather than a priori; that is, it is not self-evident but has to be experimentally demonstrated, and vindicated.

Asimov’s Laws of Robotics are less flippant than they look.  The Zeroth Law is the moral equivalent of the fourth pillar of the axiomatic principles of medical ethics of Beauchamp and Childress, justice, itself a kind of zeroth law, added retrospectively after autonomy, beneficence, and non-maleficence.  The plight of an individual at the end of life has to be seen within the context of humanity at large.  Therefore do not send to know for whom the bell tolls.          

I remember being present at the annual conference of the Royal College of General Practitioners – it was either in Liverpool or in Harrogate, I can’t remember which – when the late Margo MacDonald put forward her then proposed Bill before the Scottish Parliament for the introduction of assisted dying under stringently controlled conditions.  I remember a GP sitting on my left whispered to me, “She’s not very bright, is she?”  I am convinced the only reason why he thought such a thing, was that Ms MacDonald spoke with a pronounced, industrialised West of Scotland accent.  I can’t think of any other reason. I reassured the GP, “On the contrary, she is very bright.” 

I respected what Margo MacDonald had to say, but as you can tell from my letter, I’m not for it.  To be honest, I’m phobic of it.  My visceral reaction to it is the same as my reaction to capital punishment.  It occurs to me, what would happen if somebody on Death Row in the US requested to be transferred to Oregon for an assisted suicide?  Would the prisoner fit the criteria?  It could be argued that he had a terminal disease, the condition of being on Death Row, and a life expectancy of less than six months might be valid.

I have another question about assisted suicide.  What happens if it all goes wrong?  All the hoops have been gone through, all the forms are signed, and the lethal cocktail is quaffed.

But it doesn’t work.

(Just in case you imagine this can’t happen, may I remind you of an adage frequently recited in medicine: show me a treatment that has no side effects, and I’ll show you a treatment that doesn’t work.)

What are the attending doctors to do with a patient who has not succumbed?  Do the signed papers still hold good, such that some kind of coup de grace may be administered, or are we in virgin territory, in which a decompensating patient must now be resuscitated?  I don’t know. 

Bur enough of this baleful topic. Moving on to Herald letter No. 2, it so happened that during the week, a plaque was removed from the base of an Edinburgh statue of Henry Dundas.  Dundas, at least according to the plaque, delayed the abolition of slavery to the extent that half a million slaves still got transported across the Atlantic while he swithered.  The historian T. M. Devine disputes this interpretation.  With this skeletal background, here is my letter.  Some of the material has previously appeared in this my weekly blog. 

Dr Martin Luther King’s memorable “I have a dream” speech, given before the Lincoln Memorial on August 28^th, 1963, contains a remarkable sentence which begins:

“I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification…”

All my life I’ve wondered, what are the words of interposition and nullification?  I don’t know, but I would hazard a guess that they were the governor’s way of putting a brake on the aspirations of the civil rights movement. 

Now I find, by a strange ironic twist, that the words of interposition and nullification are everywhere.  They are, or were, on the plaque at the base of the statue of Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, in St Andrew Square, providing “context”.  They are on the frontispiece of the 2023 republication of Ian Fleming’s Live and Let Die, telling us that social attitudes were different in 1953.  Duh.  An early chapter in that book has been renamed “Seventh Avenue”, and gutted.  We can look to the United States to see the inevitable corollary to such interventions, with the banning of books from schools and libraries (Book bans hit record high in US libraries, Herald, September 21).  Some of the books in question are To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, Huckleberry Finn, Slaughterhouse Five, and the Harry Potter series.  They have been assigned to oblivion, as if by that wretched character in 1984, Syme, whose job it was to obliterate the English language.  And look what happened to him.

I wish people would stop telling us, you and me, what to think.  I am quite capable of reading a book, or looking at a statue, which is after all a work of art, and making up my own mind about its meaning and purport.  I can do without the context of somebody else’s interposition and nullification.  We only need three words on a book’s frontispiece, or a statue’s plaque:

Complete and Unabridged.                                    

Being in Glasgow yesterday, emerging from Kelvingrove Art Gallery to find it had stopped raining of a preternaturally warm autumn afternoon, we strolled up to the top of Kelvingrove Park to view the statue of Lord Roberts of Kandahar, just to see whether anybody had reapplied in red paint the word “Monster”, or indeed whether somebody had appended a plaque of interposition and nullification.  All was well with the statue.  However, we did also pass the statues of Lord Kelvin, and Joseph Lister on the way back, both bedecked with traffic cones after the fashion of the Duke of Wellington outside the Gallery of Modern Art.  I think it is unfortunate that Banksy allegedly remarked that the traffic cone atop the Duke of Wellington is Glasgow’s finest work of art.  Arthur Wellesley’s Glasgow bunnet is, I fear, a permanent fixture.  I’m thinking of crafting a plaque to add to the statue’s base, which would provide “context” to future generations:

The traffic cone was a late amendment to this statue, tolerated at a time when people were more resigned to Glasgow’s edginess, its litter culture, Old Firm sectarianism, and anarchic loutishness.  Wha’s like us?      

The theme of the Church of Scotland’s lectionary this week was forgiveness.  The Old Testament reading was Genesis Chapter 50, verses 15 – 21, in which Joseph forgave his brothers for selling him into slavery; and the New Testament reading was Matthew Chapter 18, verses 21 – 35, in which Peter asks Jesus how often he should forgive his brother for sinning against him.  Seven times?  No, says Our Lord, but seventy times seven times.  One could imagine a literalist might store up a grudge 490 times and, on the 491^st episode of enduring harm, letting rip with a vengeance.  But, you may say, surely our Lord meant that our capacity to forgive should be unending.  But does the illustrative parable Jesus went on to tell back up such an interpretation? 

