Author: jamescalumcampbell

If April is indeed the cruellest month, it is surely because we are faced with the burden of filling in a tax return for the financial year just ended, a grim task if ever there was one.  I have some sympathy for the Chancellor et ux, who seem to have fallen foul of the complexities of the system.  I myself have dual citizenship and “non-dom” status, though, as it happens I am non-dom not in the UK – where I am dom – but in New Zealand where, at the moment, I am only occasionally dom.  I have some savings accounts in NZ, and some years back I wrote to the Inland Revenue in NZ to enquire whether I was obliged to pay them any tax, other than a small sum designated “resident withholding tax”.  My letter must have been lost in the bureaucratic morass and I never received a reply.  So I did some independent research and satisfied myself that I was only obliged to pay tax on my worldwide earnings in the place where I lived.  “Worldwide earnings” sounds rather grandiose but be assured I am not operating in Mrs Sunak’s ballpark.

I can see the rationale behind my paying nearly all my tax in the UK where, after all, I benefit from all the public services of the community.  I can also see an argument for my paying tax on my NZ earnings, in NZ.  After all, that wealth is being generated in NZ.  Should not NZ therefore benefit?  For ought I know, Akshata Murthy might put forward a similar argument for India. 

Either way, the attack on Mr Sunak seems to me to be something of a confection.  What business is it of his, or anybody else, if his wife chooses to give succour to the subcontinent?  And what business is it of ours if he had chosen to hold on to his US green card?  That the Labour opposition should choose to criticise the Chancellor for his alleged disloyalty to the UK, his lack of judgment and “transparency”, is of course predictable.  But the opposition has proven itself extraordinarily inept at punishing the government.  All these open goal mouths – partygate, PPE contracts for cronies, Grenfell Tower, massive tailbacks of lorries full of rotting meat at Dover, a Ukrainian refugee “policy” mired in bureaucratic obfuscation, and now the scandal at Shrewsbury and Telford NHS Trust, and they can’t seem to put the ball in the back of the net.    

Talking of green cards, a friend mentioned to me the other day that Gérard Depardieu, star, opposite Andie MacDowell, of Peter Weir’s film Green Card, not only holds the equivalent documentation in Russia, but has been a Russian citizen since 2013.  Allegedly he took Russian citizenship – an honour conferred upon him, at a special dinner, by Mr Putin himself – in order to avoid punitive French taxes. 

Green Card is a favourite film of mine.  In it, Depardieu’s character Georges Fauré and MacDowell’s character Brontë Parrish enter a marriage of convenience, he to attain a green card, and she to satisfy the requirements for ownership of her Manhattan apartment.  They go through the necessary procedure and go their separate ways.  Of course they meet again by chance.  She is dining with friends in a classy New York restaurant, and he happens to be the waiter.  One of the party asks for the vegetarian option, and Depardieu says, “Why?”

Inevitably, the Immigration and Naturalization Services catch up with them and subject them to an interview to see if their marriage is legitimate.  The interview is excruciating, and hilarious.   

Later Brontë is dining with friends in a very upmarket Manhattan apartment.  After the meal, one of the party plays Chopin on a magnificent Steinway grand piano.  Depardieu calls unexpectedly.  As he is a musician and composer, he is invited to play.  He sits at the piano, in silence, for a long time.  And then he subjects the party to a cacophony of atonality, fortissimo.  He finishes and says, “It’s not Mozart.”  The lady of the house replies, “I know.”  But then, just when you think Depardieu’s character as a musician is fake, he extemporises contemplative music of great beauty, and launches, in exquisite French, into a heart-breaking appeal for a charitable organization, which the lady of the house translates in real time, with tears in her eyes.

But to return to Rishi, I don’t think this current storm-in-a-teacup will do him much political damage.  All he needs to do is take a leaf out of his next door neighbour’s playbook, and ignore it.  Meanwhile that same next-door neighbour’s reputation currently seems to be riding high.  Boris’ unexpected visit to Kyiv seems to have gone down well.  And President Zelenskyy seems to like him. 

Meanwhile Mr Putin has appointed one General Alexander Dvornikov to lead the impending offensive in the Donbas region.  As General Dvornikov previously fought in Chechnya, and led the Russian forces in Syria, this bodes ill for what is now to come.  Is it not appalling that two Christian countries should be at war in the week between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday?  Gérard Depardieu, reportedly a buddy of Mr Putin, has stated, “I am against this fratricidal war.  Stop the weapons and negotiate.”  The Archbishop of Canterbury was on Question Time on Thursday evening and, from the perspective of one who had consecrated a mass grave in the Sudan, he made the observation that the horrors of war will not end until the war ends, that is, until the opposing sides negotiate, no matter how unpalatable that may be.  Naturally, another panel member dismissed this as naïve, but I note that even President Zelenskyy himself is willing to talk to Mr Putin, for the sake of peace in Ukraine. 

But how has it come to this?  On Sunday evening, I watched Thatcher and Reagan: A Very Special Relationship (BBC 2, 9.00 pm).  All of a sudden, in the 1980s, the west found itself able to “do business” with The General Secretary of the Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev.  President Regan wanted to rid the world of nuclear weapons; Mrs Thatcher didn’t.  She believed in the ancient doctrine of the Balance of Power.  After the fall of the Berlin Wall she opposed the reunification of Germany precisely because the balance would be upset.  In 1986, Reagan held a summit with Gorbachev in Reykjavik, but the stumbling block to real progress in bilateral disarmament was the Strategic Defence Initiative or “Star Wars Program”.  Mrs T also opposed Star Wars, because – aside from the fact that she didn’t think it would work – it would render the US unassailable, while the USSR would remain vulnerable.  Once again the Balance of Power would be upset.

But even in 1986 nobody was to know that the USSR was about to collapse.  Then we had thirty years to make the world a safer place.  And now look what’s happened.  This is not the return of the Cold War.  This war is already hot.

So what to do, as we hold our breath between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday?  Personally I will listen to Bach’s St Matthew Passion.  Then on Good Friday, we snuff out a candle.  Tenebrae.                            

