Author: jamescalumcampbell

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.                             

What do the following five political exchanges have in common?

Secretary of State, with hindsight, do you think the government underestimated the pandemic threat, and should have closed the border, and locked down earlier?”

  “The government is doing everything in its power to protect the health of our people, our fantastic NHS, and the economy of the nation, through the successful roll-out of our world-leading vaccination programme going forward.”   

“The Prime Minister surely had a point when he remarked that Mrs Thatcher, who was warning of the dangers of globing warming 35 years ago, was ahead of her time when she closed down the mines.”

“For the Prime Minister to traipse north of the border, and make light of Mrs Thatcher’s decimation of Scotland’s heavy industry, demonstrates an abominable and unpardonable lack of either judgment or sensitivity.”

“Would the Prime Minister agree with me that the SNP’s carping over the cost of the upgrade to the Continuous-At-Sea-Deterrent is akin to a eunuch quibbling over the cost of Viagra?” 

“Yes.” 

“Police Scotland have been explicit that it is only legal to ride an e-scooter on private land, so when the First Minister tried one out while campaigning in Troon, she was clearly breaking the law.  Officers have had to spend a significant amount of time dealing with her silly stunt.” 

“It is common sense not to take action against the First Minister.”

“Any Foreign Secretary who continues to sip piña colada, poolside on Crete, and refuses to speak to his Afghan counterpart, while we continue to witness the terrible scenes at Hamid Karzai International Airport, has to consider his position.”  

“The Foreign Secretary has my full support.  And I am not going to take lectures from an opposition party whose multifaceted mismanagement of foreign policy while in government has more than contributed to the crisis we now face.”

Would you consider these interchanges to be, in their way, unremarkable, or are they strange?  In the first example, it is evident that the cabinet minister’s response to the BBC reporter, concerning the government’s management of the pandemic, is a non-sequitur.  In the second example, concerning Mrs T. as environmentalist, a member of an opposition party purports to be offended by an allegedly insensitive remark by the PM.  But nobody seriously believes that the opposition member has been traumatised by the remark, which he clearly perceives as posing more of an opportunity than a threat.  This is a classic example of “humbug”.  The outrage is sham outrage.  The third exchange, comparing Trident to a treatment for erectile dysfunction, is an extract from Prime Minister’s Questions at Westminster.  The question is a “plant” from the government back benches.  It is not a sincere enquiry; indeed it is hardly a question at all.  All that is required in response is acquiescence.  The point of the plant is not to receive an answer, but merely to pour contumely upon an opposition party.  It’s a gag.  It doesn’t matter that it is clumsy and distasteful, so long as it is contemptuous.  In the fourth example, the First Minister of Scotland is taken to task for breaking the law.  But the complainant doesn’t seriously expect Police Scotland to place the First Minister under arrest.  The opposition member knows his complaint is both trivial and vexatious, and he can hardly be surprised when Police Scotland shuts the matter down.  Again, the outrage is faux-outrage.  In the last exchange, concerning the evacuation from Kabul, the terrible scenes at the airport are of only marginal relevance to the business of getting the Foreign Secretary the sack.  The response is an example of the polemical technique of “whataboutery”, the tu quoque logical fallacy or argument ad hominem, characterising the opposition as the pot calling the kettle black.  Neither question nor response is going to improve the situation at Kabul.  Both are entirely devoid of a creative idea to enhance an evacuation.  Something akin to Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of Dunkirk, is entirely lacking. 

  What is the meaning of this elaborate gavotte?  Are our politicians aware of the fact that they inhabit a surreal world of humbug?  In his tract On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005) – the author uses the starker term – Professor Harry G. Frankfurt asks why there is so much of the stuff around.  What is the origin of humbug?  Why does it survive and flourish?  Does humbug have any adaptive value? 

  The origin of humbug lies in the whip.  The whip is the machinery that maintains a political party’s internal discipline.  The government has a chief whip, sundry assistant whips, and there is a whips’ Office.  Traditionally, the whip is seen as a powerful, intimidating and Machiavellian figure, simultaneously charming and obnoxious, and occasionally utterly terrifying – Ian Richardson’s Francis Urquhart in the television drama House of Cards.  Gavin Williamson, when he was chief whip, captured this sense of the steel fist within the velvet glove when he chose to have on his desk Cronus, a tarantula, as his amanuensis.  It’s the sort of accoutrement a Bond villain might have favoured, stroking one of Cronus’s eight limbs.  “Ah, Mr Bond, an unexpected pleasure…”

  The whip’s office is shadowed by a similar apparatus within the opposition parties.  Given that government and opposition parties are by nature constantly at loggerheads, you might expect there to be little cooperation between the whips’ offices, but in fact there is considerable cross-party collaboration, through what are known as “the usual channels”, simply in order to stop parliamentary business from descending into chaos.  Thus, for example, there is the practice of “pairing”, when an MP unable to attend for a vote will pair with an opposition member, who will abstain in order to maintain the parity that would have existed had both MPs been present to vote.   

