Author: jamescalumcampbell

I was tremendously impressed by the king’s address to the Bundestag last week.  Slipping apparently effortlessly between English and German, he appeared entirely relaxed.  I got the impression he was speaking Hochdeutsch that was scrupulously korrekt whilst still idiomatic.  I suppose a native German speaker might have proofread his text, might even have composed it, yet I didn’t get the impression the king was merely lip-syncing.  I think he knew what he was talking about.  I suppose he has been trained all his life to address august bodies.  But still, to address the assembled Bundestag in German… He appeared to go down very well.  Funnily enough, the part of his address which I least understood was given in English.  He made a reference to Miss Sophie’s “the same procedure as every year, James?” which elicited laughter.  I had no idea what he was talking about.  I wondered if it might be some reference to a James Bond movie, perhaps some thinly veiled double entendre from Miss Moneypenny, but no.  It was apparently a reference to a theatrical sketch from 1963, entitled Dinner for One, aka The 90^th Birthday (German: Der 90. Geburtstag), written by Lauri Wylie, and starring May Warden and Freddie Frinton.  A deluded upper class English lady presides over a dinner party for four guests who are all in fact absent because deceased.  The butler serves up a four course meal of soup (mulligatawny), fish, chicken, and fruit, each course accompanied in turn by sherry, white wine, champagne, and port.  The butler is required to fill in for the absent guests, thus toasting the hostess sixteen times and becoming progressively more and more plastered.  There is plenty of slapstick, chiefly the butler’s repeatedly tripping over the head of one of these absurd tiger skin rugs from the colonial era.   Apparently this sketch is hugely popular in Germany, and is shown every New Year’s Eve. 

To be honest, it left me cold.  That probably says more about me than about the sketch.  But drunkenness is seldom funny.  There is a sketch by Rikki Fulton, in his persona as the Reverend Jolly, giving an armchair “Late Call” homily on telly, unaware that the water decanter he takes copious advantage of contains neat gin.  When I watch it, I feel like Malvolio in Twelfth Night.  I need Sir Toby Belch to berate me.  “Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”  I wonder if the Germans might be similarly unmoved by Henning Wehn (the king called him Germany’s comedy ambassador), who tells the tale of a child, seemingly, to his parents’ consternation, unable to speak, until one evening at the dinner table, aged five, he announces, “The soup is cold.”  His parents, overjoyed that he is no longer mute, ask him why he has not spoken before.

“Until now, everything has been satisfactory.”

The king made reference to his forthcoming coronation in Westminster Abbey next month.  This reminded me of the coronation of his grandfather, George VI, immortalised in the movie The King’s Speech, in which Colin Firth played the king, and Geoffrey Rush, his Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue.  At the coronation rehearsal, Bertie berates Lionel for sitting on the throne above the Stone of Scone.  It’s a vignette about kingship, un coup de théâtre.  Charles will occupy that seat next month. (At least, as far as we know.)  I wonder what George VI would have thought if somebody had told him in 1939, that his grandson would address the Reichstag at a time of peace and harmony, at least across Western Europe.  At the time, his own challenge was to control his stammer and address, on the radio, The United Kingdom, the Commonwealth, and the Empire.  He pulls it off in the movie, somewhat aided by the allegretto from Beethoven 7, and subsequently soothed by the slow movement of the Emperor Piano Concerto.

There is a powerful scene in The King’s Speech in which George VI asks the Archbishop of Canterbury to find a place for Lionel Logue in the pew reserved for the immediate royal family.  Canterbury, who is a snob and who thinks Logue is a parvenu and a charlatan, scratches his chin and says, “Well, of course sir, I’ll see what I can do, but it is going to be very, very difficult.” 

I’ve come to regard that reply as a marker for the establishment’s consummate ability to close ranks.  I’ve just finished reading Jon Snow’s The State of Us (Bantam, 2023).  It’s really a book about inequality in the modern world, especially in modern Britain.  Grenfell Tower lies at its heart.  It’s about the disadvantaged in search of the life more abundant, who are continually fobbed off with the rejoinder, “Well, of course, I’ll see what I can do, but it is going to be very, very difficult.”    

Nicola Sturgeon told a Loose Woman that she had a kind of epiphany while watching Jacinda Ardern resign the NZ Premiership.  Ms Ardern told New Zealand that she had nothing left in the tank.  (Actually she head neigh thung leeft un tha teenk.  Such is the Great New Zealand Vowel Shift.  Or shuft.  Perhaps soon we shall be mutually incomprehensible.)  Ms Sturgeon experienced a pang of envy.  She realised that she too, was burned out, and that she too had to go.  That was the right decision for her; but was it also the right decision for the party she led, and for the nation of which she is still (at time of writing) First Minister?  She realised in short order that it was.

This reminded me of my own time-to-go epiphany, albeit from a less public stage.  I was skulking one Sunday morning, like Nicodemus, at the back of Dunblane Cathedral, when the man in the pulpit said, “What is it, that you’ve been meaning to do for quite some time now, but that you just haven’t got round to doing?  Do it now!”  I had an odd hallucination.  In a scene reminiscent of Kafka’s The Trial, it was as if the entire cathedral emptied itself of everybody, save for me and the man in the pulpit, who was addressing me across a vast acreage of deserted pews.

“Do it now!”

My memory tells me that the following day I tendered my resignation. 

Yet that can’t be right.  I know that I ran my intention to depart prematurely past my accountant, to make sure that I could continue to live in the style to which I have become accustomed.  This may be met with howls of derision, because it is well known that senior doctors are so immensely wealthy and are under such an enormous tax burden that it is no longer worth our while to get up in the morning and go to work.  But you need to understand that as a younger man I wasted my substance on riotous living, and in addition spent an enormous amount on an expensive hobby, aviation.  So I know that I popped across to Dunfermline to run it all past the bean counters.  Once it was established that I was happy to quaff Oyster Bay Brut rather than Dom Perignon or Krug, I was given the nod.  I was so euphoric that I left the accountant’s, jumped into my car in the carpark beside the Abbey, and reversed smack into a neighbouring Peugeot. 