Saturday: walked in fine spring weather, with friends, from Loch Lomond Shores in Balloch, ten miles westward to Helensburgh on the Clyde Estuary, via the Three Lochs and the John Muir Ways.  From a vantage point of a thousand feet, an object in the middle of the estuary between Helensburgh and Greenock was pointed out to me.  I thought it was just a small islet, but it turned out to be the wreck of the Captayannis, sitting on a sandbank.  The Captayannis was a Greek sugar-carrying vessel that sank in the Firth of Clyde in 1974.

On the evening of January 27^th that year, there was a severe storm, and the Captayannis dragged her anchor while delivering sugar to the James Watt Dock in Greenock.  Her captain ran for the sheltered waters of the Gareloch, but the vessel ran into the anchor chains of another tanker and sustained damage below the waterline.  Realising the ship was sinking, the captain deliberately beached her on the sandbank.  Everybody got off safely.  The vessel has lain there on her side ever since.  Everything of value has been removed – somewhat after the fashion of the salvage operation described in Whisky Galore. 

It is a very favoured part of the world, “Doon the watter”, as we say in Glasgow.  From our vantage point I could see the car ferries busily toing and froing between Gourock and Dunoon.  The saga of the difficulties of the ferries to the highlands and islands, both in their manufacture and operation, is a sorry one, but here the Western Ferries operate a first class service.  I use it not infrequently as I like to visit Tighnabruaich on the Cowal Peninsula, Argyll’s secret coast.  We holidayed there when I was a kid.  I would take a rowing boat across to the uninhabited north-west side of the island of Bute.  If the steamer came down from Glasgow and crossed the Kyles of Bute I knew to turn my bow to face the wash.  No life jacket, of course.  We often went for a walk round Ardlamont Point, affording a wonderful view of the north end of the Isle of Arran.  From here, the Arran hills have the contour of a sleeping soldier, lying supine in repose, a rotund individual, his helmet tilted slightly off the back of his head.

We also got a good view of Ardmore Point, just to the south of Helensburgh, on the route to Cardross.  Next to Ardmore is the farm shop at Ardardan, a place I know well because I once spent a summer working in the garden there, when the big house still existed.  It was owned by an aristocratic family, and my aunt, who had an extraordinary ability to acquire spacious houses, rented it for a period.  Sometimes I would stay for a weekend, entertaining the romantic notion to “write”, in gracious surroundings.  I don’t think I got much written.  I’d take my bike down to Helensburgh and go for a swim in the open air pool.

Helensburgh itself sits on a hillside.  The Hill House, designed by Charles Rennie Macintosh, well worth a visit, overlooks the town.  For a time Helensburgh was somewhat rundown, but the promenade has been spruced up, and there is a neighbouring plaza which is rather smart.  We sat outside there on Saturday, quite comfortably in the sun, drinking coffee.  The walk north-west on the promenade to the marina at Rhu is very pleasant, and if the tide is out you can cross on another sandspit to a lighthouse out in the middle of the bay.  I have a yen to move back to the seaside.  (In Devonport Auckland, I was “within coo-wee”, as the Kiwis say, of the Waitemata Harbour.)  So sometimes I entertain the notion to find a place in Helensburgh.  It’s well served by Scotrail, with two stations, upper and lower. 

But now here’s the thing.  This is why I have no plans currently to move doon the watter.  If you walk out to the lighthouse by Rhu, and stand and look north, you are looking directly at the submarine base at Faslane from which the four submarines of the Continuous At Sea Deterrent operate, to “keep us safe”.  To the west lies Kilcreggan, a beautiful peninsula.  If you drive past Faslane’s endless stretches of forbidding barbed wire you can access the peninsula.  It is very charming.  Keep driving and you arrive, on its north-west side, at the most sinister location in Western Europe.

Coulport.

I believe Her Majesty’s Government is minded, not only to update Trident, but also to increase the arsenal of nuclear warheads by 40%.  Clearly a world nuclear bomb stockpile of 13,000 is insufficient. 

From Helensburgh we got the train back to Balloch.  It was an idyllic day – even if I was always conscious of the blight on the horizon.             

In this glorious spell of spring weather, I have enjoyed some lovely walks in the heart of L’Écosse Profonde, round Loch Leven, “the three bridges” in Callander, and the Birks of Aberfedly, in deepest Breadalbane.  I hadn’t been to the Birks before.  It is a steepish woodland walk for a mile or two to the head of a gorge, where you cross a footbridge over a vertiginous waterfall, somewhat reminiscent of the cascading waters of Corrieshalloch Gorge up near Ullapool. 

How fearful,

And dizzy ‘tis to cast one’s eyes so low!

…I’ll look no more,

Lest my brain turn and the deficient sight

Topple down headlong.

(King Lear, Act 4, Scene 5)

Having crossed the bridge, you come down the other side of the river by a further series of waterfalls, back to the starting point.  It turns out that Robert Burns visited here on August 30^th, 1787.  “I composed these stanzas standing under the falls of Aberfeldy, at, or near, Moness.”  I daresay The Birks of Aberfeldie is not the bard’s most profound utterance, though I would not go so far as to say that, like an actor treading the boards on automatic pilot, he “phoned one in”. 

The little birdies blithely sing,

While o’er their heads the hazels hing,

Or lightly flit on wanton wing

In the birks of Aberfeldie!

Burns writes in Scots, of course.  I was filling in my census form the other day – a strange questionnaire, all about my gender, my sexual orientation, and would I be able to start a job next week?  Well I suppose I would, if I absolutely had to, but if you take such questions too literally you just tie yourself in knots.  So I said no.  Then, did I understand Scots?  Did I read Scots?  Did I speak Scots?  Well, as we say in West Stirlingshire, Whiles.    

Well noo, ye ken, hen, ah hae nae doot that t’wud be rang o me tae spurn ma mither tongue’n aver a cannae jalouse whit Rabbie’s oan aboot, an’ wudnae pit pen tae paper anent ony matter ye wannae quibble ower, usin’ whit ye may caw’ a stairheid patois juz’ becuz them posh loons’n Auld Reekie cannae or wullnae cott’n oan tae whit ah’m sayin’.

Ken, Jimmy.