  The whip can be exerted with varying degrees of ferocity.  Obedience to a “three-line” whip is absolutely mandatory; the issue in question is underlined three times on the parliamentary order paper.  To defy a three-line whip is a misdemeanour that puts the perpetrator beyond the pale.  A minister who defies a three-line whip is expected to resign.  Paradoxically, a member who rebels in this way is not actually whipped; on the contrary, the whip is withdrawn.  The rebel’s suffering ceases, and he enters an anodyne, twilit zone, after the fashion of a concentration camp inmate who ceases to barter what pitiful baubles he may possess, and starts to smoke his own cigarettes.  Thus, the member is cast into outer darkness.   

  Not all issues are whipped.  Members are free to vote as they choose, on “issues of conscience”.  Examples of issues of conscience might be, from one end of life, the legalisation of termination of pregnancy, and from the other, assisted dying, or even – heaven forfend it should ever reappear on the order paper – capital punishment.  The existence of an “issue of conscience” begs the question: over what sort of issue might a member conclude, “I don’t have to worry my conscience about that!”?          

So you vote through a bill for which you have no enthusiasm, presumably, because the overall direction in which the government is moving is to your taste.  No doubt the first time you do it is the most difficult.  You pass through the “aye” lobby, virtually unnoticed.  It is a banal excursion, like a walk in the park.  You resume your position on the green benches, perhaps with a sense of relief, unaware that you have just pawned your soul.  That wasn’t so hard!  The ayes have it.  Unlock!

  The corollary to the reality of the whip is “the surreality of humbug”.  The government is compelled by the exigencies of realpolitik to push through a measure that is deeply unpalatable to the electorate.  A thick-skinned political elder statesman is wheeled out in front of the TV cameras, a heavyweight and a big bruiser, a party grandee who is capable of expounding what he and everybody else knows to be humbug, all the while keeping a straight face and a steady voice suffused with gravitas, “his lips dripping” – as Dr King said of the Governor of Alabama – “with the words of interposition and nullification”.

  “Prime Minister, did you make clear to the President your frustration at his refusal to extend the deadline for withdrawal of troops from Kabul?”

  “Let’s be clear, the immediate phase of the evacuation has actually been a very considerable success by the military.”   

  Once you have identified humbug as the currency of political discourse, you might feel tempted to enjoy it for its comic value, much as you might enjoy a satirical game show on radio or TV.  You tune into Any Questions or Question Time as you might tune into Mock the Week or Have I got News for You, not to find out what’s going on in the world, but for a good laugh.  This is dangerous.  It means you have moved beyond the realm of cynicism into a fey state of irresponsible indifference, puerile, bordering on madness.        

  I guess the acquiescence to the whip is a gradual and insidious process.  After all, it’s your career; and you have mouths to feed and school fees to pay.  You need to progress.  Yet what shall it profit a man, if he should gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?  When you lend your support to some cause you do not believe in, when you express an emotion which you don’t actually feel, when you aver that something which you perceive to be black is actually white, you sacrifice your humanity.  Once the process is complete, you have lost touch with reality.  You have become, through and through, a party man.  You, yourself, are the embodiment of self-deception.  You are humbug.     

  Once you recognise that the origin of humbug is the whip, then you see the entire structure of our political institutions collapse like a house of cards.  No whips: no parties. Would that be propitious?  Careful what you wish for.  It is the most natural thing in the world for a group of people, in pursuit of a common goal, to organise.  It is well recognised that totalitarian regimes hate political parties (apart from their own), just as much as they hate trade unions, and seek to outlaw them.  Once in power, they push through parliament an “Enabling Act”, necessary “because of the supreme national existential crisis we now face”, banning all opposition.  So, long live political parties!  Yet how refreshing it would be to hear an exchange like this:

  “Your Prime Minister fouled up, didn’t he?”

  “Big time.”

