Author: jamescalumcampbell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.     

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

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

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

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

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

Protracted silence.  Longer than you’d think. 

BONG…

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

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

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

What must be?

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

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

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

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

Where were we?

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

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

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

Bis nächste Woche!

I know it’s an overused expression, but I tell you, it’s positively Kafkaesque!

I recently discovered that I was paying over the odds to a certain anti-virus software company, being billed twice, once for a bog standard package, and once for a state-of-the-art all-bells-and-whistles piece of sophistication. I entered a chat room, and had a lengthy discussion with a robot, who I have to say was not particularly helpful, I daresay because it didn’t recognise the peculiar character of my plight. So I excused myself, and got on the blower. Having worked my way, via keypad, through an exhaustive menu, I was quite surprised finally to commence a conversation with a real human being. We agreed that the sophisticated package was superfluous to my needs; it was cancelled, and I was refunded.

Unfortunately the bog standard package also seemed to get cancelled (without the refund). I was back in the chat room, but to no avail. I was getting daily emails to tell me I was “unprotected”, To be honest, I couldn’t face another trawl through the menus for another phone call, so I gave up. Inevitably, therefore, I have become “infected”. Yesterday evening my computer started making seriously alarming noises. I thought my integrated smoke alarm system had gone off. The various tocsins were clearly designed to induce a sense of panic. I was invited to renew my subscription. So this morning I bit the bullet and proceeded so to do. I opted for the cheapest option, a year’s subscription being of the order of a pony, as our Cockney cousins would have it. The transaction appeared to proceed smoothly, all the way to the last hurdle. Having entered my credit card details, “they” (a Kafkaesque word if ever there was one) proposed to send a six a digit code to my mobile phone. It never came.

“Transaction failed. Try again later.” I did so, to no avail.

Yesterday, as it so happened, the minister in Dunblane Cathedral preached a sermon on the topic of “perseverence”. His text was from Luke, and concerned the parable of the poor widow who repeatedly put herself before a judge in an attempt to right a wrong, an injustice, that had been inflicted upon her. The judge was a heartless man, and couldn’t have cared less. But the widow was so persistent that in the end he grew weary, and granted her request, just so that he could have some peace. It’s all reminiscent of another story about a man who bangs on his neighbour’s door at dead of night in request of sustenance. The man who has been rudely awakened accedes to the request simply because he has been importuned. Now, says Jesus, how much more will our loving heavenly father heed our petitions?

So I took this all to heart, and persevered. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, and try again.

“Transaction failed. Try again later.”

Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel sing a beautiful song, “Don’t give up”, and I have an inspirational fridge magnet that says, “Never give up”. And Winston said to the boys at Harrow, “Never give in, never give in, never never never…” But even Winston added a rider, something like “save for considerations of common sense.” I’m not convinced that that heartless judge would have changed his mind about the widow. I’m not even sure he would have noticed her existence. The pivotal episode of Kafka’s “The Trial” occurs in a cathedral, and concerns the story of a man who spends a lifetime “going to law”, sitting in a waiting room outside a door which will grant him access to justice. At the end of his life he asks the doorman why it is that in all the time he has been waiting, he has never encountered another supplicant. It is because, he is told, this door has been specifically and exclusively created for him, and now, says the doorman, “I am going to close it.”

There’s another piece of biblical advice that rather contradicts the perseverence trope.

I must publish now, mid-flow, for reasons that I will explain.

Back soon!

My current New Zealand passport is due to expire in June next year so, mindful of the fact that les douaniers don’t like you to travel on a passport with less than six months to run, I thought I would apply for a renewal in good time.  Accordingly, not wishing my photo ID to make me look even more decrepit than I actually am, I popped into MacFadyen’s in Stirling for a haircut, thence to Timpson’s for a photo.  (I recall a rather Bacchanalian night out in Sydney last century, when a group of us passed our emergency medicine fellowship exams, following which we took an early morning flight back to Auckland.  At the Sydney Airport check-in, the official glanced at the passport of a very beautiful young lady in our group, glanced up at her, and said, “You look even worse than your passport photo.”)

Timpson’s (“a family business run on the values of trust & kindness”) did well by me.  Granted it’s a bit of a mug shot (I believe Timpson’s employs people who have been detained at His Majesty’s pleasure), but that’s what you want.  You mustn’t smile, rather look glum, even a little shifty.  Nothing sums up the fleeting nature of life (swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, my mum said) better than the series of one’s passport photos, perhaps seven or eight increasingly wrinkled snaps before the final expiry date.  When I bought my all electric Skoda Enyaq a year or two ago my local shopkeeper remarked, sincerely but perhaps a little tactlessly, “That might be your last car.”  I must mention the passport to him. 