Well, I did the right thing.  I popped a note of abject apology, with contact details, under the Peugeot’s windscreen wiper.  Then I phoned my insurance company.  They took me through a checklist.  “Did you suffer an injury?”

“No, nothing like that.  I imagine I was only going at half a mile an hour.”  

“Was the occupant of the other car injured?”

“The other car was empty.  It was in a carpark.”

“Did the airbags deploy?”

“At half a mile an hour?”

“Did the police, fire, or ambulance attend?  Did extrication require cutting equipment?  Did you attend ‘A & E’?” 

“At half a mile an hour?”

“Are the injuries deemed to be life-changing?”

And so on, relentlessly.

Now if I am right that I had my epiphany on Sunday, and tendered my resignation on Monday, then I must have visited my accountant before I had my epiphany.  In other words, sitting at the back of the cathedral, I already knew I was going.  I didn’t have an epiphany at all.  It’s a confabulation.

Once you’ve made up your mind to go, there’s no going back.  The government might raise the pension pot tax threshold from £1.0m to £1.8m – they might stuff the consultants’ mouths with gold (actually I think Nye Bevan stuffed our mouths with silver) – but I doubt if it will tempt many retired surgeons to go back.  Once the working environment becomes intolerable, there is no amount of remuneration that can compensate.  For Ms Ardern and Ms Sturgeon, it was the toxicity of social media that was instrumental in compelling them to quit.  For me, it was the intrusion into my consulting room of a third party, the computer, bringing along its own agenda which was not my agenda, nor that of my patient.  Meanwhile, across the channel, M. Macron is trying to raise the pension age for the French apparently without recourse to the usual democratic processes.  Bonne chance avec ça.  Aux barricades!  The King is not crossing the channel today, not so much because of security concerns, but because of the bad optics.  M. Macron greeting His Majesty, and the Queen Consort, at the Palace of Versailles?  Too reminiscent of Louis XVI.  I feel sorry for the king.  If he is anything like his mother, he will never quit.  The Archbishop of Canterbury is unlikely to suggest to him, obliquely, across the vastness of Westminster Abbey, that he abdicate.         

Was my own epiphany a confabulation?  This week Matthew Syed talked about confabulation, in the last of his current BBC Radio 4 series Sideways, a different way of looking at the world.  He told the story of how as a young man he had given a talk to a group of 100 well paid bankers, and had bombed.  He thought he would never stand up and address a crowd of people ever again, but then he got a grip and decided to learn the art of public speaking.  He joined Toastmasters, and never looked back.  He even returned to address the same group of financiers, and was a great success. 

It’s a nice story, one of suffering a set-back, and using it as a pivotal moment in order to make a change for the better.  A salutary and inspiration tale. 

Except that it wasn’t true.  Matthew Syed had been attending Toastmasters for at least two years before he gave the disastrous talk at Goldman Sachs.  It’s not that he made the story up, or even consciously embellished it.  Confabulation and lying are not the same thing.  But we like to cast the experiences of our lives in terms of narratives that make sense. 

Perhaps Boris Johnson’s narrative, that he never attended any parties at No. 10, is a confabulation.  He told Harriet Harman et al that, as part of his work, he needed to thank the people who were giving of themselves 110%, 24/7, to save the nation.   You see, he said, with evident irritation, people just don’t understand…  I thought he was going to start thumping the table.  No epiphany there.              

Well now, having successfully dodged the wretched Covid for upwards of three years, it has finally caught up with me.  Bit of a prodrome last night, thick head and fever today.  The test line on the lateral flow test was immediate and unequivocal.  I sat in a “dwam” and listened to the Radio 4 morning service, then the Kuenssberg Show, but found it difficult to concentrate.  I made a couple of phone calls, and sent texts and emails to put off commitments for the next few days.  Then I studied a little German, but didn’t get very far.  The only thing I could begin to take in was the waspish Noel Coward Diaries (Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1982), but even then it was too much of on effort.  I had to suspend activities.  I put myself under house arrest.  It was something of a relief, to stop.  I could imagine that somebody being hunted by the police might feel a similar sense of relief when finally collared, especially if guilty. 

Then I went back to bed and slept for two hours, feeling somewhat better on waking, to the extent that I can here once more wrestle the best of three falls with words.

Talking of words, I have an orphan tome just shy of 100,000 of them looking for a new home.  The publishing contract was all signed, sealed, and delivered, and then the publisher, alas, went into administration.  The rights are returned to me.  But what to do with them?  I sent the tome to another publishing house.  If you don’t hear from us after three months, they said, forget it.  Three months have elapsed.  I wasn’t unduly surprised.  Who would want to take on Part III of a trilogy?  But I would have appreciated a rejection slip.  Email would be fine.  How hard can it be? 

But truth to tell, the publishing world is shot through with this kind of casualness.  It has a long and undistinguished history.  Even Jane Austen and Walter Scott used to tear their hair out at the lack of communication.  And Lord Byron.  Except that Byron, being an aristocrat, gave his publishers hell and they accordingly touched their forelocks.  But the relationship between publisher and writer can be very unbalanced.  Writers are at a disadvantage.  The relationship can even amount to one of abuse.  My writing colleagues complain of “gaslighting”, and a profound sense of disempowerment.  When I read a particular email from a fellow writer, I was reminded for some reason of the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who fell afoul of the Soviet authorities and was marginalised, only permitted to give recitals in remote Siberian villages.  He took to alcohol.      

Writers very often have to compromise their art simply in order to get published.  Personally I have found this very difficult.  Frankly, I’m not a team player.  Anyway, what am I going to do with 100,000 words?  I could go on hawking it around various publishing houses.  Or I could try and acquire an agent who could do all the legwork for me.  Or, I could self-publish.  Just to get the damned thing out.  “Closure”.  Then I could get on with another tome which is currently on the stocks, brand new, complete of itself, and which, hopefully, is not burdened by any troubled history.

