Author: jamescalumcampbell

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. 

On Sunday I played my viola in a chamber orchestra concert in front of a real live audience.  What a treat.  All Beethoven; we played the third piano concerto and the fifth symphony.  Both in C minor.  Beethoven can be a bit grumpy.  Well, he had a lot to put up with.  All these sforzandi in unusual places.  People used to think they were misprints – clearly the stress should be at the beginning of the bar and not suddenly in the middle.  I wonder if this is how Beethoven heard the world, as a series of unpredictable and excruciating bangs and crashes.  No wonder he had a temper. Yet he could leave C minor and compose, in E major, the sublime passage for unaccompanied piano at the start of the slow movement of the third piano concerto.  There is something magical about sitting silently in a crowded hall and hearing, from within the body of the orchestra, the solo piano iterate that theme.  I almost felt as if Beethoven were in the room.    

I wonder if he minded my taking part, with my aged, crumbling technique, trying not to pollute the soundscape.  I think he might have admired the resolve to take up the outworn, buried tools and make the effort, after the fashion of Tennyson’s Ulysses –

Made weak my time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 

Yes, I think Beethoven would have admired that.  And if you are going to be an impostor, why not join in what is arguably the most famous orchestral opening in the entire repertoire?  Beethoven 5 seems to haunt all subsequent symphonic writing.  Vaughan Williams 4, for example, is closely modelled on Beethoven 5: the same four movement structure, a recurring four note motif, a haunting bridge passage between scherzo and finale, and the finale itself a grotesque parody of the culminating exultation of the Beethoven.       

The last time I played Beethoven 5 was in 1974.  It was with the (then) Scottish National Orchestra under Alexander Gibson.  I recall we did it in City Halls Glasgow, the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, and the town hall in Ayr.  People used to complain about Sir Alex’s beat, though I don’t recall any difficulty following it.  Just as well.  The opening to Beethoven 5 has potential for catastrophe.  You must attack it.  Like going in for a rugby tackle, if you are lily-livered, you will get hurt.  I remember Gibson wanted us to play the minim, fourth note of the piece, with two lengths of the bow, down and up, to give added power.  The string players of the orchestra moaned, “He’s changing the bowing again!”  It is the lot of the orchestral musician to moan.  I had to smile yesterday when, in our pre-concert rehearsal, we changed the bowing in exactly the same way.    

Anyway, yesterday I thought the orchestra sounded good, the soloist magnificent, and the conductor was clear as a bell.  Each time I play a gig, I think, let this be my schwanengesang.  And yet…  I was a bit flat afterwards, but a post-concert dinner with friends lifted my spirits.  As they were mathematicians, the conversation drifted in the direction of number theory.  Did you know, I said by way of light badinage, that every integer can be expressed as the sum of 1, 2, 3, or 4 squares?  The conversation switched to Beethoven, but I could see the professor had become deeply preoccupied, looking for a proof, or a disproof, an exception to the rule.

And by strange coincidence, when I got home and flicked on the telly, there was a biopic about the Cambridge mathematicians Hardy and Ramanujan.  They enacted the famous scene of Hardy visiting Ramanujan when he was in hospital with advanced TB.  Trying to make light conversation, Hardy remarked that the registration number of his taxi – 1729 I think – wasn’t very interesting.  “On the contrary Hardy!  It is the smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.”  Or something like that; don’t quote me.  Embarking on an anecdote about number theory is akin to telling a joke when you can’t quite remember the punch line.           

“Coal is history.”

It’s a line from Brassed Off, the Pete Postlethwaite and Ewan McGregor film whose anti-Thatcherite narrative concerning the decimation of the coal industry in the 1980s, has a brass band sound track (Rodrigo’s “Concerto de Orange Juice” is particularly effective on the cornet – or was it a flugel horn?).  The consigning of coal to history is, in the context of the film, a matter of some regret.  But times change.  Alok Sharma might have wished to borrow the “Coal is history” line in Glasgow at the end of an evidently very long weekend, but he wasn’t quite able to be so definitive.  Coal is to be “phased down” rather than “phased out”.  Coal has a wee way yet to go.    

