Author: jamescalumcampbell

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.                                       

Glyndebourne came to the Royal Albert Hall last Wednesday with Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (semi-staged, sung in Italian, with English surtitles).  The opera also came, so I’m told, with a health warning, or rather, what is known as a “trigger warning”.  The Marriage of Figaro depicts unwanted sexual advances, and aggressive behaviour.  Don’t say you weren’t told.

Such premonitions can rouse feelings in the audience ranging from mild amusement, to unabashed hilarity; from irritability, to frank outrage.  It’s health and safety gone mad I tell you.  What a snowflake society!  But such warnings are not new.  For as long as I can remember, the BBC has advised that some programmes “may disturb those of a nervous disposition”.  Quatermass and the Pit. 

Still, perhaps the opera world has gone a little far on this occasion.  The Royal Opera House is warning the Tosca audience, not that Puccini’s opera depicts torture and execution, which it does, but that the interval bell, summoning people to their seats, is frightfully loud.  And apparently people can be threatened by the sound of applause.  It is suggested that clapping be replaced by silently holding one’s hands in the air and gyrating them, a procedure that would certainly scare the hell out of me. 

I’m not unduly exercised about trigger warnings.  I knew, and respected, somebody who would never listen to Mozart’s Cosi fan Tutti because the opera seems to encourage infidelity.  It never bothered me.  But then I can’t speak Italian.  But if the truth be told, when it comes to opera, I’m completely philistine.  The plots are frequently such a tangled web as to be unfollowable; and besides, they last for ever.  I really can’t see me going back to hear Götterdämmerung again.  I sat in agony in a very uncomfortable seat in the gods of Glasgow’s Kings Theatre for five hours.  Five hours!  Life’s too short.  Give me an orchestral concert every time.  Ninety minutes of music, with an interval. 

And I don’t really “get” recitative.  It’s the classical world’s version of rap.  It’s there to advance the convoluted plot, if you can be bothered.  I’d rather the cast just spoke the dialogue, as in Beethoven’s Fidelio.  Listening to recitative on the radio you can hear all these hackneyed modulations on the jangling harpsichord, against the background of thumps and bumps as people galumph about the stage.  I don’t think Ralph Vaughan Williams cared much for the harpsichord.  Didn’t he describe it as the sound of two skeletons copulating on a tin roof?  Or am I doing him a disservice?  But I shouldn’t be this dismissive.  Some opera I deeply admire.  Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle (tellingly, only in one act).  And I love Madame Butterfly, but I might hesitate to go to see it again.  It’s just too painful.  You see, it really needs to come with a trigger warning.  

I remember the late Sir Terry Wogan could be very dismissive of BBC announcements commencing, “If you have been affected by issues raised in this programme, you can seek advice and counselling by calling this number…”  But then Sir Terry was a national treasure and therefore could be as politically incorrect as he liked.  You might argue that issuing a trigger warning goes against the element of surprise that might be crucial to the impact of a play or a film.  Think of the notorious shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho.  The only advanced warning at the time was that the film was rated “X”, which meant it was horrific, or carnal, or both.  Psycho depicts a brutal murder made all the more horrific by the scything downbows of Bernard Herrmann’s string orchestra, sul ponticello, resembling the repeated stabbing actions of a knife attack.  What on earth would have been the reaction of the first audiences, who had no idea what was coming?  One can only imagine the voluble response of a community of people taking moments to digest and process what they had just seen, and then trying to settle down again.  Hitchcock must have anticipated such a reaction, because he allows time for the audience, with a series of silent shots focussing on Janet Leigh’s inert body on the shower floor, the bloodstained water trickling away.  It’s curiously beautiful.  A catharsis.

Something similar is evident in the Roman Polansky film of Macbeth.  Now there is a film that really ought to have come with a trigger warning.  It is a depiction of absolute evil, and when I recognised early on in the film that that was what it was going to be, I had to make up my mind whether to get up and leave, or stay the course.  I stayed the course.  I’m glad I did, because I think that I garnered some inkling of what Aristotle meant by “catharsis”, the purgation of pity and terror.  Towards the end there is a lightening of atmosphere, literally.  The outdoor sets acquire greater natural light. 