I’m not bitter.

Mostly, this week, in my Covid penumbra, I bemoan the fact that I will miss my German class on Thursday, the last class of the term before Easter.  I will miss that sense of belonging, or, as we say in German, das Zusammengehörigkeitsgefühl.                 

I would be interested to pursue the audit trail that led from Gary Lineker’s tweet, voicing his opinion on the government’s policy on asylum seekers, to his current suspension from the BBC.  Of course, if in the course of your argument you invoke the shades of 1930s Germany, you are certainly going to touch a nerve.  The BBC might say that they didn’t suspend Mr Lineker as such, they asked him for the moment to step back.  At any rate somebody must have read his tweet, and taken umbrage.  That might have been somebody in the BBC who is devoted to its pledge to impartiality, and considered Mr Lineker to have breached the guidelines; or it might have been somebody in government who felt that the BBC’s highest paid presenter had no right to weigh into a political debate.  The Prime Minister has been careful to state that the row is an internal matter for the BBC, and that Mr Lineker is a fine presenter.  But plenty of Tory ministers and backbenchers have been critical, and it would not be the first time the government has leaned on the BBC.  Winston tried to tell the BBC what to say and to do during the General Strike, but Lord Reith would have none of it.  So you might argue that the BBC’s Director General Sir Tim Davey’s commitment to uphold impartiality has a fine tradition. 

But is it reasonable to issue a freelance football pundit, who happens to anchor Match of the Day, with a gagging order that affects not only his voice on BBC air, but on any other platform, or indeed in any other public space? 

Breaking News… I’m writing this at 10 am.  Mr Lineker will resume TV duties next weekend, and there will be a BBC review of the guidelines particularly affecting how freelancers use social media.  That sounds to me like a victory for Mr Lineker, who certainly isn’t going to apologise for anything.

I’m trying to imagine how I would feel if, in the unlikely event that the BBC asked me to present a programme, let’s say, on the novels of Ian Fleming (my putative specialist subject on Mastermind), Auntie pointed out the clause, perhaps buried in the small print in my contract, stating that, by the way, I could no longer voice any of my own opinions here in this blog.  I would say, what?  No opinions to be voiced whatsoever?  Can’t I say that I prefer white wine to red wine?  Oh yes yes.  Don’t be silly. You can say that.  But you can’t say anything political.  I like to think that I would politely turn down the BBC’s job offer; but then if they were offering me a salary of 1.4 million pounds per annum, I might think twice.  I might think, oh, just do it for a year, or two, or maybe three…     

But everything is political.  If I say that the potholes on the Glasgow roads are now beyond a joke, is that not an implied criticism of the managerial priorities, or abilities, of the city fathers?  By the way, the potholes on the Glasgow roads are now beyond a joke.    

So I await the BBC’s review of freelancers’ guidelines with some fascination, because it seems to me it would be impossible to define in black and white what sort of opinion you might freely state, and what you might not dare to utter.  Probably the best guideline, and the tersest, would be, thou shalt not get up the nose of the High and Mighty.

Sir Tim Davey unleashed a lash for his own back when he nailed his colours to the impartiality mast.  (Pardon this ridiculous, and vaguely nautical mixed metaphor.)  Bias is usually a very subtle thing.  You hold a point of view which you consider to be so self-evidently right and manifestly true that you hardly notice it is a point of view at all.  It is an undisputed fact.  You might say, for example, that the BBC is the finest broadcasting organisation in the world. 

I could imagine that the BBC might create a new department, a team of Bias Detectors, much as some publishing houses have teams of “sensitivity readers”, to scour not only the corporation’s own output, but the unending splurge of material, much of it bile, being spewed out twenty-four seven by the exponentially increasing number of available social media platforms.  Department Eliminating Tendentious Raconteurs Intent To Utter Solipsism, or DETRITUS.  Can you imagine a more hellish occupation than sitting all day at a computer screen, trawling through the trolls?  And what would the end product look like?  Nobody would have an opinion about anything.  The British Bland Corporation.  Of course the opinions would still be there.  They would merely be driven underground.      

The Lineker Affair is a quintessentially British row.  The establishment gets preoccupied with issues of form and process, and turns a blind eye to that which really matters.  If people’s lives are so desperate that they are prepared to drown in the English Channel, or the Mediterranean, then we need a global response to a global problem, the more so as, the state of the world being what it is, the problem is only likely to get much worse.  I would suggest that the United Nations be given the power to oversee the management of asylum seeking across the globe, and arrange a kind of pro rata allocation of asylum seekers to those among the sum total of 200 odd countries in the world that are still deemed to be safe.  This would involve each country surrendering a degree of sovereignty, something which the current UK government would find extremely difficult to accept.

If the government has taken its eye off the ball, so has the BBC.  While everybody is exercised about Gary Lineker, the BBC is quietly axing the BBC Singers, and cutting 20% off the budgets of its English orchestras, while Arts Council England is withdrawing significant financial support from English National Opera, and the Britten Sinfonia.  At the RSNO concert in Glasgow on Sunday evening, conducted by the most musical man on the planet, John  Wilson, David Hubbard, the principal bassoonist, whose lot it was to welcome the audience, expressed the orchestra’s disquiet at that which is currently happening in the arts, music in particular. 

The BBC Singers, the only professional choir in the UK, is about to turn 100 years old, and the BBC celebrated its centenary last year.  Nothing lasts for ever.  The BBC might do well to remember that.  Recall the words of Pastor Martin Niemöller:  “First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Communist.  Then…”   

Ken Bruce signed off from Radio 2 on Friday.  I was – am – a fan, so I listened to his last show right through.  I performed dismally as usual on Pop Master, but fortunately the last ever contestant scored a creditable 27 out of 39, and then solved “3 in 10” in approximately 1.5 seconds!  Ken told him he knew his stuff.  Always cheerful, witty, unfailingly courteous.  He has an encyclopaedic knowledge of popular music, and I noticed that he always identified the name of the songs he played, and the artists who performed them.  Well, maybe just once he didn’t, but that was for his last song on Friday.  He chose the last three tracks of Abbey Road which the Beatles perform without a break – Golden Slumbers, Carry that Weight, and – suitably enough – The End.  Maybe you don’t need to identify the Beatles.  I love Golden Slumbers, full of yearning for the past.  McCartney at the height of his powers.  