When I was a boy, everybody burned coal.  And when my dad was a boy, he used to scour the Ayrshire beaches in search of “duff”, a mixture of sand and coal dust.  (I don’t know how effective a fuel it was, but I imagine it was pretty duff.)  I remember the coal was delivered off the back of a lorry in hundredweight bags.  The coalmen wore a tabard to offer some protection to the shoulders and back.  Others would patrol the streets vending their wares – “Co-aaaal… briquettes!”  The coal was kept in a bunker and transferred to the scuttle on the hearth.  You lit the fire using old newspapers and wood kindling.  Then add a little dross, and then the coals themselves.  On the hearth would be a “companion set” with which to clean up after the ash was removed.  The ash was transferred to the “dustbin”, and indeed ash dust was the principal non-recyclable detritus, because anything else that was no longer of use was burned in the fire.  There was no plastic to speak of.  My father taught me that the only thing you couldn’t burn was silver paper of the sort that covered a Fry’s Cream or a Fry’s Five Centre.  I used to amuse myself by pushing the poker under the burning coals, until it glowed red hot, then white hot.  Nobody had central heating.  Radiators belonged to schools and hospitals.  Sometimes, if the atmospheric conditions were right, a smog would descend over Glasgow.  A real pea-souper.  I would walk home from school like a pilot, instrument flying in cloud, unable to see the hand in front of my face.    

When I was a medical student I went down a mine, in Loanhead, Midlothian.  I remember performing a Valsalva manoeuvre to equalise the pressure in my ears as we plummeted down two thousand feet at breakneck speed.  I was surprised at how warm, indeed hot, the atmosphere was.  We walked along a broad avenue and then turned into a series of dwindling passageways until at length we reached the coal face.  The last section was a long and claustrophobic tunnel.  I might have been under Stalag Luft III.  At least the business of extracting the coal was being done by an automated rotating digger, rather than a miner with a pick axe. 

One of the few Wilfred Owen poems that is not a war poem is Miners. 

There was a whispering in my hearth,

A sigh of the coal,

Grown wistful of a former earth

It might recall.    

Owen uses his trade mark half-rhyme throughout; hearth – earth, coal – recall.  The half-rhyme produces an atmosphere of wistfulness and poignancy and of loss, of reaching out for something elusive and intangible; the dying fall of a whizz-bang heard at a distance, from a redoubt in the Ypres salient.  Miners is a war poem in disguise.

And I saw white bones in the cinder-shard.

Bones without number;

For many hearts with coal are charred

And few remember.     

In his essay Down the Mine, George Orwell depicts work that is backbreaking, pitiless, and ultimately soul-destroying.  I wonder what Orwell would have made of the deliberations in Glasgow, and the fine distinction between “phasing down” and “phasing out”.  It seems to me there is an element of the absurd about a conference of parties, on the brink of physical, psychological and spiritual exhaustion, staying up all night fine-tuning the text, wrestling with niceties, trying to stumble on a formula that will mimic a sense of accord.  As someone frankly phobic of committee meetings, I think come 5 pm on Friday, had I been in Mr Sharma’s shoes, I would have said, “Down – out – whatever.  It’s a wrap.”  After all, if you are going to “phase” in the downward direction, you are going to have to phase down before you’re out.  The trouble with staying up all night obsessing about this stuff is that you lose all sense of proportion.  You might as well debate how many angels can dance on a pinhead, or how many children had Lady Macbeth.  This is why airline pilots and surgeons don’t operate when tired.  But for politicians, all night sessions, particularly at the end of a COP, are de rigueur.        

I have a sympathy for the developing world, who feel they should not be lectured to by the west, who after all have caused all this trouble in the first place.  We have had our coal and burnt it.  I’m less sympathetic towards Australia.  Why on earth would you want to mine coal in Australia?  I worked in Brisbane in the 1980s.  It was 37 degrees Celsius by 7.30 in the morning.  Australia could turn the hot red centre into a vast solar panel and heat the world, of they were minded so to do.  But they would rather sell coal to the Chinese.  Meanwhile we are losing the natural world. The Great Barrier Reef is dying.  If I’d been stuck in some committee room down the Broomielaw in the wee small hours propping my eyelids open with match sticks, I would have been doodling mindlessly on my scratch pad, looking for anagrams of Alok Sharma.  Harms koala.                    

I’ve had an infestation of wasps.  It started one night just after I’d turned in.  I read a few pages of Billy Connolly’s autobiography Windswept and Interesting (Two Roads, 2021).  Incidentally, I have an idea Greta might also have been reading it, as she has become so potty-mouthed.  I detect a Glasgow influence.  “You can take whatever the f*** they are doing in there and stick it up your a***!”  I paraphrase.  Her command of the local patois is complete.   Anyway, I turned down a page corner of the Connolly (bad habit), hunkered down, and switched the light off.

