Author: jamescalumcampbell

The Orwell Essays, A Selection of Prize-Winning Journalism

Brian Sewell

(Quartet, 2013)

“Waspish, indiscreet, comical and utterly outrageous”.  Unable to resist the lure of the Sunday Express crit on the back cover, I handed my £10.80 to Madame Waterstone (£12 minus 10% for being a member of the Society of Authors, God bless them), took the tome home, and devoured it in an afternoon.  Some books are like this – page-turners, easy to read, compulsive, unputdownable; others are quite the opposite – difficult to grasp, only digestible in small portions that need to be chewed over, easily set aside, and difficult to pick up again.  And that does not necessarily mean that the former are all good and the latter all bad; neither does it mean that the former are all trite and the latter all profound.  It more likely has something to do with a writing style being simpatico to an individual.  You the reader might not agree with what the writer is saying, but in some sense you both speak the same language.

I knew very little about Brian Sewell, who died in 2015, beyond the fact that he was an art critic with a voice so posh that he was parodied on BBC comedy programmes like Dead Ringers.  I could not help reading his essays and hearing them in the cadences of his precisely articulated, received, cut glass pronunciation.  You might say that his deliberately antiquated voice was in itself a representation of his often reactionary views. It was certainly their ideal vehicle.  In an essay entitled Febyuree (whose mispronunciation he profoundly regrets), he bemoans the fact that BBC announcers and newsreaders have the accents of “far provincial slums”.  By “far”, I presume he means far from London.  He talks of “the mean whine of the South-East”, “the ugly, adenoidal thickness of the Liverpudlian”, “the ugly brogues of Birmingham and Bradford.”  Of Radio 4, Ian McMIllan and Simon Armitage are “poor speakers laden with dreary northern tones”.  It is significant, I think, that he makes no reference to the accents of Glasgow, Belfast, or Cardiff.  That is because his outlook is not British, it is profoundly English. 

All of this, of course, goes against the grain of what Mr Sewell denotes as “political correctitude”.  But it’s all small beer compared with some of the issues he takes on.  Perhaps the most “utterly outrageous” of his essays is Goneril, Regan, and Lady Macbeth, an attack on womanhood’s (alleged) attitudes to abortion, animal experimentation by cosmetic companies, and the fur industry, which makes John Knox’s The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women seem a paradigm of feminist enlightenment.  Sewell’s essay first appeared on 18/11/97; I doubt if any newspaper would have printed it now. 

I think it would be fair to say that Brian Sewell delighted to surprise, by going against the populist grain.  He has an apologia pro Enoch Powell; the return of the Elgin Marbles to Athens would be a “cultural disaster”; fox hunting (perhaps rather surprisingly for a man clearly passionately concerned about animal welfare) should be left alone.     

It would be easy to assert that Brian Sewell, both in what he said and in the manner that he said it, was a snob.   Yet this would not be a fair accusation.  The essence of the snob is not that he cherishes an ideal of excellence, but that he cherishes his own membership of a persistently exclusive club.  In Education, he describes his doorstep encounter with an uneducated young street hawker who asks for help to get a job on the newspaper for whom Mr Sewell wrote.  Sewell did not dismiss him.  He said, “Write me a letter telling me everything about yourself…”  To be honest, that’s more than I would have done.  I would have told him to write to the editor.

Mr Sewell is caustic about Mr Blair, who he thought confused mendicants with criminals.  I don’t think he would have thought much of Blair’s “education education education” trope.  I dread to think what he would have made of Her Majesty being compelled, in her most recent speech in the Palace of Westminster, to use the expression “levelling up”.       

I didn’t agree with everything, or even much, that Mr Sewell had to say.  But that did not stop me from relishing the book, the style, the precision of language, the constant surprise of the unexpected.  I was much reminded of Bernard Levin’s journalism, his ability to take something on head-on, his clarity of thought, and his passion. 

But the main attraction in The Orwell Essays lies in their fearlessness.  Mr Sewell was not afraid to express views which now, twenty years on, would probably have had him “cancelled”.  Of course we can read expressions of views that are obnoxious, on social media, any day of the week.  But nowadays the Fourth Estate and the mainstream body politic avoid controversy like the plague.  That is why BBC programmes like Any Questions and Question Time have become so unutterably bland.  The Cancel Culture thrives on Fear.  Everybody keeps their head under the parapet.  We need more people like Brian Sewell to say, with good manners, clarity and distinction, exactly what they think.                                   

“Death and Taxes” was the title of this blog a fortnight ago, when I was bemoaning the difficulties of extracting a certain piece of information from a certain financial institution in New Zealand.  I’m no further forward.  Having registered for internet banking, I found that I was unable to get into the system because I didn’t have a “NetGuard Card”.  I phoned them up.  I answered a string of security questions to satisfy them that I am who I say I am.  And did I want to register for voice recognition so I wouldn’t need to answer the questions next time?  No thank you.  Anyway, they verified that they’ve sent me the card.  That was two weeks ago.  It hasn’t arrived.