A certain servant owed his king a vast sum of money – 10,000 talents.  He begged the king to give him time to repay the debt.  The king took pity on him, and cancelled the debt.  But then the servant went out and confronted his servant, who owed him a far smaller debt, 100 pence.  The wretched man begged for time to repay the debt but no!  He was flung into debtor’s prison.  Well!  When the king came to hear about it, he was absolutely furious.  He summoned the man who had owed him 10,000 talents, tore a strip off him, reneged on his promise to cancel the debt, flung the man into prison, and had him tortured.

Of such is the kingdom of heaven.

But wait a minute.  Far from enduring a wrong 490 times, the king only forgave once.  Two strikes and you’re out.  How does Jesus’ parable reinforce his doctrine of forgiveness?  Ah but, I hear you say.  The king in the parable is God, and God is perfectly entitled to act by a different set of rules.  Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.  In fact, far from forgiving the servant this time round, he tortures him.  Lurking anonymously like Nicodemus in the rear pews of Dunblane Cathedral on Sunday I couldn’t help noticing that the reader chose to skip the bit about torture.  It is the way of the modern world.  There might have been a rider in the order of service: “This parable was written 2,000 years ago, when no Declaration of Human Rights existed, and torture was widely regarded as an appropriate corrective procedure…”  No change there, then. 

I could imagine Richard Dawkins, who is single-handedly waging a personal crusade against God, might add this parable to a very long list of incidences in which God is not portrayed in a very favourable light.  There was an extensive piece about Richard Dawkins (The Sunday Interview) in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph.  I think he must be mellowing.  He professes to vaguely enjoying Anglicanism.  “I suppose I’m a cultural Anglican and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green.”  You can take the man out of the church, but you can’t take the church out of the man.  I dare say he would have thought more kindly of Joseph in the Old Testament, who forgave his brothers for selling him into slavery.  In fact, Prof Dawkins has views on the modern predicament in which the UK finds itself, having historically made vast sums of money out of slavery.  You can’t, he says, apologise to people who are dead, on behalf of other people who are dead.  That reminded me of a remark overheard by a neighbour of mine, when he recently attended a conference of Freemasons in the unlikely location of Beirut, when an Indian gentleman remarked to a Black American, “Listen friend.  I don’t own any slaves, and you don’t pick any cotton.” 

But it’s never as simple as that.  My fellow Americans, said Abe Lincoln, who after all abolished slavery, we cannot escape history.  You only need to go to places which have notable pasts, either recent or remote, and you feel history all around you. I think of Belfast; I think of Gibraltar – two remarkably similar places.  No surrender! 

Not surprisingly, Prof Dawkins has trenchant views on gender reform.  “I shall continue to use every one of the prohibited words.”  Interestingly, on the front page of the same Sunday Telegraph, there is the headline, “GMC removes word mother from staff maternity guidance”. 

In today’s culture wars, forgiveness is not much in evidence, but rather its diametric opposite, cancellation.  Yet we are taught to pray for forgiveness.  The Church of Scotland uses two versions of the Lord’s Prayer.  One, which is working class, says “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”, and the other, which is middle class, says “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  There is no upper class version.  The upper classes cannot trespass, they can only be trespassed upon.  The working class doesn’t give a hoot about trespass; in Scotland there is after all a right to roam.  But they are very scared of landing in debt.  Sometimes in C of S Orders of Service you see “The Lord’s Prayer (debts).”  It has a parsimonious ring. 

I have to admit I’m something of an outsider in Dunblane Cathedral.  I slip in, I maybe have a brief chat with some acquaintances, and I slip out.  A couple of years back the minister asked me to join the cathedral’s music committee (there is a lively music scene in Dunblane Cathedral) to represent the congregation, and I did so.  I confess I lasted two hours.  I felt like a fish out of water.  I guess I’m not a committee man.  I resigned.  Then, quite recently, the minister was giving a sermon on Doors of Opportunity.  “Remember,” he said, “that when a minister, or a church member, asks you to do something, it may not be the minister or the church member who is posing you the question” – and at this point, so it seemed to me, the minister was looking directly at me, “It may be God.”

Probably just my imagination. 

The pews in Dunblane, as with many other Churches of Scotland, are getting very scant.  And there are very few children.  What are they all doing?  Staring at their tablets?  No wonder there is so little forgiveness in our society.  No-one is being taught its value.  At this rate, once my generation is gone, the pews will be empty, and Richard Dawkins will have fulfilled his Great Ministry.  Yet, apparently, for one reason or another, he is going to miss choral evensong.                                         

On Friday, the second last night of the Proms happened to coincide with the opening of the Rugby World Cup in Paris, but I guess it was no mere coincidence that the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra opened with Arthur Honegger’s second Mouvement Symphonique, Rugby.  Apparently rugby was Honegger’s favourite game.  I certainly found myself imagining the development of play during a lively orchestral interlude.  That sounds like a line-out, now a ruck, a smuggled ball, a rolling maul, now the ball flashed out to the backs, a tackle on the try line, a forward pass… scrum down.  It was all very vivid.

On Saturday, The Herald published a glossy, as it is intermittently wont to do, talking up some of the private schools in Scotland.  And, in turn therein, somebody wrote about the sport of rugby, and its importance in the school ethos, as informing the other disciplines of the school in terms of esprit de corps, teamwork as well as personal endeavour, perseverance, courage in adversity, determination, grit, and so on.