Bzzzzzzzzzz

I switched the light back on, scanned for an insect, saw nothing, shrugged, and switched off again.

Bzzzzzzzzz

Ignore it.  But now I was sensitised, wired for the next buzz.  Forget it.  Pretend you are camping under canvas.  You are merely part of the natural world.  That seemed to work.  I slept.  In the morning I found a docile wasp wandering across the window pane, and, being a sentimental soul, I scooped him into an egg cup and deposited him outdoors. 

Of course he was merely a harbinger.  Over the next few days his mates kept turning up.  I tracked them down to a wasp nest under a slate on my roof.  A hive of industry!  (Do wasps have hives?)  I called Pest Control.  Yes they could come that afternoon.  They gave me a window: between 1.30 and 5.30.  I waited.  They never came.  I find this sort of thing very dispiriting.  I attribute it to a collapse of civilisation as we know it, as John Buchan put it, “a general loosening of screws”.  Well, I had cabin fever and I had to get out.  I took my car out from its off-road parking space and drove it up the lane beside my house.  It’s a single track, but it broadens out at its junction with the Main Street, just where somebody had parked a Chelsea Tractor.  I was half way up the lane, when another Chelsea Tractor swung in from the Main Street.  I thought they would back up to let me out, but no, they held their ground.  Impasse.  I swung in behind the (parked) Chelsea Tractor I to afford Chelsea Tractor II space to get by, but they didn’t take up the offer, and held fast.  I had no alternative but to back up, in the process taking out with my wing mirror the wooden box attached to the wall of my cottage, housing my electricity smart meter.  I got out to inspect the damage.  Chelsea Tractor II reversed into the Main Street and disappeared.  I parked, and effected a temporary repair, with Scotch tape, of the wreck of my electricity box, and phoned the electricity company.

“Nothing to do with us, sir.  The box is your property, and your responsibility.” 

That didn’t sound quite right to me, so I found a website, and a “help” (Ha!) desk, and again asked the electricity company if they would replace the box.  Approximately one month later I got a reply, to the effect that the box was mine.  It’s the pottery barn rule: you break it – you own it.  You will hardly be surprised to learn that I was not on tenterhooks awaiting this reply.  I had got on the phone and managed to track down a kind-hearted and sympathetic human being, who told me that I had to provide a new box, and the electricity company would fit it.  Eureka!  Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.  To bed.

Bzzzzzzzz

I called the Wasp people.  They never came?  Terribly sorry.  They’ll be round this morning.  True enough, the van pulled up, just beside the wrecked meter box, two hours later.  I had expected a team, with bizarre equipment, like Ghostbusters, but it was just one guy and an aerosol can.  He duly sprayed the entrance to the nest.  It took him about three minutes.  That freed me up to take my car into the garage for its annual MOT.  I dropped it off, found a coffee bar, and read the paper.  Then the garage sent my mobile a video glooming me up with a swag of “advisories”, and then saying I’d failed the emissions test.  They needed to carry out diagnostics on the PDF.  PDF?  That can’t be right.  Isn’t that a computer doc?  DPF?  Some sort of filter anyway, and by 5 pm they told me it was kaput.  It’ll take a few days to get a replacement.  Cost in excess of £1000.  Want to go ahead?  I said I’d sleep on it.

Bzzzzzzzz

Back home, I asked the village’s font of all human knowledge what he thought about a DPF costing a Grand.  He said, “Who are you with?”  I stated the name of a reputable car company.

“Big mistake.  Get a second opinion.”  He gave me the name of a wee garage.

The electricity people came and fitted the box.  Good job.  Incidentally people seem to have stopped using the outlet to our lane as a parking space.  I think word may have gotten round that an incident occurred.   

The people at the wee garage were very dubious about the idea that my DPF had conked out.  “It’s a six gear car.  Take it down the motorway at speed in fourth gear and blow all the soot off.  Then bring it in on Friday morning and we will MOT it.”  This I did, feeling guilty as at the other end of the motorway lies COP26.  If I’m an emitter, then I too am blah blah blah.  I would dearly love to go electric but where would I charge it up?  I must wrestle with this problem, but in the meantime my car has two days to run before it becomes illegal.  Not having a car in the country is social suicide. 

Bzzzzzz

Actually I think the wasp situation is improving.  There is no sign of activity at the nest site, and the wasps I come across are either comatose or corpses.