New Zealand often finds herself in the vanguard of human progress.  Were not NZ women enfranchised in 1895?  Now, they have held a referendum which has supported the legalisation of assisted dying.  That makes me think we will follow suit.  Last week the MSP Liam McArthur introduced the Assisted Dying (Scotland) Bill to Holyrood.  Two correspondents to The Herald wrote movingly about the “bad deaths” of their loved ones, which they had been compelled to witness, under the headline banner Why I pray Holyrood will back assisted dying bill.   Who would not feel compassion for the suffering of these patients, and the agony of their loved ones?  Death is not the worst thing that can happen to any of us, and I am sure if my life were excruciating, or terrifying, or unremittingly miserable, I would want it to stop.  The Viennese psychiatrist Viktor Frankl tells us otherwise in his book Yes to life in Spite of Everything (Rider, 2020) but he was entitled to hold that view.  I haven’t been to Auschwitz.    

The trouble arises when you try to define in law the conditions under which you might legally assist a patient to commit suicide.  Apparently the Assisted Dying (Scotland) Bill is supported by 86% of the Scottish public, but how many of us have read the Bill?  I searched for it on line and I can’t find it.  You would have thought something this critically important would be easy to track down.  I do however have before me the Assisted Suicide (Scotland) Bill, introduced by the late Margo MacDonald on 13/11/13.  I was present when Ms MacDonald presented its content at an annual conference of the Royal College of General Practitioners, shortly before her own death. 

(Incidentally, I remember during her presentation, an English general practitioner seated on my left whispered to me, “She’s not very bright, is she?”  I think he was basing his assessment not on what Margo MacDonald had to say, but on the manner in which she said it, that is, in the unapologetically rough and heavily industrial accent of the West of Scotland.  I assured him that Ms MacDonald was, on the contrary, very bright.)

Her Bill allowed for anybody of sound mind, over the age of 16, who considers their quality of life to be unacceptable because of an illness that is terminal or life-shortening, to be helped to die.  I have lost count of the number of afternoons I have spent with patients, some of them aged 16, trying to persuade them that life after all was worth the candle.  How much easier it would have been to say, “Now, are you sure you’ve thought this through?”, and then produce the requisite forms.  The trouble is, everybody is terminally ill, and nobody is quite of sound mind.  Who am I to judge somebody else’s quality of life? 

It seems to me that the attempt to define what constitutes a life not worth living is beyond the capacity of the law, not because our law-makers aren’t clever enough, but because no number of legal safeguards can anticipate the vicissitudes of each of our own unique lives.  It’s a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle applied to our quotidian experience; life just isn’t like that.  Paradoxically, the full force of the law might even obliterate the wriggle room in which doctors already move to relieve suffering.  Rather than creating the blunt instrument of a new law, I would simply highlight a change in emphasis, and the necessity not to pursue medical interventions that are futile, by changing the word “need’st” in Arthur Hugh Clough’s famous The Latest Decalogue to “must”.  Hence:

Thou shalt not kill, yet must not strive

Officiously to keep alive.  

Talking of death, I was saddened to read in The Sunday Herald that the Herald columnist Fidelma Cook has passed away.   She had metastatic lung cancer.  She was 71.  At the age of 56 she had moved from Glasgow’s west end to the south of France and in 2006, she began writing a weekly column which appeared every Saturday, about her new life there.  She wrote very vividly about the sights, and sounds, and scents, of La France Profonde.  She could be very critical of the British expat community in France.  She was devastated when Brexit happened, and she frankly despised the current government in Westminster.

When her condition was diagnosed, she did not shy away from charting its progress, and even when she became very ill she continued to send in her weekly column.  I can only remember one week when another journalist had to stand in for her.  She was very admiring of the standard of medical care in France (her GP aside).  In fact, her latest scans had showed no further disease progression, she rallied, and in her most recent columns she was able to turn her attention away from her illness.  Her last column on Saturday, There will always be an England.  Oh, and flags – lots of flags (I say last, but who knows – maybe The Herald has more) was typically feisty.  I will miss her column.                 

If you happen to live in a bijou cottage, as I do, it is imperative that you become as expert in the art of stowage as the captain of a submarine, the more so if you are a bibliophile, as I am, otherwise, like a sufferer of Diogenes Syndrome, you will disappear under a welter of paper.  So you learn to use the space.  If you must store stuff in boxes, then box clever.  But it is not enough to move things around.  That is merely to rearrange the Titanic’s deck chairs.  You have to cast stuff overboard, or at least in the direction of the charity shops.  You must let go.  So periodically I declutter.

I underwent this cathartic experience during the week just gone.  I found myself looking at ancient photographs and letters from people with whom I have long lost touch.  It made me a trifle maudlin; I think the psychiatrists would say I was “dysthymic”.  If the experience was a tad discombobulating, I can’t say it was unpleasant.  On the contrary I was reminded of episodes in my life that were extremely rich and rewarding.  But I hardly knew it at the time.  The thing about looking back to the past is that all the angst you may have experienced there and then is expunged.  It’s all done and dusted so, at least as far as the past is concerned, you are beyond harm.  You just see a record of the good times.  Why didn’t I know how lucky I was?

