Author: jamescalumcampbell

Last week, on the hottest day ever recorded in Scotland, with the sole purpose of being perverse, I went into the sauna at my local gym.  85 Celsius.  I fell into conversation with a Ukrainian refugee who asked me what the English word was for the machine in the gym on which you could run.  I couldn’t think, and replied, rather lamely, “a running machine.”  Then it came to me.  “A treadmill.”

“I haven’t heard that word.  Why treadmill?”

I had the image of a pony attached to a wheel at a pithead, endlessly walking in a circle to uplift a bucket of coal from the bowels of the earth.  I said, “It’s a kind of metaphor for carrying out an uncongenial repetitive task.  If you are obliged to persist, you’re on a treadmill.”

“Treadmill.”  He lodged it away.  He’d only been in Scotland for two weeks, but already he’d picked up a job as a translator.  I told him I thought he’d be very good at it.  Where did he learn English?  School?  He said he’d studied it at school and got nowhere, but then he just picked it up from U-tube.  I asked him if he found the Scottish accent difficult.  Not at all.  I told him sometimes I couldn’t understand the guys in the gym when they spoke rough urban Stirling, and I’m from Glasgow, 25 miles away.  The third occupant of the cubicle, a young lady, flashed me a grin.

The treadmill used to be a feature of life in prison.  Hard labour is punitive.  The labour is even more punitive if it is pointless, like painting coal white, cleaning a parade ground with a toothbrush, or moving heavy sacks from point A to point B, then from point B back to point A.  Such tasks are designed to break the spirit.  Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves…  Such is the myth of Sisyphus.  You push the heavy stone to the top of the hill, only for it to roll back down to the bottom.  You go back down and start all over again.  I remember at school, we all thought it preferable to receive two smart strokes of the tawse than to be forced to write out a hundred times, “I must not forget my pencil.”  The prefects were not allowed to beat us, but they could hand out lines.  Their favourite was, “Discipline is the fundamental basis of any well-organised society.”  The galling thing about that is that it’s not even true.  Discipline is the fundamental basis of any totalitarian regime.  I wonder what would have happened if I had gone to the headmaster and said, “I refuse to condone a lie.”  Like the guy in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible who refused to sign a confession, I would doubtless have paid a heavy price.  “Love is the fundamental basis of any well-organised society.  And by the way, the school toilets are a disgrace.”  I might have received three swipes of the strap, accompanied by the mantra, “GOD – IS – LOVE!”  So I would never have taken the risk.  But I might have buried deep in my 100 lines, say around line 63, one single seditious message.  You know where you can stick your well-organised society.  Safe enough.  You might write 100 lines, but nobody will ever read them.   

If you find yourself on a treadmill, what do you do?  Well, obviously, you get off.  But what if you can’t?  What if you are a galley slave, chained to your oar?  All you can do is try to retain a sense of self.  An attitude to your situation.  Survive.  And wait.  And try, somehow, to communicate with your peers, who are in the same boat.  At school, you would perform a small ceremonial act of rebellion, like sticking chewing gum to the underside of your desk, and you would hope like hell that your neighbour wasn’t a stooge, in the pocket of the authorities, and a clype.  

Sitting in the sauna, I conjured this thought experiment.  You are on a treadmill in the gym, pelting along at full tilt, and the conveyor belt abruptly halts.  Do you crash forward over the front of the machine, or fall off the back?  Either way, when Boris’s treadmill came to an abrupt halt, I think he would have done well to get off.  He might have followed the example of his great hero, Winston, who, when the electorate rejected him in 1945, couldn’t get out fast enough, even if he was determined in due course to make a come-back.  But they say that Boris is hanging around because he doesn’t believe either Rishi or Liz can cut the mustard.  The Tories will self-destruct and then Boris will say, “Here am I.  I can save you.  All you need do is ask.”  But Indispensability Syndrome is a terminal condition.  If you think you are indispensable, the caustic aphorism runs, just look at your appointments book the week after you are dead.

Sweating away in the sauna, I can’t decide whether the suddenly halted treadmill hurls you forward or tosses you back.  I’ll have to Google it.  But not now.  One of the advantages of the sauna is that it is a device-free zone.  I have never seen anybody bring their smartphone into the sauna.  Another advantage of sauna etiquette is that it allows conversation to be abruptly terminated.  The other day a guy was passing inappropriate remarks about a personable young lady whom he could observe through the Perspex door, conducting a children’s swimming class.  You know the sort of thing.  “Do you think if I told her I was seven years old I could join the class?  She can be my lifesaver any time…”  It was all very creepy.  I muttered, “Heat stroke”, left, and slid into the pool. 

I was amused to hear the five remaining candidates (as I write) for the Tory leadership being asked that hoary old chestnut of the standard job interview, “What is your main weakness?”  Anyone who has been groomed for high office will have been asked just that during the mock interview, and later advised, “Whatever you do, don’t let them discover your real weakness.  I drink too much, I take illicit substances, I’m sexually incontinent… I don’t think so.  Don’t even admit to something far less flagrant.  I swither, I dither, I suffer from Impostor Syndrome.  No.  What you must do is present a strength disguised as a weakness.”  Thus:

Rishi Sunak (Wykehamist, PPE at Oxford, MBA at Stanford on a Fulbright Scholarship, Goldman Sachs, Hedge Funds etc.)  Weakness: “I work too hard and am too perfectionist.”  This has been widely perceived as too cheesy.

Liz Truss (West Primary School, Paisley, Roundhay School Leeds, PPE at Oxford, worked for Shell.)  Weakness: “I’m excessively overenthusiastic.”  Given her style of delivery, often described as robotic, this seems hard to believe.  Besides, is it a tautology?  You can be overenthusiastic, or you can be excessively enthusiastic, but is being excessively overenthusiastic not a bit OTT?  Demonstrates the point, I guess.

Tom Tugendhat (St Paul’s London, Theology at Bristol, Masters in Islamic Studies, Gonville and Caius, learned Arabic in Yemen, Lieutenant Colonel in the Territorials, served in Iraq and Afghanistan.)  Weakness: “I may talk about the army a little too much.”  I don’t think the army will object.

Penny Mordaunt (Oaklands Roman Catholic Comprehensive School, Hants, Philosophy at Reading, has worked as a magician’s assistant.)  Weakness: “I’m tempted to say Burmese cats.  I have four and introducing them into No. 10 might present some challenges with Larry.”  She dodged the question.  Then, an apparent non-sequitur:  “I think over the years I’ve learned to be able to delegate to become more effective.  But I think all of us are going to need to learn to build a team of all the talents in the party.”  Is this where the cats come in?  Is it just me, or does Ms Mordaunt bear an uncanny physical resemblance to Marine le Pen?  Do you ever see them both in the same room?

