Author: jamescalumcampbell

Welcome to XXX Insurance.  Please be aware that your call may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes.  You will now hear five options.  You can make your selection at any time.  If you would like to renew or cancel your policy press one.  If you would like to take out a new policy it’s two.  If you would like to make a claim on an existing policy it’s three. If you would like to declare a change of circumstances relating to an existing policy it’s four.  For all other enquiries please press five. 

5

Please have your policy number ready.  Our call handlers are currently experiencing a very high level of demand.  Please hold, as your call is important to us.  Alternatively you can contact us on line at www…

I held.

Suddenly, a blizzard of strings.  Winter, from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.  Now, like an Airbus A380 pilot orbiting in the stack above Heathrow, I was truly in a holding pattern.  Like Pachelbel’s Canon or Mozart 40, the Vivaldi is a telephonic cliché.  How apposite that I should be on hold to the strain of Winter, the season when nature hunkers down, lies dormant, and waits.  Other wintry scenes are available, and might have been evoked.  Schubert’s Winterreise.  But that would never do.  That blighted, unrequited individual looking up with longing at the window of his lost love would make “hold” a miserable, even a desperate experience. 

Fremd bin ich eingezogen

Fremd zieh’ ich wieder aus…

I came here as a stranger, and I will depart as a stranger…

But I get impatient with these fragile Schubertian Werther-like figurers who wander off into the winter snow, to seek accommodation in a cemetery.  So she chucked you, mate.  Get over it.  Don’t adopt the mantle of victimhood. 

On the other hand, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is as effervescent as champagne, music that will be contemporary for ever.  Sempiternal.  These thickly textured falling cadences in this first movement sound so modern, and evergreen.  Even in winter.

Thank you for holding.  Your call will be answered shortly…

When I was a child, I would lift the receiver of the black Bakelite telephone, and immediately, immediately, the rich contralto voice of Kathleen Ferrier would ask me, “Number, please?”  I remember the numbers of my childhood.  Kelvin 4994.  West 3018.  Bell 3500.  Pennsylvania six five thousand…

Customer satisfaction is our highest priority…

Why do we put up with this?  It is self-evident that any automated system of such clunky design is not there for the benefit of the user.  It is there for the benefit of the Masters of XXX.  It is there to promote “efficiency”.  If you are “efficient”, you can make staff redundant and close High Street branches.  Have you noticed, if you transact your affairs via internet banking, that the banks have made you your own (unpaid) teller?  Not only that, they flag up dire warnings of scams that may look awfully authentic, and expect you to be able to detect them.  Not only are you your own teller, you are your own self-funded security officer, guarding the vaults.  

Winter, second movement.  A clip-clop sleigh ride, with a beguiling melody for the solo violin, lulling you into a false sense of security.  If the person who finally takes your call is a scammer, your guard will certainly be down.  But see, the thing is, you have been scammed already.  And this is the subtle point.  The said financial institution is the scam.  Why do we accept that the money men, the merchants and the hedgers and the masters of the universe, should earn eye-watering sums of money – our money – topped up by eye-watering bonuses, while offering us this pitiful apology for a service?  Friends, we are being had.    

Thank you for holding.  Your call…

It is incredible to me that anybody should think this is a rightful way, not just to conduct business, or any form of societal interchange or social intercourse, but to lead one’s life, far less to consider that it might be “efficient”.  Life, real life, just isn’t like that.  Nearly always, your enquiry will not fall under options 1, 2, 3, or 4.  Your enquiry will be 3.14159….  Life cannot be reduced to an algorithm.  Every caller, every enquirer, is unique.  “Efficiency” is the quantification of human souls. 

We took a catastrophic wrong turn when we tried to run all our community services – banks, post offices, health, social care, police, education, by computer algorithms.  The people who devise these systems – how far removed they are from the interface between service provider and customer.  But all the transactions that really matter in life are one-on-one, be they in the banks, the doctor’s surgery, the care home, in the local shop and at the supermarket check-out, Citizen’s Advice, the police station or the lawyer’s office.  We need to dump all the digitised menus, come straight to the point, and simply ask, “What can I do for you?  How may I help you?”

Third movement.  A subdued opening, as of nature holding her breath.  A violinistic recitative.

At the moment, by the time you reach the bottom of the algorithm and press five, you might be put through to a call handler situated anywhere on the planet.  One thing they won’t have is local knowledge.  What a dystopia we have created.  Is there any way back, any way out of this labyrinth we have wilfully constructed and now lost ourselves in? 

Another blizzard of violins, a final dazzling flourish, a momentary, barely perceptible pause, and the last, emphatic chord.

Silence. 

Should I stay on hold?  If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?                                   

I have a horrible feeling that the balloon is about to go up.

I have a vague recollection of a surreal film by the director Luis Buñuel – I forget which one – in which a couple move around their world conscious that acts of violence are taking place in various distant lands.  They pass a shop window and see through it a television showing the carnage following an act of terrorism.  Wherever it is happening, it is elsewhere.  Throughout the film, the depictions of destruction move closer towards the protagonists until eventually, they too are swallowed up by it.

Another film image:  Darkest Hour begins very ominously with a panning shot, screened in silence, of mile after mile of tanks, presumably assembled at the German – Polish border.  It has the look of footage that has been retrieved from an archive.  It looks real.  I think of that shot when I see pictures of troops, arms, and matériel assembled at the Russian – Ukraine border.  The fact that the US has ordered families of embassy staff to leave Ukraine is surely very concerning.  Yet Ukraine, some might say, is “a faraway country of which we know nothing”.  That’s what Nevil Chamberlain said about Czechoslovakia in September 1938 at the time of the Sudetenland crisis.  Twenty months later, in the Commons, Leo Amery echoed the words of Cromwell to the Long Parliament when he said to Chamberlain, “You have sat there too long for all the good you have done.  In the name of God, go.”  And of course, last week David Davis resurrected these words once more and directed them at Boris Johnson.  Mr Davis said Mr Johnson would be familiar with the words, but Mr Johnson said he didn’t know what Mr Davis was talking about.  This, considering Mr Johnson has written a biography of Churchill, I find hard to believe. 