I took the car in at 0830 on Friday, and got the call at 10.00.  “Your car’s ready to be picked up.”  The fee was modest.  Just like that.  It just shows you that it pays to shop around.  This morning I reinsured the car with a different insurance company, at half the price. 

Well, it’s all a kettle of small beer, so to speak, is it not?  Don’t sweat the small stuff.  Our local chamber orchestra has reconvened for rehearsal, in person, for the first time in two years.  Beethoven 5.  Balsam.  I will seize fate by the throat!  

Bzzzzzzz                      

The metaphysical poets were fond of the notion of the futility of life before love.  It’s just going through the motions.  In Aire and Angels, John Donne said: 

Twice or thrice had I lov’d thee,

Before I knew thy face or name;

So in a voice, so in a shapelesse flame,

Angells affect is oft, and worship’d bee.

And again, in Good Morrow, that sense of the ridiculousness of Mr Eliot’s “waste sad time”:

I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I

Did, till we lov’d? were we not wean’d till then?

But suck’d on country pleasures, childishly?

Or snorted we in the seven sleepers den?

‘Twas so; But this, all pleasures fancies bee.

If ever any beauty I did see,

Which I desir’d, and got, ‘twas but a dreame of thee.

But my favourite exploration of this idea of life before and after, comes from Abba, and The Day before You Came.  It’s terribly Nordic.  It has diminished sevenths.  It sounds like Sibelius.  It is a narrative, the lyrics all important.  It describes the humdrum day of a woman who gets up, reads the morning paper on the train on her way to work, sits at a desk in her office, goes for lunch at half twelve, works on, leaves at five, reads the evening paper on the train on the way home, picks up a Chinese meal and eats it watching telly, goes to bed at 10.15, reads a little, and then sleeps. It’s all perfectly normal.  It happens the day before “you” came.  We never find out who “you” are.  But clearly “you” are somebody, or something, that completely turns her life upside down.  We might assume it’s a guy, the love of her life; but it could as easily be a woman, an epiphany, an illness, or a catastrophe.  A Nemesis.  I’d guess it was a guy.  But the experience is not at all without complication.  In fact, it is full of anguish.  What a difference a day makes.  Yes, but what sort of difference? 

I like Abba.  I’m a fan.  I think they were, are, a phenomenon, with a talent for melody, and an ability to get everybody up on to the dance floor.  Check it out.  You are at a “do”, a “function”, (I’m stuck in another century), and the band struggles to get people on their feet. Then they cover Abba, and suddenly the floor is heaving.  You can’t belittle that. 

Talking of the dance floor, I have a notion that, sometime during the lockdown and without my realising it, my relationship with Terpsichore finally came to an end.  I quite like the idea of dancing a tango with an enchantress who drapes herself about me while I merely stand motionless and expressionless, or with the disdainful pout, the cruel curling lip of an Argentinian drug baron.  But I wouldn’t convince.  I would be like a middle-aged man who takes it upon himself to ask the band to accompany him in an Elvis tribute.  I would sing Are you lonesome tonight?  My teenage daughter would wish quietly to exit the scene.  Then, when I abandoned song in favour of spoken prose… “I wonder if you are lonesome tonight…”, she would wish quietly to die and that her substance be sublimated through a crack in the floorboards. 

People say Abba didn’t take themselves seriously, but I think their ability to produce the goods was totally serious.  Of course, a lyric like “Voulez-vous… ah HAH!” is utterly ridiculous, but isn’t that the essence of all pop music?   There is an argument that all pop music is essentially a spoof, a take-off.  If it strives for anything deeper, it becomes inflated and pretentious, like Bohemian Rhapsody.  Abba called somebody, last night, from Glasgow.  And now Greta Thunberg is in town.  I was in Glasgow yesterday, the day before the great and the good came.  Usually I proceed west along the M80, the M8, and the Clydeside Expressway, but all of that is shut off, so I went by an entirely different route, through Strathblane.  My luncheon date took place within two miles of COP26, but I was unaware of any disruption to anything.  Greta was on telly that morning.  Andrew Marr interviewed her in London’s Natural History Museum.  Having endured forty five minutes of politicos unable to give a straight answer to a straight question, I was relieved that she came up with the goods.  Her English is perfect.  Mr Marr asked her if it was right for protestors to cause people inconvenience.  I guess he was thinking of people gluing themselves to the M25 so that women had to give birth in the back of stationary ambulances.  Ms Thunberg agreed it was not right to cause harm.  On the other hand, to be effective, occasionally you might have to piss people off.