Kemi Badenoch (University of Lagos Staff Secondary School, Phoenix College Morden, MEng University of Sussex, computer systems software engineer, LLB Burbeck.)  Weakness: “Allowing my sense of humour to look like I’m flippant about issues.”  How can a sense of humour be a weakness?

Well, I suppose we all do it.  We present a sanitised, cosmetic version of ourselves to the wider world.  We describe ourselves not as we are, but as we would wish to be.  We play charades, much as Cary Grant hides behind a plethora of identities in the 1963 film Charade, until finally he comes out of hiding for Audrey Hepburn’s Reggie Lampert.  “Reggie, I beg you.  That man is Carson Dyle!  Trust me just one more time.”

“Why should I?”

“I can’t think of a reason in the world.”

So of course, she does.

That would be a great answer for an aspiring Prime Minister.  “Why should we entrust you with the title deeds to the highest office in the land?” 

“I can’t think of a reason in the world.” 

Political suicide?  Oddly enough, it’s the sort of answer that Boris, a man allegedly economical with the truth, might have gotten away with.  He has the patrician’s indifference to the threat of dropping a clanger.  But then, Boris can say what he likes, being yesterday’s man.  Or is he?  He’s still in the bunker.  Maybe he thinks the five contenders will implode and self-destruct, and he will once more be summoned to the Palace.          

I’ve just heard that Rishi and Liz have withdrawn from the next TV debate, which is thus likely to be cancelled.  At least we will be spared further reiterations of humbug.  Humbug is the Lingua Franca of political discourse.  The trouble with humbug is that it can’t be taken seriously.  It turns the Tory leadership contest into a reality TV game show.  Indeed, the manner of the sequential elimination of the candidates closely resembles a game show.  I’m a Strictly Baked-Off Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!  “The person who will not be returning next week is…”

…prolonged agonising silence while the camera focuses on each anguished face…

The name is announced, and the overhead limelight is extinguished.  At least we are spared the hugs and kisses, and the crocodile tears of the survivors.  We move on to the next round.  It’s worthy of mention that the Tory Party, which has always championed First Past the Post at General Elections, has opted to anoint the next PM by a far more complicated system absorbing various elements of Proportional Representation. 

I didn’t listen to the second televised debate, which I gather was ill-tempered, but instead listened again to the magnificent Sinfonia of London at the Proms, under the baton of the most musical man on the planet, John Wilson.  I heard them on Radio 3 on Saturday, and I watched them on BBC 4 on Sunday.  A programme of British music.  They played Arnold Bax’s tone poem, Tintagel.  I love Bax’s music.  But it is rarely heard in the concert hall.  I once drove into Tintagel, on the coast of Cornwall, with the car windows down and the sound system blaring Bax’s tone poem.  Nobody paid any attention.  The Tintagel coastline is straight out of Tristan and Isolde, wild and Celtic, but the Arthurian “improvements” are a bit naff.  Bogus Lancelot. 

Today England has an unprecedented red alert for the weather.  Some establishment figure has said that it is not surprising that in snowflake Britain, the snowflakes are melting.  This reminded me of the time the decision was made to silence the bongs of Big Ben for four years, to protect the hearing of scaffolders during the refurbishment of the Palace of Westminster.  A grandee passed a crass remark along the lines of, “Why don’t the poor dears just wear ear muffs?  It’s health and safety gone mad I tell you.”  People who pass remarks like that tend not to be scaffolders by profession.  Some people think the BBC has been “excessively overenthusiastic” about telling everybody to close the curtains and sit still.  I expect the constituency of the bloody-minded will ignore the advice and head for the beach.  For myself, I’ve got a jumper on.  The local weather forecast in the paper says today it will be 15 – 16 C.  The weather, and the climate, are different up here.  In all sorts of ways.           

Never having tasted it before, I bought some sauerkraut from Waitrose the other day.  Incidentally, I heard a very amusing story about an immensely wealthy sheikh who asked a lady acquaintance where she went for her groceries.  She recommended Waitrose.  She chanced to meet the sheikh a little later and asked him if he had favoured the store with his patronage.  “Oh yes.  Very good indeed, but my goodness, terribly expensive!”     

I didn’t care for the sauerkraut.  Unusual for me – I’m not picky, I can eat almost anything.    Naturally fermented, live cultured, it belongs to a range of “versatile super condiments that will elevate your sandwich…”  I should think it would levitate the Palace of Westminster.  I was describing my sauerkraut experience to somebody yesterday who said, “What is sauerkraut?” and, thumbing through the Oxford Dictionary of English, as will happen, got side-tracked.

“Do you know what Erik Satie’s middle names were?”

I did not.

“Alfred Leslie.  Scottish mother, you see.  Where were we?  Sauerkraut.  A German dish of chopped pickled cabbage, from German sauer, sour, and Kraut, vegetable.  I suppose that’s the origin of the derogatory term for a German.”

Anyway, what am I to do with this tub of sauerkraut, “live cultured,” it says, “for tasty Gutness.”?  Gutness?  I checked the Oxford again, and got side-tracked.  Gutbucket – a glutton.  Also, of jazz or blues, raw and spirited in style: his gutbucket guitar solos.  And gutta-percha – a kind of rubber, from Malay getah perca.  I knew about gutta-percha because my Ayrshire grannie used to sing The Drunkard’s Ragged Wean to me:

He stands at Jimmy’s corner

Till Jimmy cries him in

To see if he’s got oany bits

Or gutta-percha shin…

Where were we?  An Oxford entry for gutless, but not for gutness.  I presume this is a kind of clumsy German pun on goodness.  If it’s doing my gut any good maybe I should persevere.  I hate to throw food out.  Besides, the brown bucket isn’t due for uplift for another three weeks and meantime it will be like having a nuclear fission reactor on the back patio.  And with a looming world food crisis maybe I’ll be glad to have fermented cabbage.  No need to rush into anything.  It’s good in the fridge until August 27th, by which time I’ll gratefully intone the Selkirk Grace over it.  Apparently Burns delivered it, extempore, before the Earl of Selkirk.

Some hae meat, and canna eat

And some wad eat that want it;

But we hae meat

And we can eat

Sae let the Lord be thankit.

How would that go in German?

Manche Leute haben Fleisch,

Und können nicht ja essen…

(usw.)