  Only the truth will make you free.  Even, perhaps especially, if you get your jotters.  This is the final corollary to the exposé of humbug.  No whips – no parties.  No parties – no politicians.  At least, no professional politicians.  Why not elect members of parliament the way we might elect a committee to run a golf club, or a kirk session, or an amateur orchestra?  Elect, for one term only, men and women of independent mind.  Typically this might be a person from any walk of life – doctor, lawyer, clergyman, entrepreneur, nurse, shopkeeper, teacher, plumber, carer, refuse collector – somebody from the real world, perhaps entering the sixth or seventh decade of life, effective, humane, experienced, and wise, looking for a change of direction, a person who might be persuaded, albeit reluctantly but out of a sense of civic duty, to stand, once, for parliament.  The lure of re-election would no longer be an enticement.  Every vote would be a conscience vote.

  “Absurd!” I hear the professional politicians say.  “Hand the country over to a bunch of amateurs?  How could they possibly cope with the complexities of high finance, jurisprudence, international diplomacy, and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune referred to by Mr Macmillan as ‘Events, dear boy’?  They would be found wanting at every turn.”

  No change there, then. 

  One thing the “bunch of amateurs” would have which the current incumbents lack, is a sense of humility.  They would create a government by recognising individual talent within their midst.  The Ministers of Defence, Health, and Education (as examples), would ask the leaders of the armed forces, the doctors and nurses, and the teachers what they needed, and not tell them how to do their jobs.  Most of all, they would do that which the liberal democracies of the western world have been unable to do since the end of the Second World War.  They would bury the ancient hatchets of tribal affiliation and declare a truce, nay an armistice, in the endless political parties’ internecine warfare.  They would not have to “reach across the aisle” because the aisle would no longer exist.          

In the latest attempt to get the Assisted Dying Bill through Holyrood, the champions of the cause are mindful that patients in the remote areas of Scotland, particularly the Western Isles, may be disadvantaged by not having willing medical facilitators on hand to smooth the process.  Never fear.  The transaction can take place remotely.  Two doctors on Zoom can declare you terminally ill and mentally competent.  The relevant boxes can be ticked.  It may not surprise you to hear that this, according to at least one palliative care consultant, “beggars belief”.  But the Member of the Scottish Parliament pushing the bill has said, “The dying must not be left behind”.    

When I heard that the dying must not be left behind, I thought of the Bakhtiari.  Jacob Bronowski described their way of life in The Ascent of Man.  I don’t know if this ancient Persian tribe still follows the flocks in the great spring migration across the Zagros Mountains.  During the year they cross six mountain ranges on the way out, and six on the way back, braving snow and flood.  The great test is the crossing of the Bazuft River.  When the herd plunges into the meltwater, this is the moment when the elderly and infirm may choose to pause at the water’s edge, and say, “I’m not coming with you this year.  I’m going to stop here for a bit”, rather after the fashion of Captain Oates stepping out of the tent and remarking that he might be detained for quite some time.  Nobody demurs.  It is the way.  As Dr Bronowski said, only the dogs look puzzled.  The dying are, in fact, left behind.  But I doubt if the Bakhtiari sanction the process by laptop.

Well, if the assisted dying bill goes through at the third time of asking, no doubt provision will be made for “Distance Dying”.  There will be an app.  I dare say it will be downloaded and utilised.  This is a useful context for me to introduce Campbell’s Law.  Campbell’s Law is a sociological observation much like Parkinson’s Law, Murphy’s Law, and Sod’s Law.  Parkinson noted that the work expands to fill the time available; a special case of Murphy’s Law is that if two engineering components can be fitted together the wrong way, then they will be fitted together the wrong way; Murphy’s Law is a special application of the more general Sod’s Law, which states that if something can go wrong, it will go wrong.

Campbell’s Law is a generalisation of Parkinson-Murphy-Sod, a grand unifying theory, if you will, of everything.  Here it is:

If you introduce a public service in an attempt to decrease the demand on an already existing public service, you will increase the demand on the existing service proportionate to the extent to which the new service is taken up. 