And then on Sunday, marrying these two themes, BBC Radio 4’s Morning Worship came from Rugby, the school, where the game was invented precisely 200 years ago, and this time the ethos of rugby became inextricably bound up with Christianity.  There is a story, apocryphal for all I know, about a boy named William Web Ellis who, playing soccer one day on the school pitch, “The Close”, and “with a fine disregard” for the rules, took it into his head to pick the spherical ball up, tuck it under his arm (he probably realised immediately that an oval ball would be more convenient), and run for the opposition’s line.  Thus the game of rugby was born.  I don’t know whether the masters at Rugby immediately recognised an act of originality amounting to genius; but had he done it at my old school, woe betide him, he would have been given short shrift.  But apparently he was to be praised for breaking the rules, or, as they subsequently became known in rugby, the laws.  Laws have been defied magnificently at other times in history.  In 1905, Einstein defied Newton’s Laws and created the Special Theory of Relativity.  In 1955, Rosa Parks defied the municipal laws of apartheid in Montgomery Alabama, when she sat down in a seat reserved for white people.  And of course Jesus was the biggest law breaker of them all.  He was continually getting up the Pharisees’ noses. 

So breaking the rules can be an admirable thing to do – yet not, however (the man from Rugby hastened to add), if these rules happen to be the ones current at Rugby School.  Ha! 

Then one Naomi, BBC Young Chorister of the Year, sang Swing Low Sweet Chariot, accompanied by a music teacher on piano.  It was quite magnificent.  I almost warmed to the Rugby ethos.

But not quite.  I have never liked rugby.  I played rugby at school. We were pathetic.  Posh schools used to rack up scores like century breaks in snooker against us.  Our school was much better at football.  I was only vaguely aware at the time of the class division that separated the gentleman’s game played by hooligans, and the hooligan’s game played by gentlemen.  I remember playing football in the street with my pals one day, and a smartly dressed young gentleman of the Muscular Christianity constituency passed by and remarked, “Don’t like the shape of the ball you’re playing with, chaps.” 

When I was about 14 years old I got thumped in the head during a rugby match one Saturday morning.  I got carried off.  I developed an impressive swelling over my right eyebrow.  I think the PE teacher drove me home, but I can’t remember.  The doctor came, and I remember he subjected me to the “serial 7s” test.  You subtract 7 from 100, then 7 from 93, 7 from 86, etc., down to zero.  Well, down to 2, if you get it right.  I didn’t get past 93.  The GP announced that I was concussed, but I would get better.  Well, I suppose he only had two options – watchful waiting, or a craniotomy.  CT scans were yet to be invented.   

I remember I was rather proud of the black eye I could show off at school on Monday morning, and the surrounding bruise, all the colours of the rainbow.  I got better.  Or did I?  My third year at secondary school marked the apogee of any academic excellence I may have aspired to.  After that, everything was a struggle.  My exam results became mediocre, I was easily distracted, chronically disconsolate, and I couldn’t remember a thing.  Now, with the increasing physicality of the game, the Rugby Union wonder whether there might be a correlation between repeated head trauma and early onset dementia. Duh.  Incidentally, when the RU refer to “physicality”, they actually mean brutality, or violence. 

I lived in New Zealand for 13 years.  When I bought my house in Devonport on Auckland’s North Shore, the real estate agent was an ex-All Black.  The New Zealanders are obsessed with rugby.  Of course the posh schools play rugby, but it’s much less of a class thing there because the society is much more egalitarian.  The Maori and the Polynesians, who live in disadvantaged South Auckland, are very good at rugby.  Kids play from a very early age, and their parents yell at them from the side lines urging them to be more aggressive.  I remember in the emergency department tending a kid who broke his neck on the rugby field.  His master leaned over the spinal board and said, “Never mind, Darryl, you played a blinder.”  

In New Zealand, my colleague Dr Alastair Cameron-Strange voiced the opinion that rugby is a metaphor for the First World War, played at the Front.  A war of attrition.  The backs are the officers, and the forwards are the other ranks.  There is an impasse – the scrum.  The Big Push.  Then there is a mid-field incident of bloodiness, the ball gets flashed from the scrum half to the stand-off, and you’re in Berlin by Christmas.  Or maybe not. 

“Physicality” in rugby is not against the laws.  The big no-no is the forward pass.  In the next war, Herr Hitler took the allies by surprise by developing Blitzkrieg, rapid armour, the technique of the forward pass.  The bounder.  In his own way, he was the Reich’s William Web Ellis.   

Not for me.  I got out.  I escaped the Saturday morning purgatory by joining Glasgow Schools’ First Orchestra which met on a Saturday morning.  I see that in the current World Cup Scotland and New Zealand, my two homelands, both lost their opening games.  Scotland will be relieved the trouncing wasn’t worse, while New Zealand will be in deep mourning.  For myself, I am indifferent.  I still favour music over rugby.  On Saturday at the Last Night of the Proms, Sheku Kanneh-Mason played Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, and accompanied soprano Lise Davidsen, along with the cello section of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, in Heitor Villa Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras Number 5.  Magnificent.  I hope Sheku never goes near a rugby pitch, but protects his fingers, and his God-given talent.                       

Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

Pithy.  You can always rely upon the Germans to come up with le mot that is juste.

Coming to terms with the past.