I wonder why the daily news doesn’t come with a trigger warning.  After all, especially these days, it’s pretty bad.  Granted we may be pre-warned about some particularly graphic piece of television footage of an act of violence, or its aftermath.  But the newsreader does not say, “You may not wish to hear about the overnight attacks in Kyiv, or the relentless bombing of Gaza City.” The facts are allowed to speak for themselves.  That is not to say they are not sometimes concealed, no doubt more often than we know, for political reasons.   

So I guess trigger warnings have a place.  But you may easily see how they could get out of hand, and lose potency.  Like crying “wolf”.  The second movement of Haydn’s Surprise Symphony contains a surprise.  You have been warned. 

A sociable week, just gone, with friends who have remained friends since the 60s.  Sometimes I have a feeling that time, the passage of time, is an illusion, and that in some sense I struggle to define, or articulate, everything is here and now.  Perhaps this is what T. S. Eliot was banging on about in Burnt Norton, the first of the Four Quartets, time being “eternally present”.  We dined together in Glasgow, we who have been making music together for more than half a century.  One of the party was off the next day to Ireland to visit family.  I raised a glass and said, “Calm seas and a prosperous voyage.  How long does it take?”  He shrugged.  “Couple of hours.”  Our host quipped, “I thought it was about 10 minutes.”  Musical joke.     

En passant, I popped into the Scottish Antiques Centre near where I live, and inevitably emerged with three books under my arm, vowing to move on three other books by leaving them in the village phone box which has become a book depository.  What did I get?

For Whom the Bell Tolls.  Not the original John Donne No man is an island.  Not Hemmingway’s Spanish Civil War novel.  But, as the subtitle says, “Light and Dark Verse by Martin Bell” (Icon Books, 2011).  That explains the somewhat unoriginal title.  It took me a while to figure out it was a play of words on the name Bell, the man in the white suit.  He was a BBC war correspondent, then an independent MP, and also, as the book reveals, something of a poet.  I think the poems are terribly good.  I suppose some people would describe the verse as doggerel, and perhaps the poet as poetaster, but I think there is a power here, characterised by a journalist’s plain speaking and lack of obscurity.  He uses all sorts of forms: “quatrains, couplets, a sonnet, a ballade, limericks and even a clerihew.”

Clerihew?

Chambers – a humorous poem that sums up the life and character of some notable person in two short couplets (started by E. Clerihew Bentley in his Biography for Beginners, 1905).

Bell’s clerihew has Tony Blair as its subject, and is not terribly complimentary.  Neither is the more substantial Principal Witness, on the same subject.  I think through his experience as an independent MP Martin Bell became thoroughly disillusioned with the mother of parliaments.  He was there during the expenses scandal.  Bell wrote his first poem when he was 19, and then not another one for more than 50 years.  This is what happens when you get absorbed in a profession.  Where does the time go? 

Talking of 50 years, on Saturday I went to a Golden Wedding luncheon in St Andrews, of some dear friends of mine.  Their wedding in Perth seems like yesterday.  I played my viola there while they signed the register.  Unaccompanied Bach.  I wonder now I had the nerve.  The golden anniversary was a sweet occasion.

I was playing my viola again yesterday in Polmont, with the Antonine Players, a string ensemble.  We are rehearsing for two concerts in September, in St. Michael’s Parish Church, Linlithgow, and again the following week in the Church of the Holy Rude in Stirling.  Mozart, Vivaldi, Rutter, Walton, and Skalkottas.  Like the golden wedding, here is another link with the past.  The Vivaldi Concerto in B minor for 4 violins was, as far as I remember, the first piece of music I ever took part in, as a public performance.  That’s well over 50 years ago.  The music is fantastic.       

Second book under the arm: Nevil Shute, The Rainbow and the Rose (Heinemann, 1958).  You know you have a problem when you start buying books you already own, and have read.  Stop me if I’ve told you this before.  I think I’ve already blogged about the occasion I picked up a paperback copy, from Toppings in Edinburgh, of this, the one book that was missing from my handsomely bound Edito-Service S. A., Geneva edition of the complete works.  But this one is a first edition, in good condition.  I’ve already moved the paperback on.