This phenomenon is observed in medical practice all the time.  Too many patients and not enough GPs?  Solution, get the pharmacists to consult and prescribe.  And indeed, patients do consult their pharmacist.  But this hasn’t lessened the demand to see the GP; indeed it has increased it, because the pharmacist becomes an additional source of referral to the GP.  Face-to-face GP-patient interaction too time consuming? Solution, consult on Zoom.  Of course this has been necessary during the pandemic, and the previous English Health Secretary, Mr Hancock, was very keen that remote consulting become the default mode for General Practice.  He told the GPs not to go back to their “bad old ways”. But Mr Hancock has moved on – albeit not to the UN – and now Mr Javid is trying to cajole GPs once more to see their patients face-to-face.  He is offering financial sweeteners.  Perhaps he will echo the words of Mr Bevan back in 1948.  “I stuffed their mouths with gold!”  (Actually I’m not sure Bevan said that.  He stuffed their mouths with silver.)  Anyway it has become evident that despite, or perhaps because of all this Zooming, people are crying out to see their GP in person, while the waiting list for hospital appointments and procedures has gone way off the scale.  It was another previous Health Secretary, Enoch Powell, who recognised early on that the demand on the National Health Service would turn it into a bottomless pit.  I fear that the integration of health and social care will make the pit even more bottomless, if such as thing is conceivable. 

Is there any way we can short-circuit this never-ending spiral of supply and demand?  I believe GPs are ideally positioned to put a break on the conspicuous consumption of health care products.  An experienced GP’s most powerful therapeutic tool is masterly inactivity; his or her most potent and efficacious prescription is reassurance.  But you can only carry it off face-to-face, and given the time and space.  “I think we should hold our nerve, and keep a watching brief.  It’s okay.  You’re going to be fine.”   I suspect that the doctors who are good at masterly inactivity will not be keen on filling in the forms for the elderly Bakhtiari on Eigg, Rum, Canna, and Muck.    

Are you familiar with the Glasgow Coma Scale or GCS?  It is an index of neurological conscious level.  How awake are you?  It first appeared in a landmark paper by Jennett and Teasdale, neurosurgeons in Glasgow’s then Southern General Hospital – now Queen Elizabeth University Hospital – in 1974.  At the morning ward round, the consultant would ask the nursing sister how awake a head-injured patient was, and the sister would reply, a little more – or a little less – awake than yesterday, or just the same.  It was evident that some more objective means of assessment was needed, and the Southern General came up with the GCS. 

It looks at three modalities.  It assesses a patient’s eye opening ability, speech, and movement, as follows:

EYES

Spontaneously open (Score 4 points)

Open to command (3)

Open to a painful stimulus (2)

Closed (1)

SPEECH

Normal (5)

Confused (4)

Incoherent (3)

Incomprehensible (2)

Absent (1)

MOVEMENT

Normal (6)

Localises a painful stimulus (5)

Withdraws from a painful stimulus (4)

Flexes to a painful stimulus (3)

Extends to a painful stimulus (2)

No movement (1)

You can see that if you score full marks, that is, if you are wide awake with eyes open, speaking and moving normally, you have a GCS of 15 (4 + 5 + 6).  On the other hand, if you are profoundly comatose, with eyes closed, silent as the tomb, and completely immobile, you score a 3 (1 + 1 + 1).  You can’t score less than 3.  You get a 3 for turning up.

My theme today is not really the GCS, but I can’t resist a pedagogical impulse and must clarify a few points.  If the patient’s eyes are closed, the doctor says, “Open your eyes, please, if you can.”  If the patient cannot, the doctor exerts a painful stimulus upon the patient, in a controlled and non-injurious manner, such as exerting some pressure with a blunt instrument, like the side of a pencil, on the flat of a fingernail. 

With regard to speech, there is certainly some subjective overlap in the spectrum from confusion to incoherence to incomprehensibility, but in reality most physicianly assessments of these states reach broad agreement.  Confused speech is usually syntactically more or less correct, whereas incoherent speech is sometimes described as a “word salad”, and incomprehensible speech more resembles a grunt. 

With regard to movement, the doctor exerts pressure on, say, the right index fingernail, and the index finger is removed (score 5), or the whole right arm is removed (4), or the patient adopts a highly abnormal reflex posture in which the arms flex across the torso (3), or adopts another highly abnormal reflex posture in which the arms extend beside the torso (2), or there is no reaction (1).

Back in the 70s, you might say the GCS went viral.  It certainly went global.  In particular, it was found to be of enormous use in the pre-hospital and acute emergency setting, with respect to the care of patients who presented with diminished consciousness from both medical and surgical causes.  It remains in use today.