It is three score years ago, as the great man might have put it, since Dr Martin Luther King Jr gave his celebrated “I have a dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and before a great throng, in Washington on August 28^th, 1963.  When I first heard the speech, I was captivated by the charisma of the orator, a combination of presence, delivery, but most of all, content.  I was intrigued in particular by a sentence that began:

“I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification…”

What, I wondered were the words of interposition and nullification?  I don’t know, but I would hazard a guess that they were the governor’s way of putting a brake on the aspirations of the civil rights movement.  It sounds to me like the editing of a text.  You interpose a word here, you nullify a word there, and lo, and behold, with minimal intervention, an entire document has been attenuated, much after the fashion of an infective organism that has been modified to remove its virulence – I nearly wrote virility (Freudian slip) – in the creation of a safe vaccine.  The organism’s virulence, its potency, is annulled, its virility emasculated.   

And note that the governor did not merely speak the words of interposition and nullification; his lips were dripping with them.  That language comes across to me as very biblical; the governor sounds like Anass, or Caiaphas, or Pontius Pilate.  Dr King was a Baptist minister so his adoption of biblical language is not surprising.  The speech and its delivery are utterly spellbinding.  I don’t suppose we have heard oratory to match this, on this side of the pond, since Winston’s great set pieces of the Second World War.  In them we have the same historical awareness, the same adoption of magnificent, slightly archaic language (“Not one jot or tittle of our just demands do we recede!”), the rolling cadences, and always, a close attention to exactitude of meaning.  Who, nowadays, can even begin to speak thus? 

But in order to be an orator, to have an orator’s power to communicate and to move, you must first be sincere.  What you have to say must come from the heart, your own heart.  But what have we now?  Politicians have speech writers.  (Can you imagine Winston employing s speech writer?)  Speeches are cobbled together by think tanks, focus groups, and special advisors.  They must conform to a doctrine, a manifesto, and an ideology.  They must not stray off piste.  (Dr King’s remarkable I have a dream speech came out of a decision to drop the prepared text and speak, impromptu, from the heart.)   Nowadays, any political statement must not make the politician, the party or the government a hostage to fortune by undue reliance on candour.  Doubtless you could program some ghastly Artificial Intelligence contraption to concoct the speech for you.  It would surprise me if this has not already happened.  Perhaps AI could act as an editor.  You submit the speech, and the AI modifies it with the words of interposition and nullification.  Result: “I am busy delivering for hard-working British families who deserve a better future…”

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

And now here is a strange irony.  It is three score years since Dr King’s speech, and it is three score years and ten since the publication of Ian Fleming’s first James Bond book, Casino Royale.  The entire Bond canon is being republished to celebrate this anniversary.  Browsing in Waterstones the other day, I picked up a copy of Live and Let Die and confirmed something I already knew to be the case.  There has been an edit.  The publishers have adopted the words of interposition and nullification.  The words of interposition are in the frontispiece, a repudiation of the attitudes of the time (1953); and the words, rather absence of words, hence nullification, are in an early chapter renamed “Seventh Avenue”, in which an entire rather lengthy conversation had been removed.  It no longer exists.  Ergo, apparently, it has never existed.  Syme, that wretched character in 1984, has sent it down the memory hole.  The Pharisees, not content with controlling the way we live now, persuade us that their way of looking at the world is the norm, because it was ever thus.  They are obliterating history.    

It’s not a new phenomenon.  When the Hanovers made up their mind to subdue the Jacobites, once and for all, not only did they lay waste and depopulate a vast landscape; they destroyed a culture by proscribing a societal structure, modes of dress, music, and, most of all, language.  They obliterated, or tried to obliterate, history. That modus operandi is also biblical.  By the waters of Babylon, I sat down and wept.

The salutary lesson is that such techniques of oppression are effective.  The idea that the Jacobite landscape is an unspoilt wilderness is a myth.  The trendy “North Coast 500” route for tourists that runs round the top of Scotland circumvents Ben Armine Forest, Loch Choire Forest, Borrobol Forest, Benmore Forest, Glendhu Forest, and so on.  But why do none of these forests contain any trees?  The landscape is denuded.  The visitors in their campervans awkwardly negotiating the passing places on the single-track roads are unaware that they are passing obliterated ancient settlements that have been turned into archaeological sites.  

The tall statue to George Leveson-Gower, first Duke of Sutherland (“the Mannie”), a pivotal figure in the highland clearances, still stands, upon Ben Bhraggie, above Golspie, in Sutherland.  Some would have it removed.  Occasionally it is vandalised, much as, following the Maori Wars in New Zealand, Hone Heke, a Maori chief and signatory to the Treaty of Waitangi, would repeatedly cut down the flagstaff bearing the Union Jack on Maiki Hill above the town of Russell, in Northland’s beautiful Bay of Islands; much as the statue of Lord Dundas in Edinburgh is occasionally besmirched with graffiti.  Dundas delayed the abolition of the slave trade, utilising a temporising technique similar to the one Dr King described as “the tranquillising drug of gradualism”.   Justice delayed is justice denied.  Some would erect a plinth beside the Mannie, providing “context”, bearing the words of interposition and nullification.  I would rather leave it alone.  If it is an affront, let it be an affront.  We must bear our scars, not hide them.         

To my enormous relief, Part 3 of the trilogy concerning the life of the troubled doc is being published, with a fair wind, maybe around Christmas or New Year.  We’ve signed the contract, and now I am busy offering suggestions for a cover design, blurb, author bio and so on.  I’m not very good at multi-tasking.  A friend and fellow viola player remarked the other day that she tends to do things in clumps.  (I think she used the word clump.)  So she has a viola clump, or a gardening clump, or a Scottish politics clump.  I’m the same.  I need to focus on one thing at a time.  At school, I was never any good at flitting from class to class, eight times a day, switching off French and switching on Mathematics.  I was in a constant state of preoccupation.  The teacher would say with evident exasperation, “Campbell!  What planet are you on?”  I have this notion that people who excelled at school did so because they had this capacity to compartmentalise, focus and re-focus.