The thing is, we’re not prepared.  We are preoccupied with other matters.  I wonder if Sue Gray’s report will be published this week in time for the great Wednesday lunchtime soap opera that is PMQs; and, if it is, how much of it will be open to public view, and how much redacted.  Over the last couple of weeks we have grown used to the endless repetition of this exchange across the floor of the Commons:

“When is the Prime Minister going to admit that the game is up, and resign?”

“I think you should be patient, and wait until the civil service report, which will detail all the facts, is published.”

“Why does the Prime Minister need a report to tell him that he went to a boozy party?”

“I am concentrating on bringing the country out of the pandemic, through our world-leading scientific research that created and mass-produced an effective vaccine, oversaw its roll-out, organized a furlough scheme made only possible by utilising the full resources of this broad-shouldered United Kingdom, which can now boast the fastest economic recovery in Western Europe.”

It’s a deflection tactic, to answer a question about Partygate by bragging about governmental achievement.  It’s a non-sequitur.  But in any case, is it true?  Did the government do any of these things?  Vaccines were created by scientists, they were mass produced by pharmaceutical companies, and they were delivered into arms by the National Health Service.  What did the government do?  It printed a lot of money.  It introduced lockdown legislation which apparently did not pertain to itself.

We have other preoccupations.  We are preoccupied by issues of gender.  Does a woman have a cervix, or is womanhood merely a state of mind?  If you think the former, should you be cancelled?  Should Lord Dundas’s statue in Edinburgh be removed because he delayed the abolition of the slave trade?  Should the BBC make “woke cuts” to comedy reruns containing politically incorrect jokes?  (This, I recall, was the work of one Syme, in Orwell’s 1984 – to rewrite history.  Syme himself of course was erased.  Cancelled.  Disappeared.  He never existed.)    

Are the party whips bullies?  Duh.  A Tory grandee on Any Questions said (I paraphrase), “The whips need to maintain discipline.  If everybody voted according to their conscience, government would grind to a halt!”

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

It occurs to me that the ongoing shenanigans in No. 10 might in due course provide rich material for a Hollywood blockbuster, a Broadway musical, or perhaps a Glyndebourne opera.  Working title: Allegra con brio!  Then again, the English composer William Walton pre-empted any such production, in 1931, with his uncannily prescient oratorio Belshazzar’s Feast, its text drawn from Psalm 137, and Chapter 5 of the Book of Daniel.  For Babylon, read London Town, the City awash with laundered money. 

Babylon was a great city,

Her merchandise was of gold and silver,

Of precious stones, of pearls, of fine linen,

Of purple, silk and scarlet,

All manner vessels of ivory,

All manner vessels of precious wood,

Of brass, iron and marble,

Cinnamon, odours and ointments,

Of frankincense, wine and oil,

Fine flour, wheat and beasts,

Sheep, horses, chariots, slaves

And the souls of men… 

In Babylon

Belshazzar the King

Made a great feast,

Made a feast to a thousand of his lords,

And drank wine before the thousand…

And in that same hour, as they feasted

Came forth fingers of a man’s hand

And the King saw

The part of the hand that wrote.

And this was the writing that was written:

MENE, MENE, TEKEL UPHARSIN

THOU ART WEIGHED IN THE BALANCE

AND FOUND WANTING.

In that night was Belshazzar the King slain

Slain!

And his Kingdom divided. 

Rembrandt vividly depicted the eerie interruption to the king’s feast in oils, and Walton’s musical evocation at this point is as spine-chilling as it is blood-curdling.  The expression “the writing on the wall” derives from this tale, and has slipped into common usage, depicting a person who has indeed been found wanting, but often who fails to realise that the game is up.  “He can’t see the writing on the wall.” 

I watched the Prime Minister deliver his carefully crafted apologia last Wednesday before the commencement of Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons.  He must have known he was going to be in for a rough ride, and he was clearly trying to get on the front foot.  But he still had to endure a series of blistering attacks, and calls for his resignation, from every opposition party.  He sat with bowed head.  He had to be contrite.  He had to take full responsibility.  He had to apologise.  Above all he mustn’t be petulant.  He mustn’t pick a fight.  To use an expression of his, once applied to a putative UK response to Covid 19, he just had to take it on the chin. 

He duly apologised, but he did not do so unreservedly.  In particular, he did not admit that he, and others who had attended a drinks party in the Downing Street garden, had broken the law.  Instead, he used language that you often hear from entrepreneurs, CEOs and captains of industry whose business affairs turn out to be of a dubious, not to say shady nature.  “We fouled up.  In retrospect, we should have done things differently.”  This is not a confession of wrongdoing, but merely an expression of regret over bad optics.   

Watching his performance, I had the impression of somebody who, deep down, felt he had done nothing amiss, but that it was incumbent upon him that he eat a substantial plate of humble pie.  It is often said that Boris Johnson is a serial liar, but I don’t think his expression of regret on this occasion constituted a lie.  Rather it was a mode of expression that is peculiar to the political world.  Effectively, his statement could be summarised as, “There was a party at No. 10, and there was not a party at No. 10.”  If you send out 100 invitations to guests for drinks and nibbles in the Downing Street garden, then you have just organised a party.  If you slip out of your office for 25 minutes to thank colleagues for all their hard work, then you are looking after your colleagues during a difficult time.  Ergo, you apologise for the way things must appear, especially to people who, because they stuck to the rules, were denied the opportunity to say goodbye to dying loved ones; and you simultaneously explain how such an event was, in good faith, permitted.  This remarkable feat of mental gymnastics was denoted by George Orwell and his neologism, “doublethink”. 