With COP26, now that Glasgow is back on the map, I see an opportunity for another Glasgow-inspired index.  How successful will COP26 be?  Very successful, moderately successful, so-so, somewhat counterproductive, or an absolute disaster?  Again, we need something a little more analytical, so I propose the GBS or Glasgow Blah Scale, which will be an index of the presence or absence of humbug.  I am grateful to Ms Thunberg for the use of the word “blah”.  I have a notion that her characterisation of the deliberations, to date, of word leaders with respect to global warming, “Blah Blah Blah” will immortalise her.  It is self-evident that the extent to which COP26 falls short of target will be camouflaged in “blah”, or “fudge”.  I have modelled the GBS on the GCS.  The GBS may be used to reflect both the overall success of the meeting, and the power of each individual attendee’s contribution.  Here I apply the GBS to the latter, that is, the individual attendant, be he for example Prime Minister Johnson, Prime Minister Morrison, or Chairman Xi.  The three modalities in this case are presence or attendance at Glasgow (cf eyes), the comprehensibility of the communiqué (cf speech), and the extent to which the communiqué is realised by subsequent action (cf movement).  As follows:

PRESENCE

100% (4)

Token appearance (delegate drops by) (3)

Sends a deputy (2)

Absent (1)

COMMUNIQUÉ

All ambitious targets ratified (5)

Confusion in some areas (4)

Humbug (3)

Bullshit (2)

Silence (1)

ACTION

All ratified resolutions implemented (6)

Some isolated targets missed (5)

Oil exploration subsidised (4)

Coal industry revived (3)

Mining for minerals in Antarctica commenced (2)

No agreement reached in Glasgow, but COP27 put in the diary (1).

It occurs to me that the Glasgow Blah Scale might be modified to refer to any committee meeting we each may have the misfortune to attend.  Who has not attended a meeting, be it in the Palace of Westminster, in the work place, or at the local golf club, which has been abandoned with precious little achieved?  GBS 3.  I hope this will not pertain to Glasgow.  There is a letter in The Herald today from a professor in Anchorage Alaska, urging Glasgow to close all means of exit from the city, (airport, roads, river etc) until a legally binding agreement has been reached, among other things, to reduce global carbon emissions by at least 50% by 2030, and to fully fund a $100 billion/year Green Climate Fund. 

The idea of detaining all the world leaders down by the Broomielaw, until they have laboriously worked their way from GBS 3 to GBS 15, is beguiling.  Watch this space. 

On Saturday, The Herald’s letters editor wrote a column headed by the question, So why don’t more women write to the papers?  He took an inventory for the week: Monday, 2 letters out of 12 published were from women. Tuesday – 3 out of 11.  Wednesday – ditto.  Thursday – 2 out of 12.  Friday – 1 out of 14.  Saturday – 2 out of 9.  Total – 13 out of 69, or just over 17%.  (Actually, 13 out of 69 is just under 19%, but let’s not quibble.)  I can add to this that today (Monday) the total is 1 out of 10, with 1 indeterminate because the writer has given his/her initials rather than a first name.  (Reading the letter, an assertive missive critical of a certain financial institution, I’m inclined to think the writer is male, but no doubt that just demonstrates a whole swag of my own prejudices and presuppositions.)  Apparently other newspapers show the same demographic. Now why, asks the letters editor, should this be?  Could it be that women are just too busy with childcare, preparing meals, multi-tasking in general?  Or perhaps women are more inclined than men to keep their opinions to themselves.

It occurred to me that the editor really ought to have told us, not merely the gender demographics of the letters published, but also those of the letters received, if only to rule out the possibility that female voices are being edited out. 

Then on Sunday, by an odd coincidence, another striking gender demographic came up.  On BBC Radio 4’s A Point of View, Zia Haider Rahman drew our attention to a newspaper article, stating that only 19% of people who read Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale, are male.  Mr Rahman made the point that this is not remarkable, as apparently only one out of five males read any fiction at all.  So there is no case that men specifically choose not to read women authors.  Mr Rahman cites this as an example of what the statistician Sir David Spiegelhalter calls “the base rate fallacy”.   

Are we therefore to conclude that the reason why women have no time to write to the papers is that they are too busy reading novels?  It crossed my mind to write in to The Herald and make such a suggestion.  Maybe I will.  But it’s dangerous territory, is gender.  As a matter of fact there has been quite a lot of Herald correspondence lately on the vexed subject of gender identity.  Last week, Andrew Marr interviewed the Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey and asked him what was wrong with stating that a woman is an adult human female.  It was a question of some relevance, as Natalie Bird had made such an assertion, and in consequence had been banned from membership of the Liberal Democrat Party for ten years, since such an assertion was deemed to be transphobic.  Mr Marr did not exactly get a straight answer from Sir Ed.  One of the Herald’s journalists mounted a defence of Ms Bird, and was rather pilloried in the letters page by someone championing the rights of transgender people.  I thought, do I want to get involved in this debacle?  Why not?  I might be attacked on social media but I never look at social media anyway.  I wrote as follows:

What is surprising to me about the current debate on trans-gender issues (“Why can’t they say a woman is an adult human female?” The Herald, September 22) is the total absence of any reference to an individual’s chromosome complement.