The show reminded me of other Radio 2 swansongs.  In 1984 Terry Wogan bowed out, albeit temporarily, to concentrate on TV.  He had, as usual, a bit of banter with Jimmy Young whose show followed Wogan’s.  I seem to recall Wogan saying, “If you spill coffee over the controls you’ll never hear the end of it.”  Jimmy Young said, “I won’t wish you luck because you won’t need it.”  Wogan said, “Who doesn’t need luck?”

Then it was Jimmy Young’s turn to go.  He wasn’t happy about it; definitely was pushed, rather than fell.  He kept saying during his last outing, “This isn’t my idea, you know!”  He might have listened to Wogan who once said that one of three things can happen to you as a DJ.  Either the management will get fed up with you, or the audience will get fed up with you, or you will get fed up with yourself.  Wogan once said that he liked going to parties, but never stayed till the bitter end.  Similarly, he said that he would pack his tent and go in his own time. Which he did. 

But after TV he had a reincarnation on Radio 2 and then it was Wogan – Bruce banter that we got at 0930.  Wogan could be hysterically funny, but there was another side to him, opinionated, acerbic, that perhaps only came through in his writings, particularly for the Telegraph. 

On Friday Ken received a lot of accolades, which he mostly deflected with admirable modesty and tact.  Recently a Pop Master contestant said to him, “Such an honour to speak to Radio 2 Royalty” to which Ken replied, “You must mean Richie” (the travel man).  Ken said people from Scotland, particularly Glasgow, didn’t like to receive praise.

Glasgow!  I seem to have spent a lot of time there this week.  After a gap of nearly half a century I have re-joined a private swimming club near the city centre.  It was originally a Victorian spa for the Glasgow gentry.  Moustachioed gentlemen could be seen in waspish swimwear swooping across the pool on rings and trapeze.  Pictures of them might have been used as an advertisement for Bovril or Woodbine.  There were Turkish baths, a gym, a reading room, and snooker tables.  What’s not to like?  I was lured by a notion at least a century old of “going up to town and relaxing in my club”.  But not without some trepidation.  Returning to the past is always a bit of a gamble.  I remember getting a panic attack when I went back into my medical school’s anatomy lecture theatre after a gap of forty years.  And I never even made it across the entrance to my old school. 

But in fact my first visit to the baths was reassuring.  I felt (in a good way) as if I’d never been away.

On Thursday at the Goethe Institut we did a segment on Austrian German, so in preparation I asked an Austrian friend of mine for some typically Austrian idioms I could use. 

He said, “Hast du ein Vogel?”  Actually he said something more like, “Host du un Vogel?”  I said, “You mean, Hast du einen Vogel?  Have you a bird?”

“Nein.  Host du un Vogel?  Are you mad?  Or, Spinnst du?  Similarly, are you mad?”  (Literally, I suppose, are you spinning a yarn?)  And then something about an imaginary border that separates Austria and Bavaria from the “Hochdeutsch” north – “Die Weißwurst Grenze” – the white sausage border.  So I went to my class, suitably briefed.  But of course, as so often happens in a conversation class, none of it came up.  We ended up talking about the current trend of editing out politically incorrect material from classic novels.  First Dahl, then Blyton, and now Fleming.  I said, “Ja!  Doppel null sieben!”

And again on Sunday, another visit to the big G, for lunch, a walk, and a private piano recital.  It was a lovely spring day and it was a joy to see the crocuses, some daffodils, and some early spring blossom on the trees.  I believe it is my favourite time of year.  The gradual fading of winter (not done yet), the lengthening days, and the growth, are tonic to the soul. 

Then, on the drive home, a darkening of the sky, the sun low on the horizon, some rain, and then the appearance of the most remarkable rainbow I have ever seen in my life.  I first noticed a segment of it somewhere abeam Kirkintilloch, and it occurred to me that I had never seen a rainbow so broad.  By the time I reached Cumbernauld, there was a huge multi-coloured semicircle encompassing the sky, horizon to horizon, and outside it, its inverse reciprocal, hardly less intense, complete in itself.  I have never seen that, in such entirety, before.  The colours of the second rainbow are in reverse order: Vain In Battle Gave York Of Richard. 

There is a rainbow mythology, that its appearance is a reassurance that the Almighty will never again inflict the flood upon us.  I hope it’s true, but I don’t think we should risk complacency.  If the sea levels rise much more – and I believe the computer modelling is not reassuring – then the number of people across the world seeking higher ground is certain to increase, exponentially.  The Prime Minister may wish to deport illegal immigrants immediately from these shores, but if these shores start to vanish, then maybe we too will find ourselves washed up on some distant land, craving asylum.                                              

Hot on the heels of the Roald Dahl débâcle, I see from the front page of the Sunday Telegraph that the James Bond books have been edited to remove racist references.  All fourteen spy thrillers are being reissued in April to coincide with the seventieth anniversary of the publication of the first, Casino Royale.  Apparently the alterations followed a review by “sensitivity readers”.  I suppose this must refer to a group of people who have gone through the texts with a fine-tooth comb looking for offensive words, phrases, or extracts that need to be expunged.  I seem to recall that Syme, a character in Orwell’s 1984, was similarly entasked.  He too, like the text he worked on, was disappeared. 