But life goes on.  Yesterday I rehearsed with the Antonine Ensemble, a string chamber orchestra, for a concert we are giving next Sunday in St Michael’s Parish Church in Linlithgow.  “Shades of Baroque”.  The music is beautiful, but some of it is also technically quite demanding.  I need to stop composing literary blurbs in my head and concentrate on the notes.  We are playing Purcell’s Chaconne from Fairy Queen, Corrette’s Organ Concerto No. 1 in B flat, Britten’s Simple Symphony, Chossudovsky’s Phases de Doute, and Respighi’s Suite for Strings and Organ.  Another musical friend, erstwhile fiddler with the LSO, remarked that the second movement of the Britten, Playful Pizzicato, reminds her of the tune to The Archers, but I incline to think it more like “Campbeltown Loch I wish you were whisky”:

The price of the whisky was grim!

The Loch was full up to the brim!

Absurd.  The Respighi concerto is wonderful, very passionate.

And at a very convivial luncheon in Bearsden on Friday, a group of us reminisced on the great good fortune we had, at least in one respect, to be educated in Glasgow at a time when great emphasis was put on music, and the opportunity to learn a musical instrument, with both the instrument and the tuition supplied for free.  But I fear classical music has become a pastime of the elite.  We should remind the education ministers that there is some evidence that learning a musical instrument in early life is protective against the later development of Alzheimer’s disease.  Politicians are more susceptible to that sort of argument than the assertion that Purcell’s Chaconne from Fairy Queen is beautiful.  Whenever economic times are hard, music seems to be the first thing to suffer.  I noticed that at the Prom last night on BBC Radio 3, Sir Simon Rattle went out of his way to talk up the BBC Singers, whom the BBC were inclined to disband earlier this year.  They’re not out of the woods yet.  Sir Simon conducted Mahler 9 from memory.       

Talking of convivial luncheons, last Tuesday I met up with some friends from St Andrews.  We met halfway between our respective domiciles, in the Kingdom of Fife, at a vegetarian farm shop and café improbably named The Pillars of Hercules, in Falkland.  Highly recommended.  It is situated in an extensive, wooded regional park, also containing Falkland Palace.  We dined under a Perspex awning resembling a polytunnel, effectively a greenhouse.  It wasn’t a particularly warm day, but under the awning it was sweltering.  Our accompanying dog chose to sit outside, and pant.  My vegetarian tikka masala seemed super-hot.  Delicious.  I’ll certainly make a return visit.  My friends are moving house in order to downsize.  They are trying to get rid of a ton of books.  Knowing my interest in Churchilliana, they brought along four bagfuls, so I took them off their hands, and said I would probably be arrested later that day for fly-tipping in Loch Leven.  Actually the books are rather good.  Some I’ve read, so they went to Oxfam, but I’ve held on to Winston’s four volume treatment of the Great War, The World Crisis.  In the 1920s, people remarked that in The World Crisis, the author depicted the First World War as a kind of Winston bio-pic, such was his ego.  I dare say.  But he does write very well.

And following another convivial luncheon in Glasgow on Saturday, I was treated to a private piano recital, and heard Ballad from the Lyric Pieces by Grieg.  A melody, quite simple, somewhat severe, repeated with a series of harmonies whose poignancy seems even beyond the capacity for expression of music itself.  For a moment, I stopped trying to compose a cover blurb for Part 3 in the life of Dr Alastair Cameron-Strange.               

“And don’t worry about your work here.  Put it right out of your mind for a couple of weeks.  I’ll tell 009 to take care of the section.”

Fleming I. L., Thunderball, Jonathan Cape, London, 1961.

  It was a dull March evening. The rain slanting against the windowpane sounded like the drumming of fingernails.  His secretary had left the office hours ago.  009 sat moodily swivelling in her chair.  He had his raincoat on but he hadn’t the energy, or even the purpose, to get up and go.  Idly he removed the cover from the ancient office Barlock typewriter.  He straightened a paperclip to form a probe and began to gouge the congealed print matter from the machine’s metallic type-face.  He started with his own number: 009.  He pondered the events – more accurately, non-events – of the past fortnight.

  It seemed to him that he had been woken from an eternal slumber by the din of the phone that was the direct line to M’s office.

  “009?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Miss Moneypenny.  Message from M.  No, it’s all right, you don’t need to come up.  Just to let you know the head of the double-0 section has gone to a health farm on a rest cure.  You’re in charge.  Yes.  You are to take care of the section.”

  And he had experienced a tremendous lift and surge of the heart.  For how long had he been awaiting this call?  He was like an understudy to a great actor, languishing in the wings season after season, but now, suddenly and unexpectedly, informed that he was about to step out on to the stage, into the dazzling limelight.  It just shows you!  If you keep the faith and wait long enough, an opportunity will arise.  Seize the day! 

  The following morning he had arrived early at his office within the anonymous grey building beside Regent’s Park, determined to clear his desk of all the routine signals so that he would be ready, when the red telephone rang again, as surely it must.  Surely.  Rumour had it, rumour from the famous “Powdervine”, that something was brewing, Something Very Big.  Crash dive and ultra-hush.  Well, he was ready.  And he was a hundred per cent fit.  Unlike his superior, he didn’t smoke 60 cigarettes a day, he didn’t consume half a bottle of spirits a day, and he didn’t have behind him – or ahead of him  – a string of untidy affairs which never seemed to burden his superior with an unwanted heir, alimony, or a sexually transmitted disease.  Surely all of that had to constitute some sort of security risk!  And yet, there was no doubt about, it, James was the apple of M’s eye.  He got all the plum jobs – the exotic ones.  009 couldn’t remember that last time he had been summoned to the seventh floor, the inner sanctum, the last time he had sat down at the desk before these damnably clear grey eyes.