Then I contacted a New Zealand pal who might vouch for my identity, and that was me sorted.  I went online on Thursday evening and submitted my application.  And now here’s the thing.  On Friday morning around 10.00 am I parked at Ingliston Park & Ride, by Edinburgh airport, and took the nine or ten mile walk into Edinburgh city centre, along the route of the tram line.  Just as I set off, I got a text to tell me my application had been processed and the passport would be delivered by courier to my home address on Monday.  How good is that?  Well, here we are on Monday.  Hopefully I can give you the result in real time.

My NZ passport is very important to me.  I entertain this pipe dream.  I call it my “Blue Bayou” fantasy.  “I’m going back some day…”  I’m having a conversation here in Blighty with increasing frequency.  When I mention that I have dual citizenship, the reply is usually, “Lucky you.  A bolt hole.  You can get out.” I usually agree, and say that if Mr So-and-So gets in at the next general election, I’m off to Ninety Mile Beach.  Of course it’s a bit of an indulgence.  Why would you want to leave a place when perhaps one thousand people are desperate to come here across the channel every sunny day?  The grass is always greener.

Doubtless my nostalgia for NZ is a little rose-tinted.  Certainly when I was last there, just before the Covid Lockdown in 2020, I was aware that the country, or at least Auckland, was becoming a little more like the rest of the world.  It was becoming expensive to dine out.  The house prices had sky-rocketed.  The main highway was in a state of perpetual gridlock. 

I think New Zealand was quicker to realise the reality of an impending pandemic than the rest of the world.  In the five weeks that I was there, in February and early March, the newspapers (not usually renowned for their foreign news coverage) were full of news from Wuhan.  Then in early March, just after I’d returned to the UK, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern effectively closed the borders.  It must be said that NZ managed the pandemic extremely effectively.  Cases, and fatalities, were low.  But inevitably the economy took a hit.  And this was ultimately why Ms Ardern lost popularity at home.  Her public health measures came to be regarded as draconian.  The contrast between her reputation at home, and abroad, was stark.  A prophet is never recognised in her own country.  I think it was Enoch Powell (and he would have known) who said that all political careers end in failure.  Jacinda Ardern wasn’t actually voted out of office.  She chose to step down when she felt that she had, as she put it, “nothing left in the tank”.  But when I gathered that she had become unpopular it did make me realise yet again that NZ, like everywhere else, was falling in love with the love of money.  It’s the economy, stupid.  I believe that the NZ I knew, thirty, forty years ago, would under similar circumstances have tightened her belt, mucked in, and pulled together.

(Text update 1120: parcel will arrive soon.  I’m getting quite excited.) 

Yet, returning to my passport saga, it does seem to me to indicate one thing: New Zealand still works.  New Zealanders have a can-do attitude.  All things are possible.  Kiwis take a pride in what they do because, indeed, they are proud of their country.  They – actually I should say “we” – don’t have much time for obfuscation.  Temperamentally, they would rather remove difficulties than create them.  I always remember a scene in the film The King’s Speech, starring Colin Firth, Helena Bonham Carter and Geoffrey Rush.  I know I’ve blogged about this before, but I think it’s worth a reiteration.  When, at his coronation in Westminster Abbey, King George VI asks the Archbishop of Canterbury to ensure that his speech therapist, Lionel Logue, is accommodated in the seating reserved for the royal family, the archbishop, who is a snob and who thinks Logue is a parvenu and an upstart, scratches his chin and says, “Well of course, your Majesty, I’ll see what I can do, but it is going to be very, very difficult.”

Why should something be easy in one country, and very very difficult in another?  I think the answer lies in powerful, vested interests.  When something of vital importance to the little person is of no interest to, or offers no advantage to, or perhaps even threatens the prosperity of the rich and powerful, then that thing of vital importance is liable to be kicked into the long grass.  To paraphrase, if it’s not too fanciful, you might say that the difference between NZ and the UK is the difference between unicameral government, and the House of Lords.    

1230:  Passport’s arrived, bang on time.

God bless New Zealand. 

Monday, September 29^th

Monday morning is blog morning.  I wrote about railway trains, around the 200^th anniversary of the inaugural Stockton to Darlington run.  As is often the case, I had no idea what I was going to write about until I started blethering away.  (I dare say it shows.)  I’ve been blogging weekly now since January 2015, so there are nigh on 600 blogs somewhere out in the ether.  It has been a great boon for me, this discipline, so much better than keeping a private diary.

To Arlington Baths in Glasgow in the afternoon.  I came here as a child, and a little over a year ago I renewed my membership.  It is the nearest thing to time travel that I know.  Generally I have a Turkish bath and a swim, but just occasionally I venture on to the travelling rings, and trapezes.  In my advanced years I do feel a bit of a prat, but on the other hand I feel it’s good for my back, hanging about in mid-air.  One of these days I will perform the transfer between trapezes, known as “the fly”, for the first time in fifty years.  I will certainly blog about that.