Professors of linguistics often hold the liberal view that there is nothing intrinsically inferior about such a mode of speech, just as there is nothing intrinsically superior about, say,  BBC Received Pronunciation.  Languages are democracies.  But is that true?  The professor of linguistics may be a great mimic and may adopt any brogue, and ham it up, but the prof is still likely to deliver his lecture, by and large, using a “higher register”.  When I were a lad, it was quite common for youngsters from a working class background to be sent to elocution lessons.  Their parents reckoned, no doubt quite rightly, that they would get ahead in life if they were able to “talk proper like”.  Gaelic-speaking parents very commonly and quite deliberately didn’t speak Gaelic in the home, because they felt their children would be held back if they conversed in the peasant language of the illiterate.  This was undoubtedly a misguided view.  The advantages of multilingualism are clear. Middle class parents now compete to send their children to Gaelic-medium schools.    

I find myself slipping into Scots all the time.  I think I must relish a perverse, contrarian delight in talking rough in the gracious drawing-rooms of Edinburgh New Town.  Then people give me sidelong glances, dubious as to whether I should have been invited in, after all.  One very useful aspect of having a low-caste, preferably urban, heavily industrialised lingo at one’s disposal, is that one can utilise it in the detection of humbug.  If a member of the establishment, a political Big Beast, elder statesman and Grandee, spouts something on the airwaves that you suspect might be a load of tosh, albeit delivered in the mellifluous tones of one born to lead, it can be useful to translate the statement into the local dialect, to see if it stands up.  I call this the SPT or Stairheid Patois Test.  It could as easily be done in some variation of Cockney, or Scouse, or Geordie.  But when somebody pompous comes on Private Passions and, unaware they are talking in cliché, says something like, “I cannot live without Schubert, Michael.  Sublime, pellucid limpidity…” I translate it into Glaswegian.  Then it sounds ridiculous. 

But then again, Glaswegian can be extremely expressive, and concise.  Remember the motto of NATO:

Hit wan, ye hit uz aw’. 

Monty, General Bernard Law Montgomery, was interviewed on Canadian television while touring that country shortly after the Second World War.  The interview reminds me of one of these improvised dialogues between the satirists John Bird and John Fortune, in which Bird took the role of interviewer and straight man, and Fortune the role of interviewee, an establishment figure, a politician, captain of industry, or military man, who turns out to be completely bonkers.  Fortune’s response to questions would become more and more ridiculous, his wide-eyed, disdainful expression more and more absurd, to the point that Bird would have the greatest difficulty maintaining his own serious demeanour, without “corpsing”.

Monty thought the generals of the Great War were a bunch of amateurs, and he recalled that thirty thousand British soldiers (his own statistic) were killed on the first morning of the Battle of the Somme.  “Imagine that!” said Monty, with Fortune’s wide-eyed stare.  “Thirty thousand!  Before lunch!”

And later: “I didn’t want to parley with General Rommel.  I wanted to smash him!”

As the harsh reality of the war receded from our collective consciousness, the conflict became a vehicle for gentle nostalgia, quips and ribaldry.  Hence the BBC produced shows like Dad’s Army – “Vot ist your name?” – “Don’t tell ’im, Pike!” and ’Allo ’Allo, which mocked the French Resistance – “Listen carefully, ah weel say zees only wance”), and even made fun of the Gestapo.  Then there is that Fawlty Towers sketch “Don’t talk about the war!” in which Basil, erstwhile Minister of Funny Walks in Python, does his ridiculous goosestep.  There is a marvellous Smith and Jones sketch which mocks our stereotypical notion of the character of senior officers in the Wehrmacht.  One of them listens to Wagner on an ancient Deutsche Grammophon contraption with its huge HMV trumpet, while his tailor measures him for a new uniform, and he enjoys the company of a Marlene Dietrich lookalike.  “You see, we are not all barbarians.” 

At Bayreuth, one of the Wagners showed Daniel Barenboim a passage in the score of Tannhäuser.  “This is the point at which the Führer wept.”  That line could have come straight from an Alas Smith and Jones sketch.  It is possible to laugh at anything, so long as the subject is safely locked up in the museum of the past.  I have even laughed at a joke about a concentration camp.  I can only remember the joke’s punchline: “You had to be there.” 

But now look what’s happened.  It turns out all these characters aren’t in a museum at all.  Far from being as extinct as the dinosaurs, they are very much alive and kicking.  The events of the late 1930s no longer seem remote.  They could have happened last week.  Actually, they did happen last week.  Winston’s great oratorical set pieces no longer sound archaic.  They have come alive.  It turns out that we have been deluding ourselves, as Winston said we would, in the theme of the final volume of his History of the Second World War, Triumph and Tragedy –

“How the great democracies triumphed, and so were able to resume the follies which had so nearly cost them their life.”

In his second term as PM, Winston wanted to work hard at the preservation of the peace.  He wanted to convene a “summit” (he even coined the term) of the great powers to find a way to de-escalate the nuclear arms race.  But by that time the UK itself was no longer a great power, so his overtures to the USA and the USSR were ignored.  In the 60s, Khrushchev, Kennedy, and Macmillan secured an uneasy détente, but the fact that there are said to be 13,000 nuclear warheads still extant in the world today is surely an appalling indictment of international diplomacy and, in particular, the members of the United Nations “Permanent Security Council”, an oxymoron if ever there was one.    

What are we to do?  There isn’t much point in quoting the Irishman you approach in the street to ask for directions.  “If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.”  It would be nice to return to 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, when it seemed that the world was granted a golden opportunity.  But our greatest delusion then was the notion that “History has come to an end”.  We had the same delusion in 1918, with the notion that the armistice brought to a conclusion “the war to end all wars”.  It was a delusion again in 1945.  Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.  We were deluded then simply because such conflicts didn’t directly affect Europe.  Even now, here in our remote island on the western edge of the continent, surrounded by our moat, we can’t quite take it in.  I met my friends at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday evening, as usual, and we listened to glorious Walton, Rachmaninov, and Elgar, and for a time we could almost, but not quite, forget the troubles of the world. I heard from a friend whose Swedish friend has just returned from her native land, that everybody there has packed an overnight bag, ready to go, and has identified the location of the nearest air-raid shelter.

Unfortunately, Mr Putin has opened Pandora’s Box.  If in any sense we are receding back into history, it is not to 1989, but to 1939.  Or, as the remarkable final sentence of The Great Gatsby has it:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

When my dear pal visited me on Thursday she brought some truly scrumptious home-made Empire biscuits.  They used to be called German biscuits but in 1914 all things German became unpopular and they were rebranded Empire biscuits, much as the royal house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was redubbed the House of Windsor.  There is a Beyond the Fringe sketch in which a young man is seen playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata on the piano.  His father appears behind him and says, “That music you are playing, Jeremy, is by Beethoven.  Beethoven was a German.  We are at war with Germany.  That is something you are going to have to work out… later on.”