I am a worrier.  I am Claudio, a young gentleman in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.  In Act 3 Scene 1, Vincentio, the Duke of Vienna counsels him:

Happy thou art not,

For what thou hast not, still thou striv’st to get,

And what thou hast, forget’st…

Thou hast not youth nor age,

But as it were an after dinner’s sleep

Dreaming on both…

So one is a passive observer of one’s own progress through life.  But it seems to me now that the trick of life is to live in the present.  The past is immutable and the future, invisible, has yet no existence.  So live now.  Carpe diem.  Temperamentally, I was never any good at this.  I remember when I was a child I would say to myself, “If only such-and-such were not the case, I would be perfectly happy.”  Such-and-such might be a tiresome chore, classmate, social obligation, or some nameless dread I’ve long since forgotten.  Winston once said that of all the things he worried about, most of them didn’t happen!  True enough.  I have a notion that if some worry of my younger self had been magically spirited away, I would just have found another.  So the worry itself was not the real issue, it was just a kind of “objective correlative” for a state of mind that was fundamentally angst-ridden.  I think on the whole my pals thought I was relentlessly upbeat and irritatingly cheerful, yet it was all a front.  I was at heart a melancholic.  The soundtrack to my life was the second movement of Arthur Honegger’s Second Symphony.  If you listen to it you will doubtless sympathise and say to me, “You poor sod.”

I used to think that if I had to do it all again, I wouldn’t make such a pig’s breakfast of it.  Now I’m not so sure.  I would wake up in the untarnished tenement of my younger manifestation only to find the angst still present.  The Duke again:

Thou art not certain,

For thy complexion shifts to strange effects

After the moon.

Plus ça change.  But one thing I would do differently.  I wish I’d known that I didn’t have to take on the whole world on my own.  I would ask my mentors to teach me life skills.  Of course that could well have backfired.  I don’t suppose my mentors were living in the present any more than I was.  Their whole motive and purpose was to forge our cohort into something utilitarian for the future.  So keep a stiff upper lip, Campbell, and get on with your Latin declensions and your trigonometry.

It has become fashionable to talk about inner turmoil, in terms of “mental health”.  Royals of the younger generation do so, unlike their senior counterparts.  I’m not at all sure that it is always – or even commonly – useful to think that unhappiness is pathological, that you must have a disease because you feel anxious or fretful.  Shakespeare clearly thinks it’s the norm, the human condition.  A generation ago people sought solace in the church, through song, meditation, prayers of intercession, and benediction.  Nowadays, people visit their therapist. 

But it has been good to declutter.  I may still be trudging my way through the slow movement of Honegger 2, yet, just once in that movement – this is so characteristic of Honegger – we experience a moment of the rarest magic.  It is transitory.  Almost immediately, the melancholy returns.  Yet, unmistakably, for that moment, the sun came out.                                   

Esteemed Reader,

It is with a heavy heart that, in the year of Our Lord two thousand and twenty one, I take up my quill to lament the passing of another milestone as our collective handcart continues its precipitate plunging descent through a dystopia of our own creation and towards the lower regions of Hell. 

You can tell I’m filing my tax return.

I was resigned to the fact that extracting information from various financial institutions in Blighty, a “world leader” in obfuscation, would be like drawing blood from a stone.  What I find hard to bear is that now dear New Zealand has become more like the rest of the world, the world as it is understood by Franz Kafka.

I wrote a letter to a certain financial institution in NZ, with whom I have been investing for thirty five years, requesting a print-out of interest earned on various accounts for the tax year 2020-21.  I got a reply by email stating that this was not possible, and that I could access the information I needed through internet banking.

Now vis-a-vis this particular institution I don’t use the internet; however I bit the bullet and registered, with a considerable degree of difficulty, for internet banking.  It was one of these Catch-22 situations where I needed an identifying number to register, but would only have an identifying number once registered.  Anyway I got round that difficulty and got into the system.

The first thing I encountered was an alarm warning me that phishing scams were rampant and that if I came across such and such an alert it was bogus and on no account should I click on such and such a link.  You see what is happening.  Not only has this financial institution employed me as my own (unpaid) bank teller; it has also employed as my own (unpaid) night watchman, guarding the vaults.

Anyway having accessed my account I couldn’t figure out how to find a tax certificate.  I went into “Help”.  Has anybody in the history of the universe ever received help from a digital help desk?  You ask a question and are directed to a menu of “commonly asked questions”, none of which you have asked. 

But eventually I found what I was looking for.  Open menu, open documents, click on tax certificates.  I duly opened menu and opened documents.  No sign of tax certificates.  Anywhere.  I logged out and emailed my contact in the institution and explained my difficulty.  I suggested a solution.  Would it be possible for the institution to send me a tax certificate by mail, a service for which I would be delighted to pay?

That was three days ago.  No reply.  (Incidentally, No Reply is a very wonderful Beatles’ song, the opener to the LP Beatles for Sale.  It is full of anguish.)  Now granted the weekend has intervened and I may yet receive a reply.  But you know how it is when you carry out an interaction with an automated system, like booking a hotel room or buying concert tickets.  You don’t get it quite right so the transaction does not go through.  But the automated system doesn’t tell you why.  (It has read its Kafka.)  It just ignores you.  I have a horrible feeling that human beings are modelling their behaviour patterns on machines.  If your request, or plea for help, does not figure in the “commonly asked questions”, you are simply ignored.  And people seem to think this is just dandy. You are, after all, a vexatious caller.  A crank.    

The reason why I find all this so upsetting is that this is not the New Zealand I know and love.  When I first went to NZ in the mid-80s I was amazed to find that the taxi drivers would give you a tip.  “That’s 22 bucks mate.  Call it 20.”  I remember buying my house, on Auckland’s beautiful North Shore.  I went into a real estate agency in Devonport and said, “I want to buy a house here.”  The agent, an ex-All Black, took me round a few houses that were on the market.  At the sixth house, I said, “This is the one.”  He said, “How much do you want to offer?”  I named a price.  He shook his head and said, “it’s too much.  Offer this, and you will get it.”  And that’s how it panned out. 