To Little Italy on Byres Road (excellent lasagne), thence to the Sir Charles Wilson Building of Glasgow University for the annual Bowman Lecture, when a distinguished speaker talks about the application of statistical methods to some field of human endeavour that is in the public interest.  On this occasion Paul Johnson, erstwhile director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies, now Provost of The Queen’s College Oxford, gave a talk on wealth inequalities.  His slides were packed with data, and I had to concentrate.  Surely it has become a given that in our society the gap between the rich and the poor is widening?  But the data would suggest that if anything, over the past decade or so the gap has somewhat narrowed.  “Nothing to see here.”  No, it was back in the 80s that the gap suddenly appeared, and skyrocketed, a process from which one may say there has not been a recovery.  Was Mrs Thatcher selling off the family silver?  But the name of the Iron Lady was never mentioned, and indeed Paul Johnson said he would present data and refrain from political interpretation.  Let the facts speak for themselves, or, as Burns put it, “Facts are chiels that winna ding” – by which I think he meant that an exposition of the truth should not give rise to any cognitive dissonance.  But I immediately regret my translation.  Abstraction is the curse of modern discourse.

I was actually surprised at how narrow the gap between rich and poor, for most of us, actually is.  By and large.  On an ascending scale of affluence, and if memory serves me right, a household – not even an individual, but a household – taking in about £12,500 per annum sits on the 10^th percentile; £25,000 – 50^th percentile; £50,000 – 90^th percentile; £150,000 – 99^th percentile.  No, it’s only above the 99.9% mark, the top 0.001%, where people start earning the really big bucks.  I suppose this rather bolstered a notion I’ve long entertained, that, around these airts and pairts, the elite really are elite. 

Another slide sticks in the memory.  If you want to be upwardly mobile, go to a private school.

Tuesday, September 30^th

I’m rationing my exposure to politics.  It’s the Labour Party Conference this week.  They say that the PM’s coat is on a shoogly peg, and that Andy Burnham is manoeuvring.  Sir Keir had to give the keynote address of his life, or go under.  I only caught the briefest soundbite.  As he proclaimed a litany of government achievement, an apparently enraptured audience, all waving patriotic flags, drowned it all out with the white noise of prolonged applause.  They resembled the audience of the politburo. 

Wednesday, October 1^st

October 1^st is a poignant day for me, my father’s birthday, and the day of my mother death.  I and a family member met at Falkirk Crematorium, as we do, to lay flowers where our parents’ ashes are buried.  It is a beautiful space, lovingly tended.  We lunched in Falkirk.  Last week I believe the town was bedecked with saltires on lampposts, an expression of disapproval at the extent of uncontrolled immigration.  But I only saw one flag. 

Thursday, October 2^nd

Yom Kippur.  There has been a terrible incident in Manchester.

To Glasgow and my German class.  I drove in.  Driving into Glasgow can be something of a nightmare.  The M8 has been “up” for years.  Maybe six or seven years, I do not exaggerate.  Since before the Covid lockdown, a mile east of the Kingston Bridge, westbound, the road narrows to two lanes.  This has nothing to do with roadworks on the M8 itself, we are told, but roadworks under that part of the M8 which is a flyover.  My theory is that the M8 now has to take a volume of traffic never imagined when it was opened in the 1960s, and that structurally it has become dangerous; and that, moreover, as my mother used to say of people with chronic terminal illness, “there is no betterment”.  We’re stuck with it. 

You might imagine the road into town would be okay if you came off at Glasgow Cathedral and the Royal Infirmary, thereby missing the bottleneck down to the Clyde.  Not so.  Along Cathedral Street, the road is, again, “up”.  It’s been like that for weeks.  The usual thing, bollards, and a temporary traffic light.  I have no idea why.  Nobody is working there.  

I park in the Buchanan Galleries.  I rather like the Buchanan Galleries, as shopping malls go, but apparently there are moves afoot to tear them down.  I have no idea why. They are barely older than the current century.

Then on the way out, to get back on to the M8 eastbound, for several weeks now, you encounter another set of bollards and another temporary traffic light.  

The German class was great.  Much talk, and laughter.  I have talked myself into presenting a musical quiz.  I’m slightly wary of it, because music is an enthusiasm of mine and I know I could easily make the whole thing quite recherché.  So I’ve deliberately kept it light and, I hope, amusing, and have structured the questions in such a way that you could have a bash even if you were tone deaf.  Now it’s not so much the quiz itself that preoccupies me, rather the technical question of how to grapple with the IT and present music and pictures, son et lumières.  We’ll see how it goes. 