You might argue we are all female, in that we all carry the genetic information for expressing female characteristics in the X chromosome.  Most females have twenty three pairs of chromosomes including two X chromosomes (46XX).  Individuals with Turner’s Syndrome (45X0) and so-called Superfemales (47XXX) have female characteristics.  It is the presence of the Y chromosome that conveys male characteristics, in both 46XY, and 47XXY (Klinefelter’s Syndrome).  You might say that maleness is a superimposition upon femaleness.  The arrangement 45Y0 is incompatible with life.  A mosaic pattern, by which an individual might develop cell lines with both XX and XY components – hermaphroditism – is rare.  Similarly, an XY individual may develop female characteristics because a crucial part of the Y chromosome has been deleted, but that again is vanishingly rare.  So, by and large, like it or not, mother nature with regard to gender takes a binary approach. 

Of course, this need not tell us whether or not the Y chromosome should be welcome in a Women’s Refuge, but at least it solves a problem of semantics.  If a woman (sic) chooses to wear a T-shirt with the logo “A man has a Y chromosome”, it would be hard to argue the point. 

The letter’s editor published me unedited, God bless him.  Thus far there have been no rejoinders.  I have not been told that I, and others of my “ilk”, should “hang our heads in shame”.  (Sometimes I think we inveterate writers to the press stick to our habit through a profound, unconscious desire to be hauled over the coals, to be told to wake up and smell the coffee.  You write in search of brickbats rather than bouquets, rather as a compulsive gambler’s deepest desire is not to win, but to lose.)  But I have received no comments, adverse or otherwise.  That, somebody told me, is because I have issued the definitive statement on the matter.  But I think they were just teasing me. 

Many women have withdrawn from public life because of the vitriol they have had to endure.  Perhaps this is the reason why they don’t feel inclined to write into the papers.  Maybe females are more vulnerable to attack, serious attack.  I remember a (male) academic philosopher wrote in some years back to state the case that women were not particularly at risk of assault.  Most victims of assault were male.  You can imagine the furore that caused.  More recently, somebody got into trouble by suggesting that young ladies ought to be “street-wise”.  It’s a mine field.  That’s the trouble.  It is a minefield – the street.        

So maybe that’s why there are so few letters to the editor from women.  Writing to the press is like taking a walk down the street, alone, at night. 

Meanwhile, to return to Margaret Atwood and David Spiegelhalter, why aren’t we chaps reading more novels?  When I heard about this on Sunday, I was reminded of something a friend of mine once said to me when we were at school:

“I can’t stand fiction.  I mean, it’s just a pack of f****** lies.”                       

A mathematician has informed me that any prime number that is divisible by 4 with remainder 1 is always the sum of two squares.  Try it out: 13 divided by 4 is 3 remainder 1, and is the sum of 9 and 4.  17 divided by 4 is 4 remainder 1, and is the sum of 16 and 1.  29 divided by 4 is 7 remainder 1, and is the sum of 25 and 4.  37 divided by 4 is 9 remainder 1, and is the sum of 36 and 1.  41 divided by 4 is 10 remainder 1, and is the sum of 25 and 16.  53… 49 and 4.  61… 36 and 25.  And so on. 

I had three questions for my mathematician.  First, is there a proof, or do we just have to examine each prime number sequentially, as above, and keep going ad infinitum, looking for an exception?  I suppose if there is a proof, then somebody of sufficient brain power would merely shrug and say, “Well, it’s a statement of the bleedin’ obvious, in’ it, mate.” 

Second, are there always only two unique squares to make the addition, or might two different squares add up to the same prime?  My gut instinct leans to the former, but who knows?