The thing about Burns is, he packs a lot of meaning into just a few words.  We could translate the Selkirk Grace into modern management-speak:

Despite the ready availability of low hanging fruit, and perhaps because of a significant digestive malfunction going forward…

I wonder if, post-Brexit, there is an enormous backlog of sauerkraut at Dover, awaiting customs checks.  We could ask the pretenders to the apex of Westminster’s “slipper slope” and greasy pole if they have a sauerkraut policy.  When the runners and riders for the race for PM became rather numerous, the paddock overcrowded, I was reminded of an ancient Hollywood “Sword and Sandals” movie in which the position of Caesar comes up for grabs during the last decadent days of the Roman Empire, and as the unseemly struggle for power commences, the film’s hero and his love interest leave Rome to live happily ever after in deepest rural Tuscany.  They already knew the game was up for the Empire, when Caligula made his horse a senator.

Elections to the Conservative leadership are notoriously unpredictable.  The stalking horse who kicks off procedures doesn’t usually get it, and neither does the front runner.  No, the race falls to the dark horse.  Think of 1963.  Quintin Hogg?  Rab Butler?  No.  Alec Douglas-Home.  Once the 22 sets the rules, we can expect a media feeding-frenzy.  I heard a political reporter on the BBC describing the life of a journalist covering the Lobby.  Wear flat shoes, she said, keep a phone charger in your bag, carry snacks, and keep abreast of the goings-on on Twitter and WhatsApp.  It sounded like an absolute nightmare to me.  My favourite Prime Minister of the 20^th Century is Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1905 – 08).  Glasgow Boy.  Glasgow High School educated, but we won’t hold that against him.  His period of tenure was notably un-tumultuous.  Every September, he went off on holiday for six weeks to Marienbad.  He didn’t keep in touch by Facebook.  Rather he spent his time reading German literature.  I don’t suppose the Prime Minister-apparent, whoever he or she may be, would risk letting the charge on the mobile run down.  What a life to strive for.  But them’s the breaks.                         

I see that the competitive Scrabble world is in turmoil over the proscription of 419 words that have been deemed offensive and unusable.  I can well imagine the fury of some members of the London Scrabble Association who have tendered their resignation.  If you put down n*****, they say, you are not casting a racial slur.  It just happens to be a word in the dictionary.  Next, you will expurgate the dictionary itself.  Such a word does not exist; it never existed.  Enough of this woke nonsense.  Then again, maybe “woke” itself is a bit questionable.  It started out as a rallying call among the disadvantaged, to remain constantly aware of the slings and arrows of their particularly outrageous fortune.  “Stay woke, man.”  But then the people who couldn’t be bothered with all this brouhaha – generally middle-aged white males – started to use it in a pejorative sense.  Perhaps the International Scrabble Committee will interrogate you as to whether you intend “woke” as a term of approbation, or a slur, or maybe just the past tense of the verb to wake.

I rather think there will be few people who are absolutist in their espousal of total freedom to say what you like, even on the Scrabble board.  My freedom stops at the end of your nose.  And if names are as hurtful as sticks and stones, then maybe there are limits.  Clearly I think so, otherwise I wouldn’t have obscured the n-word in a flurry of asterisks. 

Manners and morals of a past age can become offensive to us, and we may wish to revise our opinions and attitudes.  But still I think it is a mistake to attempt to alter, or obliterate the past.  In BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read (which is a good listen), Harriett Gilbert extolled the virtues of an historical romance by Georgette Heyer (was it The Grand Sophy?) with one reservation.  There was in the book a passage describing in repugnant terms a Jewish usurer of backstreet London.  Ms Gilbert thought the passage lent nothing to the overall structure of a fine book, and that in any subsequent editions, it ought to be removed.  Well, I haven’t read the book, so I must choose another example.  There is a wonderful chapter in John Buchan’s Mr Standfast, “The Village Named Morality”, in which Richard Hannay is extracted from the Great War trenches by the intelligence services and placed deeply under cover in the village of Biggleswick, a repository for artists, pacifists, and various assortments of “the half-baked”, in search of a German spy network.  Thus a purportedly slow-witted South African man of brawn and muscle exercises his veldt-craft in highly unlikely surroundings resembling the drawing rooms of Knightsbridge and Bloomsbury.  His descriptions of pacifist meetings in the village’s Moot Hall are hilarious.  Then along comes this appalling sentence:

And to my joy, one night there was a great buck n***** who had a lot to say about “Africa for the Africans.”  I had a few words with him in Sesutu afterwards, and rather spoiled his visit. 

That sentence has been altered in recent editions of Mr Standfast.  The question arises as to whether we are hearing the voice of Richard Hannay, or of John Buchan himself.  Is there a remove between Buchan and Hannay?  Does Buchan realise that Hannay is a racist?  Either way, should the sentence have been edited out? 

The natural successor to Hannay in the intelligence world is James Bond.  Bond’s attitudes and opinions can be as startling to the modern ear as Richard Hannay’s.  Now Bond is not racist.  Nor is he a snob (unlike his creator, at least according to Sean Connery) though of course he can hardly escape entirely the innate sense of superiority of the old Etonian.  But Bond is sexist.  From Thunderball: 

Women are often meticulous and safe drivers, but they are very seldom first-class.  In general Bond regarded them as a mild hazard…  Four women in a car he regarded as the highest potential danger…

(I think if Bond had done his research, he might have found that the most dangerous drivers were males between the ages of 17 and 35.) 

From Casino Royale:

These blithering women who thought they could do a man’s work.  Why the hell couldn’t they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men’s work to the men… The silly bitch. 

Bond is also homophobic.  From Goldfinger: 

Bond came to the conclusion that Tilly Masterton was one of these girls whose hormones had got mixed up.  He knew the type well and thought they and their male counterparts were a direct consequence of giving votes to women and “sex equality”…  Pansies of both sexes were everywhere… He was sorry for them, but he had no time for them.

Again, Casino Royale:

And now he knew that she was profoundly, excitingly sensual, but that the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the sweet tang of rape. 

And, on the same theme, in The Spy Who Loved Me, a real whopper:

All women love semi-rape. 

I wonder if that one has survived the blue pen of a latter-day Bowdler.  Or, like Hannay’s great buck n*****, has it been erased?  I’m not for this kind of revision.  Stet, as the newspaper editor says.  Let it stand.  It seems to me that reconstructions of this kind resemble the act of stripping a disgraced individual of an honour.  Somebody blots his copybook and is relinquished of a knighthood.  It’s a way of rewriting history.  It’s the establishment’s way of distancing itself from a bad odour.  That thoroughly filthy fellow is not a knight; he was never a knight.  Do we make the world a better place by forgetting how awful it used to be?  Do we pull the statues down, or let them remain, as our monuments to shame?    