We read a piece by Jette Poensgen, a fifteen year old girl living in Lauchhammer, a small East German town in South Brandenburg which lies, as she puts it, somewhere between the past and stagnation.  Zecke?  Nehm ich als Kompliment.  Tick?  I’ll take it is as a compliment.  The point is, she gets harassed by fellow students whom she calls out for expressing far-right extremist views.  Apparently it has become quite cool to give Nazi salutes in the school corridor, or to bully somebody by writing a concentration camp number on their forearm.  Jette says that for a while she was silent, through lack of self-confidence, but now she calls it out.  I take my hat off to her.  Such insight, and eloquence, at such a young age.  And such courage.     

Friday, October 3^rd

Storm Amy due this evening.  I got out early to walk, and went to my other baths club, the Stirling Highland Hotel.  Somebody said, “Amy doesn’t sound very threatening.”  The two baths clubs I belong to could hardly be more different.  In Arlington, people tend to keep themselves to themselves.  In the Stirling Highland, conversation is incessant and uninhibited.  We know one another.  When people wax intemperate, they are called out.  A group of us meet up in the pub twice a year.  I value it.  There are plumbers and miners and shopkeepers.  Such a relief to inhabit the real world. 

Saturday, October 4^th

To go, or not to go, to the inaugural concert of the new RSNO season in Glasgow.  Mahler 7. 

I thought of all the traffic jams, and didn’t go. 

Sunday, October 5^th

Scrumptious lunch, and warm hospitality, at my cousin’s in Bearsden.  But first, the 125^th anniversary of the founding of the Boys’ Brigade in Dunblane.  I attended the service in Dunblane Cathedral.   The cathedral was full, the BB band excellent.  I hadn’t realised that the BB, started in Glasgow in 1883, now extends across the whole world.  I enjoyed the service, though as an outsider.  To quote Cary Grant, I’ve never been a joiner.  I’ve never belonged to any of the para-military organisations.  I only went the whole hog, into the RAF volunteer reserve. 

Talking of anniversaries, I gather today is International James Bond Day.  63 years ago today, the first James Bond film, Dr No, was released.  What a tremendous stroke of luck for Ian Fleming, who always had his eyes on the big bucks, that Sean Connery should have been cast as Bond.  At first Fleming was doubtful, but he was won round, and even wrote Scottish ancestry into his hero when he wrote his obit, albeit prematurely.  And at the end of the whole saga, when Bond turned down his knighthood, he sent a telegram to M: “Eye am a Scottish peasant and eye will always feel at home being a Scottish peasant…”  Evidently the old Etonian had mellowed.     

Monday, October 6^th

Blog day.  What shall I talk about?                            

Last week saw the two hundred year anniversary of the historic train journey from Stockton to Darlington which is widely regarded as the inauguration of the age of rail, and perhaps even the start of the industrial revolution.  We were taught about it very early on in primary school, and I can remember struggling to read, phonetically, the name Gee-orgy Step-henson, much to my parents’ amusement. 

BBC Radio 3 chose to celebrate the occasion, and despatched Petroc Trelawny on a train from Inverness bound for London Kings Cross.  If the anniversary had fallen only a few months earlier, he would have been able to travel all the way to Penzance.  That was the longest rail journey in the UK, but the service is no longer being offered, so Kings Cross it had to be.  Other Radio 3 announcers chatted with Petroc along the way, and a nostalgic railway retrospective was interspersed with railway-related music.  I think it was a brave project to take on.  I wonder if Radio 3 had a Plan B, in the event that Petroc got delayed, diverted into some remote siding down the east coast, and transferred to a bus.  Rather than being a panegyric to the golden age of steam, the programme would have become a farcical reflection of “Broken Britain”.  Perhaps Petroc could have played it for laughs.     

I only dipped in and out a couple of times, so I’m not sure what the choice of music was.  Surely they would have had Honegger’s Pacific 231, and also the highly evocative The Little Train of the Caipira, which forms the last movement of Villa Lobos’ Bachianas brasileiras No. 2.  They certainly played Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, which was the sound track for Brief Encounter, the 1945 film starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson.  The action takes place almost entirely within a railway station tearoom.  It was shot in black and white, which must have reflected the drab post-war age of austerity.  It’s a kind of yearning for high romanticism as perceived, imagined, and yearned for, within a situation of humdrum mundanity.  Celia Johnson’s character, Laura Jesson, is not unhappy.  On the contrary she is happily married with two children to whom she is devoted.  She sits quietly at home in a plush armchair doing embroidery, while her husband struggles with the Times crossword.  She only becomes unhappy when she falls in love with the dashing doctor, Alec Harvey, who happens to remove a fleck of dust from her eyelid.  They sit in quiet despair in the station tearoom, the background of bells and whistles reminding them that their time is running out. 