Apparently not all disparaging racist remarks have gone.  Bond has remained critical of Oddjob, Goldfinger’s Korean man servant.  Was he North Korean or South Korean?  Perhaps some ethnic groups are still fair game.  And sexist and homophobic remarks have been allowed to remain.  So the main focus of attention is on Afro-Caribbean peoples.   When I read that an entire chunk of dialogue, a conversation in Harlem between a black man and his girl faithfully and phonetically reproduced, had been expunged from Live and Let Die, I got out my second impression (1954), and refreshed my memory.  Bond and his friend Felix Leiter sit in a booth in a diner in Harlem and eavesdrop, rather after the fashion of Professor Higgins studying the speech patterns of cockney flower girls in London’s east end.  It struck me that both Fleming and Bond are rather complimentary to the couple in the next booth.  Just for the record, I don’t think Bond was a racist.  He got along just fine with his friend Quarrel, a Cayman islander, in Dr No, and with Fidele Barbey, from the Seychelles, in The Hildebrand Rarity.  Despite the fact that, like his creator, he was an Old Etonian, he wasn’t even a snob.     

I can well imagine there will be a backlash.  Actually two backlashes.  Some people will say, “Enough of this woke nonsense!”  Others will say, “If black people are not to be disparaged, then what about women?  Why has the tang of rape been allowed to remain sweet?  And what about the LGBTQI community?  You haven’t gone nearly far enough!”  Then Ian Fleming Publications will be in a real pickle.

The Enid Blyton canon is undergoing a similar revision.

Is censorship of Ian Fleming’s canon “political correctness gone mad”?  I myself avoid this expression, along with “woke nonsense”.  In my experience they are usually employed by people who occupy positions of power.  In order to figure out whether a remark is hurtful, vicious, and damaging, you need to try to put yourself into the shoes of the person at the receiving end, the butt of the joke, the victim of the barb. 

In 2004, When Boris Johnson was editor of the Spectator, he published a poem by James Michie entitled Friendly Fire, calling for the extermination of Scottish people, who were “polluting our stock”.  The poem is said to be satirical.  It presents a caricature of the Scottish nation as wee, chippy, provocatively foreign, and a drain on the economy.  The poem advocates the refortification of Hadrian’s Wall, and the formation of a ghetto on its northern side.  But James Michie would go further:

The nation

Deserves not merely isolation

But comprehensive extermination.

We must not flinch from a solution.

(I await legal prosecution.)    

Maureen Fraser, then director of the Commission for Racial Equality in Scotland, condemned the poem as very offensive, and deeply inflammatory.  She found some of the language to be completely and utterly unacceptable.  The SNP MP Ian Blackford raised the issue in the House of Commons.  Some people thought his outrage was of the “faux” variety.  Humbug.  He was advised to lighten up.  It’s only a bit of banter.  And it is self-evidently a terrible poem, written in the style of William Topaz McGonagall.  The clue is in the title.  The “fire” is “friendly”. 

Of course, a friend’s ammunition is just as lethal as an enemy’s.  And more dangerous.  As was discovered in the Vietnam War, not all incidents of friendly fire are purely accidental.  You don’t expect to be shot in the back.      

“Just a bit of banter” is, like “woke nonsense”, another expression to be avoided.  All these references to sandy hair, knobbly knees, kilt, skean-dhu, sporran, and the Free Kirk (of which Kate Forbes is a member) – they are all clearly light-hearted and jocular.  And the last line with its acknowledgement that the poet is sailing close to the wind is evidently a disclaimer, a literary volte-face or palinode, a get-out-of-jail-free card.  The Jocks will take it all in good part.  

On the other hand, there is clearly a conscious and deliberate deployment of language that has a long and dark history – verminous race, polluting our stock, offensively foreign, ghetto, extermination, solution.      

The final solution.  You see what is being evoked.  I wonder if the editor of the Spectator had any idea that the Gaelic nation that was being lampooned had indeed, in the proscription of the tartan, the Gaelic language, and in the Highland Clearances, been subjected to a final solution.

Following the furore, the Spectator removed Friendly Fire from its website. 

I wish they hadn’t.  I would prefer the purveyors of friendly fire to remain in full view, out in the open, shooting themselves in the foot.  I wonder whether the Spectator removed Friendly Fire because they were persuaded it was in bad taste, or because they felt it was causing the organ reputational damage.  They might have said, “We fouled up.  This is not who we are.”  Removing a scurrilous article is a bit like the establishment stripping a disgraced individual of his knighthood, not because the individual is a cad and a bounder, but because the perpetuation of his gong tarnishes the establishment’s sheen.  That person is not a knight.  He was never a knight.  Like Dreyfus, his epaulettes are ceremonially ripped from his shoulders. 

No.  Let history remain to be seen, unmodified, as it happened.  Don’t obliterate it with a blue pencil.  Just write “stet”.  And don’t offer up an apologia.  You know the sort of thing: This language which seems entirely unacceptable to us, was commonplace in its day and reflected societal views widely held at the time.  Duh.  Freedom to critique is the reciprocal of freedom of expression and should not be micromanaged by any self-appointed arbiters of taste.  One of the most basic freedoms to be cherished, perhaps the most basic, is the right we each have as individuals to make up our own minds. 

Thursday, February 16.

Up up and away at crack of dawn to Glasgow, and my weekly tussle with the German language for the better part of three hours in Glasgow’s Goethe Institut.  I parked for free on Cleveden Drive.  It’s still about two miles from my destination, but I’m too mean to pay the exorbitant parking fees on Park Circus, and I enjoy the walk through Glasgow’s West End, via the Botanic Gardens.  I paused as usual for a flat white at The Paper Cup on Great Western Road.  I was able to read Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation speech, in full, in The National.

It’s a very good speech, frank, honest, and deeply personal.  I don’t know why some of the First Minister’s critics were so mean-spirited about it.  Even Donald Trump managed to be more gracious to Hilary Clinton when he won the Presidency in 2016.  He’d said her crimes were “egregious”, and had his mass gatherings chanting “Lock her up!”  Then when he defeated her, he thanked her for her years of public service.  “And I mean that most sincerely.”