Now the house prices in Auckland have gone bananas and there’s no way I could afford a house in Devonport.  New Zealand is becoming like the rest of the world.  And that is cause for lament.

Well, they say the only certainties are death and taxes.  No point in getting upset.  To paraphrase St Paul, “Whatsoever things are good, whatsoever things are true, think on these.”  With this in mind, I tuned into Yo-Yo Ma on Desert Island Discs.  The renowned musician took his cello with him when he went for his Covid vaccination, I think in New York, and gave an impromptu recital. Somebody said to him, “That was very good.  Do you play in an orchestra?”  Mr Ma replied, “Sometimes I play with the Boston.”   

For the record (eight records), he chose Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, the aria Erbarme Dich from Bach’s St Matthew Passion, Brahms First Piano Concerto, the Elgar Cello Concerto (Jaqueline du Pré) the Oscar Peterson Trio and Tin Tin Deo, Richard Strauss’ Morgen (Janet Baker), Moscow Nights sung by Dimitri Hvorostovsky, and Schubert’s Second String Trio.  All this calmed me down.  His book was Enyc Brit and his luxury a Swiss army knife (stretching the rules on both counts, but Ms Laverne was inclined to cut him some slack), and he saved the Schubert from the waves. 

The thing is, Mr Ma is full of humanity.  He happens to be a cellist and music is what he shares with us.  He touches people.  It seems to me that in the world of music there is usually somebody who, perhaps reluctantly, finds that the mantle of moral leadership has fallen upon them.  I suspect Mr Ma has become that beacon of light for our time.                

So.

I have a notion that “So” qua expository prelude – like a clearing of the throat – is beginning to lose popularity, which will no doubt be a relief to the many who found this usage particularly irritating.  For a time I thought it was going to be replaced by Hmm.  So:

“Minister, do you think vaccination should be made compulsory?”

“Hmm.  That is a moot point…”

Personally, I prefer so.  So indicates that the speaker has already considered the question on offer, and is about to put forward an opinion that has already been formulated – the Prime Minister might say it is “oven-ready”.  Hmm on the other hand appears to suggest that the question comes as a surprise and that the respondent is thinking on her feet, but because hmm is synonymous with so, the hmm is a deception; it is faux-spontaneity.  But I’m not sure it is going to take off.  Our attention will be diverted by other buzz words.

Like, egregious.  The use of egregious in my newspaper’s letters column is, like, egregious.  I first heard President Trump use it, before he attained high office, with respect to Mrs Clinton.  “Her crimes are egregious.”  I had to look it up. 

The Oxford Dictionary of English:  egregious adjective 1 outstandingly bad; shocking… 2 archaic remarkably good.   

I suppose we have a similar contrast of meaning in our modern use of the word “wicked” as a term of approbation.  Egregious comes from the Latin ex grex, meaning standing out from the flock.  Over the years, fame has metamorphosed into notoriety.  Mostly, when the disgruntled correspondents to The Herald describe something as egregious, they just mean it’s bad, or gross, or grossly bad.  But much as the world is full of that which is egregious, we cannot expect this word to overtake so or hmm as verbal upholstery.  No.  The coming word is absolutely.  You can easily see why broadcast interviews are now full of absolutely.  Absolutely has taken over from yes. 

“Should we vaccinate the whole world by the end of 2022?”    

“Absolutely.” 

The only thing that is stopping absolutely from attaining world domination is the fact that politicians seldom answer a question directly.  “Knowing what you know now, would you have locked down and closed the border early last March?”

“We are determined to do all we can to protect the economy and the NHS…”

The only time politicians uses a word like yes or no, is after they have retired.  I watched Tony Blair being interviewed by Andrew Marr on Sunday, out of a sickly fascination to hear the silver-tongued lawyer adeptly deploy arguments.

“Do you think people should show evidence of double vaccination to attend public events?”

“Yes.”

No wonder Mr Marr said it was a pleasure to talk to Mr Blair.  I thought well of Mr Blair for choosing to say “yes” rather than “absolutely”.  My ancient 1990 Chambers Dictionary defines absolutely as “a colourless but emphatic affirmative”, so it was a hackneyed expression even back then.  Another synonym of “absolutely” would be “no question”.  In other words the answer is self-evident, you don’t need to bother asking.  “Yes”, on the other hand, takes the question seriously and gives an answer that could not be more direct.  Our Lord did not instruct us to “Let your absolutely be absolutely, and your absolutely not be absolutely not”.

So why is absolutely taking over from yes?  Could it be that it is a reflection of a polarised society, in which people occupy an echo chamber, hear that which they wish to hear, and seldom reach across the aisle?  If a dictator surrounds himself only with sycophants – “absolutely-men” – everything that he says or thinks will be taken as read.  Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Absolutely is a conversation stopper.

Absolutely denies the possibility of seeing another side to an argument.  Yes allows that no is at least possible.  In that sense, yes validates debate.  You could imagine a totalitarian regime banning the word yes for that reason, and insisting on absolutely.  Yes would certainly have to be censored, and expunged from literature.  Molly Bloom’s beautiful soliloquy that ends Joyce’s Ulysses would become:

…my breasts all perfume absolutely and his heart was going like mad and absolutely I said absolutely I will absolutely.              