Their brief affair is never consummated.  There is a story – apocryphal for all I know – that during an early screening, somebody in the cinema yelled out, “When’s he going to have relations with her?”  That at least is the gist of what he cried.  But it was a different world, the world of the novels of Nevil Shute.  Watching the film now, one is struck by the lack of multiculturalism.  Much more apparent is class difference.  There are people who speak RP, and people who speak Cockney.     

The lovers’ affair is constrained by railway timetables.  In the end, when they only have a few precious moments left, an acquaintance of Laura sits down beside them and starts wittering on.  It’s excruciating.  Alec disappears to Johannesburg, and Laura briefly contemplates throwing herself under an express.  But she doesn’t.  Instead she goes back to her husband Fred, still struggling with the Times crossword, but showing himself to be much more astute than one might have thought.  “You’ve been a long way away.  Thank you for coming back.”  Actually he says, “Thank you for coming beck.”

(Incidentally, and apropos of nothing, the Sunday Times runs a weekly crossword clue competition.  A month or two ago we were invited to submit a clue for the word “Biped”.  I submitted a train-related clue.    

Upstanding young woman coming out around 3.14, westbound (5)

Didn’t win.          

Yehudi Menuhin rather admired Brief Encounter.  He himself had a brief foray into the world of cinema when he took a screen test for the role of Paganini.  I think he played it for laughs.  He said he “didn’t disenjoy” the experience.  The role eventually went to Stewart Grainger, but Menuhin recorded the sound track.

In 1936, W. H. Auden wrote a poem for a film about the dissemination of the post across Scotland, entitled The Night Mail.  The music is by Benjamin Britten.  The combination of film, words and music, is extraordinarily powerful.  But it all belongs to a different age, an age of confidence.             

Ian Fleming had a particular penchant for trains, but his journeys are always abroad, particularly in the States.  Bond never had any qualms about consummating relationships, especially to the background throb of a train engine, in Live and Let Die, and again in From Russia with Love.  A train in Diamonds are Forever becomes a funeral pyre, and the scene of a shoot-out in The Man with the Golden Gun.  Train stations and trains seem to open up a world of endless possibility, but only abroad.  British Railways?  Bond sighed. 

I can sympathise.  The last time I made the journey to London by rail, it became something of a saga.  We went down the east coast.  Two trains ahead of us broke down, and we stopped to pick up the passengers.  The carriages became crammed with people, seated and standing, and luggage.  We ran very late.  It was inconvenient, but the return journey was truly a nightmare.  Everything that could conceivably go wrong, went wrong.  Signal failures, mechanical failures, line obstructions…  We sat motionless outside York for an unconscionable period and then, in an effort to find a way forward, crossed over to the west coast, only to encounter more difficulties.  Moreover I was developing a sore throat and a fever, and was feeling wretched.  We crawled into Stirling around midnight.  I staggered back to my car, to find I had a flat tyre. 

And now we have, or don’t have, HS2.  HS2 seems to me to be scandalous.  Eye-watering sums of money have been spent, and no progress has been made.  People’s homes have been compulsorily purchased.  And to what end?  What, in any case, is to be the advantage of reaching your destination twenty minutes earlier?  But HS2 has been parked on the back-burner, while our attention is diverted by a second runway at Gatwick, and a third at Heathrow.  Meanwhile, paddy fields have been installed in the south of England, and rice, basmati and risotto, I believe, successfully grown, perhaps beside the Gewürztraminer vineyards in the Somerset Levels.  You will recognise the connection.  Our politicians don’t.  They cannot join up the dots.    

Have you ever been to a state banquet?  I have; twice, after a fashion.  When I was in New Zealand I was for a couple of years the National Medical Advisor to the Order of St John, which sounds very grand, but I was essentially advising the ambulance service on the training of first aiders. During my brief stint I edited the 2^nd edition of the New Zealand First Aid Manual, the authorised training manual of the Order of St John.  Anyway the appointment was at the behest of New Zealand’s then Governor General, Sir Michael Hardie Boys, and I guess that was why I ended up, twice, in Government House in Auckland, at a swanky do.

Well I say swanky, but I can tell you it was nothing like the nosh-up in Windsor Castle for President Trump’s unprecedented second state visit.  Did you see that picture of the big long table, at which the great and the good on either side were separated by a huge floral arrangement of stunning opulence?  It must have made conversation, other than with one’s immediate neighbours, impossible.  By contrast, in Auckland we sat at circular tables each accommodating about a dozen people, and I was surprised on both occasions to find myself sharing a table with the G.G., and Lady Hardie Boys.  They were very charming, and Sir Michael seemed genuinely interested in my work.  I remember there were people present at these dinners, from all walks of life, and we all seemed to share a certain bewilderment that we had received the invitation at all. 