I left The Paper Cup, walked past Hillhead School and cut through the cloisters of Glasgow University and then up through Kelvingrove Park in the direction of the statue of Lord Roberts of Kandahar, on horseback, looking back towards the University Tower.  Somebody has defaced the statue with the word “Murderer”. 

German was great fun, but terribly difficult (for me, anyway).  Viel Spaß, aber furchtbar schwierig. 

Afterwards, to unwind, I headed down as usual to the Kelvingrove Art Gallery in time for the daily 1.00 pm organ recital.  You are more likely to hear a medley from The Sound of Music than J. S. Bach’s St Anne’s Prelude and Fugue.  Don’t knock it; Climb Every Mountain is rather impressive on the organ.

Then I retraced my steps to the car, parked about 100 metres from my birthplace, Redlands Hospital, no longer there (the hospital, not the car).  Having some time on my hands, I took a further walk down Amnesia Lane, passing the various houses where I stayed as a child.  We continually flitted between grand mansions, because my mother and her three sisters ran care homes for the elderly in Glasgow’s West End.  My earliest recollections are full of the decrepit, the incontinent, and the confused.   My mum’s oldest sibling, Auntie Susie, had an extraordinary ability to acquire grand houses.  I don’t know how she did it.  She said she never had to take out a mortgage.  She was a Gael and I think she cultivated Highland connections.  She had started life downstairs “in service”, and she ended up looking after the aristocrat for whom she had worked.  50 Cleveden Drive had a rather grand bathroom on the first floor which had been installed to accommodate a visiting Prime Minister – I think it might have been Andrew Bonar Law.    

One of my school chums lived virtually next door in another grand house at the corner of Cleveden Road and Cleveden Drive.  This was a “home for unmarried mothers.”  I would pass them on my way to school, smoking cigarettes at the corner, heavy with child, looking as if they were about to be run over by a truck.

I crossed Great Western Road and walked past Gartnavel General Hospital to Hyndland Station, over the footbridge and into Broomhill.  For some reason the street names are all redolent of English history – Marlborough, Randolph, Churchill, Naseby, Edgehill…  I used to get up at 0630 to deliver papers on Naseby and Beechwood Drive, and because I rarely went to bed before midnight I spent half my school career in a state of terminal exhaustion.  I just remember the letter boxes were as tiny as the Sunday papers were bulky, and there were an inordinate number of homeowners in Beechwood named Colquhoun.   

51 Rowallan Gardens.  Our longest stay.  I have fond memories of it, but you forget the bad times.  We had a protracted war with our neighbours who couldn’t stand the sound of the piano or the viola, and would turn their radio up full blast.  I remember my father later voicing a regret.  We should have moved. 

Hyndland School.  The alma mater.  A penitentiary in red sandstone.  Spero meliora, said the school motto.  Were meliora achieved?  Goodness only knows.  I popped into Hyndland Bookshop, a wonderful independent bookshop full of enticing titles.  I bought Stephen Hough’s Enough, Scenes from Childhood (Faber, 2023).  I had already read the concert pianist’s Rough Ideas (Rough, Enough, rhymes with Hough).  I suppose this was Hough’s own version of a walk through the environs of his childhood, in his case the Wirral.  He doesn’t have a good word for Chethams, the music school, at least as it was in the 1970s.  It sounds bleak, tatty, and even sordid.  I was reminded of George Orwell’s memoir of a miserable childhood, Such, Such Were the Joys. 

17 Dowanside Road.  I remember a “speaking tube” between the ground floor and the basement, presumably whereby you could in a former age demand of the help a cup of afternoon tea.  At the top of Dowanside Road and just round the corner, 4 Crown Road North.  Auntie Susie also acquired No 6 and knocked a hole in the wall between them, while her sister Effie had the tall and stately number 15.  I stayed in 15 when I started school aged 5.  It was a walk of about half a mile.  I remember on day 2 I decided that school wasn’t for me, and walked home about mid-morning.  I was promptly turned around and sent back. 

1 Queens Gardens, opposite Notre Dame School.  Auntie Mhairi’s business, after 30 Marlborough Avenue.    

And finally, 2 Lorraine Road, the first of the nursing homes, acquired I think just before, or perhaps during the war.  My mum being a midwife delivered all my cousins there.  I took it all for granted.  Four highland women running a network of care homes across Glasgow’s West End – well, it was just de rigueur.  Quite extraordinary.                                  

Boris Johnson has told us that Richard Sharp knows nothing of his personal finances.  He can tell us that hundred per cent for ding-dang sure.  It’s another example of the BBC disappearing up its own fundament.  Mr Johnson’s slang is as anachronistic as Billy Bunter.

Fundament?

Chambers fundament the lower part or seat of the body

And then, perhaps more pertinently, the next entry in Chambers –

Fundamentum relationis the ground of relation, principle of, or the nature of, the connection.

What is the fundamentum relationis twixt Mr Sharp pointing Mr Johnson in the direction of £800,000, and Mr Johnson pointing Mr Sharp in the direction of the chairmanship of the BBC?  The Parliamentary Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Select Committee explored this issue with Mr Sharp.  They tried to get to the bottom of it.  Well, good luck with that.  Following an audit trail in London is like trying to find you way home through a dense fog.  A real pea-souper.  A committee member, the SNP MP John Nicolson, described Mr Sharp as “haughty”.   

Well, I suppose Mr Sharp has much to be haughty about, if he so chooses.  He graduated in 1978 (PPE, Christ Church, Oxford) and worked as a banker for J P Morgan for 8 years, and then Goldman Sachs for 23 years, where he was Rishi Sunak’s boss.  He was an adviser to Mr Johnson when the latter was London Mayor, and to Mr Sunak as Chancellor of the Exchequer.  He has donated £400,000 to the Conservative Party.  So, irrespective of the nature of the fundamentum relationis, Mr Sharp’s appointment to the BBC chairmanship was not exactly by “blind audition”. 