And in the postlude to A Room with a View, E. M. Forster mused on how his characters might have evolved during the Great War.  The sensitive but passionless Cecil solves the Beethoven problem by asserting that Beethoven was, in fact, Belgian.  Beethoven himself was not above such apparent manifestations of xenophobia.  As Donald Francis Tovey puts it, “When quiet was restored after the bombardment of Vienna the native language of Bonaparte became unpopular and attempts were made to purify even musical German of Italian elements.  Hence what Sir George Grove calls ‘Beethoven’s German fit’.”  Thus, for example, in the slow movement of the Sonata in E flat major Op. 81a, “Les Adieux”, Andante espressivo becomes In gehender Bewegung, doch mit viel Ausdruck.

Now we are having a “Russian fit”.  Another pal of mine was due to attend the Russian ballet in Glasgow last week. Cancelled.  And the Munich Phil sacked Maestro Valery Gergiev.  Roman Abramovich distanced himself from Chelsea; he fell before he was pushed.  It’s interesting that the Chelsea fans still give him vocal and visual support from the grandstand.  As Bob Shankly is oft misquoted to have said, “Football is not a matter of life and death; it’s more important than that.”    

Sheku Kanneh-Mason played Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concerto – most beautifully – in Glasgow last week.  Shostakovich is just fine in the current climate because he was a dissident.  And besides, it is more likely to be living performers than dead composers who are liable to be sanctioned.  I am sure it is better to be economically sanctioned than to have a gun pointed at your head.  But governmental emergency measures, even economic ones, can be blunt instruments, and even the most peace-loving individuals can be harshly treated.  Didn’t the US intern all the resident Japanese after Pearl Harbour?    

To Sunday lunch at Dunblane Golf Club, the course waterlogged and closed, but still looking beautiful in the spring sunshine.  Cousinly party of seven, representatives of the enormous diaspora of our extended family.  It was a convivial occasion, even if conversation inevitably turned to the international scene.  The Kremlin have expressed suspicion that the US have been perfecting biological weapons on Ukraine territory.  The West declares this is a lie, a piece of disinformation put about in order to justify an escalation in the deployment of more sinister weaponry, for example, the use of chlorine barrel bombs which proved so “successful” in Aleppo.  Did not Mr Blair make a similar assertion back in 2003, before the invasion of Iraq, when he said that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction capable of being deployed within 45 minutes?  When the journalist Andrew Gilligan said the intelligence backing this claim had been “sexed up”, the government was incandescent with rage, directed against the BBC, precisely because it was being alleged that the so-called “dodgy dossier” was being deliberately used as a piece of disinformation.

Perhaps Mr Blair really thought Saddam had WMD at his disposal.  Perhaps Mr Putin really thinks the Americans are perfecting biological weapons in Ukraine.  Who can tell?  It is a truism that the first casualty of war is the truth.  It is said that the Ukraine crisis has entrenched Mr Johnson’s position in No. 10, by effectively burying Partygate and the Sue Gray report.  That may be true in the short term, but in the end, if you can’t trust somebody’s relationship with the truth, you can no longer have any confidence in the veracity of any statement they make.  I trust the BBC, or at least parts of it, more than I trust the government.  I tend to believe what I hear from the lips of Lise Doucet and Orla Guerin.

On Sunday evening, in a further attempt to take my mind off doom and gloom, I watched the Baftas from the Royal Albert Hall.  Ah, the glitz, the glamour!  Bond – filmic Bond – is sixty years old, and the timeless Shirley Bassey sang Diamonds are Forever.  After that, not having been to the movies for over two years, I can’t say much of it touched me.  Emma Watson has an extraordinary presence.  I wonder if Mr Putin likes the Harry Potter movies.  Does he see himself as Harry, or as Lord Voldemort?                                  

In these strange and troubled times, having gloomed myself up last week by rereading Nevil Shute’s doomsday novel On the Beach, I selected another Shute, more or less at random – What Happened to the Corbetts.

Big mistake.  Mind, no spoiler alert required here, as I’m not yet quite sure what did happen to the Corbetts, but I can tell you they suffered under the onslaught of a series of air-raids in Southampton.  Shute wrote the book in 1938, so he clearly manifests a certain prescience.  He well understood that the main threat would not be gas attack, as feared at the time, but the use of high explosives.  

Then last Thursday on BBC Radio 3’s Essential Classics, Tom McKinney played a late choral work (1956) by Vaughan Williams – A Vision of Aeroplanes.  Mr McKinney said the piece had nothing to do with aeroplanes, because it was a setting from the King James Bible, for organ, choir, and soprano solo, of the first chapter of the Book of Ezekiel.  But I think Mr McKinney was mistaken (even although I rather imagine RVW, perversely, would have agreed with him); the piece has everything to do with aeroplanes.  Read the chapter for yourself.  It raises the question: how could such a vision have been experienced by somebody living thousands of years ago, or even understood by the translators in 1611, when the King James Version came into being?

And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire.

Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures.  And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man.

And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings…

They sparkled like the colour of burnished brass…

Their wings were joined one to another; they turned not when they went; they went every one straight forward…

And they went every one straight forward: whither the spirit was to go, they went; and they turned not when they went…

And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them: and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up.

Whithersoever the spirit was to go, they went, thither was their spirit to go; and the wheels were lifted up over against them: for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels. 

When those went, these went; and when those stood, these stood; and when these were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up over against them: for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels… 

And under the firmament were their wings straight, the one toward the other: every one had two, which covered on this side, and every one had two, which covered on that side, their bodies. 

And when they went, I heard the noise of their wings, like the noise of great waters as the voice of the Almighty, the voice of speech, as the noise of an host: when they stood, they let down their wings… 

Is that a description of a squadron of flying machines with retractable undercarriages?  How could somebody writing in the pre-Christian era know about such a thing?  A listener contacted Tom McKinney to say she had sung A Vision of Aeroplanes in a London choir, but the choir had abandoned it.  The music is austere, even harsh, and uncompromising.  The listener said it had given her nightmares.  The text reminds me of the imaginative world of Nigel Kneale, the creator of Quatarmass, and his similarly nightmarish television drama The Road, broadcast by the BBC in September 1963.  The tape was lost, but the script survived, to be recast as a radio drama.  In 1768, people living in a remote English village have visions of a population hastening along a road – perhaps it is an evacuation corridor – to escape an attack.  They think the vision comes from the ancient world; it is the invasion of the Roman Empire.  But how can that be?  A road never passed through this English woodland.