Much later, after I’d returned to Scotland, the Westminster Government appointed a New Zealand high court judge, Dame Lowell Goddard QC, as independent chair of an inquiry into institutional child sex abuse.  Allegedly, a paedophile ring operated within the City of Westminster.  When she was asked how she would cope with the British Establishment, she expressed a similar sense of bewilderment to that I’d encountered in Auckland.  New Zealand, she said, does not have an Establishment.  I thought then of my visits to Government House, and found myself in agreement.  New Zealand, or at least the Eotearoa of the end of last century, did not have an elite.  That is not to say that there weren’t posh schools, wealthy people, a thriving private health sector, and so on.  I even came across a few snobs.  But what there wasn’t, was an elite group so crème de la crème that it was essentially sequestered away from the rest of common humanity.  The gap between the rich and the poor, at least at the time, was relatively narrow.  (Well I say that, but I’m not Maori, nor Polynesian.) 

But if the state banquet at Windsor was anything at all, it was sequestered.  It was conducted, in fact, entirely behind closed walls.  Marine One touched down within Windsor Park.  The President and the First Lady were met by the Prince and Princess of Wales.  They proceeded through the park by horse and carriage, along a driveway lined by the military, but not by the public.  No doubt the security concerns were compelling.  But the President must have been more than satisfied with the resultant publicity shots.  Such Pomp and Circumstance.  Security would have remained top of the agenda throughout the ensuing banquet.  Nobody, after having had a few drinks, was going to heckle the president.  “I just want to set the record straight on a few things…”  The entire shebang took place within a cocoon, and was choreographed right down to the last pas de deux.  I thought the vast, groaning dinner table looked utterly absurd.  It was the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. 

But I for one am relieved that the whole event went off without a glitch.  I wouldn’t have minded so much a breach of etiquette, as a serious and violent incident.  There wasn’t even a lapse of manners.  No doubt the king was charming, and the president seemed to be on his best behaviour.  The question has arisen, was the Prime Minister merely being sycophantic, or did he play a blinder?  I’m inclined to think he did very well, up to a point.  He was polite and courteous.  He expressed differences of opinion, for example, concerning migration, global warming, and the Palestinian two-state solution, without recourse to disparagement or personal attack.

But I’m not at all convinced by the worthiness of the supposed economic prize.  All these Hi Tech Moguls came across on Air Force One and promised investments in British AI worth billions.  We will have once more and yet again the latest manifestation of the Dark Satanic Mills, huge factories consuming vast amounts of energy and cooled by oceanic amounts of water.  What will they be doing?  They will be trawling, or perhaps trolling, the internet, looking at absolutely everything, in order to discern a pattern.  We absolutely must get ahead in the tech race.  Bletchley Park gone mad.  We are creating, have already created, the next Dystopia.     

I will be eternally grateful for the thirteen years I spent in New Zealand.  I believe I witnessed the possibility, indeed the reality, of a society based on egalitarian values, a sense of community, an acknowledgment of the responsibility to look out for one’s neighbour.  That is not to say that bad things didn’t happen in New Zealand.  Of course not.  I saw them, at first hand, in the Emergency Department.  But this was broadly before the age of the internet.  Cell phones were in their infancy.  There were no social media.  People lived, and communed, in the real world.  People didn’t post messages anonymously, going viral, to suggest, for example – I kid you not – that illegal immigrants be gassed.  Who would have thought the road to Auschwitz-Birkenau was this short?   

I’m intrigued that the Far Right has taken to trumpeting Christianity as one of its “core values”.  In the wake of the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk, even President Tump has, unusually, started to invoke the name of “God”.  He has advised Sir Keir to bring the military on to the beaches, otherwise, the UK will be destroyed.  I can only imagine that he has not considered deeply the meaning of Christ’s Parable of the Good Samaritan.  This is a parable which turns our perception of reality on its head.  We are used to the idea of ourselves, from a position of power, lending succour – or not – to the poor and needy.  But the parable puts ourselves into the position of the person who has been attacked, robbed, and left for dead, and asks us to imagine that it is the despised outsider who comes to our aid.  We thus are called upon to identify the outsider as our neighbour.  I have a notion that now, somebody preaching such a doctrine would not get very far in today’s political climate.  How would Jesus fare if were alive today?

I think he’d be crucified.        

There was tremendous excitement in the scientific world last week with the discovery of some sort of echo of a shadow of a footprint of a fossil of a microbe from a few billion years ago on Mars.  Extra-terrestrial life!  This reminds me of a scene – I think from the film Poltergeist – when an investigator of the paranormal brags she once saw a kitchen utensil move a fraction of an inch in the absence of any apparent external agency.  She then opens the door to a room which really is in dire need of an exorcism, and is dumbfounded to find all the cluttered contents flying around in a perfect maelstrom.  I suppose the moral of the tale is that, if there really were something out there, we would know about it.