It seems to me that the Prime Minister is not so much a liar, as an exponent of doublethink.  For example, when Allegra Stratton was caught on camera admitting to another social gathering having taken place at No. 10, Mr Johnson expressed outrage at such a revelation.  He declared himself to be as furious as everybody else that such an event had taken place.  Yet we now know that he had attended a similar event himself, therefore his outrage must be faux-outrage; or, he is angry, not because a party took place, but because Ms Stratton told us about it.  He was angry, and he was not angry.  In order to hold these two notions simultaneously in your head, you must be delusional.  You must inhabit either an alternative universe, or a lunatic asylum.                       

Doublethink is crucial to political life, as it is currently conducted.  The Conservative Party is trying to decide what to do about the problem of Boris.  They have temporarily kicked the ball into the long grass by having a senior civil servant take time to establish the full facts.  But how long does it take to conclude that if you send a man with a suitcase round to the local off-licence, you are having a party?  Meanwhile the MPs have returned to their constituencies to consult the grass roots members as to whether Boris is an honourable, or a dishonourable man.   Yet everybody understands that a debate over moral rectitude is quite beside the point.  All that matters is whether Boris is an electoral asset, or an electoral liability.  Practitioners of doublethink hold these two concepts simultaneously in their minds.  There are four options open with respect to Boris: honourable asset; honourable liability; dishonourable asset; dishonourable liability.  He will not be discarded for dishonour; he will be discarded, ruthlessly, if he is perceived to be an electoral liability.  But the Backbench 1922 Committee will couch his dismissal in terms of the dishonour he has brought upon his office.  This is pure doublethink. 

I don’t anticipate that the Prime Minister will resign.  And I suspect that if he is dismissed, in Trumpian fashion he will not accept the decision.  That is because he cannot see the writing on the wall.  And similarly, the Conservative Party cannot see that public anger has turned into derision.  The Westminster Village cannot be taken seriously any more.  This is why Belshazzar’s Feast is so apposite.  No. 10 has become the setting for a phantasmagoric hallucination. 

The Tories might prop him up.  “Now is not the time”, they will say.  They won’t want the next PM to inherit such a nightmare.  But if they stall, I think the consequences will be far-reaching.  Take note of the last line quoted from the Book of Daniel. 

…and his kingdom divided. 

There was a fifth member of the panel on Any Questions at the weekend, a heckler outside Reading Minster trying to disrupt proceedings.  He was tolerated with evident good humour and Chairman Chris Mason even invited him to join the debate by phoning up Anita Anand on Saturday’s Any Answers.  I couldn’t hear what the heckler was saying, although he seemed to be using a pretty big megaphone, but I thought I recognised the voice.  I think he was the Remainer who used to disrupt the BBC newscaster on College Green night after night during the protracted Brexit debate.  So I guess he was protesting about the presence of Nigel Farage on the Any Questions panel.  A question arose relating to “The Colston Four”, the four defendants found not guilty of criminal damage, a jury verdict, despite the fact that they, and others, had clearly hauled Edward Colston’s statue off its plinth in Bristol, dragged it through the streets, and cast it into the harbour.  Some people think this verdict was bizarre.   

The SNP MP Joanna Cherry QC made the point that it was not the role of politicians to question the decisions of a jury whose members had sat throughout a case and heard all the evidence.  As a former prosecutor she had frequently been enraged by apparently perverse jury verdicts, but had never felt it was her role or her right to question them.  Nigel Farage took an opposing view.  The fact that Edward Colston had been a slave trader, ergo monster, was neither here nor there.  It might just as well have been a statue of Mahatma Gandhi that had been desecrated.  It was as if it were not the Colston Four, but Colston himself, who was on trial.  (When Mr Farage made this point I heard an echo of a similar remark once made by Bernard Levin who sat through the case of the Crown versus Penguin Books and the prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act for their publishing D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  It was as if it were not Penguin, or even Lawrence, who was on trial, but Connie Chatterley herself.)  Mr Farage thought this trial would have been unnecessary, if the police had done their job and stopped the mob from tearing down the statue in the first place.  Well, the poor constabulary are always getting it in the neck.  Either they pussy-foot around, or they are too heavy handed.  Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.  I remember seeing the footage of the toppling, the dragging, and the drowning of the Colston effigy and thinking there was something biblical about the scene.  The destruction of a graven image.  At least it was an inanimate object, and not a living being.  However, Mr Farage took a dim view, and told us to expect to see many more similar episodes of public disorder. 

Irrespective of whether or not Colston was a rotter, was his statue any good?  I mean, was it a work of art?  People have been minded for decades now to remove all the statues from Glasgow’s George Square.  You might say that George Square, at the heart of the second city of Empire, is the absolute epicentre of the worldwide trade in tobacco, cotton, sugar, slavery, abuse, dominion, and exploitation, all celebrated in the statuary of various historical worthies.  Yet the only popular demonstration against any of it is the placing of a traffic cone on the head of the Duke of Wellington, in nearby Royal Exchange Square. The only reason I can think of, that George Square remains unmolested, is that Her Majesty’s Sculptor in Ordinary, Alexander Stoddart, wrote a detailed account of the artistic merits of each George Square statue, one by one, in a blistering attack against Philistinism, second only in its eloquence and effectiveness to Mr Stoddart’s equally scathing letter to The Herald, at the time of the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, condemning the intention to demolish the Red Road flats as a coup de théâtre during the games’ opening ceremony.  It never happened.   

What a blessing we live in a part of the world where you can debate these issues freely, stand outside a public hall with a megaphone, voice an opinion uncensored on air, and, should you become rash and hot-headed, be faced with a policeman who does not pull a gun on you, but says in a conciliatory tone, “Now just calm down, sir.”  And, if needs must, one can expect to have a fair trial before a jury of one’s peers.  I would feel a lot safer attending a demo in George Square than in Tiananmen Square.  But we shouldn’t take it for granted.  If HMG were minded to send the tanks to George Square, it wouldn’t be the first time.             