In fact it is a vision of the future.  This is a nuclear attack.          

On BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions on Friday evening, from Penicuik, the second question was from one Thomas, who sounded very young, who asked the panel a very pertinent and searching question.  If Mr Putin deploys nuclear weapons, how should NATO respond?  Alister Jack, the Secretary of State for Scotland, said he was going to dodge that question.  As a cabinet minister, he clearly doesn’t wish Mr Putin to know the west’s game plan.  Then he added, I thought with infinite condescension, “But don’t worry.  You can sleep peacefully at night, because the nuclear deterrent is protecting you.” 

But on Sunday morning’s A Point of View, with respect to the deterrent, the writer Will Self did not share Mr Jack’s equanimity.  He made reference to Shute’s On the Beach.  He told us to be afraid, very afraid.  I wonder what would have happened if, when the Russians shelled Europe’s biggest nuclear power station at Zaporizhzhia, they had broached the reactors?  Presumably the invading forces would have had no choice but to evacuate the theatre of war.  It would have been a catastrophe for both Europe and Russia, but it is sobering to reflect that such an event might not be the worst case scenario.  At least it could have been spun as an “accident”.  Deployment of a “tactical” nuclear weapon, on the other hand, would be deliberate, and would predicate, according to the deterrent doctrine, a reprisal.  And then we find ourselves on Nevil Shute’s beach.  Not every cloud has a silver lining. 

I wish Mr Jack had said to his young inquisitor, “Well, if Mr Putin explodes a nuclear bomb, he will have demonstrated that the nuclear deterrent doesn’t work.  So what would be the point in exploding another one?”             

During the course of the weekend I have been rereading Nevil Shute’s nightmare vision of the end of the world, On the Beach.  Given the circumstances, I’m not sure it has been a good idea.  The book opens one sunny summer morning down in Port Phillip Bay, near Melbourne Victoria, where, following a brief but devastating nuclear exchange in the northern hemisphere, people are quietly awaiting the inexorable approach of the radiation that will finish them off.  Antarctica will be the last continent to suffer the extinction of all life.   

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper

I read a lot of Shute as a teenager.  I used to come across dog-eared copies of No Highway, Requiem for a Wren, A Town like Alice, Trustee from the Toolroom and so on, during summer holidays in Argyll boarding houses, and I recall with nostalgia the fusty aroma of the aged paper within the hardback covers.  The literati rather turn up their noses at the prosaic, pedestrian trudge of Shute’s slow moving plots, but to me they conjure the spirit of an age long gone, and they seem to have a realism precisely because they are not self-consciously literary; they are yarns expounded in plain language by an aeronautical engineer.  With respect to On the Beach, it is precisely the understatement that gives the book an atmosphere that is terrifying, because so realistic. 

As a youngster I was more intrigued than terrified, but of course as you get older, terrible events, whether real or imagined, disturb you more profoundly.  I was certainly aware that the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 was causing my parents grave concern, but I had no inkling of any danger to me at a personal level.  When the Russian tanks moved into Prague in 1968 I was by then more aware of the great fault line which stretched from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic and divided the world.  But the Iron Curtain had been a fixture all my life.  In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera quotes the lines above the last movement of Beethoven’s last work, the string quartet Opus 135:

Muss es sein?

Es muss sein! Es muss sein! 

9/11 was, at least until now, the great “kaleidoscope” moment of our century.  Then the west embarked on a whole series of foreign adventures, most notably, from the point of view of the UK, the invasion of Iraq in 2003.  Regime change is not an ambition peculiar to the Russians. 

And now, five days ago, “2/24”.  Russia invaded Ukraine.  My dismay – and no doubt yours, gentle reader – was not merely cerebral, it was visceral.  I woke to the news, and a world enveloped in deep snow, in the first truly wintry day we have had this year.  I couldn’t settle to anything.  I happed myself up, took a flask of coffee, and went out on a long walk across the Carse of Stirling, pausing briefly for my morning coffee during a blizzard on Flanders Moss. 

It’s not just that this war in Europe is close to home; it’s that this confrontation between east and west, so far a proxy war of the Great Powers but only just, is between blocs that have enormous nuclear arsenals.  The stakes are incredibly high.  On the Beach, a work of the imagination, could quite easily become a reality, and with extraordinary rapidity.

So what do you do?  Keep calm, and carry on.  As usual, I went to hear the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday evening.  The orchestra dressed in the colours of the Ukrainian flag, strings in yellow, and winds in blue.  After the interval, they reverted to formal evening dress, for a performance of Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Antarctica.  As a friend of mine waggishly said, “Now they are showing solidarity with the penguins.” 

Serendipitously, RVW’s depiction of man’s intrepid struggle against the implacably indifferent forces of nature seemed to carry an extra layer of meaning for the occasion.  A series of quotations head each movement (like Beethoven’s Muss es sein), and the first is from Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.

To suffer woes, which Hope thinks infinite;

To forgive wrongs, darker than death or night;

To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;

Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;

This is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful, and free;

This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

You might argue that Scott of the Antarctic, the film for which RVW wrote the music, and the Scott myth generally, puts a positive spin on an expedition that was an incompetent, bungled, logistic disaster.  Scott was about as well prepared as Mallory, when he went up Mount Everest as if he were going up Ben Nevis, in a tweed jacket.  (Actually, that would have been reckless even on the Ben.)  RVW 7 is an homage to amateurism.  The Scott expedition was doomed to failure; they all perished in the frozen wastes, so evocatively depicted in the Sinfonia by a wordless soprano, the beautiful apparition of Katie Coventry high up in the gods, the nineteen RCS voices and, ultimately, the relentless moan of the wind. 