Having just published Cobra, a nuclear farce, precisely half of which takes place within the confines of Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, I was interested to hear Dominic Cummings’ account of a “surreal” Cobra meeting, convened to discuss the pandemic, interrupted by a request from President Trump allegedly that the UK bomb Iraq, and further interrupted by the PM’s girlfriend (now wife, heartiest congratulations to them both), exercised about some tabloid tittle-tattle concerning the family pet.  You wouldn’t make it up!  Well, I suppose in a way I did. Prescience, or mere serendipity?  You decide. 

I can’t say I listened to more than the recorded highlights of Mr Cumming’s seven hours before the combined Select Committees, but if he had a good word to say about anybody in government, the civil service, or the scientific community, I didn’t hear it.  He saved his most bitter vitriol for the health secretary Matt Hancock, who was said to be economical with the truth, and who ought, apparently, to have been sacked 15 or 20 times.  The entire picture was one of a dysfunctional establishment, failing to comprehend the enormity of the impending catastrophe, failing to come up with a coherent plan, yet insisting that such a plan had indeed been put into effect.

Mr Hancock had to respond to all this in parliament the following day.  I should say that I’m not a great fan of Mr Hancock, principally because of his enthusiasm for remote consultation in general practice, which he advocates ought to be the norm.  To me, that is, frankly, anathema.  Even so, when I listened to his statement to the House, I could not but help admire his grace under pressure.  He was calm, measured, articulate, and reasonable.  Whether or not his defence of his own actions throughout the pandemic will be vindicated by any subsequent Inquiry remains to be seen. 

One of the more contentious issues about the government response to the crisis relates to the freeing up of hospital beds to give hospitals capacity to cope with the anticipated surge of admissions.  As we now know, patients, Covid status unknown, mostly elderly, were discharged to care homes, with disastrous consequences. 

I think this tells us a lot about the way the UK works.  You get a directive from the powers that be, and you enact it.  Yet we should pause to consider the issue of hospital discharge.  In medical parlance this is termed “disposition”.  You can readily see why the more familiar term “disposal” is not used (even if in this context it might seem more appropriate).  Now disposition is a clinical decision.  It comes at the end of a litany of decisions as follows: diagnosis, formulation, treatment, disposition.  (“Formulation”, a diagnostic construct apprehending how the diagnosis pertains to the patient’s unique set of circumstances, is a concept normally reserved to psychiatry.  Yet every consultation contains a psychiatric element.)  With respect to an individual patient, nobody would expect the Health Secretary to make the diagnosis, far less organise the “management plan”, or treatment.  And yet, it appears, the government are prepared to dictate the disposition.  When the consultants were instructed to send their patients home, should they not have paused to consider whether, in each individual case, such a disposition was advisable, and if they thought otherwise, should they not have put their foot down?   

New Zealand has done very well throughout the pandemic, thus far.  (Thus far- you always need to add that rider.)  As a New Zealand citizen, I believe that the reason NZ did vastly better than the UK relates to the relationship between the politicians and the healthcare professionals.  When I was Clinical Head of the Department of Emergency Medicine in Middlemore Hospital, South Auckland, the then Minister of Health, subsequently Prime Minister, Bill English, visited the department.  He did not say to me, “This is how you will practise.”  Instead he asked me, “What do you need?”  I said, “We need to double the medical staffing of the department.”

At the time, I didn’t think my answer went down very well.  And yet, within a few years, it happened.  Nowadays I tell UK doctors about the medical staffing of NZ emergency departments and they just don’t believe me. 

In the UK, the line of command is top down.  Yet the idea that a Minister of Health should tell clinicians how to practise strikes me as being completely absurd. Mr Hancock tells the Royal College of General Practitioners to stay on Zoom for perpetuity.  I cannot understand why the RCGP, a very large and powerful college, don’t just tell the Health Secretary to take a running jump. 

Scott Morrison, the Australian PM, arrived in Queenstown NZ yesterday to have talks with NZ PM Jacinda Ardern.  Australia and New Zealand opened a quarantine-free travel bubble last month.  (Currently there is a viral outbreak in Melbourne so NZ has suspended the arrangement with Victoria.)  But in Queenstown, under the wintry slopes of the Remarkables, there is no need for face coverings or social distancing.  Mr Morrison and Ms Ardern even greeted one another with a Maori hongi.                                                   

When my father was working in the Chief Constable’s Office in the old City of Glasgow Police Headquarters in St Andrew’s Square, he invited his younger brother – 17 years my father’s junior – for lunch in the police canteen one Friday.  My uncle ordered fish and chips. 

A senior police officer at a neighbouring table called out, “Cancel that!  Son, never order fish on a Friday.”

Well, that became something of a family joke.  But you know, it’s not funny.  It’s pitiful.  That little vignette tells you really all you need to know about West of Scotland sectarian intransigence.  It’s a package – The Old Firm, the polis, the masons. 

When Glasgow Rangers won the league last week, without losing a single game, the club applied to the government for permission to invite 10,000 fans to Ibrox to celebrate, on four successive nights.  The request was turned down, on the grounds that it would have been a violation of Covid restrictions.  Glasgow remains on Level 3.  Result – the fans descended upon George Square en masse.  The scene turned ugly.  Three police officers were injured.  There were twenty arrests. 