I can’t say I have the foggiest notion as to what a financial institution like Goldman Sachs actually does, but I imagine being a member of that particular club would open doors for you just as attendance at an English public school, then Oxbridge, would do the same.  The whole purpose of attending Eton, or Harrow, or Winchester, and then Oxford, is to establish what Jane Austen calls “useful acquaintance”.  The freemasonry of the haughty.  It’s a meal ticket for life.  The aim is to become recognised as “one of us”.  You become a member of an ancient, druidical witanagemot whose manners and customs are instantly recognisable within the fold, but not beyond.  The deployment of smoke and mirrors is so sophisticated as to create an illusion of transparency.  “Levelling up” is sleight of hand, a conjurer’s trick.  The rich get richer, and the poor ye will always have.  Yet the privileged have no real idea just how privileged they are, because they have no idea what lack of privilege must feel like.  They sit above the glass ceiling, look down upon those beneath who are unable to break through the ceiling, and they are contemptuous because the ceiling, being made of glass, is invisible, so they forget that it is there.                                      

It’s a very expressive word, haughty.  It comes from old French halt, haut, and Latin altus, high.  So it aptly describes the attitude and demeanour of the ruling class.  It’s highly perfumed, is haughtiness.  Hauteur.  Burns captures its quality perfectly in his radical poem A Man’s a Man for A’ That.  He has intense contempt for it.

Ye see yon birkie ca’d “a lord,”

Wha struts, an stares, an a’ that?    

Yes, hauteur certainly “struts and stares”.  It is a remarkable thing that when the Scottish Parliament was reconvened after a gap of nearly 300 years, Burns’ poem was sung in the presence of the monarch.  For some, Scottish Nationalism is primarily an attempt to escape from disdain.  The “establishment” becomes an object of mockery.

The man o independent mind,

He looks and laughs at a’ that.

There is something inherently ridiculous about the high and mighty. 

Meanwhile, an extraordinary (sic) cross-party summit has been held at Ditchley Park in conditions of the utmost secrecy to discuss the catastrophic economic fall-out of Brexit.  It’s like something out of a John Buchan “shilling shocker”, with mysterious men in Ulsters alighting from shooting brakes to gather at a country seat in order to manipulate the levers that control the world.  But why should such a meeting be held in camera?  Fog, everywhere.  It is the default mode to obfuscate.  The trick is not to be open, but to seem to be open.  That’s for ding-dang sure.  Hundred per cent.    

It occurred to me the other day, in a slow-witted way, that one’s mood is rather like the weather.  Some days are dreich, some cloudless, but mostly round these parts, it’s showers and sunny periods.  There’s not much point in complaining about it; just wrap up and get on with whatever you are supposed to be about.  You could imagine the late Duke of Edinburgh saying as much.  I don’t suppose he would have had much time for his grandson’s book, whose German translation is entitled „Reserve“.  But nowadays the quality of reticence, of being reserved, the stiff upper lip if you will, has rather fallen out of fashion.  It’s okay not to be okay.  So we say, let’s talk about the weather.

I haven’t read Prince Harry’s book.  I said in my German class last week that I was waiting for it to be remaindered.  Then I would pop into Waterstones and say, “Have you got a spare spare spare?”  It was a cheap gag.  I’m not proud of it.

When I was a medical student the psychiatrists were keen on making a distinction between “reactive” or “exogenous” depression on the one hand, and “endogenous” depression on the other.  You might be low, on the one hand, because outrageous fortune had just hurled too many slings and arrows at you, or, on the other because of some chemical imbalance in the brain which depressed your “affect” no matter what your external circumstances were.  The distinction was not clear-cut; there could be a progression from reactive to endogenous depression because sooner or later life’s endless vicissitudes would alter the brain’s hard wiring.  You might say, “Life eventually got to me.”  In this sense, endogenous depression was seen as a more serious illness than reactive depression, more likely to culminate in an altered mental state, a psychosis.  The voices might tell you to kill yourself.  This was the end of the spectrum psychiatrists were interested in.  Talking therapies were not so much in vogue.    

I remember the lecture when these theories were being propounded.  My neighbour leant over, shook his head, and whispered to me, “It’s all reactive.”  I don’t know why he thought that.  Maybe he looked at the patients, and at how miserable their lives were, and concluded than in their shoes he would be just as wretched.  But if he was right, then you might argue that depression was hardly a medical condition at all, rather a social one, and that its treatment would involve an attempt to improve a patient’s living conditions.  Yet at the time, major depression was seen as an organic disease, to be treated by interfering with neurotransmission, using potent drugs such as the tricyclic antidepressants.  The trouble with the tricyclics was that they were very dangerous in overdose, and after all, depressed patients were liable to overdose.  The selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, SSRIs, were yet to come on the market.

Electroconvulsive therapy, ECT, was still in vogue.  Here, the idea was that if depression really was a disease of neurotransmission, then somehow you could “wipe the slate clean” by passing an electric current across the brain.  I suppose it was analogous to treating ventricular fibrillation by passing a current across the heart, thereby “defibrillating” the rogue arrhythmia and bringing the heart muscle to a standstill in the hope that it would recommence in normal sinus rhythm.  ECT’s immediate effect was to cause an epileptiform convulsion.  Thereafter, it was hoped, the brain in quietude would revert to something more like its normal self.  The first locum I ever undertook as a medical student was in a psychiatric hospital and I assisted at a weekly ECT session.  The therapy was performed, mercifully, under general anaesthetic.  The anaesthetist was a cheerful young woman with a very sunny personality and the clinic was always a happy one.  I often wondered whether it was actually the weekly contact with her that improved the patient’s mood.  Or could it have been the general anaesthetic itself, rather than the ECT? 