I went to Antarctica in 1997.  I was a ship’s doctor on a voyage from Ushuaia in Argentina, across the Drake Passage.  I wonder now that I had the nerve.  What if somebody fell seriously ill?  Rapid stabilisation and transport to the nearest hospital was not an option.  I was it.  Fortunately, most of my patients suffered from sea sickness; they weren’t going to die, even if they felt as if they wanted to.  The ship’s captain and crew were Russian, most of the passengers Belgian, and I carried out most consultations in broken French.  Mal de mer. 

We visited various stations on the Antarctic Peninsula, Argentinian, Chilean, the British at Port Lockroy, and the Russians, I remember, at one of the most dismal locations I have ever encountered, Bellingshausen.  Even the name has the ring of a remote gulag.  I don’t recall these outposts enhanced the magnificent desolation of the continent.  The penguins and seals looked right at home, but we were there under sufferance.  My visit to Antarctica changed my view of the world.  I had thought of the globe as our natural habitat, all of it; but at the polar extremes you can really only live as you might live on the moon, or Mars.  I was never so glad as to come round Cape Horn on the return journey, and see green foliage.  It’s all so fragile.

And then, on Sunday evening, Mr Putin announced that he had put his nuclear forces on high alert.  It raises the question, has he lost the plot?  Has he gone mad?  We tend to accuse people of madness quite casually.  That guy is nutty as a fruitcake, one sandwich short of a picnic, etc.  Certainly it would appear the President of the Russian Federation is paranoid, but is he a paranoid schizophrenic?  I make it a golden rule never to attempt diagnoses remotely; and besides, I have seen nothing to indicate that the president is psychotic.  The first truly mad patient I ever encountered was when I was a medical student doing a locum at a Glasgow psychiatric hospital. The police apprehended a man on the runway of Glasgow Airport trying to climb up the nosecone of a Trident 3 en route to London.  He wanted to hitch a ride because he had urgent news to convey to the Prime Minister, and he was being pursued by a band of Russian homosexual spies.  The psychiatrist interviewed him and passed a remark perhaps lacking in clinical objectivity and nuance.  “That guy’s off his head.” 

I read Mr Putin’s lengthy address from the Kremlin of February 21^st, a review of Russian history, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the gradual eastward expansion of NATO, and the requirement to bolster the defences of the Russian Federation, culminating in the announcement that Mr Putin was recognising the independence and sovereignty of the People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.  Of course things have moved on, very rapidly, since then.  Mr Putin sounds aggrieved, at the shame and ignominy of the collapse of the Soviet Union, but he does not sound mad.  He outlines his aims quite clearly and explicitly:

First, to prevent further NATO expansion.  Second, to have the Alliance refrain from deploying assault weapon systems on Russian borders.  And finally, rolling back the bloc’s military capability and infrastructure in Europe to where they were in 1997.

But, as Mr Putin already pointed out in his speech, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary were admitted to NATO in 1999; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004; Albania and Croatia in 2009; Montenegro in 2017; and North Macedonia in 2020.  “The bloc” didn’t move east.  Peaceful democracies compared freedom with oppression, and decided to move west. 

I saw some footage of Mr Putin being interviewed, in the presence of two uniformed senior officers of the Russian military.  I thought the military men both looked scared stiff.  I don’t think Mr Putin truly represents the Russian people.  He needs to be stopped.

But the situation is piled high with risk.  We need cool heads.  One false move, an Archduke Ferdinand moment, and Antarctica might turn out to be the last habitable place on earth. 

I’m going to step out of the tent now.  But I hope not to be gone for some considerable time.     

I watched Sophie Raworth interview the Prime Minister, apparently in a dimly lit Munich basement, at the weekend.  It was absolutely excruciating.  The interview lasted twenty five minutes but the substantive trafficking of information might have been accomplished in about three.  It would be folly for Russia to attack Ukraine and if Mr Putin fires the starting pistol we will impose economic sanctions; we are going to remove Covid restrictions in England, with caution; I can’t say anything about Partygate while a police investigation is underway; I won’t say anything about the Duke of York’s difficulty, and the public purse.  That was it.  Mr Johnson stonewalled, and let the clock run down.  Ms Raworth needed to take the PM by surprise, with an unexpected flanking manoeuvre, and by stealth.  She didn’t have this in her armamentarium.  She merely continued a full frontal assault, the entrenched warfare of attrition, a heavy and prolonged, but futile bombardment.  By the time the guns fell silent, no advance had been made. 

But how apposite, or perhaps ironic, that the Great Powers (without Russia, who declined to attend the Bavarian security conference) should convene in Munich.  The Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (one time stand-up comic) flew in both to thank NATO for its support, but also to accuse it of appeasing Russia.  Of course “appeasement” invokes the spectre of Munich, 1938.  Meanwhile Russia and Belarus have continued joint military “exercises”, including, most chillingly, rehearsals of “tactical” nuclear missile launches, personally supervised by Mr Putin. 

While Munich 2022 was being reported, a family member was attending church.  I was told the sermon was very good.  It concerned Jesus’ teaching that we turn the other cheek, love our enemies, and do good to those who hate us.  If somebody demands your coat, give him your shirt as well.  Is that what Mr Chamberlain did?  And should we follow that advice with respect to Mr Putin?  There is a letter in today’s National from the redoubtable anti-nuclear arms campaigner Brian Quail, pointing to the grim inevitability of the situation we now find ourselves in.  He quotes the prophetic words of Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels: “Even if we lose, we will win, because our ideas will have penetrated the hearts of our enemies.”  Mr Quail urges us to renounce our devotion to war.  We must stop blaming the other.  “I have seen the enemy, and he is us.”  Did not Wilfred Owen explicitly put himself in his enemy’s shoes?  I am the enemy you killed, my friend.    

Naïve?

From my own limited experience of school bullies in the playground, I remember that one of their prime motivations was fear.  But it only became evident if you stood up to them.  I seem to recall that Jesus rather lost his temper with the commercial entrepreneurs in the temple in Jerusalem, and took a whip to them.  He preached, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you”, and I hope that if I were behaving badly, my friends, and even my enemies, would call it out. 

But I experienced the best of Russia on Saturday evening, at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.  Patricia Kopatchinskaja played the Stravinsky Violin Concerto, and the RSNO played Rachmaninov 2.  Ms K, aside from being a virtuoso violinist, was a real character.  She played with wit.  She engaged the audience.  The music came alive.  Afterwards, she regretted the fact that Stravinsky had not provided her with a cadenza, and proceeded to play one of her own composition, full of the concerto’s themes.  It involved a duet with the RSNO leader Sharon Roffman, herself a stellar performer.  Brought the house down.  As did, after the interval, the gorgeous Rach 2.  After that, it was not difficult to love Mother Russia.  But then, more than a century ago, when it all fell apart, Rachmaninov and Stravinsky both got out. 