There has been much debate in the newspapers about this incident.  It’s the government’s fault.  They should have seen it coming and granted the fans leave to enter Ibrox.  Lesser of two evils.  It’s Rangers Football Club’s fault.  They ought to keep their fans under control.  And of course it’s the polis’s fault.  It always is.  They didn’t plan sufficiently for a riot.  Either they were too tolerant, or they were too aggressive in their approach.  Oddly enough, it doesn’t seem to have been the fans’ fault.  Boys will be boys.  It is what it is.  Everybody knows that football fans, Rangers fans especially, are “boisterous”.  Vis-à-vis the individual’s civic responsibility, in Glasgow, expectation is low.  Can football fans honestly be expected to wear face coverings and socially distance?

I drove into Glasgow yesterday from the east via the M80.  There is a 50 mph speed limit from about seven miles out from the city centre, and after the M80 merges with the M8, because there are roadworks and two lanes are closed, this has been reduced to 40 mph.  Nobody pays the slightest attention.  Well, I do.  Some people find my adherence to the speed limit rather quaint.  But then, they haven’t spent a career in major trauma.  There I was, cruising along at 40 mph in my Volvo, Audis and BMWs whooshing and flashing past me on both sides. 

It’s a cultural thing.  You stick to the limit because Health & Safety is a grand integral of each individual’s contribution to the security of the environment.  The aviation industry understood this decades ago.  “The right stuff” is the wrong stuff.  There are old pilots and there are bold pilots.  Every sortie should be founded on meticulous preparation.  This is as true on the road as in the air.  But the road is becoming an increasingly hostile environment.  Speed kills.  When you come to a sudden halt, all that kinetic energy just rips you apart.  And remember, the kinetic energy is not proportional to your velocity, but to the square of your velocity. 

It was even worse on the way home.  There was torrential rain.  The Audis and BMWs were undeterred.  Whoosh whoosh.      

Then there’s Glasgow’s litter culture.  Frankly, the place is a tip.  It’s the same issue – a failure to take personal responsibility.  There is no sense of ownership.  The detritus is somebody else’s problem.  Glasgow is like a man who is down on his luck, who has suffered too many setbacks and has lost hope, and who, ceasing to take an interest in his appearance, becomes shabby and unwashed.  He has lost all self-esteem.  Even so, if you chance to see somebody throw half a kebab away in the gutter of Sauchiehall Street, I would strongly advise you not to remonstrate.  He will look at you askance, and take offence.  You are liable to get a smack on the mouth.

I wonder what the great and the good of Planet Earth will make of it all when they descend upon us for COP26, if they ever do.  I think they will regard Glasgow as a wondrous natural phenomenon and a force of nature.  They will hallow Glasgow much as the literati revere Douglas Stewart’s 2020 Booker Prize winning novel Shuggie Bain.  There will be admiration, but it will be admiration from afar, the fascination of an anthropologist discovering and observing a remote Amazonian tribe, without going native.  They might find the rage of the Old Firm, the roar of a football crowd which in its visceral intensity is quite different from a rugby or an athletics crowd, absorbing and even intoxicating.  But the agony of it all won’t touch them.  They will merely say, “Extraordinary!”  And then fly home.                                         

Cobra, by James Calum Campbell (Impress, 2021)

What is the central premise in Cobra?

An international criminal organisation hijacks a British nuclear submarine, part of the Continuous At-Sea Deterrent (CASD), and extorts money from Her Majesty’s Government, under the threat of dropping a 200 kiloton hydrogen bomb on London.

Pretty grim stuff, then.

Yes and no.  It’s a “nuclear farce”.

You’re playing it for laughs?

Again, yes and no.  There exists an H-bomb literature that spills over into film.  In the film Failsafe, an American nuclear-armed bomber is despatched to Moscow as a result of a computer glitch.  The US president on that occasion was played by Henry Fonda, and the subject matter is deadly serious.  In Dr Strangelove, another US bomber is similarly despatched, this time on the orders of a rogue general who has gone mad.  The US president this time was played by Peter Sellers, who also played most of the other principal parts.  Sellers certainly played it for laughs, but perhaps the farcical elements make the impact of the film even more startling and sobering.  In Ian Fleming’s Thunderball, SPECTRE steals two hydrogen bombs and holds the western world to ransom.  You might say that that is also deadly serious, but there are strong elements of farce in Thunderball, not least in the duel that takes place at a Health Farm between two very tough men weakened by a diet of carrot juice, and weaponising the facility’s therapeutic equipment.  Thunderball started out as a screenplay collaboration between Ian Fleming and Kevin McClory, which was shelved.  When Fleming eventually published his novel, McClory successfully sued him in court because his contribution had not been recognised.  I guess that’s fair enough, but I can quite see why Fleming was so galled by the experience. Everything that is wonderful about Thunderball is pure Fleming. 

So what is different about Cobra?

In two words, Faslane, and Coulport.  Faslane is the naval base on the Clyde that is home to the UK’s CASD, and nearby Coulport is the repository for Trident’s nuclear armoury.  They happen to be on my doorstep.  Politically, in Scotland, the CASD is a highly contentious issue.  There is great tension between the government at Westminster, and the Scottish government at Holyrood.  Westminster wants to enhance and upgrade Trident, and increase the cap on the nuclear warhead stockpile by 40%, while Holyrood wants to scrap the whole thing.  That struck me as a scenario ripe for exploration.

So you studied Failsafe, Dr Strangelove, and Thunderball?

