Author: jamescalumcampbell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They sparkled like the colour of burnished brass…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper

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

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

Muss es sein?

Es muss sein! Es muss sein! 

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

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

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

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

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

To suffer woes, which Hope thinks infinite;

To forgive wrongs, darker than death or night;

To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;

Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Naïve?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Crosswords?”

“Certainly.  I have a clue for you.”

“I had a horrible feeling you might.”

“Organise BBC game show host! (6,9)”

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

“It’s topical.”

“Michael McIntyre.”

“Doesn’t quite fit.”

“I need another clue.”

“It’s a eulogy.”

“Doesn’t help.  I give in.”

“Bamber Gascoigne.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bzzzzzz

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

“Josiah Willard Gibbs.”

“Very well interrupted!”

Applause.

“Three more questions on thermodynamics…”

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

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

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

I’ve started so I’ll finish        

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

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

Ever working night and day

Getting neither thanks nor pay…

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

I edged forward another ten metres.

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

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

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

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

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

“Where?”

I really ought not to be allowed out. 

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

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

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.