But we mustn’t take our eyes of Beijing.  Thanks to the men’s curling team (silver), and the women’s curling team (gold), team GB avoided the embarrassment of coming home from the Winter Olympics empty-handed.  Reviewing the papers on Sophie Raworth’s show on Sunday, Pippa Crerar, the political editor of the Mirror, pointed out that the teams were Scottish.  But then, Ms Crerar has a Scottish accent.  It is good to know that the United Kingdom has been supported in her need by the broad shoulders of Scotland.   

On Michael Barclay’s Private Passions (Radio 3, Sunday, midday) the geologist Sanjeev Gupta chose a piece of music which happened to be a palindrome, John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean, its second half a mirror image of the first, which, considering the piece was 45 minutes long, was certainly a fairly remarkable undertaking.  Michael played four minutes of the piece, two minutes either side of the midpoint.  I found the music minimalist in style, atmospheric after the nature of a film score that can hypnotise you if you stay behind in a cinema, late at night, to watch the credits scroll endlessly by.  I thought at first the idea was a bit of a gimmick, but then it occurred to me that it would have been the sort of thing J. S. Bach might have done.  There is a famous portrait by Elias Gottlob Haussmann, one of two, in which the master is seen holding a copy of his six-part canon BWV 1076, one of fourteen canons Bach appended to his Goldberg Variations.  If you turn the music upside down and read it back to front, it reads quite differently.  It is the ultimate musical acrostic.      

And again, Haydn composed palindromes.  I had one performed for my benefit on the pianoforte yesterday evening, part of the Hoboken 16 collection, and dedicated to Haydn’s patron Prince Esterházy.  It was very charming, and certainly very clever, but I wonder if it had a certain static quality, like listening to music being generated mechanically by a cuckoo clock.

The Herald has been publishing letters about palindromes, literary ones, all week.  It’s the sort of harmless topic that can capture readers’ interest, generate correspondence, take off and run for a while.  I suspect such preoccupation might serve a useful purpose in diverting, albeit temporarily, our attention from the grim events unfolding on Europe’s eastern border.  I can’t say anybody has written in anything terribly original.  There have been the usual chestnuts: “Able was I ere I saw Elba” (and its parody “Regal was I ere I saw lager”), “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama”, and, that great chat-up line, so apposite on St. Valentine’s Day, “Madam, I’m Adam.”  It made me consider whether I could come up with anything comparable. 

Niagara ban illicit song, A deified Agnostic, ill in a bar again.           

Granted it needs a little context.  It sounds like a newspaper headline, describing a conservative community making clear its disapproval of a pop star with outlandish views and behaviours.  It reminds me of a Canadian community who once tried to ban Madonna from performing acts on stage considered lewd, and corrupting of the town’s young and impressionable.  I have a notion that if I keep my palindrome on ice, something will crop up that will render it sensible and relevant.  I once concocted a panagram (anagram of the alphabet) that did precisely that.  I had read that “Cwm fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz” (statues on the banks of a fjord in a valley disturbed an old man – the sort of thing you would want to say every day) was the only known panagram in the English language.  And I thought, surely, another can be concocted!  I came up with:

“M: Gulf wrack hext spy, viz J. Bond.  Q”

Clearly this is a message from MI6’s quartermaster to his boss, to let him know that 007 is spooked by the appearance of detritus in the Caribbean.

And now here’s the extraordinary thing.  It came true.  Sir Sean Connery made known his disapproval of all sorts of flotsam and jetsam washed up on the beaches of Nassau.

“Jack’s vow: BGLTQ mix fund Zephyr” (Jack pledges the gay community, et al, to finance the purchase of an automobile.) 

I put all this to my good hiking friend Harpoonata Venture and she said, “Why are you preoccupied with all this stuff?”  I replied, by way of admission, “I am like Monsieur Manette, Lucie’s father in A Tale of Two Cities who, when things turn bad on the international scene, reverts to his cobbler’s last.  When the world looks grim and I am fretting, I turn to puzzles and acrostics.” 

“Crosswords?”

“Certainly.  I have a clue for you.”

“I had a horrible feeling you might.”

“Organise BBC game show host! (6,9)”

“I haven’t the foggiest.  Give me a clue.”

“It’s topical.”

“Michael McIntyre.”

“Doesn’t quite fit.”

“I need another clue.”

“It’s a eulogy.”

“Doesn’t help.  I give in.”

“Bamber Gascoigne.”

“That will never do.  University Challenge was on ITV, not BBC.”

“Ah, but that was quite deliberate.  The point is that Bamber Gascoigne is an anagram of ‘Organise BBC game.’  The clue’s definition is ‘show host’.  Therefore the mention of BBC is designed to throw you off the scent.”

“I don’t think that’s fair.  You need something in the clue to indicate that ‘organise game show’ is to be anagramised.  Like, ‘Badly organise BBC game show host.’” 

“Not necessary.  There is an explanation mark at the end of the clue, which indicates that there has been a certain truncation of the clue pointers.  That is a crossword convention.  ‘Organise’ becomes the clue’s operator, or key, even though it is itself part of the anagram.”

Bamber Gascoigne hosted University Challenge between 1962 and 1987.  He was charming and patrician; in the show’s reincarnation, Jeremy Paxman rather more acerbic, and intimidating, at least before Dr Parkinson cruelly deprived him of some of his animation.  He could berate contestants for their ignorance but it was only because he knew something they didn’t.  In its structure, University Challenge is very subtle.  The “starter for ten” is a question which moves from obscurity towards clarity.  At what point to do you jump in, and risk the 5 point penalty?  If you strike early, not only do you have to anticipate the answer, you also have to anticipate the question.  Fingers on buzzers no conferring.

“In his thermodynamic equation relating free energy to enthalpy, entropy…”

Bzzzzzz

Glasgow Campbell!  (Aye, right.  Fat chance.)

“Josiah Willard Gibbs.”

“Very well interrupted!”

Applause.