But to return to the Scrabble board, lubra is out.  It means an Aboriginal woman.  I had thought the term was gin – because I’ve seen it in Nevil Shute books.  I had thought that gin was just short for aborigine, but according to the Oxford Dictionary of English it comes from the Dharuk diyin, woman, wife.  Dharuk?  The Oxford again: an aboriginal language of the area round Sydney, Australia, now extinct.  I worked in Brisbane, Queensland, and I was certainly aware that the Aboriginal people were so marginalised as to be virtually invisible.  I couldn’t have told you the name of a single Aboriginal language.  Perhaps by now, for all I know, they are all extinct.  At least a word like lubra, or gin, is a potential portal to the rediscovery of the past.

I believe greybeard is out.  It’s ageist.  And Jesuit, and Jesuitic, which, if placed on the appropriate squares, used to earn you a whopping 200 points.  But I was surprised Jesuit was ever an option.  I didn’t think proper names were allowed.      

You know the old gag: I used to be indecisive, but now I’m not so sure.  It certainly pertains to me.  In my opinion I’ve become less opinionated.  With regard to ethical issues, I have taken on board the advice of Oliver Cromwell, to consider in the bowels of Christ, that I may be wrong.  I can see, for example, that people who support a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy deploy arguments as powerful as people who support the rights of the unborn child.  The only thing I felt sure about in this debate was that the medical profession in this country has been manipulated, and has allowed itself to be manipulated, into ticking box 2C – if memory serves me right – in a form designed by Lord Steel et al in 1968.

Nevertheless, one day last week when the BBC Radio 4 newscaster announced, “Within the last hour, the United States Supreme Court has overturned the historic judgment Roe v. Wade…” I did feel a visceral stab of dismay.  Maybe that was because I had just finished reading Margaret Atwood’s 2019 Booker Prize winner, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments (Chatto & Windus, 2019).  Terrific book, very funny in a black way, and also a real nail-biter.  The Handmaid’s Tale was being readied for publication in 1984 (the Orwellian influence is clearly discernible), and in 2019 we find that Gilead, the USA dystopia, is worse than ever.  Life for a woman in Gilead resembles life under the Taliban.  And now life imitates art.  President Trump front-loaded the Supreme Court with right-leaning justices who have altered the law.  I thought, naively, that it was the business of judges to interpret law, and not to make it.  Surely the court’s decision is political, rather than legal, just as a doctor’s ticking box 2C is making a judgment that is moral-ethical, rather than pathological-diagnostic.  I remember the first time I visited the United States, in 1982, being met by my American uncle at JFK in New York, who said, with profound irony bordering on sarcasm, “Welcome to the land of the free.”

One of the defining characteristics of occupying a dystopia is that you don’t know it.  The ruling elite makes sure of this.  Hence Winston Smith’s task is to obliterate unpalatable truths in the memory hole, and women in Gilead are rendered illiterate by being denied access to books.  The current dystopia we are constructing for ourselves here and now is characterised by the obliteration of human communication.  When we make contact with any corporate organization our first port of call is liable to be a robot, who is keen to ascertain that we are not a robot. 

“Please state in a few words the reason for your call.”

“Well, it’s a little complicated.  You see, to let you understand…”

“I’m sorry.  I didn’t catch that.  Do you wish to alter the terms of your policy?”

The robot is keen that your problem, whatever it is, fits neatly into a template.  If it doesn’t, it can’t cope.  But it won’t tell you.  Things just grind to a halt.  Say you buy a concert ticket on line.  You go through the rigmarole of making the booking, presenting credit card details, proceeding to the check-out counter, and pressing “Proceed”.  And nothing happens.  The problem is simple to solve.  You haven’t ticked the box to say that you have read the terms and conditions.  So you retrace your steps and tick the box (without reading the terms and conditions).  Hey Presto. 

Now this relatively straightforward scenario has become a model for all sorts of interaction.  Even if your interlocutor is not a robot, he will exhibit robotic behaviour, and if your request or enquiry is a little out of the norm, he will cease to function on your behalf.  It simply isn’t what he has been programmed to do. 

Another aspect of this kind of interaction, or lack of it, is the absence of the courtesy of acknowledgment.  You submit an enquiry electronically to a financial institution, an insurance company, a publishing house, the Inland Revenue… You press submit, cast your bread upon the waters, and hope for the best.  After a week or two you grow doubtful as to whether your message-in-a-bottle has reached dry land, and you send out another bottle.  Did you get my message?

Stoney silence. 

Not every human enterprise has been puddled by this noxious pollutant.  Aviators remain good communicators.  I can still remember the poetic mantra twixt control tower and London shuttle while I sat in my Chipmunk at the holding point at Glasgow Airport, number two to a Trident 3.  “You’re clear to London Heathrow via White Nine Amber One, to cross Lanark and Talla at flight level 55, and to climb when instructed by Scottish Radar to Flight Level 230 today.”

The pilot would read it back, word perfect.

“Read back correct.”

It wasn’t just a courtesy.  It was a matter of life and death. 

But for the most part, in our society, human communication is being rapidly eroded. You can’t get an appointment with your GP, you can’t buy a train ticket from somebody at the station ticket office, and you can’t ask a bank teller to effect a financial transaction.  That is our peculiar dystopia, and we don’t recognise it.  The next dystopia is never like the last dystopia.

Is the USA really morphing into Gilead?  You might argue that it already has.  Margaret Atwood makes the observation that The Testaments is not really a futuristic novel; she made a point of depicting nothing that doesn’t already exist.  The way out of Gilead is escape north to Canada.  I did that in 1982.  I hired a car and drove up through New York State across to Ontario via Thousand Island Country.  Very beautiful.  I went round Lake Ontario, through Margaret Atwood’s home town Toronto, and headed for the border at Buffalo.  A Canadian looked at me dubiously and said, “Why on earth are you going back down there?”   

The following is a calypso, after the style of Cy Grant, on BBC’s Tonight, anchored by the imperturbable Cliff Michelmore.

Shortly after my father, as a young man, joined the City of Glasgow Police, he was involved in a fracas in a public house, during which he injured his hand.  After the battle, he received some attention, and advice from a senior officer.  “Son, next time you’re in a rammy, use your stick.”  Which US President was it said, “Talk softly, and carry a big stick”?  In the 1930s, when Winston saw what was happening in Nazi Germany, he declared that we had to rearm, not in order to fight, but in order to parlay.  Preparation for war was the sole guarantor of peace.  Now the new head of the army, General Sir Patrick Sanders, is glooming us up about the imminent possibility of World War 3.  British troops “must be prepared for battle in Europe once again”.  Boots on the ground.  Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?  That a military man should ask government for more manpower and weaponry is de rigueur.           