There are various theories as to why our satellite dishes have not, thus far, picked up any messages from afar.  One is that intelligent beings from elsewhere have taken note of our predilection to violence, and have decided to have nothing to do with us.  Who could blame them?  Another theory is that the tendency to aggression is, literally, universal, and that all civilisations self-destruct before they develop the technology to venture substantial light years abroad.  The universe is teeming with life, but incommunicado.  I believe there is an equation that calculates the number of civilisations there are, based on the number of galaxies, the number of stars therein, and the number of orbiting planets inhabiting the “Goldilocks Zone”.  The equation’s solution is a substantial number.     

My gut instinct, not founded on any logical construct, but purely visceral, is that we are entirely alone.  After all, we’ve been listening out for over a century now, across the wavelengths of fifteen billion light years.

Deafening silence.

Nary a cheap.

Probably just as well.  At least the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary don’t need to worry about a steady influx of alien immigrants from Alpha Centauri, paying exorbitant fees to Masters of the Universe in order to board obsolete and gimcrack spacecraft, quite inadequate to the task of passing by Jupiter and through the asteroid belt.  Stop the flying saucers! 

I attended a funeral last week.  Actually I attended two on consecutive days.  I think it was Bernard Levin who confessed that he could not quite get used to the recurrent disappearing act of his friends.  The funerals could not have been more unlike.  The first was in Dunblane Cathedral, and was extremely high.  We heard organ music by J. S. Bach, and Olivier Messiaen.  First Corinthians Chapter 1 was read in 17^th century prose in its entirety.  The psalmody was austere.

The second was in a new crematorium to the north of Glasgow.  The ceremony was entirely secular.  The celebrant was very warm hearted.  We heard Sinatra sing My Way, and Louis Armstrong, It’s a Wonderful Life.  Both ceremonies were very enriching, and the “afterwards” heart-warming.  Lovely purvey.

I’m a Glaswegian, but Glasgow is notoriously territorial, and you do not need to venture far in the city to get lost.  (Fortunately I had sat-nav, even if it did let me down in the end.  “You have reached your destination.  It is on the right.”  On my right was a field.  I had to ask a passer-by.  The crematorium was several fields to the north.  Close, but no cigar.)  Anyway I found myself driving north up Springburn Road in the direction of Bishopbriggs.  Through a working class area, mile after mile, the street lampposts carried saltires.  This had nothing to do with Scottish Nationalism, and everything to do with migrants and asylum seekers.  The rhetoric on social media is daily becoming more intemperate.  It is no longer “stop the boats”, but “sink the boats”.  And much worse than that. 

I dare say the saltires were being unfurled by the extreme right, but flying a flag is a bit like flying a kite.  Or like publishing a book.  Once it’s out there in the public domain, you no longer have any control over its meaning and purport.  The words may be your intellectual property, but the ideas are up for grabs.  The flags were positioned halfway up the lampposts, presumably because this was as far as the ladders would extend.  But it gave the impression of an array of saltires all flying at half-mast.  We were therefore in a state of mourning.  The flag is lowered to half-mast in order to give precedence to the death flag, which, while invisible, is there.

I suppose the two contrasting funerals served to emphasise two different ways of looking at the world, and the universe; the sacred way, and the secular way.  We may search for an underlying meaning, and purpose, to our lives; or we may say that life is inherently meaningless or, as Albert Camus might have said, absurd.  That same dichotomy comes up when we contemplate our position in the vastness of space-time.  We may ask, if we on this tiny blue speck are entirely alone, what could that possibly mean?  Or we may say that the very question is meaningless, and absurd.  Sometimes I have the feeling that deep space, and deep time, are merely an illusion.  Maybe the Spanish Inquisition had it right all along.  We really are, contrary to expectation, at the centre of the universe.  But then again, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. 

 But I can’t get terribly exercised about these deep philosophical questions.  Maybe it’s a lack of imagination on my part, but they don’t bother me.  It is the human condition to see everything through a glass darkly.  Doubt is, of itself, an article of faith.  I suppose I found some sort of resolution on Sunday evening, playing my viola in Stirling, in concert in The Church of the Holy Rude.  The acoustic was very forgiving.  I had a short solo.  It rang out across the tremendous space.  I said to the conductor afterwards, “Gosh, what a sound.  Was that me?”  She laughed and said, “Yes, it was you.”