  And his colleagues?  The other members of the small, exclusive section?  Yes, they had seen a bit of action.  There was the time Bill – 008 – made it to Peenemunde and back.  He had been in pretty bad shape; had to rest up in Berlin.  That certainly deserved a mention in despatches.  And 0011?  Had he ever made it out of the “dirty half-mile” in Singapore?

  (009 carried on mechanically removing effete print from the Barlock.)

  He had run the section like clockwork.  So efficiently, in fact, that there was never any need for any communication from the floor above.  He might as well have been invisible!  And he wondered, with a pang of jealousy, about James.  James seemed to carry his destiny with him.  009 suddenly developed the odd conviction – like an epiphany – that James would make something out of his rest cure.  What?  God only knew.   Some sort of conflict, some sort of bizarre set-up, involving some sort of farcical contraption and, no doubt, a girl.  There was no second-guessing the content of the report James would subsequently deliver up to M.  It would be completely extraordinary. 

At the Royal Academy of Music’s European Summer School for young musicians, 1973, in Caen, Normandy, we played Brahms 2.  It is a very sunny work.  Herr Dr Brahms, with perhaps rather leaden Teutonic humour, warned his friends that the symphony he was working on was very dark and morose.  I think we must have been playing it in a dark and morose fashion, because during the rehearsal the conductor said to us, “Cheer up!  Have you never been happy?”  And I wondered about that.  The soundtrack of my life has not been Brahms 2, rather Honegger 2.  Not that Honegger 2 is entirely dark and morose.  In its second movement, when it could hardly get any gloomier, there comes a miraculous, God-given vision of utter peace and serenity.  And (eternal optimist as I hope to be), the last movement and its close are extremely up-beat.    

I’ve just finished reading the 20^th Anniversary Edition of The Art of Happiness, a Handbook for Living, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and Howard C. Cutler (Hodder & Stoughton 1998).  “Dedicated to the Reader.   May you find happiness.”  Well, how could I resist?  Dr Howard C. Cutler is a psychiatrist based in Phoenix Arizona, and the book is largely a record of conversations between the psychiatrist and the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people.  The central thesis of the book is that the meaning of life is to be found in the conscientious pursuit of happiness.  Right enough, isn’t that built into the American Constitution? 

The distinguished actor Albert Finney once received a lifetime achievement award, and in his acceptance speech, he quoted a line he once had to render in a play, which at the time he thought was little more than a throwaway remark, but which he had come to realise was profoundly true:  Life is all about having a good time.  That reminded me of a line concerning the meaning of life the Scottish actor Ian Charleson had in a movie – I paraphrase – “I don’t know why we are here, but it’s certainly not to have a good time.”  I suppose that is a profoundly Scottish sentiment. 

The last time I read anything about the Dalai Lama, it was in a short piece by Emily Maitlis in her collection Airhead.  She interviewed His Holiness in a posh London hotel and was rather bemused, because, if I interpreted her correctly, his responses to questions of profound spiritual significance seemed somewhat simplistic.  She went along to interview, literally, a god, only to find that he was a perfectly regular guy, warm hearted and full of smiles.  I got the impression, not so much that she thought he was an impostor, rather that the mythology that had grown up around him was fake.  I had a vague reminiscence of Peter Sellers’ last film, Being There, in which he played a gardener who is regarded as a great sage when in fact he is what used to be called a “natural”, or, after the fashion of Forrest Gump, an idiot.    

Heretofore, it has never crossed my mind to pursue happiness.  I have always thought of happiness as something nebulous, something hard to grasp.  It has occasionally ambushed me and taken me by surprise, but I have never taken seriously the idea of bottling happiness.  I have this idea that if you actively try to pursue it and capture it, it will merely elude you.  On the other hand, if you lay yourself open to the possibility of happiness choosing you, then, just maybe, for a moment, you will get lucky.  What is the inscription at the head of the score of Elgar 2?  Rarely, rarely comest thou, spirit of delight.      

Oddly enough, The Art of Happiness reminded me somewhat of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, a book not so much instructing you how to be happy, as how to survive, how to choose to survive, even in the direst circumstances.  But when it comes to self-help books, my Bible is the classic lampoon of the life-style guides common in 1930s America, James Thurber’s Let Your Mind Alone!  I have no intention of undergoing psychoanalysis.  I have a notion that, for me at least, that level of self-scrutiny might be a path to madness.  On these occasions when I have been surprised by joy, I’ve always found myself embarked on some project that has taken me out of myself – making music with others, trying to master a foreign language, medicine certainly; even writing a book is an escape from self-absorption and introspection because it is intended ultimately to be a communication with other people. 

I recall the psychiatrists in Edinburgh were fond of a stock question about mood, or “affect”, “How are you within yourself?”  Usually, of course, “How are you?” is merely a conventional greeting, and not the sincere, delving enquiry that is a therapist’s overture to an essay at diagnosis.  So I just reply “Good, thanks”, with an antipodean twang.  I find enquiries about my personal happiness slightly discomfiting, and I usually give a stock reply.  “Call no man happy!”  “How’s life?  Roller coaster ride, roller coaster ride!”  I’m not proud of it.  In the doctor’s surgery I have sometimes heard people say, with regret, “If I had the opportunity to live my life again, knowing what I know now, I would live it entirely differently.”  They are reminiscing about a woodland walk among bluebells, in life’s springtime, encountering Robert Frost’s bifurcation of ways, one much like the other.  What difference then?  For myself, I have this odd, inexplicable notion that I took the other path.  In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the late Milan Kundera remarked that you can never know which of two options is the better course, because you can only live out one of them.  So I tend not to dwell on life’s alternative universes.  No regrets then.