Last week the Prime Minister made a surprise visit to Kyiv to pledge the imminent delivery of more big sticks.  Kyiv must have seemed a more attractive destination to him, on the day, than Doncaster.  It’s a photo opportunity he clearly relishes, and carries off rather well.  “Volodymyr, good to see you!”  “Ah!  Boris!  Welcome!”  He pledged a lot of stuff, arms, training, economic assistance.  Mind, President Zelensky might do well to take any promise from the PM with a pinch of salt.  The PM’s opponents say he is making the script up as he goes along, chiefly to divert attention from intractable difficulties at home.    

I wonder which member of the government originally came up with the Rwanda wheeze.  When I first heard about it, I thought it was a rather belated April Fool’s gag, in very bad taste.  We are going to export our refugees the way we export our plastic detritus.  Out of sight, out of mind, like landfill. We associate Rwanda with the genocide of 1994, against the Tutsi.  Not at all, said the government.  Rwanda is an up-and-coming nation with a fast-growing economy.  And the people-traffickers must be deterred.  This is an example of cognitive dissonance: Rwanda is an attractive destination – look at these nice pictures of plush hotel bedrooms – and it is an unattractive destination, otherwise the traffickers, and the refugees themselves crossing the channel at great personal risk, will not be deterred.

Lord Geidt, erstwhile ethical advisor to the government, has resigned.  At first, the government was rather coy about publishing his letter of resignation, but they really needn’t have worried, because Lord Geidt himself was rather coy about expressing the reasons behind his action, other than saying he had been put in an “odious” position.  I thought “odious” was an unusual choice of word.  He might have called his position “invidious”.  It’s one of these words that gets bandied around without anyone being quite sure what it means.  I would say that being in an invidious position is like being in what the psychiatrists call a “bind” or, worse still a “double bind”.  It doesn’t matter what you do; you are in a “lose-lose” situation.  You are stuck between a rock and a hard place.  Now “between a rock and a hard place” is another strange expression, as if you can’t think of another synonym for “rock”.  But I digress.  In fact, “invidious” comes from the Latin for envy, invidia.  If you are in an invidious position, you are likely to excite envy in others, and thus, ill will.  Now that is odd.  Surely an invidious position is unenviable. 

But Lord Geidt did not say his position was invidious.  He said it was odious, or hateful, from the Latin for hatred, odium.  That is a strong word.  He was being asked to rubber-stamp as ethical a course of action that he considered unethical.  In order to do so, you need to go beyond the realm of cognitive dissonance and enter the realm of doublethink.  Either that, or you resign. 

What else is going on at home?  The trains grind to a halt this evening.  Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t believe the government wants to keep them going.  Rather HMG wants everything to seize up so as to sow class division.  Some of the unions are even calling for a general strike.  Would that be the first since 1926? 

And the problem posed by the Good Friday Agreement, the Northern Ireland Protocol, and a hard border in the Irish Sea, continues to bamboozle Westminster.  It’s like trying to solve the ancient problem of trisecting an angle using only ruler and compasses.  It is manifestly impossible. 

Now that Brexit is beginning to bite, I rather suspect that some of the old school Tory remainers who were purged from the party must look back upon the SNP’s paper of 2014, Scotland’s Future, with a certain nostalgia.  A politically independent Scotland within the Union of the Crowns, a shared currency and bank of last resort, and an open border.  What’s not to like?  Had that been the case, it seems very unlikely that the rump of the UK would have chosen to leave the EU.  But of course that is mere conjecture.  That opportunity is gone.  At the time, Alex Salmond passed a remark that has since been widely, perhaps wilfully, misunderstood.  He said that the chance for independence was a “once in a generation” opportunity.  He wasn’t choosing that it be so.  He was merely saying carpe diem, seize the day, because the day may not soon recur.  He might have quoted the words of Brutus in Julius Caesar Act IV scene III:

There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune,

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

No point in crying over spilt milk.  In modern parlance, we are where we are.  Energy crisis, soaring cost of living, inflation, recession (= stagflation), and, apparently imminently, a general strike, and World War 3.  How is the government responding to all this?  Is anybody in government up to the task?  Cometh the hour, cometh the man, or woman.  Or are they merely responding to each impending crisis with back-of-a-fag-packet formulae?  I see that a Google software engineer has been suspended because he has gone public with the notion that his Artificial Intelligence Device – like HAL in 2001 – has gone sentient.  His going public was apparently a breach of confidentiality.  Whose confidentiality?  The device’s?  Maybe Google suspended him because they think he’s crazy, or maybe because they think he’s right.  I myself don’t believe that machines can be like us, although I do strongly suspect several prominent politicians are turning themselves into machines.  As soon as you surrender yourself to the whip, you become a machine.  Winston again, back in the 30s:  “So they go on, in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.”

The European Court of Human Rights, to which we remain a signatory as it is part of the European Council rather than the European Union, has for the moment stopped the flights to Rwanda.  One way out for the government is to withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights.

Meanwhile in our hospitals, the frail and elderly are stacked up in the departure lounge, with nowhere to go, while the ambulances are stacked up outside “A & E”.

Drip, drip, drip.                            

A convivial luncheon, last week, in Kilbride.  East or West?  West.  But I believe the honest burgers of the Ayrshire coastal town, home of the world’s tastiest potato, prefer to leave the compass bearing out.  That bespeaks a certain self-confidence of the sort that characterises other Scottish townships, Kippen, Bridge of Allan, and, of course Edinburgh.  Perhaps the residents of East Kilbride would call it smugness.  West bespeaks urbanity, gentrification, and style; east is disadvantage, squalor, and despair.  Just think of Glasgow.  Or war time London.  When the Luftwaffe bombed Buckingham Palace the (then) queen said, “Now we can look the East End in the eye.”  The west’s sense of superiority over the east is seen globally, in macrocosm.  West is freedom, east is oppression.  This has little to do with compass bearings.  Australia is firmly in the west.  Still, in New Zealand, the association of “westness” with enlightenment and sophistication is less apparent.  Inhabitants of West Auckland are known as “westies” and here the term implies a certain rough-neck, hick, frontier spirit.  Meanwhile the east-west divide has become less apparent in London, where obscene wealth and obscene poverty live cheek by jowl, after the fashion of the huge, sprawling Gotham Cities of Latin America.   