Not really.  I studied The Silent Deep, the Royal Navy Submarine Service since 1945, by Peter Hennessy & James Jinks (Allen Lane 2015).  That gave me insight into the Perisher Course that is a rite of passage for submariners, and, crucially, the “letter of last resort”, the Prime Minister’s instruction to the submariners in the event that the UK is incapacitated by a nuclear attack.  It occurred to me that in this day and age, dominated by managerial pseudoscience and a slavish devotion to Information Technology, a “glitch” of the sort dramatized in Cobra is all too likely to happen. 

Without risking a plot spoiler, can you say something about the structure of Cobra?

Certainly!  All of the odd numbered chapters take place in Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, and all of the even numbered chapters take place “in the field”.

Cobra has sent an agent into the field?

Not exactly.  He is a maverick, skiing off-piste.  His name is Crude.  Brent Crude.  I wanted to construct two narratives running in tandem, and apparently running independently of one another, except when, on perhaps two occasions, their paths cross.  The odd-numbered chapters consist of static talking heads, while the even-numbered chapters are faux-thriller.           

Brent Crude, Sugar Futures, Parsley Sage, Adverse Camber… Why did you give the principal characters such absurd names? 

I believe you might find that as you read on, you will stop noticing how absurd the names are.  But I wanted to emphasise the farcical nature of the world I was depicting because it seems to me the nature of our current political discourse is often deeply farcical.  There exists a tension between the pursuit of a political career and the responsibility to follow the dictates of your conscience.  What happens if your conscience tells you not to follow the dictates of the whip?  Well, you could resign.  The trouble is, you might have a wife, or a husband, and family, mouths to feed, school fees to pay and so on.  The result of this tension is that we hear a government minister on Any Questions or Question Time expounding a load of humbug which he, or she, and everybody else, knows to be essentially meaningless.  This is a very rich minefield for devotees of the absurd.  In fact, as Cobra progresses, the scenarios become more and more ridiculous until, in the end, Cobra disintegrates into a kind of incoherent word salad.    

What’s the worst of Cobra and what’s the best?

I have to apologise to you that the leader of Her Majesty’s opposition is so potty-mouthed.  I don’t much care for what the BBC call “strong” language, but which is actually “bad” language.  But I couldn’t think of another way of depicting the way people in public life, particularly women, are subjected to vile taunts. 

And best?  Well, I tried to orchestrate a crescendo of absurdity throughout the book.  So I particularly like Chapter 34, the last chapter.  Then there’s a postlude.  You might well consider that I’d gone over the top by then, and lost the plot.  You should have seen it before it got edited.                                                                          

Stop me if I’ve said this before…

The village shopkeeper, font of all human knowledge, asked me when my latest tome was coming out.

“Cobra?  It was released as an E-book on May 4^th…”

“Ah.  Star Wars Day.”

“Star Wars?”

“May the fourth be with you.”

Well, it was new to me.

“…and the real thing, the Gutenberg version, comes out today.”

In fact, I’m waiting impatiently for twenty complimentary copies to arrive by courier.  Staring at a Kindle is all very well, but I need to caress my volumes.  Then I need to bite the bullet and do some marketing, which is something I’m not very good at.  It feels meretricious to walk into my local independent bookshop brandishing my tome, saying, “I am a local writer.  Please put lots of copies of this on your shelves, and organise a book signing event.”  But I’m going to brazen it out.  Some people think that self-effacement is more attractive than self-advertisement, but it’s not; it’s just easier. 

It’s a good week for publication.  In Cobra, a fiendish international criminal organisation hijacks a Trident submarine and extorts vast sums of money from the UK exchequer under threat of the annihilation of London.  Though it may not sound like it, Cobra is progressively a more and more absurd nuclear farce.  It’s topical, because the Holyrood election has just taken place.  Putting the question of political affiliations to one side for a moment, I was relieved that the complexion of the new parliament remains essentially unchanged, because that fits in well with my narrative.  And of course Trident, its proposed upgrade and expansion, remains a political hot potato.  I wonder if the subject will be raised if Mr Johnson succeeds in convening a “summit” (good Churchillian word) with the Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Ireland First Ministers.  Covid will ostensibly be top of the agenda, but I surmise the real agenda will be the hidden one, dominated by constitutional issues.  If Trident gets a look-in at all, it will be in “Any Other Competent Business”.  But it will be the elephant in the room.  You could imagine men and women of kind heart, good will, and good faith (even politicians) knocking their heads together and coming up with some compromise with respect to the complex interrelationships of the four nations, Europe, and the world.  But with Trident there is no conceivable compromise.  You either have it, or you don’t.  Mass destruction, like falling in love, getting pregnant, or dropping dead, is an all-or-nothing phenomenon.  You can’t inflict upon somebody a touch of annihilation.  Can I convince my local bookseller that this is a fitting subject for ribaldry?

Meanwhile, in England – not in Wales – the Labour Party has taken a drubbing.  It seems that political loyalties are no longer based on working class versus middle class, but rather on Brexit versus Remain.  The agony continues to reverberate.  Brexit is like phantom limb pain.  It occurs to me that all of these moderate Tory Remainers who were shunned and evicted from the corridors of power after the 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union, might well now look at the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, and wish that that particular result had gone the other way.  If the EU, despite the pre-vote grandstanding, had welcomed an independent Scotland (as is the current mood music), rUK – no longer Team GB – might have been less inclined to set sail alone upon the high seas, Scotland would have kept Sterling as her currency, and there would have been no hard borders at Gretna, or in the middle of the Irish Sea.  I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the old-style Tory grandees would have preferred such an arrangement to the current, highly uncertain situation.  But who can tell?  The “retrospectoscope” is a notoriously unreliable instrument.               