Every New Year’s Day I have the same telephone conversation with a family member, who asks me if my name is on the New Year’s Honours List, and I reply that a palace equerry has sounded me out, but I have humbly declined.  It’s just a running gag.  Perhaps I’ll be offered a gong for this weekly blog, now entering its eighth year.  “For services to anecdotage.”  Stop me if I’ve told you this before…

I read that retiring 007 Daniel Craig has been made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, the same honour, stated The Herald, conferred upon James Bond.  I thought, “Is that right?  Didn’t he turn it down?”  I consulted The Man with the Golden Gun, and its final chapter, ENDIT, to discover that Bond did have a CMG, and it was the offer a knighthood, the KCMG, that he declined.  His secretary Mary Goodnight was very angry with him, but he ordered her to send an encrypted reply to M, with the words, “AYE AM A SCOTTISH PEASANT AND EYE WILL ALWAYS FEEL AT HOME BEING A SCOTTISH PEASANT.” 

Incidentally it was such a pleasure to reread ENDIT.  The Man with the Golden Gun was published in 1965, but Ian Fleming never saw it between covers, the dust jacket with artwork by the ever inventive Richard Chopping, depicting the golden gun, bullets, the mandibular carapace of a sea creature, and insects, all contributing to an atmosphere of decay.  Fleming died in 1964 at the age of 56.  He had been a lifelong smoker of sixty sticks of cigarette a day, and he was a cardiac cripple.  By all accounts his last days were very miserable.  How could he, in such circumstances, have written something as sunny as this?  Although Jonathan Cape had sufficient material to publish Octopussy and The Living Daylights in 1966, chronologically, ENDIT is really Bond’s last appearance.

Speaking as a Scottish peasant, I see the attraction in turning down an honour.  It’s the lure of being a maverick. The man of independent mind.  Maybe the offer of a conferment is akin to the Mafia shouting you a slap-up meal in a restaurant.  Once you accept, you are in their pocket.  There is, after all, no such thing as a free lunch.  And maybe everybody has their price.  You might turn your nose up at a British Empire Medal, but how about an Order of Merit?  Companion of Honour?  I see that Tony Blair is to become a Knight of the Garter, but, at time of writing this, a petition against such a bestowal has passed 300,000 signatures.  Iraq hangs round Mr Blair’s neck, like an albatross.  I did sign a petition against the Iraq war back in 2003, but, re the Garter, I can’t say I’m exercised one way or the other.  One thing I feel the Establishment should never do, having bestowed an honour upon somebody, is to take it away again because the recipient has in some way blotted his copybook.  This happened to Fred Goodwin, chief executive of RBS, after the 2008 financial crash.  The Establishment invite you into the fold when your star is on the rise.  Blot your copybook, and they will drop you like hot coals.  You will be cancelled, and “disappeared”.  It’s like rewriting history.  That man is not a knight.  He was never a knight.  Thus the Establishment closes ranks and protects itself.

I suppose it was easy enough for Bond to turn the K down.  He was, after all, a loner, only responsible to himself.  I imagine most people getting the call from the palace will be under immense pressure from loved ones.  One’s wife might say, “Of course you must accept, if only for the children.  Think of their schooling.  They need useful acquaintance, in order to get ahead.”  Yada yada yada.   

Personally I would be frightened that accepting a position somewhere amid the multi-layered Imperial echelons would make pomposity unavoidable.  I would become one of these dreadful medical elder statesmen you encounter at international conferences.  After the keynote address in the first plenary session, the chairman says, “There’s just time for a few questions from the floor.  Approach the microphone and please be brief.”

“Sir Bulvers Bagshot-Clutterbug, Emeritus Professor of comparative neural networking, Gonville and Caius, with a special interest in the adaptive value of the relentless proliferation of preening and self-aggrandisement.  I greatly enjoyed your talk, doctor, and felt it gave more than adequate emphasis to the precise points I would have wished highlighted and underlined.  I have three observations to make, a recommendation, and, arising from these, if I may, a question perhaps of a provocative nature…”

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz                                

Alas, the annual ceremony of lessons and carols due to take place in Glasgow the Sunday before Christmas was cancelled, due to Covid, and consequently the Archinto Strad (copy thereof, D. M. Sanderson, Glasgow, 1965) stayed in its case.  I had to be content with the vicarious experience, from King’s College Cambridge.

1.  Once in Royal David’s City…

I understand that the treble given the nod to sing unaccompanied to a congregation of a billion or so doesn’t know he’s got the gig until the downbeat happens.  That strikes me as a completely nightmarish scenario.  But then I don’t have the temperament.  Anyway, since the viola has been silent, let me continue with this offering of my personal nine:

•  A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens

In my annual revisitation to this hardy perennial, it only occurred to me this time round that the novella has “staves”, rather than chapters, because, of course, it is a carol.  I suppose the reason why it remains so popular is that it reflects something we all do at this time of year.  We look back to the past, we “consider our position” in the present, and, looking to the future, we guess, and fear.  I find myself identifying more and more with Ebenezer Scrooge.  Not that, if I may say so, I was ever a skinflint.  Indeed, on a couple of occasions in my life, if I haven’t exactly sold all I had and given the money to the poor, I have at least spectacularly chucked everything over and started again from scratch.  I’m not proud of it.  Self-destruction can pose as largesse.  And miserliness is not the only way of being parsimonious. 

•  Winterreise

A performance of Schubert’s great song cycle was supposed to be on BBC4 on Christmas night.  I switched on in high expectation.  Blow me, if they didn’t announce, “in a change to our schedule…” that the Berlin Phil was going to play film scores by John Williams.  No explanation; no promise to reschedule.  I bet you somebody in management said, well, we can’t possibly put on something as lugubrious as Winterreise on Christmas night.  Let’s do Star Wars. 

•  Ode to Freedom

It’s the last track on the latest offering from Abba, after forty years’ silence.  It sounds like Tchaikovsky.  I like it, but I gave away the CD to my local hospice charity shop, along with Adele’s Thirty.  Now that’s lugubrious.  To be loved?  Such anguish.  Billy Connolly tells a story about crying as a child because he was always being berated by his elders.  He was reproducing the yodelling, snivelling cry of an urchin on stage, when he actually started to cry, for real.  He got too close.  Never sing louder than lovely.  I gave the charity shop a few tomes.  Christopher Hitchens’ Hitch 22, and the autobiography (signed by the author) of Brian Cox, the actor, not the physicist.  I enjoyed them but I’m not going to read them again.  So I handed them on, with a few others.  It’s a good exercise.  I’m a bibliophile, but not to the extent of Barry Humphries, whose library apparently contains 50,000 volumes.  Hearing that on Christmas morning, I didn’t feel so bad about my own stacked shelves.   