“Three more questions on thermodynamics…”

I’m convinced the best players buzz before they have formulated the answer (best illustrated in the music round), confident it will come to them while the voiceover announces their name.  Of course, if they corpse, they will receive a dressing-down from Mr Paxman.  Get the answer right, and you are afforded the opportunity to confer at leisure, while the other side can only look on helplessly.

I suppose the ultimate quiz show is Mastermind, hilariously parodied by The Two Ronnies in the days when Magnus Magnusson was the quiz inquisitor.  Mastermind pares things down to the bare essentials. The black chair; nowhere to hide.  I watched Celebrity Mastermind on Saturday.  Rufus Hound pipped Chris Mason to the post.  Next morning the host, Clive Myrie, dressed down for the occasion, reviewed the papers with Sophie Raworth.  He invited Sophie on to the show and she said something like, “No way!  I would freeze!”  With that I sympathise.   

But enough of these dried fruits of my idle elucubrations.  I suppose I had better turn on the radio and see if World War III has commenced.

I’ve started so I’ll finish        

Greatly excited at the prospect of a real live orchestral concert in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday evening (RSNO, Beethoven’s 4^th Piano Concerto with Steven Osborne as soloist, and Beethoven’s 4^th symphony), I arranged a pre-concert rendezvous with friends, printed out my e-ticket, printed out my vaccination status, carried out a lateral flow test (negative), and jumped into my car.  I left at 5.30 pm for a 7.30 show start.  I like to leave in plenty of time – I call it the CAHOOTS Doctrine (Campbell adds hours on over the schedule).  I hate being late.  And I hate that sensation of irritation one has for the man in the tractor who is holding one up; he is, after all, putting bread on one’s table.  Do you consider a two hour cushion for a forty five minute trip excessive?  Well…

I joined the tailback on the M80 shortly after the M9 turn-off.  I could see the serried phalanxes of tail lights stretching ahead for miles into the distance.  This was not simply congestion from sheer volume of traffic.  Somewhere up ahead, somebody must have crashed.  I surfed the radio stations for any travel reports but only found some very nice Scottish dance music on the accordion, the six o’clock news and then Clive Anderson on Loose Ends, and Don Giovanni from the New York Met.  Now if I were a bit more tech-savvy I might have an app on my phone.  Being warned in a dream, I might go by another route.  The trouble is, there is a prolonged section of the M80 with no exit.  I just had to sit tight, occasionally edging forward at walking pace, listening to Mozart.

Ever working night and day

Getting neither thanks nor pay…

It was a cold, dreich night, but at least it had stopped sleeting, and I was comfy in my car with the blower on.  I sat and listened to Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte’s account of the lurid activities of that great sex pest, Don G.  I’m surprised he hasn’t been cancelled.  We were talking about cancel culture over lunch on Friday, and somebody remarked that you can’t just airbrush unsavoury facts, or people, from history.  Actually, remarked another, you can.  The powerful can suppress a truth, or eliminate an individual without trace, and within a generation the memory of the truth, or the person, is gone.  That is why people who are cavalier with the truth are such a menace. 

I edged forward another ten metres.

Should I phone my friends and tell them I’m going to be late?  But you shouldn’t use your mobile while behind the wheel, even supposing you are stationary.  Pull over on the hard shoulder and switch on the hazard lights?  But the emergency services might need the hard shoulder.  Am I being too precious?  Another hour of this, and I might do something totally crazy, like crashing through somebody’s back garden to access a side street, or obliterating the central reservation’s crash barrier to access the other carriageway.  You see, m’lud, with my fragile mental health, I really needed to hear Beethoven.

Ten more metres.  Where the devil am I?  Abeam Dunipace.  Carry on at this pace, and I might make it for Rachmaninov 2, on February 19^th.    

Talking of hearing Beethoven, I’ve just read a very interesting book, Hearing Beethoven, A Story of Musical Loss and Discovery, by Robin Wallace (The University of Chicago Press, 2018).  It is a very unusual book.  Two books in one, really.  Robin Wallace is a musicologist whose late wife, Barbara, happened to be profoundly deaf.  The experiences of Beethoven’s deafness, and Barbara’s deafness, are explored in parallel, and inform one another.  The exploration gives an insight into how Beethoven might have heard the world.                                

Beethoven kept his deafness to himself for as long as he could.  He seemed to have had a sense of shame about it.  He seemed unable to express the fact that he was not at all a bad-tempered misanthrope, but on the contrary a warm-hearted and social individual.  But his deafness cut him off from his fellow men, and women.  So to some extent he was in a state of denial.  This state of denial is very common, even, perhaps especially, with presbyacusis, the almost inevitable diminished hearing of later life, and I encountered it in medical practice constantly.  Whereas people adjust to presbyopia quite easily, perhaps in their mid to late forties, and acquire some reading glasses, most people hold out against a hearing aid, until their level of disability is positively Beethovenian.  This is unfortunate, because using a hearing aid, or aids, is a skill that demands time to be acquired and perfected.  Consequently people are disappointed by the apparent uselessness of their aid, and may stop using it, and opt for social isolation.  They regard their hearing aid, even a miniature digital aid, as a badge of decrepitude. 

Abeam Denny.  I caught the seven o’clock news on Radio Scotland.  Yes, there had been a serious crash on the M80.  Here am I fretting about being late for a concert, while some poor soul has set off on a journey, never to return.  I decided to cut my losses and head for home, pulled off at the earliest opportunity, abeam Bonnybridge, and took the A872, which closely parallels the M80, northbound.  As soon as I could, I pulled over, made a phone call, and sent a text, so that people wouldn’t send out Search & Rescue.  Then I drove through Denny.  I don’t really know Denny, other than its aerial aspect, for it is the reporting point for air traffic heading to Cumbernauld Airport from the North East.  “Cumbernauld Radio, Denny inbound…”  Oddly enough, from the air it looks uncannily like Drury, the reporting point for Ardmore Airport, 12,500 miles away in New Zealand.  Sometimes I would say to Cumbernauld in a fit of absentmindedness, “Drury inbound.”

“Where?”

I really ought not to be allowed out. 

And so back home.  The best-laid schemes o mice an men / Gang aft agley…

But I still listened to some Beethoven.  I chose the Adagio sostenuto from the Piano Sonata in B flat Für das Hammerclavier, Opus 106.  Balsam.