Meanwhile my Cobra complimentary copies are quietly haemorrhaging away in the direction of friends and loved ones.  A phone call from the Isle of Skye last night, and a signed copy pledged.  Another call from New Zealand (Covid-free, God bless them), another signed copy.  Copies also pledged to Glasgow and Aberdeen.  I must take care to save a copy for that mighty organ, The Herald.         

But where the devil are my copies?  Has the express courier suffered a puncture on the Shap?  Mr Postman, look and see, if there’s a letter in your bag for me…

Die Post bringt keinen Brief für dich.

O well.  They also serve who only stand and wait.                 

Monday April 26^th

With the relaxation in Scotland of Covid restrictions, I had a brisk walk with friends and revisited my local erratic, Samson’s Stone, and the adjacent Iron Age fort.  Thence we repaired to my local hostelry, The Lion & Unicorn (established 1635), for luncheon.  Hurrah!  Carrot and coriander soup, lasagne, and ice cream.  Delicious. 

Tuesday 

I had sent last week’s blog, Horizon, to the letters page of The Herald, and they kindly published me, verbatim and unedited, under the banner headline, “A blind obedience to IT is stifling the human interactions that really matter”.  I braced myself for ripostes and accusations that I was a Luddite.  Actually, I’m beginning to think the Luddites may have had a point.  They smashed the looms, but at least they didn’t damage the planet.  We on the other hand are turning the landscape into a gigantic landfill site full of the detritus of our dark satanic mills.  Maybe the Luddites were on the right side of history after all.  As C. P. Snow said of the scientists, “the future is in their bones”.  Dr Leavis thought that was a frightful cliché.      

Wednesday

9.56 am.  Oxford Astra Zeneca mark 2.  Went like clockwork.  In and out of the health centre under two minutes.  Last time I felt like death warmed up for about five days.  See how it goes.  Meanwhile I perused The Herald letters page for hostile rejoinders.  In fact, there were two letters of support, so I had no need to defend myself.  The Prime Minister, on the other hand, came under attack from Sir Keir Starmer; he seemed reluctant to tell us who paid for the wallpaper up front, and was affronted at being repeatedly asked.  Mr Blackford, flirting dangerously with unparliamentary language, asked Mr Johnson if he was a liar.  It occurred to me that that is the sort of question that Bertrand Russell might have spent a decade trying to get to the bottom of.  After all, if Mr Johnson had answered in the affirmative, and therefore was lying, what could that possibly mean?  You see the difficulty.  I think I would strongly advise any budding philosopher not to pursue such a line of inquiry. Let it go.  Don’t enter that dark labyrinth. 

Thursday

No vaccination side effects, yet.  To Perth, to stroll by the beautiful silvery Tay.  I live in a Stirlingshire village sometimes dubbed “the middle of everywhere” and it’s perfectly true.  Glasgow, Edinburgh, Perth, and Dundee are all less than an hour away.  I walk round their airts and pairts, like Edgar Allan Poe’s The Man of the Crowd, simulating a sense of belonging.     

Friday

To Edinburgh, in glorious spring sunshine.  I parked by Fettes College off Ferry Road, the closest you can get to the city centre without paying exorbitant parking fees.  From there I walked through the New Town up to Princes Street Gardens, the Mound, then down through Canongate to Holyrood, pausing for refreshment in the Palace Café.  Then I walked round Arthur’s Seat.  What a beautiful city.  I am a Glaswegian who lived here for a decade, at the end of which time I was just beginning to break into Edinburgh Society.  Actually I was treated with the greatest kindness.  Nobody ever suggested to me that I would have had my tea.  To Blackwell’s bookshop.  Resisted the temptation to buy Jan Swafford’s new Mozart biography.  First I will have to create some shelf space.    

Saturday

A visitation from Aberdeen friends.  Back to the L & U.  Carrot and coriander (it’s terribly good), chicken and haggis in a whisky sauce, and a flat white coffee.  Then we had a walk round the local grimpen quag, Flanders Moss.  Fine views of the highland boundary fault line.  Got drookit, but ’twas good for the soul.

Sunday

International Dawn Chorus Day.  Another visitation, another lunch, a walk across the battlefield at Bannockburn, and a piano recital.  Grieg, in nostalgic mood.  Later, the only person in the country not to watch Line of Duty, I instead watched the final of BBC Young musician of the Year. A horn player, a percussionist, and an oboist.  They were magnificent, but I was unmoved.  Competition kills music.  The percussionist won.

Monday May 3^rd.   

My latest tome, Cobra, is being published tomorrow as an E-Book, and tomorrow week, as a real book, in print, on real paper.  Can’t wait – not so much for the electronic version as for the real thing.  I’m delighted with the cover design, courtesy of Cherie Chapman, and I’d thought to post it on this site but dear me, I can’t figure out how to do it.  I watched an on-line training video, and then tried to emulate the suggested steps, but to no avail.  Then I made my own vain attempts by trial and error, always fearful that, like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, I would get out of my depth and then completely lose control while the cyber systems ran wild.  Before I knew it, I would have posted a hundred and fifty million images of dubious provenance, irreversibly and in perpetuity, and I would forever be dubbed a troll, or a purveyor of bawdry, and a thoroughly filthy fellow.  So, recognising the onset of symptoms of ennui and despondency, I packed it in.  I have to admit it.  I’m a Luddite.