Luncheon in Kilbride (sic) was a convocation of people who have been playing music together for over half a century.  Two bassoons, two violas, flute, piano, percussion, and voice.  I wonder if anybody has composed for such a combination?  Perhaps we should commission a work.  Then again, perhaps not.  Inevitably, the conversation turned to matters musical.  Apparently, said a bassoon, there is some evidence that the production of sound within the belly of a Stradivarius results in a mysterious molecular realignment in the ancient wood, which enhances the beauty of tone.  This, I said, might explain why, when I (a viola) take my ersatz Strad out of its dusty case, the sound is dead, though I suspect that might have more to do with my own molecular mal-alignment, than that of my instrument’s pine belly, and maple back.   

Anyway, I did dust off the Strad, and went to play a concert yesterday with the Dunblane Chamber Orchestra.  It nearly didn’t happen, decimated by Covid as we are, our composition even more chamber-like than usual.  Only two violas.  Eek!  Even our conductor was hors-de-combat.  The conductor of the Stirling Orchestra stepped in at short notice, with great effectiveness, and fortunately the other viola player is very accomplished. 

The concert was in aid of Ukrainian refugees so we started with the Ukrainian National Anthem.  A stark reminder of the east-west divide.  Then, Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, Max Bruch’s Concerto for Viola and Clarinet, David Breingan’s Jubilee 70 (world premiere), and Schubert’s Second Symphony.  That was a lot of music.  If I were paid by the quaver, I would be a rich man.  The Schubert went like the clappers.  I had the sensation of being on a train travelling so fast that I couldn’t discern the names of the stations through which we clattered. 

The Bruch concerto was very beautiful.  I hadn’t heard it before, though having played the chamber pieces for piano, clarinet and viola, I recognised the idiom.  In the programme note, I read that the first performance, in 1912, fell rather flat.  The critics called it “bland, soft, unexciting, over-polite and unmodern.”  Well, I do wish we heard more music that was bland, soft, unexciting, over-polite and unmodern.  I suppose to your “average” concert-goer Max Bruch is something of a one hit wonder, the one hit being his G minor violin concerto.  But there is a vast repertoire out there – not just Max Bruch – that is unheard, and unknown.  I used to think that the combination of talent and industry in the arts generally would inevitably find its way in the world, but I no longer believe this to be the case.  Thomas Gray knew that full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air.  We tend to think that the great pillars of musical history – Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert – were somehow inevitable, but it’s not true.  They could have been snuffed out.  They could have produced – and no doubt others have produced – a body of work that never came to light.  What giants have been lost to history? 

A quorum of the Kilbride Octet reconvened for the last concert of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s season in Glasgow.  The RSNO went out with a bang, and Beethoven 9.  Oddly enough, the first concert I ever attended in my life ended with Beethoven 9.  It was in Glasgow’s St Andrews Hall, before it was burnt down – obviously – and I think I was aged about nine.  I don’t suppose I made much of it, though it says something of Beethoven’s universal appeal that I think I was conscious of being present at a remarkable event.  I remember being impressed around the same time when I heard the opening of the Pathétique Sonata.  I remember being overawed by the look of the music on the printed page.  All these thick black lines of hemidemisemiquavers.  They just looked so angry.

The RSNO’s rendition last week was terrific, though I admit I was rather unreceptive.  I was distracted, not so much by the fidgety child sitting in front of me (who might, after all, have been my doppelgänger) as by the child’s parents who wouldn’t cease from fidgeting with their mobile devices, as incandescent as my sense of mounting rage.  I got into a mood. 

Alle Menschen werden Brüder…

Aye, right. 

Every weekday I take (sic) two newspapers from the village shop.  I suppose I could say I get, or acquire, or buy two papers, but the posh expression is “take”, even if it sounds as if I’m shoplifting.  If I were serving you a cup of coffee I might similarly say, “Do you take milk?”  But oddly enough it’s slightly posher to say “Do you have milk?”  So in Glasgow I say “take” and in Edinburgh I say “have” so as not to be a cultural anomaly. 

The newspapers in question are The Herald and The National.  The National is subtitled, “The newspaper that supports an independent Scotland”.  Its tone can be rather strident.  Frankly, it can be an organ of propaganda.  But then, nobody else is fighting for that particular political corner.  The word propaganda, rather like pornography, has a pejorative connotation.  We tend to think of propaganda in terms of “fake news”.  When Mr Putin says he is ridding the Donbas region of Nazism in a “military exercise”, the west thinks this is propaganda.  When the west says the Kremlin locks up Muscovites for 15 years for calling the military exercise a “war”, Mr Putin would I dare say call this propaganda.  Mr Lavrov says that in arming Ukraine, the west is prepared to fight to the last Ukrainian; I suppose he must mean the west is prepared to carry out a military exercise to the last Ukrainian.

What exactly is propaganda?  Where the devil have I put my dog-eared Chambers?

n. propagan’da a congregation of the Roman Catholic Church, founded 1622, charged with the spreading of Catholicism (de propaganda fide, ‘concerning the faith to be propagated’ – not a plural but ablative singular): any association, activity, plan, etc., for the spread of opinions and principles, esp. to effect change or reform: the information, etc., spread by such an association. 

There is nothing inherently vicious in holding an opinion and expressing it honestly.  I suppose we should only turn up our noses at propaganda if it is devious, if it pretends to be unbiased, or it propagates untruths.  In constitutional matters The Herald purports to be neutral, but it is often accused of favouring the Unionist cause.  I would say The Herald letters column is pretty even-handed.  There are well-known correspondents on both sides of the argument who get a fair hearing. 

I do the cryptic crosswords of both papers.  I’m not proud of it.  It’s a therapy for fretfulness.  The National crossword is more challenging than The Herald’s.  This was not always the case.  But following the demise of the compilers MCC and MYOPS The Herald’s puzzle became anonymised and simplified, to the extent that any competent cruciverbalist can regularly solve it in less than ten minutes.  It isn’t really a cryptic crossword at all.  The National crossword is more difficult, but it doesn’t always play fair.  I was bamboozled on Saturday by 23 across:

It’s a mess! (5)

I thought the answer was NAAFI (as in Navy, Army, and Air Force Institutes) but it didn’t quite fit.  The solution turned out to be “snafu”.  Snafu?  Where the devil is my dog-eared Chambers?

Snafu (U.S. slang) n. chaos. – adj. chaotic.  (situation normal – all fouled or f***** up). 