•  Journey of the Magi

I got this very amusing Christmas card.  It depicts three wise men astride camels, gazing up at a shining star.  The sender had appended the note, “They don’t look very refractory to me.”  This is an allusion to T. S. Eliot’s poem, full of wonderful images.  I, too, am full of regret over silken girls bringing sherbet. 

•  In the Bleak Midwinter

It’s a classy carol, with words by Christina Georgina Rossetti, and music by Gustav Theodore von Holst, to give him his Sunday-go-to-meeting name.  Mind, you need to keep the tune, Cranham, moving.  If it crawls along it becomes disorientated, like a walker with hypothermia straying off course and finally dying of exposure.  I’m not sure about the lines

Snow had fallen, snow on snow,

Snow – on – snow…  

Is this not called the fallacy of imitative form?  You depict lots of snow by piling on the snow.  It is like a concrete poem

                        Snu        

              Snu

                                          Snu

Snu

If I’d been Rossetti’s editor I might have said, “Too much snow, Chrissie.  How about…  Snow had fallen, don’t ye know, on the bleak ice floe…”  Rossetti might have acquiesced out of sheer exhaustion.  Such is the torture of being edited.  You compromise, and end up with something slightly worse.   

Of course, snow is pronounced something like sniouw, that is, with a diphthong.  North of the border, it is just straight snow the way The Proclaimers would say it.  Choirmasters have this exercise whereby we hapless Scots are cajoled to attempt to imitate BBC RP.  Roses grow on Moses’ nose.  Riouwses griouw on Miouwses niouws.  On the whole I’d rather hear it from The Proclaimers.  The snow would sound bitterly cold.

•  The God Equation by Michio Kaku (Allen Lane, 2021)

I got this as a Christmas gift.  Michio Kaku has taken up the quest for the Grand Unified Theory, the theory of everything.  Well, it stumped Einstein, so good luck with that.  Apparently the God equation might only be an inch and a half long.  Personally, ah ha’e ma doots.  Haven’t we been here before, around the end of the nineteenth century?  Then along came Einstein, Planck, at al.  I’m not sure that the discovery of the God equation would be propitious for the world, or efficacious to anybody in it.  There would be nothing left to explore.  No more equations to find.  The world would end, not with a big bang, or even a big crunch, but a whimper.  We would die of ennui. 

•  The Holiday

It has become a Yuletide war horse, much as The White Tower once was, and then The Magnificent Seven, and The Great Escape.  Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet, both attempting to escape disastrous relationships, do a transatlantic house swap and run, respectively, into Jude Law, and Jack Black, in a series of “meets cute”.    And also Eli Wallach.  It is nice to see that that ruthless bandit who couldn’t figure out why men like the Magnificent Seven would bother about a bunch of peasants in their stinking pueblos, should mellow into a kindly elderly gent tottering around on a zimmer frame. 

•  Little Gidding

Got a phone call from New Zealand on Christmas night.  Apparently it was unbearably hot in Auckland on Christmas Day.  I think I could have borne it quite well.  I thought of my own dawn walk round Flanders Moss on Christmas morning, in a biting wind, when I had the world to myself.  And I remembered these lines from Eliot’s Four Quartets:

Where is the summer, the unimaginable

Zero summer?

Thursday was one of these magical winter days in the heart of L’Écosse Profonde, mild, dry, and misty, with everything bathed in a supernatural glow.  We walked to my local erratic, and its nearby Iron Age fort, thence to dinner in Tigh Mor, a gothic Schloss brooding over the shores of Loch Achray.  My tech-savvy friends enlightened me with respect to what3words, a kind of unique postcode for any three metre square postage stamp on the planet.  Apparently there are 57 trillion of them.  Is that right?  Well let’s see now.  The surface area of the globe is 4.Pi.r squared.  The radius of the earth is about 6,378 kilometres, so the earth’s surface area is somewhere upwards of 500 trillion square metres, which in turn can be divided into upwards of 55 trillion patches of 3 metres squared.  So we appear to be in the right ball park. 

What3words has been translated into 47 languages.  The English version uses 40,000 words, and covers sea as well as land.  Quite why you would want to pinpoint a moveable feast such as the rolling waves with such accuracy I’m not sure.  Maybe to place a buoy above the wreck of the Titanic?  Slurs this shark, incidentally, is the big slug black door to No. 10 Downing Street, Westminster, London SW1A 2AA.  Apposite.  A shark is a shyster and to slur your words, arguably, is to obfuscate.  White man speaks with forked tongue.

The occupant of slurs this shark has had a terrible week, not so much because of the Owen Paterson debacle, the loss of a seemingly safe seat in North Shropshire, the drip feed of allegations about illicit gatherings, and the resignation of Lord Frost, but rather because, with all that going on, not one single Tory has come out strongly in support of the PM.  Three strikes and you’re out.  Blimey, with friends like these… Is the PM a dead man walking?  I have a notion he won’t go quietly.  On the contrary, he will throw an enormous tantrum.  The pantomime villain will show his true colours.    

But Parliament is in recess.   I have spent the week catching up with old friends, enjoying Christmas lunch in my local, meandering deep into the Trossachs, and eschewing the political columns in favour of the crossword.  I suppose it is a symptom of the fretfulness of this time of year, that I started to analyse slurs this shark from the point of view of the cruciverbalist.  Is slurs this shark the solution to a crossword clue?

Lass Ruth shirks revolving door (5,4,5). 