We forgathered in St Michael’s Church in Linlithgow yesterday at 3.00 pm, The Antonine Ensemble, to rehearse for an evening concert.  Just at the downbeat, all hell broke loose with a series of stereophonic caterwauling wails echoing around the vast spaces of the kirk.  It was another dress rehearsal – for a putative national emergency.  All the phones had gone off, including the “phasers on stun”.  Not mine.  I’d deliberately switched mine off and left it in the car.  This was not of itself an act of non-compliance, but just my routine.  I never take my phone into concerts, even in switched off mode, for I just don’t trust it.  And I switch it off when I’m in a restaurant, and indeed at every social gathering.  I just have no desire to be connected.  I have no desire to fact-check something on the net halfway through my soup course, or to review my holiday snaps.  “Snaps”.  There’s a word.  Alan Bennett might use it. 

But I have to admit, even had I not been in company, I would have switched the damn thing off.  Just to be egregious, literally e grex, out of the herd.  I do not wish to be herded.  I do not wish “the authorities” to inform me, at least electronically, that I am in imminent danger of fire, flood, plague, pestilence, or terrorist attack.  It strikes me that this latest government wheeze is all part of a hidden agenda to inure us to the fact that we have all yet again donned khaki, and we must be ready to repel the invader.  A pox on their app. 

A decade ago, even a year or two ago, I would have written that without a care in the world.  But now I am conscious that putting something like that out into the public domain is not without its risks.  Maybe I’m contravening some public order legislation. Incitement to non-compliance, or something.  It’s hard to ignore the fact that the UK is gradually becoming more authoritarian.  We’re all going to carry ID cards.  Actually I have no particular objection to ID cards, because as a matter of fact – I’ve just conducted a quick inventory – I already have 19 of them in my wallet, not counting my Ground coffee loyalty card (other baristas are available).  What I object to is that apparently I have to have the ID on my phone.  It’s all a part of this gradual slide into a state of Total Digitalisation.  One’s presence in the Cloud is mandatory.  There is no escape from the catastrophic dystopia we have already created.

The fact that, yesterday at 3.00, even the mobiles on silent mode emitted a siren, is highly significant.  Winston Smith could turn the volume down on his telescreen, but he could not switch the device off.  There followed an explanation, given in emollient tones, that this was merely, on this occasion, a drill.  Who dreams up stuff like this?       

You make think I’m a Luddite, but actually I carried my first mobile phone in 1987.  It was the size of a brick, and resembled a walkie-talkie John Wayne might have used on Juno, or Omaha.  The battery was the size of a car battery.  I used it in New Zealand when I was on call to provide a liaison between Middlemore Hospital in South Auckland, and Auckland International Airport.  So I know a little about disaster preparedness.  There were three levels of call-out.  The first was purely advisory, and reported a potential hazard.  For example, an incoming 747 had shut down one if its four engines, a surprisingly common occurrence.  The second level indicated a more serious threat, and demanded my presence at the airport.  The assembly point was at a perimeter fence, near the Domestic Terminal, bearing the sign “Don’t park here ever”.  There I would park, and wait, with the emergency services, hopefully to be stood down.  We gathered there routinely when there was “purple airspace”, that is, when a Royal was flying in.  Why that specifically constituted a hazard I have no idea.  Maybe the Royal was at the controls.  The skies were cleared.  The traffic due for departure was kept on the ground.  Pilots, say, from American Airlines would call up the tower and ask, “What’s the problem?” – knowing perfectly well what the delay was due to, and no doubt wishing to cause a little discomfort.

The third and final echelon of call-out was, of course, for a crash.  In my ten years of undertaking this job, that only occurred once.  A freight plane on a night flight out of Auckland crashed in the Manukau Harbour, and I spent the night out on a boat while the frogmen dived where the aircraft wreckage was floating.  I had the melancholy task of declaring one of the two pilots deceased.  I remember that apart from a gash across the front of her shin, there wasn’t a mark on her body. 

Shortly after this, I was sitting on a committee in Middlemore tasked with revising the hospital Disaster Plan.  I was very conscious that at the time it was very underdeveloped.  One of the managers prepared a report suggesting that we were in a high state of readiness.  I pointed out that in fact the report depicted a scenario that was entirely divorced from reality.  But the report was ratified.  I think this was the first time that I came across the phenomenon of politicians (in the widest sense), managers, committee members, members of think tanks, Quangos, people in various ways divorced from the “coal face”, who would construct a plan, often in the form of an algorithm, which had no relationship to reality. 

This is why it is no damaging that so many of our politicians have attended elite schools, elite universities, and entered upon a research fellowship, sponsored by a political party, never once having suffered life’s vicissitudes, as they are suffered by the disadvantaged.  There was, was there not, an air of farce about last week’s latest “Cabinet Reshuffle”.  You go to bed one night as incumbent of one of the great offices of state, and you wake up in the morning as incumbent of another.  I have no confidence that the incumbents within the Westminster Bubble can recognise what a disaster is, let alone respond to it.