I must start using that.  “How are you?”  “Snafu.”  As with the Inuit and their many words for snow, it says something about the state of our society and culture that there are so many alternative words at our disposal for snafu.  I seem to recall that Jack Straw when he was Foreign Secretary once remarked about some political initiative, “We made a right Horlicks of it.”  And somebody else said of the same thing, “It was a pile of pants.”  Interestingly, snafu is indexed in my 1962 edition of Roget’s Thesaurus, and refers me to two and half dense columns of synonyms under the heading “disorder”, including muddle, chaos, anarchy, disaccord, ectopia, disharmony, nihilism, littering, sluttishness, slovenry, neglect, discomposure, dishevelment, convulsion, welter, hugger-mugger, imbroglio, jungle, omnium gatherum, huddle, seething mass, shambles, farrago, mishmash, hotch-potch, Babel, bedlam, ravelment, Gordian knot, frenzy, pandemonium, hullabaloo, pudder, pother, Saturnalia, spill and pelt, bull in a China shop, draggletail, tatterdemalion, Mohawk, snafu, topsy-turvy, skimble-skamble, haywire, inextricable, orgiastic, Dionysiac, harum-scarum, pell-mell, higgledy-piggledy, helter-skelter, harum-scarum, at sixes and sevens…

etc.

Reading this litany gives one a flavour of The Herald letters page.  Most letters take the form of a complaint, issued from one Disgruntled of Duntocher, draped in a Union flag, or Curmudgeon of Cumbernauld, draped in a Saltire, both dismayed at the general snafu of the nation, the nations, and the world.  “Words fail me”, keens Disgruntled (though they seldom to).  “I despair…” says Curmudgeon.  Of Disgruntled, Curmudgeon says, “He should hang his head in shame.”  But Disgruntled has no time for Curmudgeon, or “others of his ilk” (there is apparently a clan of Curmudgeons). 

On the whole, I think the letters pages of The Herald are more satisfactory than those of The National, because you hear opposing views, while The National can be something of an echo chamber.  This is not entirely the fault of The National, which I suspect would happily print Disgruntled, but that Disgruntled is unlikely to write in, because he doesn’t take The National.  There is dissent in The National, but it is liable to be dissent about Scottish Government policy, or, especially last week, Royalists versus Republicans.  But the constitutional issue is taken as read.

I read The Herald letters page every day (and occasionally contribute, as Bombastic of Breadalbane), but I have never seen Disgruntled argue so convincingly as to change Curmudgeon’s mind – or vice versa, just as I have never heard, nor expect to hear, a politician on Any Questions or Question Time confess to his opponent, “You know, I never thought of it that way.  Thou hast persuaded me.”  That is not to say that the whole exercise is futile.  People do change their minds.  They just don’t like to admit it.  When I was in General Practice the management gurus afflicted us with the “Quality Outcomes Framework” (QOF), a grotesque Myth of Sisyphus designed to waste the time of doctors and patients alike.  I put a sign up on my surgery wall saying “The QOF must be destroyed”, and, like Cato the Elder in the Roman Senate urging the necessity to annihilate the Carthaginians, I ended all my remarks at medical meetings with the mantra, “And by the way, The QOF must be destroyed.”

Well, in due course, it was.  But I never expected its creators to own up to its uselessness.  They said, of course, “The QOF was of its time.  It has served its purpose.  Time to draw a line, and move on.”  Well, that was enough.  Sometimes you have to choose success over victory.                                    

A recreational weekend.  Life in the fast lane?  Did I go clubbing?  Did I have fun?  I suppose it depends on your definition of fun. Julia Roberts’ Vivian Ward, the “tart with a heart” in Pretty Woman (but can one use that expression anymore?  The compassionate sex industry professional) is flown in Richard Gere’s Edward Lewis’s private jet from LA to San Francisco to attend the Opera.  As they board the aircraft, she says, “In case I forget to tell you later on, I had a good time.”

I remember my father once saying to me when I was a young man, “You don’t get much fun.”  I think by that he meant I didn’t play much sport, for he was mad keen on sport, football, boxing, golf, and badminton.  I probably thought the best means of defence was attack, and I probably replied, “Well what about you?  You spend all day catching crims…” (He was a cop) “…and then go to Civil Defence in the evening…” (It was at the height of the Cold War.) Periodically he would take me along to the Police Training School to try and improve my badminton.  I could see his disappointment at my lack of hand-eye co-ordination.  Actually I wasn’t that bad.  I played for my school.  But I was nothing like him.  The best and most devastating badminton smash I’ve ever witnessed.  Perfect timing.  I remember he once told me that the Second World War had been a terrible waste of his time, because joining the RAF and going abroad for years effectively ended his badminton career.

I don’t think he was right about the fun.  If anything, I had rather too much of it.  I would party until 3 am, snatch a few hours’ sleep, get up, and go and run in a 10 k race.  I wasn’t exactly disciplined.  Still, twenty years later, a caustic femme fatale took a cool look at my life and remarked, “Where’s the fun?”  Left me speechless.  You can tell it rankled. 

Back to my fun weekend.  On Saturday morning, I wrote to The Herald.    

Dear Sir,

I heard an anecdote in the sauna of my local gym, from a guy recently returned from Finland, whose Finnish hosts popped over into Russia to fetch a magnum of cheap vodka, not to drink, but to pour over the hot coals of their sauna.

Having painstakingly read the Sue Gray report, I find this to be an apt metaphor for Partygate: people living in a highly unusual hothouse atmosphere, amid an alcoholic haze.  Sue Gray’s report does not take long to read because it is of necessity very repetitive.  It is in its way a prose poem, using monotony as a literary device, her condemnation all the more powerful for its understatement.  For each event, the restrictions that were current at the time are laid out, and then the event described.  Booze is all-pervasive, and it is surely booze that defines an event as a party rather than a work meeting.  Would you expect your doctor, your teacher, your policeman to drink while on duty?

But the real question the Sue Gray report raises is this: do we need No. 10 at all?  I don’t mean that the PM shouldn’t have a pied-à-terre in Whitehall, or that he shouldn’t hold a Cabinet therein.  But do we need No. 10 as, in Ms Gray’s words, a “small Government Department”?  What is its function?  What on earth are all these special advisers doing, other than sending WhatsApp messages to one another?  It is said that they were all working incredibly hard to get the country through the pandemic.  But it was the scientists who prepared a vaccine, the pharmaceutical companies who mass-produced it, and the NHS who delivered it.  No. 10 made up a few rules which manifestly didn’t apply to SW1A 2AA. If the whole shebang were to be closed down, would any of us notice the difference?   

Yours sincerely…

Now all I had to do was sit back until Monday morning and see if they would publish me.

Then two dear friends of mine appeared on the doorstep and we repaired to The Lion & Unicorn for luncheon.  There was much laughter, particularly over the reminiscence of a friend who had the unusual habit of snorting a line of Creamola Foam.  In its powder form, I suppose.  Now I have never done that.  Maybe that is why I don’t have fun. 