I’m fond of Shute.  Like Martin Bell, he had another profession, that of aeronautical engineer.  You can read all about it in his autobiography, Slide Rule.  The title says much.  He belonged to the pre-computer age, a different time captured so wistfully in his books.  I’m always interested to read fiction written by people with a hinterland.  John Buchan.  Ian Fleming.  They have life experience. 

Third book under the arm: Jane Wilhelmina Stirling (1804 – 1859), the first study of the life of Chopin’s pupil and friend, by Audrey Evelyn Bone (printed by Starrock Services, Chipstead, Surrey, 1960).  A signed, limited edition.  So interesting to read about Chopin’s time in Scotland, with descriptions of Chopin’s recitals in Glasgow and Edinburgh, respectively in Merchants’ Hall in Hutcheson Street, and in the Hopetoun Rooms, venues that still exist today.  The reviews from the Glasgow Herald, and The Scotsman, were, are, remarkably perceptive. 

Chopin enjoyed the hospitality of the Scottish aristocracy especially in and around Dunblane.  There is mention in the book of the Leighton Library, which houses some very old and very rare first editions.  I’ve never visited, but in Dunblane Cathedral yesterday I chatted with a Leighton curator, and have promised to drop by.

Also in the cathedral yesterday, Kevin the organist played as a prelude Modest Mussorgsky’s “Promenade” and “The Old Castle” from Pictures at an Exhibition; and then, as a postlude, of course, “The Great Gate of Kiev”.  It was no accident that that should have been played on the anniversary of the liberation of Ukraine from Soviet Russia in 1991.  Where has the time gone?  And what the devil has happened in the interim?  Mark Carney, the leader of the Western World, was present. 

But it does one good to avert one’s gaze from the constant Doomscroll.  I’ve had a very pleasant week, a week of fellowship.  As ever, I eschewed social media, totally.  You may say, a chronicle of small beer.  But better that than a kettle of stinking fish.    

On Saturday evening in the Royal Albert Hall, the Aurora Orchestra performed Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, as part of the BBC London Proms.

From memory.

A prodigious feat.

They’ve been doing it for some years now, and, if memory (sic) serves me right last year they even played The Rite of Spring by heart.  To date I’ve been a little sceptical about the whole enterprise.  I mean, like, what’s the point?  I thought of it as a parlour trick, a gimmick.  On Saturday the performance was preceded by “a musical and dramatic exploration” of the symphony.  I confess I gave it about a minute.  I would have much preferred a pre-concert talk to a dramatization, perhaps in the preferred format of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, of a dialogue between conductor and a member of the orchestra.  But the musical and dramatic exploration was too reminiscent for me of another Radio 3 programme, Words & Music, which each week explores a theme through the juxtaposition of music and the spoken word.  Next to the unadulterated music, the thespian luvvies always sound so hammy.  Anyway I switched off.  If I sound a little jaundiced put it down to Shostakovich 13, Babi Yar, which was performed the previous evening at the same venue.  Shostakovich 13 is a setting for bass solo, and orchestra, of words by the poet Yevtushenko.  Its first movement depicts the horror of the Nazi massacre of Jews during the Second World War in, of all places, Kyiv.  Even this late in Shostakovich’s career, the Soviet authorities tried to suppress the 13^th Symphony.  They wanted to depict Babi Yar as an atrocity inflicted upon the entire Russian people, rather than the Jews.  Several bass soloists were leaned on, and pressured not to take part, and who could play them?  At last one held his ground, as did the conductor.  You can read all about it in Time’s Echo, by Jeremy Eichler.  All of that might have been worth a pre-concert talk.    But maybe I’m Shostakovich-ed out.  Like Mahler, he has become the darling of the concert-going audience.  But I promised to switch on again after the interval and hear the fifth symphony.

I would say I know it well.  I first heard it in concert when, following the tragic fire in the St Andrew’s Hall, the beleaguered RSNO were playing in a run-down Glasgow cinema, the Gaiety, in the middle of a sea of mud that was the building site of the M8 which, for better or worse, cut a swathe through the heart of Glasgow.  So that must have been late 60s, early 70s, when Shostakovich was very much in the land of the living.  I remember, of course, the arresting opening, and the first movement’s serene melody’s first exposition in the first violins’ high register.  At the time, in the west, Shostakovich was far from the mainstream figure he was shortly to become.  But shortly afterwards I got the chance to play the symphony.  I recall we performed it in Glasgow University’s Bute Hall.  There is no better way of learning a piece of music, one might even say, by heart. 