Lastly, how do people get into this stuff?  Why would you elect to track this elusive spoor?  I mean, why on earth would you go to the bother of dividing a prime number by 4, and then searching for squares that add up to it?  What on earth is the point?  I suppose people experience a sense of delight, and perhaps even awe, when they uncover some strange and unlikely numerical relationship, which seems to tantalise us with a hint of the reasoned governance of the universe.  A number theorist who stumbles upon a proof hitherto unknown, conscious of being the only consciousness in the cosmos apprised of such knowledge, must feel quite Olympian.  You might suppose that somebody possessed of such knowledge, uniquely privileged to be privy to arcane truths, might be in a rush to publish, to establish prestige, precedence, and a reputation.  Yet, for a mathematician, it might be that there is a seductive attraction to keeping a secret.  This knowledge, and its power, is mine and mine alone.  Thus, Newton kept the calculus to himself, the way somebody who purloins a Stradivarius from a railway compartment, or a Vermeer from an art gallery, can only admire the prize, alone, behind closed doors. 

I admire mathematicians, but I don’t envy them.  They always want to pursue a line of enquiry much further than the rest of us.  “And then you can generalise this result to n…” – that’s when I glaze over.  I have no desire to retire to my loft for two years to rediscover Fermat’s last theorem.  Some of the unsolved problems of number theory can be very simply stated, which is no doubt why professors of mathematics are bombarded by lay correspondents who think they’ve just made a big breakthrough on the back of an envelope.  A professor of mathematics at Glasgow only ever took on a couple of research postgraduates because he thought that unless you were world class you were wasting your time.  He was a Cambridge man, so I guess he might have sat at the feet of the great mathematician G. H. Hardy, who mentions this business of the primes, divided by 4 remainder 1 etc, in his A Mathematician’s Apology.  When I was reading English at Glasgow I applied for a scholarship to McGill University in Montreal and was up in front of a rather intimidating interview panel chaired by the professor of mathematics.  We got into a debate about the Cambridge literary critic F. R. Leavis.  I remember the prof of maths didn’t think much of Leavis, and I’m sure I said in a pompous undergraduate way, something like, “Oh I think you’ll find that Frank has a penetrating intellect.”  It so happened that my Senior Hons tutor in English was also a Cambridge man who had sat at the feet of Dr Leavis.  At the time I had no idea about the great rift between Leavis and another Cambridge man, C. P. Snow, who knew G. H. Hardy well and wrote a preface to his apologia.  So I was quite unconsciously walking across a mine field.

I didn’t get the scholarship to McGill. 

I guess professors of mathematics can be somewhat aloof.  There are two pieces of advice often given to youngsters, and they stand at opposite ends of a spectrum.  With the best will in the world you can blight somebody’s ambition by saying, “Don’t go down this path.  You’re not good enough.”  And I have even heard school teachers say to pupils, with much less goodwill, “You’ll never make anything of your life!”  Didn’t somebody say that to John Lennon?

The other end of the spectrum can be just as damaging.  “The world’s your oyster.  You can achieve anything, if you put your mind to it.”  But that need not necessarily be true.  I think the astronaut Tim Peake gave some very sound advice when Lauren Laverne cast him away on Desert Island Discs.  She asked him what advice he would give to somebody who wanted to pursue a goal which, at least statistically, he or she had little chance of achieving.  His advice was to go for it, and enjoy the journey.  If it doesn’t work out quite as you intended, still, something equally good will come along.  Wise words from a people person.  Chuck your hat into the ring and see what happens.  Much better than sitting in a garret solving the Riemann Hypothesis.                              

On Saturday September 11^th I flitted and flicked between the Royal Albert Hall in London and the Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York.  Ms Raducanu would drop a point whenever I watched, so I would leave Flushing Meadows and cross to South Kensington and the Last Night of the Proms.  It is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of the tennis court.  If you observe the play, you influence it.  I would listen to the Fantasia on British Sea-Songs, and then succumb to my compulsion to return to Flushing Meadows, to find Ms R was a set up.  Then Ms Fernandez would mount a comeback, and I would escape once more to Kensington Gore and Rule, Britannia!  The Australian tenor Stuart Skelton sang it dressed in Aussie cricket whites and wielding a cricket bat.  If all that Pomp & Circumstance has become a bit of an embarrassment (though I see little evidence of red faces) then maybe the lampoon is proving a useful method of avoiding offence.   Back to New York.  Yes!  Ms R keeping her nose in front.  But Ms F certainly not for giving up.  Back to the Old World.  Jerusalem!  And then back again to the New, on my Chariot of Fire.  Tennis seems to be all about momentum and, for the moment, the momentum was with Canada.  Then came the added drama of Ms Raducanu’s fall, a gashed leg, and medical time out.  Ms Fernandez did not appear happy, but what else to do other than pause while a dressing was applied?  From there, we hurtled to a third match point, an ace, and the de rigueur winner’s collapse on to the court.  The victor then took time to work her way through the crowd to her team’s box, a tradition started, as I recall, by Pat Cash at Wimbledon.  Back across the Pond, they were singing the National Anthem and then Auld Lang Syne.  Then back to NY, NY, for the plaudits of the huge crowd, and the awards ceremony.  Both teenagers were gracious, poised, and eloquent, and Ms Fernandez, a Canadian who had been the crowd’s favourite during the match, was much admired for her expression of sympathy towards New York on this September 11^th. 