I took the trouble to look up the code for various famous, or notorious locations.  The grassy knoll in Dallas – kings battle whips.  Edinburgh Royal Infirmary Emergency Department: healthier second truth. (I’m not happy with a second truth.  There is only one truth.  An alternative truth cannot be healthy.)  The White House – sulk held raves.  You might imagine the three words might reflect something of the character of the location but I don’t think so:  indent applause cartoonist – Auschwitz.     

Coming across these various location descriptors reminded me of a simple memory test still in wide use in medicine.  You ask the patient to remember a name and address and then ask him to recall it after ten minutes.  I’ve lost track of the number of times I asked a patient to remember:

Angus McIntyre

17, The Meadows

Edinburgh

…only to forget all about it until the patient would remind me: “Aren’t you going to ask me that address?”  I always strongly resisted the temptation to make things difficult for my patient:

Sir Garscube Crichton-Delaney Brocklehurst, OM, CH

Flat 17B

2477 Amerigo Vespucci Boulevard

Addis Ababa

Now I find that this ancient test for incipient dementia might take a modern twist to fit the digital age, and we might find ourselves asking patients to remember just three words, conjured out of mid-air. 

Egregious inchoate desuetude.

Grandiloquent smooching barracuda.

It is quite difficult – try it yourself – to make up a three word combination, even if you think your choice of word is entirely random, and not conjure some sort of sensible image.  A grandiloquent smooching barracuda, for example, has a certain camp quality.  We are hard wired to search for meaning on exposure to any sensory stimulus.  If you shut yourself in a dark room and then switch on a pinpoint light source and look at it – this is a reproducible physiological experiment – you will find that it starts to move around.  It’s not that it’s actually moving; but your brain is juggling with it, as if trying to view it from different angles, to figure out what on earth it might be.  Listen repeatedly to a piece of severely uncompromising twelve note serial music, and your brain will try to understand it in terms of tonality.  You might suppose that you could devise three words entirely devoid of meaning by avoiding any syntactical relationship between the words:             

Harlequin exiguous deride

What do you do?  Your brain turns it upside down: deride exiguous harlequin.  It is the second movement of the Debussy cello sonata. 

The worrying thing is, if you conjure three ridiculous words out of thin air and present them to what3words, the system will actually give you a postal address.  I suppose they just find the closest fit.  I hope to high heaven the Royal Mail don’t decide to take on what3words.  The scope for its abuse would be limitless.  A new breed of troll might be tempted to cast toxic messages at random to innocent and unsuspecting victims.  I always remember thinking I might drop a line to Sir Garscube and Lady Crichton-Delaney Brocklehurst at their home in Addis Ababa.  After all, if the address were carefully reproduced on the envelope, the appropriate stamp appended, and the stamp duly franked, the letter would be sure to reach its destination.  Lady Brocklehurst would glance at the letter with a flutter of apprehension.  “Garscube, there’s a letter for you from home.  I don’t recognise the hand writing.”  Sir Garscube had been a civil servant, in Intelligence.  He had been too close to the opposition and had had to leave in a hurry.  Is it possible after all these years, thought Lady Brocklehurst, that they had tracked them down?

Some meandering thoughts, on reading the Constance Garnett translation of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed.

Before setting down my account of the strange and disturbing events which have afflicted our provincial district, till late wrapped in obscurity, I find myself obliged, lacking any literary skill, to attempt some description of a figure notable in our midst, widely esteemed, not to say renowned, for his wisdom, foresight, and imagination, to say nothing of his magnetic personal charisma.  Alexander Pfeffelsky’s meteoric rise to prominence within our community has been little short of miraculous.  It may even be said to belie any property of credibility, or discourage any tendency to credulousness.  Of course to claim he came from humble origins would be misleading, or ingenuous, or indeed, disingenuous.  His early life afforded him great opportunity, of which it may be said he took full advantage.  He was educated privately (the English call this sort of education “public” for reasons which remain mysterious), in the best schools and university colleges, where he read “Greats”.  Or was it “Schools”?  At any rate he became adept at construing passages from the literature of dead languages, and developed a fondness for peppering his talk with classical quotation and allusion.  This no doubt contributed to his wholly deserved reputation for cleverness, nay, brilliance.  But if “brilliant” smacks of “brilliantine”, I mustn’t seem to imply that he flaunted his intellect in a meretricious way.  His erudition was, and is, for the most part, silent and deep. 

After he came down, he moved to London and devoted his professional time to the world of letters.  It would perhaps be nearer the truth to say he became a journalist, but in no sense could he be considered to be a “hack”.  He wrote for the most reputable broadsheets.  He frequently sent despatches from Brussels, where he developed a tone described as “Eurosceptic”.  There is a story, apocryphal I doubt not, that he once drew up a balance sheet listing the advantages and disadvantages of England’s remaining within the Continental trade bloc, much as a school fellow might take sides, in a random way, in an exercise for the Literary & Debating Society.  The charge of “populism”, that his primary motivation was to enlarge circulation by playing to the gallery of “Little England”, rather than to express the considered view born of a profound political and philosophical conviction, is quite misplaced.  His desires, his credo, his inner light and his moral compass were of the loftiest.  An occasional tendency to economic terminological slovenliness can be put down to an enthusiasm to communicate a burning conviction, even if, on at least one occasion, his superior in the Fourth Estate took a different view and – well, not to beat about the bush nor put too fine a point on it – sacked him.  Not that he was in the least discouraged by this set back.  A great hero of his and a statesman of a previous generation, Sir Winston Churchill, once said that success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.  And it may well be said that Alexander Pfeffelsky lived up to that high ideal.   