In the event, I was greatly taken by the Aurora Orchestra’s performance on Saturday evening.  Maybe there’s something to this business of playing from memory after all.  Even with vast forces present, it sounded like chamber music.  An intense collaboration.

It’s not without its risks.  I suppose jeopardy must partly be the attraction for the audience.  A high-wire act.  I once attended a piano recital in the Perth Concert Hall given by Mitsuko Uchida.  She played the last three Beethoven Sonatas, Op. 109, 110, and 111, not only from memory – de rigueur in the case of a concert pianist – but also as a single entity, without interruption.  That has become another gimmick in the concert world, the amalgamation of disparate pieces.  I’ve heard Sibelius 7 follow Sibelius 6 without a break, and I’ve with increasing frequency being hearing works by different composers being run together, for example Berg’s 3 pieces running straight into Webern’s 6 – a car crash if ever there was one.  So when Madame Uchida presented Ops 109 – 111 as a single piece, I held my breath.  The last time I’d heard her play, in the same concert hall, she had again performed Beethoven, the Sonata in A Op. 101, and then the next sonata in the catalogue, the towering Sonata in B flat, für das Hammerclavier, Op. 106.  During the last movement of the Op. 101, there was a power cut.  Mitsuko Uchida carried on playing in the pitch dark.  But when it came to the fugue, she had to stop.  She said in a characteristically Japanese whisper, “I cannot play the fugue in the dark.”

So she might have suspected that gremlins were lurking in Perth.  Sure enough, during the last movement of the Op. 110 – another fugue – she had a memory lapse.  It was as if she had taken a wrong track in a dense forest, and she was trying to improvise a way back.  Even, perhaps especially, for a listener, it was a remarkably discomfiting and unnerving experience.  She had to stop.  So I’m always happy to see music stands on the concert stage, even if they are only there for an emergency.   

The hoopla surrounding Shostakovich 5, no doubt a cause for dramatization, concerns the extremely negative reaction by Stalin to the “formalist” fourth.  Shostakovich had to produce “a Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism” otherwise he could expect the nocturnal knock on the door from the KGB.  He kept a suitcase packed ready for the occasion.  So the prevailing wisdom is that Shostakovich was indeed performing a high wire act, by producing a work which would satisfy the authorities, while simultaneously driving its real meaning underground.  Is the apparent triumph of the symphony’s close ironic?  Nowadays its rendition is much slower, and more strident, certainly than it was when I first heard it in the Gaiety Theatre.  I suspect the idea that the mood of celebration is fake, is probably true.  Shostakovich’s music is often sardonic.  Perhaps it shares something with the pre-war Berlin cabaret music of Kurt Weill, a sense that all is not well, that all is not as it would appear.  We hear it again in the music of Alfred Schnittke.  A solo violin gives a beautiful rendition of Stille Nacht, ending on a grotesque dissonance.  If Shostakovich’s music sounds as if it was composed in a lunatic asylum, it’s probably because in essence it was. 

I wonder what Shostakovich would have made of the Alaska Summit, last week, and of the Oval Office meeting that is about to take place, as I write, today.  At least President Zelenskyy has support from several European leaders this time, but I’m not sure how the meetings will be structured, or whether Zelenskyy will need to brave the lions’ den alone, before the others join him.  Moreover, I see J. D. Vance has just finished his holiday in Ayrshire and left Scotland, flying out of Prestwick on Air Force 2.  So it’s conceivable we could have a re-run of that frightful interview earlier in the year.  When Stalin died in 1953 – on the same day as Prokofiev – Shostakovich must have breathed a sigh of relief.  You can hear it in the last movement of the tenth symphony.  Now he might say, “Here we go again.”  I wonder if Mr Putin admires Shostakovich.

My favourite Shostakovich Symphony is his last, the 15^th.  It is full of quotations, ironies, quirks, and, like the viola sonata, a sense of finality, even of impending death.  The metronomic use of percussion at its close is mesmerising.  The clocks are ticking.