One regret.  I wish I had realised that I didn’t have to take on the whole world on my own.                          

There is a story, apocryphal for all I know, about a man who found himself in Hiroshima on August 6^th 1945, and who survived the dropping of the first atomic bomb.  He decided to get out.  Miraculously, some trains were still running, so he took a train to Nagasaki. 

Hold that thought.

It is the time of year in which to revisit apocalyptic visions.  I rewatched Hob.  Hob is the final episode in a six part series which the BBC put on in the winter of 1958-59.  It was the creation of Nigel Kneale.  Quatermass and the Pit.  I was a child of the fifties, so I was very young when the series was shown, but I remember my reaction to seeing it very vividly.  I was simultaneously enthralled, and frightened out of my wits.  I would go into school the following day and say to my friend Billy Clark, “Did you see Quatermass last night?”  I think we were the only two in the class who were allowed by our parents to watch it. 

Some workmen excavating a site in the region of a tube station in Knightsbridge discover a strange skull in the vicinity of a buried metal object.  They unearth a capsule about the size of a railway locomotive.  A palaeontologist, Dr Matthew Roney, aided by his assistant Barbara Judd, enlists the help of the scientist Prof Bernard Quatermass, of the British Rocket Group, who has an uneasy relationship with his military counterpart in the group, Colonel Breen.  Fantastically, the scientists hypothesise the capsule is a Martian space craft, 5,000,000 years old, populated by giant insects come to colonise planet Earth, and to abduct pre-humanoids and genetically modify them.  But the government, and the military, are naturally dismissive of this absurd thesis.  Breen is particularly scathing, and grows increasingly irascible with each episode.  He thinks the object’s provenance is much more recent – a remnant of the war, perhaps an unexploded bomb, or a Nazi propaganda tool designed to frighten Londoners. 

I remember two particularly disturbing scenes.  A policeman enters a decrepit, unoccupied house in nearby Hobbs Lane.  Nothing happens, but he is spooked by an uncanny atmosphere.  Later, an electrician working late, and on his own in the capsule, becomes overwhelmed with terror when objects around him start flying about as if directed by malignant poltergeists.  I can still recall the sight of the man’s spanner disappearing up to the far end of the capsule.  He flees in blind panic.  His posture and his gait are very strange, quite inhuman.  That is because he has been possessed by an insect. 

The populace have noticed disturbances of this nature in Hobbs Lane for centuries.  In old documents, “Hobbs” is spelt “Hob’s”.  A hob is a malignant elf, a hobgoblin. 

There is a stand-off between the boffins on the one hand, and the military on the other, backed by a government minister.  The boffins are ardent and sincere, but perhaps politically naive.  They warn of a dire existential threat to humanity, but the establishment say there is nothing to worry about, and give the press, represented by the ever inquisitive journalist James Fullalove, and the public free access to the site.

So we come to part six, Hob.  You will not be surprised to learn that the boffins were right.  There is an apocalypse.  London is on fire.  Those of the populace with the remnant Martian memory turn on those without it, the other, in “the wild hunt”.  Hob reigns supreme.  Can the boffins find a way to avert absolute catastrophe?

Watching Hob, I remain frightened out of my wits.  You could easily say that a television production of the 1950s is crude, the special effects amateurish.  Yet it hardly matters.  The basic premise, the script, and the cast are so strong that you readily suspend your disbelief.  In fact, it’s all too believable, not so much the Sci-Fi aspects, as the underlying psychological truth.  As a child I hadn’t appreciated Nigel Kneale’s preoccupation with the human psyche.  Quatermass and the Pit is really an examination of the nature of evil, much like Macbeth, as interpreted by G. Wilson Knight and indeed by Roman Polansky, as an external force which can lie dormant, then reawaken and possess humanity.  In Part 6, an American surveillance aircraft broadcasting to the US overflies the conflagration of London and is itself consumed.  It’s really a depiction of the London Blitz.  Everyone, Colonel Breen, Barbara Judd, Quatarmass himself, becomes possessed.  On revisiting, the most chilling thing of all was the change in demeanour of Ms Judd.  Only the Canadian scientist Roney remains immune, and retains his sanity.  But at what cost?

Now why should I revisit this rickety old piece of television history, of a bygone age, depicting outdated manners and customs, with its grainy footage in black and white, and its gimcrack sets? 

It occurs to me that in reality we are all currently re-enacting a Quatermass melodrama.  The essential Nigel Kneale scenario is being acted out.  On the one hand, the boffins are telling the government that the world is on fire, and on the other hand, the government is, despite any lip service they may pay, largely dismissive.  Didn’t Mr Cameron allegedly dismiss all this “green crap”?  Mr Sunak took a private jet up to Aberdeenshire last week, largely as a photo opportunity, and to issue hundreds of licences to develop new oil and gas fields.  He is on the side of the motorist.  Even Sir Keir wants Sadiq Khan to “reflect” on the London ULEZ initiative.  Mr Sunak wants everybody to fly off on holiday.  I get the impression that, on both sides of the Westminster political divide, politicians are not leading by conviction, but are rather licking a finger and sticking it in the air to see which way the wind is blowing.  The aim is to win the next general election.  

So who will prevail, the scientific community or the political establishment?  And how far through our six part series have we travelled?  I reckon we are nearing the end of Part 5.  One episode to go.

Hob.                       