Of course public life was always his goal.  He entered Parliament at the dawn of the new Millennium and spent seven years learning his craft.  He adopted the role, so to say, of “one nation conservative”, much like Disraeli, and became absorbed in the part.  Not that I suggest for a moment that the part was assumed, theatrical, an affectation.  God forbid.  Then he ran, successfully, for the London mayoralty, serving two terms in that role.  Midway through this period he oversaw the presentation of a Greek pageant on the grand scale, in which youths of great beauty, representing Hope and Aspiration, competed in a specially designed and constructed Olympian arena.  A ceremony redolent with allegorical significance paid great homage to that which might be considered by some a Sacred Cow, that envy of the world, the national endeavour to maintain the health and wellbeing of the populace, from the humblest serf to the noblest aristocrat.  Upon this unfolding spectacle, it is even said that the Monarch – it beggars belief – descended by parachute from a hovering helicopter, trailing a union flag.  The Chinese delegates, who four years previously had put on their own dazzling, indeed unsurpassable display, found this to be incomprehensible.  But of course irony is, for the English, the Great Private Quip.    

Alexander Pfeffelsky returned to Parliament in 2016.  His ascent to even further prominence was rapid.  For two years he served as the nation’s major diplomat on the world stage.  The great European leaders were amazed, not to say flabbergasted, by his flair and aplomb.  Impatient at the slow pace of the nation’s detachment from Europe, he resigned from the government.  His detractors were quick to say that he was merely positioning himself for a Quixotic tilt at the highest echelon of power, but I would insist his actions never emanated from any base self-regard, greed for power and influence, or anything other than the most exalted principles.   

At long last he embarked on the glory years of the premiership.  Much was to beset him.  His greatest challenge was, and remains, the worldwide pestilence.  His critics will say he was very slow to respond to the threat, but why should somebody steeped in the classics pay heed to our Men of Science?  I will not reawaken painful memoires of a dark time which, if I said it affected him on a personal level, would be to understate the case.  There is a macabre Gothic story, written by an American of the nineteenth century, born in New York, as indeed was our hero, concerning one Prince Prospero, who, while the plague devastated the land around him, was minded to lower the portcullis, pull up the drawbridge, and hold a big party, in his apartments, for his knights.  This party, which is described in exquisite and agonizing detail, was attended by buffoons and improvisatori.  Prince Prospero may have wished that it had never happened, but the description remains there; it looks like a party, it sounds like a party, it smells like a party…      

Alexander Pfeffelsky continues to be hounded by charges of elitism, cronyism, falsification of the facts, and systemic corruption.  Yet he retains a remarkable ability, on a personal level, to survive and prosper, even when all around him collapses in turmoil, chaos, and decay.  Despite everything, he retains a warm place in the nation’s affection, proof of his gentleness of spirit and profound generosity of heart.                                    

Considering it unlikely that I “pop down” to New Zealand in February, as is my wont, I bit the bullet and signed up for the entire 2022 Spring/Summer season of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, eleven Saturday evening concerts in Glasgow, running from 5^th February until 4^th June.  What an imaginative season it is.  On Sunday morning, with half an ear on the Andrew Marr show, I found myself perusing the syllabus with the enthusiasm I remember experiencing as a teenager.  More recently, with the crusty ennui of middle age, I’d been inclined to non-attendance, the way I might decline to attend the movies.  No Time to Diet?  Seen it already.  Similarly, let’s say: the William Tell Overture, Mendelssohn’s fiddle concerto, Brahms 2…  Heard them already. 

But maybe it’s because we have been starved of live music, that I look upon each programme with delight, and think, I can’t miss that.  Every Saturday evening, with a fair wind, will be a benison and a blessed relief from all of fortune’s outrageous slings and arrows, and the surreal absurdities of everyday life. 

“Secretary of State, was there a party in 10 Downing Street last December 18^th?”

“Let’s be clear…”  That hackneyed banner headline of obfuscation, prelude to any muddying of the waters.  “The Prime Minister says no rules were broken.”

Feb 5: Beethoven – the Fourth Symphony and the Fourth Piano Concerto with pianist Steven Osborne.  Even-numbered Beethoven is less bad-tempered than odd-numbered Beethoven.

“Was there a party at No. 10?”

“I couldn’t say.  Unsubstantiated reports.  We are chasing shadows.  And I wasn’t there.”  Ah.  The old school motto.  It wuznae me.

Feb 19: Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto and Rachmaninov 2.  Stravinsky called Rachmaninov “a six and a half foot scowl”.  Stravinsky could be rather critical of his composing contemporaries.  There was that remark about Britten’s War Requiem: Get your Kleenex out.  And somehow Stravinsky and Schoenberg managed to avoid one another despite both living in Beverly Hills.  Anyway, there is nothing to scowl about in the clarinet solo of the third movement of Rachmaninov 2.

“Would you agree that last December, if there was a party, then it was in breach of the rules?”  Andrew Marr, with the persistence of a dog with a bone, continued to chase shadows.

Feb 26: Sir Andrew Davis is coming up to conduct Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Antarctica.  Now that is an event.  RVW 7 is rarely performed, although I have heard it live once before, in the Royal Albert Hall.  It is not merely film music of the highest quality; it is truly symphonic. 

“…The Met are taking a look at it, but they don’t normally pursue investigations retrospectively.”  I would have thought that most, if not all, police detection is retrospective.  Right enough, I seem to recall a Tom Cruise movie – was it Minority Report? – in which criminals are apprehended before they have actually committed their crime.  Orwellian.   

March 4: Sheku Kanneh-Mason is playing Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concerto.

Then again, maybe there is a statute of limitations on the prosecution of attendance at illegal gatherings.  Though I doubt it. 

March 19: Walton’s Scapino, Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, Elgar 1.  What’s not to like?

“If the matter is sub judice, it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to comment.”

April 23: all Shostakovich.  Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, the Second Piano Concerto, and the Fifth Symphony.  .

It should be quite straightforward to establish whether or not a party took place on December 18^th.  We could make application through the freedom of information act.  If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly.

Good luck with that.

But surely events at No. 10 are logged.  It can’t be that difficult to find out what people were doing on December 18^th.  I’ve just looked at my own diary from last year to see what I was doing.  December 18^th was a Friday.  I had attended a Zoom lecture, on the statistical modelling of pandemics, on December 10^th.  Then the diary is empty until Christmas.  That’s how life was then, at least for most of us.     