Now I find that I can’t get out of this habit of channel-hopping.  It is the curse of our age, this fretfulness, this inability to concentrate on any one thing for longer than fifteen seconds.  If Mr Eliot aka J. Alfred Prufrock measured out his life with a coffee spoon, I’m doing something similar with the TV remote.  I flick away from the Ashe and surf the net for another story. 

By some strange irony, there is a shortage of carbon dioxide.  This has various knock-on effects.  For example, animals cannot be humanely slaughtered (is that an oxymoron?) so Christmas will be devoid of pigs-in-the-blanket.  Carbon, carbon everywhere, nor any drop to stun. 

Then the French have recalled their ambassadors to Australia and the United States.  Apparently they didn’t bother to recall their London man (actually, a woman) because the UK is just a bit player clinging on, as usual, to Uncle Sam’s coat tails.  The Australians have allegedly reneged on a contract to buy French (non-nuclear-powered) submarines, in favour of buying American (nuclear-powered) submarines.  The Chinese are pretty angry too.  Mr Xi might not come to Glasgow.  But Aukus deny sabre-rattling in the Pacific.  This story has all sorts of resonances.  In On the Beach, Nevil Shute surveyed the wasteland of the post-apocalyptic end of the world from the perspective of an Australian submarine.  Here, the nation is gripped by Vigil, a murky thriller of the silent deep largely confined within the claustrophobic atmosphere of a nuclear sub.  I haven’t watched it.  To tell you the truth I got put off by the trailer.  Drama-wise, everything these days is gritty, no matter the subject.  Tudor was gritty.  Heads got chopped off.  The trailers might have used the same voiceover to say “Tudor”, as “Vigil”, in a gritty fashion.                       

But to return to the Ashe, Ms Raducanu’s achievement was all the more astonishing in that she had to play in the qualifying rounds.  To win the tournament from this starting point was a feat never previously achieved.  Ten matches won in a row without dropping a single set.  As Tim Henman said, “It’s a joke!”  She became a sensation overnight.  We learned all about her.  She was born in Toronto, and moved to England with her Romanian father and Chinese mother when she was two.  She has just sat her A-levels (A in economics, A* in mathematics – clearly academically no slouch) and she is multilingual.  She is elegant and articulate, and the mass media have already picked up on her potential.  There’s a clip of her addressing the kids in China in fluent Mandarin.  So, her range is gargantuan.  And she has a billion dollar smile.

Where’s the flipper?  The Scottish Government are going to introduce vaccine passports for clubbers.  Apparently Michael Gove went clubbing in Aberdeen.  They say he tried to dodge the £5 entry fee and blag his way in by saying “I am the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster!”  There’s a chat-up line for you.  It is alleged he had a few shandies too many.  Well, good luck to him I say.

Ms R appeared on US Breakfast TV. She charmed her interviewers.  They asked her about her parents.  She said they were her fiercest critics, very hard to please.  Then she added, “I got them this time.” 

Of course, the style gurus are already circling, like sharks.  They sense an opportunity.  Kerching kerching.  Somebody suggested she could be the greatest style icon since David Beckham.  I don’t care for all that.  Emma qua commodity.          

I finally got back down to earth when I read But you did not come back by Marceline Loridan-Ivens (Et tu n’es pas revenue, Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle 2015).  It is a terrible account of a survivor’s experience in Auschwitz-Birkenau.   The reality it portrays is so awful that it hardly seems right to mention it in the same context as a game of tennis.  But I think it has finally taken me out of the fretful mind-set of the disconsolate channel-hopper.  Mme Loridan-Ivens seems to me the quintessential French woman in her total lack of mawkish sentimentality.  She comes down on the side of life and love, but only just.  Thank you, Madame, for bringing me back to reality.  I’m no longer living the vicarious life on the settee in front of the telly.   I’ve chucked away the remote.