A post luncheon stroll betwixt the Carse of Stirling and the Highland Boundary Fault Line.  It was very warm.  Hurrah, at last.  Then tea and biscuits.  Asked, what is my favourite biscuit, I said Time, but they were no longer available.  My friend consulted that font of all human knowledge, Professor Google, but failed to find Time.  Time was no more.

To Glasgow Royal Concert Hall and the penultimate concert of the RSNO’s current season.  I had expected to hear Nicola Benedetti give the Scottish premiere of Mark Simpson’s Violin Concerto, but alas Ms Benedetti has sustained an injury.  Noa Wildschut stepped in at short notice and played the Mendelssohn, very beautifully, with some unaccompanied Bach as an encore.  Then the RSNO played the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, a romantic dream, a neurotic vision, descending into chaos and madness.  The orchestral balance achieved by conductor Fabien Gabel was perfect.  A fun evening?  I thought so.

Sunday lunch in Glasgow, and a visit to the Art Galleries in Kelvingrove.  I hadn’t been in since before the first lockdown.  Good to be back.  There was a recital on the magnificent organ of the grand hall.  I saw some dreadful driving on the M80 on the way home.  Two black Golf GTIs doing about ninety, tail to tail, within six feet of one another.  I blame the war in Europe.  Unleash the dogs of war and you will have, in John Buchan’s phrase, “a general loosening of screws”.  Not much fun in the fast lane, if you ask me.

Monday morning.  Picked up The Herald.  I’m in, unedited, first up, with a banner headline.  Would we actually miss No. 10 if it were closed down?  One thing I’ve noticed about being published is that, while it is gratifying to see my work in print, I tend to think retrospectively of the process as de rigueur.  But it can’t be denied that being rejected hurts.  Maybe I have the melancholic outlook of the glass half empty man.  Every silver lining has a cloud.  Now I must get tomorrow’s Herald and look out for the angry riposte.  “No doubt Dr Campbell is blind to the shenanigans going on behind the door of No 6 Charlotte Square…   No doubt he would rather the bunting currently festooning his village comprised Saltires rather than Union flags…”

But I get ahead of myself, rather like the man who gets a flat tyre out in the boondocks and while walking to a remote cottage for assistance conjures in his mind the hostile reception he is going to get, to the extent that when the door is opened to him, his first remark is, “You can keep your f****** jack!”

Before I forget, I had a fun time.            

Apparently one of our political leaders made reference recently to the last piece of the missing jigsaw, and there was widespread hilarity in response to his gaffe.  The expression after all, should simply be the last piece of the jigsaw.  As a figure of speech, it usually refers to an elusive piece of information which, once apprehended and fitted into that which is already known, allows you to solve a conundrum and present a composite theory, and a complete picture, of something.  It’s the sort of thing Hercule Poirot might present before a group of well-to-do people, each harbouring a guilty secret, in the environment of a country house library, or the dining car of the Orient Express.  Voilà.  Problem solved. 

But what could the last piece of the missing jigsaw possibly refer to?  If you have that one piece and, say, 999 others are missing, how could you possibly reconstruct the entire solution to the puzzle?  Quite impossible, I would have said.  But then I’m currently reading Written in Bone by Sue Black (Doubleday 2020).  Professor Dame Sue Black is a forensic anthropologist who, amongst other feats, can sometimes reconstruct entire identities on perusing a piece of bone no bigger than a fingernail.  Most of the time, she is afforded more generous material to work upon, and her reconstruction, for the benefit of the police, of a complete skeleton, or several skeletons, from a plastic bag of bones dumped in a loch, does indeed resemble the completion of a jigsaw puzzle rendered more difficult by the ravages of time and nature.  I guess a forensic anthropologist needs the fastidious attitude of mind, the sedulous attention to detail of the jigsaw enthusiast.  I know some jigsaw buffs who like to turn the pieces over and solve the puzzle without reference to the pictorial aid.  That seems incomprehensible to me, but then I’ve never done a jigsaw in my life.  I’m a crossword geek.  As J. Alfred Prufrock has measured out his life in coffee spoons, so have I lived mine out in the half-lit world of amateur cryptography.

Written in Bone is a gruesome, if fascinating read.  But putting the work of Sue Black to one side, it strikes me that that last piece of the missing jigsaw might refer to an illusion of enlightenment, an hallucinatory “Ah-ha!” moment when you think you are placing the final piece into a constructed pattern that doesn’t actually exist, other than in your own febrile, fetid imagination.  The great scientists know that when they cry “Eureka!” they might have constructed a model that, while it is complete, self-consistent, and beautiful, may yet bear little relation to reality. 

I have known patients who have had a Eureka moment while reading a medical textbook, or perusing the Internet.  They’ve brought in the literature with them.  “That’s me, doc, to a T.”  It’s particularly true in the field of mental health.  DSM-5-TR is now so vast that it would be strange if you couldn’t find yourself, or somebody like yourself, therein.  People have described to me a profound sense of relief when they have discovered that, during all these wilderness years, they had never known that they were on the spectrum.  It’s like a confession followed by absolution.  They are off the hook.  It’s the last piece of the jigsaw.  Now it all makes sense. 

It is said that when you are a medical student you develop a serious illness at least once a week, when you encounter it in the literature.  Possibly because medical students have constantly to stuff their brains with facts, the diagnoses are often neurological; last week, Parkinson’s, this week, Alzheimer’s, next week, a brain tumour.  I was never afflicted in this way.  Quite the contrary.  I was ever in a state of denial.  I am like the professor of cardiology at the heart conference, who succumbs to a myocardial infarction, a bottle of antacid parked by his bedside.   

We might use the jigsaw, present or absent, as a metaphor for what used to be referred to as “the human predicament”.  The pursuit of happiness, or fame, or wealth, or gratification, or goodness, or serenity, or love, or a foe, or whatever pursuit it is that we deem to be important, can seem like the perusal of entrails to be ruminated over, a rune to be deciphered, an acrostic to be solved.  If only we could find the key.  The trick of life.  We search for it in religious texts, belles-lettres, and self-help books, seven billion souls in search of a diagnosis.  But nothing appears to fit the uniqueness of our own particular conundrum which, in any case, seems to be changing all the time.  Yet still we search.  Tomorrow I will wake with buoyancy and hope, full of beans.  I will discover the secret formula to my personal fulfilment, and I will say to everybody that it seemed such a small thing, and yet it completely turned my life upside down.  Now it all makes sense.

The last piece of the missing jigsaw.