April 30: Richard Strauss, An Alpine Symphony.  I can’t say I’m a great Straussian, but very often it is the concert one attends with least expectation that turns out to leave the biggest impression.

Was there snogging?

May 14: The Dvorak Cello Concerto and Sibelius 5.

Will there be snogging this year?

The government is not going to micromanage trysts under the mistletoe.

May 21: John Wilson, the most musical man on the planet, is coming to conduct Gershwin’s Concerto in F and Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony.

If there was a party, do you agree that rules were broken?

If rules were broken, rules were broken.  There are truths, there are untruths and, somewhere in between, there is a vast ocean of humbug.

May 28: Nicola Benedetti is playing a Scottish première – Mark Simpson’s Violin Concerto.  Premières don’t normally put bums on seats, but Ms Benedetti will still fill the hall.  And then there’s Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique. 

“I put it to you that a party did take place, and did not take place.”

“?”

There was both an event, and a non-event.

You mean, like Schrödinger’s Cat?

I extemporise.  I think that some time before this point Andrew Marr had abandoned the attempt to chase shadows, and changed the subject.  I do believe he is mellowing.  But then, come Christmas, he is moving on.  Maybe he’s de-mob happy.

June 4:  Beethoven 9.  Just for good measure. 

Well, there we are.  At the top of Buchanan Street amid all the craziness, an oasis of sublimity.  An antidote to madness and a way out.     

Omicron permitting.

On Friday evening Storm Arwen swooped down from the north east along the highland boundary fault line, demolishing trees and power lines between Doune and Callander, before cutting a swath across the Carse of Stirling, and disappearing to the south west.  I was on the phone to Glasgow at about half seven, when suddenly the line went dead and the lights went out.  The lights came on again almost immediately, but this was merely the transient ischaemic attack before the onset of the stroke proper.  The lights went out and stayed out, and I was completely in the dark.  I fumbled my way to the drawer containing the torch, and went to my second phone which is a retro phone in black Bakelite which does not require a power source.  I was able to complete the Glasgow phone call.  No, I’m fine thank you.  The house is well insulated and nice and warm.  I have dined.  I will read by candle light, and have an early night.

I used to rather like power cuts, perhaps with an utterly misguided nostalgia for the blitzy atmosphere of the blackout.  When you are young, everything is an adventure.  You see film footage of kids in devastated theatres of war playing football without a care in the world.  At what stage in life do you lose that ability to live in the present?  I was anxious and fretful about getting cold in the night.  At home, electricity is my only power source.  No gas, no coal fire.  There is nothing attractive about virtue-signalling one’s green credentials, while simultaneously freezing to death.  I do have an ancient gas heater than runs on a cylinder of Calor gas, but, like the five foolish virgins in the bible who didn’t oil their lamps, I hadn’t switched it on for about a decade, and now, of course, it was dead as a dodo.  Nothing for it but to put on an extra jumper – “wrap up”, Eddie Mair invariably used to say after the weather forecast on Radio 4’s PM Programme – and fire up the candles.  What to read?  Mindful of the sonnet On his Blindness, I chose Anna Beer’s scholarly Milton, Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot (Bloomsbury 2008).  It is said that Milton damaged his eyesight by working too much by candlelight.  The same has been said of J. S. Bach.  I don’t know if there is any medical evidence for such an assertion.  Anyway I kept at it for a while, and then I thought, maybe this power cut is affecting my house alone.  I put on a few more layers and stepped outside into a howling gale.  The whole village was in pitch darkness.  Time for bed.

At first light the refuse collectors were out on time emptying our bins.  They did well, because I subsequently learned there were lots of fallen trees scattered around the main arterial routes.  Our village got off lightly, with only a few slates off roofs.  The village store was open, conducting business by torch light, cash only.  I got newspapers, and information.  Scottish Power had abandoned attempts to get things up and running at 2.30 am.  There had been high winds and it was deemed too dangerous.  Glasgow phoned.  Would I like to come through for some warmth, and a hot meal?  Very kind, but I’m sure the power will return soon.  I went into Stirling and had hot coffee and a toasted croissant with cheese and tomato, and read the papers.  Then I hunted around for a replacement to my defunct gas heater, to no avail.  A second night without power would be challenging. 

Well, sufficient unto the day.  I went to my gym for the first time in nearly two years, for a shower, and a sauna.  The sauna was very restorative.  Then somebody came into the clammy wooden cube, with a barking cough, and I slipped out and went for a swim.  Home again at dusk, in hopes of seeing twinkling lights in the village.  Alas no.  I made the house safe and jumped back into the car to go to meet friends in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall and to hear the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, again for the first time since March 2020.  Then I remembered I needed to carry out a lateral flow test before attendance.  Back into the house, and conducted the test by torchlight.  After you apply the sample to the test kit, you need to wait fifteen minutes for the result, and it was during this wait that the lights came back on.  Relief!  And the test came back negative.  I boiled the kettle and had another coffee.  Thence to Glasgow, with a light heart.

Wagner, Thorvaldsdottir, Sibelius, and Brahms.  The concert hall wasn’t very warm, and Sibelius’ last substantial work, the tone poem Tapiola, must be the most evocative depiction of the frozen northern wastes ever composed.  In the other hemisphere, Captain Oates might have slipped out of the tent, with the intention of being gone for quite some time, to this score.  Fortunately my time in the sauna, albeit truncated, had afforded me some central heating.  The hall was perhaps one third full, all audience members masked, with social distancing.  I had that sense again of a war-time atmosphere.  After the interval Sunwook Kim played Brahms’ first piano concerto.  Balsam.    

Home by eleven.  Lights still on.  But it has been a bit of a wake-up call.  It wouldn’t take much for our civilisation to slip back into the dark ages.  John Buchan writes about the fragility of our seemingly substantial institutions.  In one of the Richard Hannay books – I can’t remember which one – Hannay takes a walk through the streets of London, as he often does, and admires the solidity of the mansions.  Then he is disconcerted by the image of a bleak white face pressed up against a window pane. 

I’m off to see if I can buy a portable gas heater.