ECT still fulfils a role, albeit more limited, but this sense of “wiping the slate clean” still persists in state-of-the-art therapies, for example, involving the use of hallucinogenic drugs to reset the brain’s myriad connections.  Professor David Nutt, head of Imperial College London’s Centre for Psychedelic Research researches this field, using Psilocybin, a component of magic mushrooms, under strict monitoring conditions.  (Don’t try this at home.)  You may imagine the use of such drugs to be controversial, and indeed Prof Nutt is no stranger to controversy.  He used to be chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD).  He told the government that horse-riding was more dangerous than ecstasy, so they sacked him.   

Nowadays, the distinction between reactive and endogenous depression has rather fallen out of favour, and psychiatrists are more inclined simply to note the severity of the condition in terms of its impact on the patient’s life.  (To return to the weather analogy, is this a short-lived squall, or is it what the inhabitants of Auckland have just experienced, the worst weather event in 200 years?  I look at the pictures of the Auckland streets, so familiar to me, turned into rivers.  Fortunately, New Zealanders are extremely resilient.)

The mood-weather analogy is not purely theoretical.  Seasonal Affective Disorder is a real entity. The climate continues to change, there is war in Europe, earthquakes abroad, rampant inflation at home, strikes and rumours of strikes, bile on social media, violence in the classroom…                                                       

Yet whose mood is not now beginning to lift, despite this winter of discontent, at the sight of banks of snowdrops, and the prospect of longer days?  I await, with buoyancy and hope, the crocuses. And then the daffodils.    

Back in the nineties in New Zealand they aired a US TV show about a guy whose weekly purgatorial task was to possess a given individual’s psyche and hence sort out somebody else’s existential crisis, whilst that individual was despatched temporarily to “the waiting room”.  I suppose it was a variation of The Fugitive, in which Dr Richard Kimble, played by David Janssen (and Harrison Ford in the movie) is a man wrongly accused, and convicted, of murder, who escapes and week by week enters other people’s lives incognito, solves a problem, and then must get on the run again.  He is always hopeful that at some stage he will be afforded the opportunity to solve his own existential crisis.  Similarly the serial possessor of psyches is a reluctant benefactor who is always hopeful that he will find a way out of his own labyrinthine dilemma.  I don’t know if this programme got to the UK, but perhaps you recognise it.

The protagonist had a companion or side-kick, part minder, part amanuensis, who would orientate him each time he glanced in the mirror at his new persona, and wondered what ghastly tangled web he had to unweave.  One week he’d be a concert pianist, the next he would find himself in the electric chair.  The minder would consult a device I did not recognise at the time, which belonged firmly to the realm of science fiction.  In fact it was a cross between a smart phone and a tablet.  It would spew out data about the particular life that needed to be sorted out that week.  The side-kick would consult the screen of his tablet regularly.  He was never off it.

I thought the whole thing was based on an absurd premise, and I had no inkling that it was all going to come true.  Nowadays, everybody navigates their way through life’s catacombs by consulting their mobile, to find out who they are, and what they should be doing.  What a catastrophe. 

Not that these devices don’t have their uses.  I imagine you could download an App, say, to help you navigate your way out of the Hampton Court Maze.  The route from a given location (identified by built-in Satnav) could be coded as a single number, given in binary.  0 is left, 1 is right.  Say the number is 011010010110.  You just navigate each junction sequentially, and escape. 

The trouble is, we have modelled all human dilemmas as an attempt to get out of a maze.  If this, do that.  Medicine is full of algorithms, constructed as a series of binary choices, and hence a series of branching lines.  Does the patient have chest pain?  Yes.  Is it severe?  Yes.  Has antacid medication provided relief?  No.  Is the pain of duration longer than an hour?  Yes.  Does the patient have pallor, sweating, or shortness of breath?  Yes.  Eventually you reach the bottom line.  Phone for a blue light ambulance.   

But of course experienced physicians don’t consult algorithms.  And they don’t think algorithmically.  They understand the severe limitations of this kind of pedestrian trudge, which is more than likely to lead you off into a remote branch line ending in a deserted cul-de-sac from which there is no way back.  We see the unintended and disastrous consequences of algorithms in many walks of life.  Look what happened to the sub-post masters when a computer system identified them all as criminals.  Look what happened to the A-level students from disadvantaged backgrounds whose exam grades were brutally downsized by an algorithm, during the pandemic. 

But in every walk of life, the high priests of information technology reign supreme.  During the first decade of this millennium they sold eye-wateringly expensive computer systems to public services such as the NHS, state education, and the police.  In primary care, the delivery of medical practice began to be dictated by pop-up menus on computer screens, targets enshrined in the Quality and Outcomes Framework, often reproduced as an aide-memoir on mouse pads, computerised systems of test result management such as Docman, and extremely time-consuming team-building exercises such as “Whole Systems Working”.  “Whole Systems Working” had better had been called “Entire Systems Collapsing” because that is the “Quality Outcome” the systems presaged.  Now, you can’t get through to the practice, you can’t see the GP, you can’t even get a timeous response to a 999 call, you can’t get an ambulance, you can’t get into hospital, but if you do, you can’t get out again. 

All the health care workers are either on strike or they are threatening to go on strike.  Mostly, governments, management, and workers talk about, or refuse to talk about, pay.  But in truth, no amount of pay could compensate for the intolerable misery of working in the toxic, dystopian environment we have created.

It goes without saying that there is too much bureaucracy, but I wonder if the problem isn’t much deeper than that.  The binary, algorithmic, digital way of looking at the world is profoundly inhuman.  I don’t believe that our brains are constructed to wander down a series of branches constructed as twenty questions in a Yes-No interlude.  At a deep level, “yes or no” don’t really work.  It may be fanciful, but perhaps the human apprehension of a dilemma is more akin to a series of so-called “double slit” experiments in which a single electron appears to pass through two disparate gateways simultaneously, but only if you are not looking.  (See Richard Feynman’s Lectures on Physics, volume 3, chapter 1, 1-4).

Now I read in the Sunday Telegraph of the “Hospitals at home” plan to save the NHS.  “Elderly and frail patients who fall will be treated by video link.”  Whatever happened to compassion, the human touch, and tender loving care?      

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.