The threat of imminent nuclear warfare is back on the agenda.  It never really goes away.  Somebody went to see the film Oppenheimer last week, was clearly very impressed, and wrote a strong letter to The Herald advocating that the only way to stand up to Russia, China, and North Korea was to arm to the teeth.  I replied as follows:

This panegyric to the doctrine of nuclear deterrence (The lesson we Scots must learn from Oppenheimer, Herald July 24) appears eloquent and persuasive, and is indeed beautifully written, but does the argument stand up?  It is true that Albert Einstein wrote to President Roosevelt as early as August 2^nd 1939, effectively kick-starting the Manhattan Project, but in the event the successful Trinity nuclear detonation occurred two months after Nazi Germany had been defeated.  Then the USA dropped two bombs on two Japanese cities that were exhausted and defenceless, and of no strategic military importance.  The choice of Nagasaki was based on the vagaries of the local weather on August 9^th, 1945.  These detonations were effectively a demonstration to Soviet Russia, and a warning not to encroach any further into Western Europe.  Joseph Goebbels said the Nazis would win in the end, because the allies would have adopted their methods.  Such is the nature of evil.

George Santayana’s remark has become a cliché, that those who do not study the past are condemned to repeat it.  But the trouble is that history seldom repeats itself.  It doesn’t even rhyme, but, like a Wilfred Owen poem, it can half-rhyme.  Back in 1945, the best minds, Chadwick and Feynman and Oppenheimer, devoted themselves to constructing a bomb.  The Danish physicist Niels Bohr thought that nuclear research should be conducted by the scientific community in a spirit of openness, and Churchill wanted to lock him up.  But Churchill in his second term came to realise that the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD) was untenable.  He tried to arrange a “summit” – he even coined the term – of the great powers, in pursuit of a lasting peace, but by then Churchill was a spent force and he failed. 

The idea that MAD is going to carry on assuring peace is fallacious.  There have been several near misses over the years, and in our own time with our devotion to automated systems, “artificial intelligence”, and managerial pseudoscience, it is only a matter of time before an “accident” occurs.  We need, somehow, to get rid of these hellish contraptions.  Today, rather than creating increasingly sophisticated weapons of mass destruction, our brightest and best need to address the question crucial to our own time: how can we all get along together, without destroying ourselves and the planet?  

Then today I read, again in The Herald, that former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, in response to a drone strike on the Moscow Central Business District, said, “If we imagine that the offensive of the (Ukrainians) with the support of NATO was successful, and they seized part of our land, then we would have to, by virtue of the rules of the decree of the President of Russia dated 06/02/20, go for the use of nuclear weapons.  There is simply no other way out.”              

I dare say this piece of sabre rattling is designed for domestic consumption. I don’t think Mr Zelenskyy has any ambitions to invade Russia, although he would rather like the Russians to clear off out of Crimea and the Donetsk region.  And if the Kremlin sends missiles to Kyiv, they can hardly complain if Kyiv sends a few back.    

But under the threat of the mushroom cloud, life goes on.  I’m enjoying my new electric car.  I’m still on the learning curve.  I was sitting at the head of a huge queue of cars at a four way temporary traffic light yesterday and, as it was rather a long wait, I put the park brake on.  Then when the light turned green, I couldn’t get it off again!  People behind me grew irate.  I thought, not only have the Chinese tampered with all their own exported electric vehicles, they have somehow infiltrated the Czech Republic!  Somebody has thrown a switch in Shanghai, and all the electric cars in the UK have ground to a halt! 

Not so.  I needed to depress the brake pedal to release the parking brake.  Silly ass. Well, nobody died. 

The threat of imminent nuclear annihilation does rather put the day to day vicissitudes of quotidian experience into perspective.  Should the Welsh Rugby Union ban the singing of Delilah?  (I think across the border in England, people are threatening to throw a switch and bring Swing Low, Sweet Chariot to a grinding halt.)  I didn’t know what Delilah was all about, other than that the eponymous anti-heroine was some kind of femme fatale.  Improbably, I once heard a rendition of Delilah in Motherwell in the 1970s, given by the Red Army Ensemble.  So I attribute my ignorance of the song’s lyrics to a rather thick Russian accent.

Fore-giff mya Delilah, ah jyust kchood not tyke annie mehr! 

It’s all about a jealous guy who sees his girlfriend with another man, and stabs her.  It occurs to me that if we cancel Delilah, then we might as well cancel the whole of Grand Opera, which seems largely devoted to the idea of seducing and/or murdering prima donnas in a fit of jealous rage.  Just as an example, I think of the close of Act 1 of Puccini’s Tosca, in which the corrupt Chief of Police Baron Scarpia, in an “evil, be thou my good” moment, concocts his fiendish plot of seduction and murder in the church of Sant’ Andrea della Valle, against a background of the Te Deum, the tolling of church bells, and the intermittent boom of the cannon from the Castle of Sant’ Angelo.  The effect is overwhelming.  

I could easily envisage that Tosca, an opera that stages an execution (at least the torture is off stage, though audible), could be cancelled simply because the audience might find it too upsetting.  The audience might not feel “safe”.  But is not the whole point of music drama, theatre, literature, and the arts in general, that dangerous topics can be explored in an environment that is, of itself, safe?  Tosca is cathartic.  Is it too fanciful to suppose that “the purgation of pity and terror” makes the outbreak of unbridled violence in reality less likely?  I dare say the Red Army singing Delilah in Motherwell contributed, albeit infinitesimally, to a détente at the height of the cold war.    

So I hope Sir Tom Jones carries on singing Delilah.  And I expect the crowd at Cardiff may wish to join in.  It’s not unusual.