Author: jamescalumcampbell

Last Tuesday, a strange encounter.  As I was walking through a retail park in a city near where I live a car pulled up beside me.  I just assumed the driver wanted directions.  He said, “Can you help please?  I from Sorrento.  I fly into Manchester this morning.  I hire this car.”  (He actually showed me the documentation of the hire contract.)  “I drive up to visit my surgeon, Mr MacDonald.  He replace my hip.  I have for him this gift.”  He gestured to a substantial package on the back seat of the car.  “But I discover Mr MacDonald has retired to Portugal.  I see you are of his height and build.  Will you please accept this gift?”

“Whoa!”  I held up my hand.  “You don’t need to do that!  But I wish you well.”

Without demur, he said, “Okay”, and drove on, for all I know, to search for somebody else of similar height and build.

What was that?

The following day, I was at the check-out in Sainsbury’s.  The young lady ahead of me, very attractive, if I may say so, despite, or perhaps because of, the mask (and may I indeed any longer say so? – I have no idea), was conducting a very substantial shop.  At the end of the transaction she turned to me and said, “Do you want my Nectar points?”

“What?”

“Put them on your card if you like.  I don’t have a card.  Never bother with that stuff.”

“Whoa!”  I held up my hand.  “You don’t need to do that!”

“It’s a £200 shop.”

“So why not get a Nectar card?”   We chatted amiably, and after she had gone I said to the check-out girl (the French say “la beepeuse”) “That’s the best offer I’ve had all day.”

“You should have taken it.”

It’s funny.  When I was teaching medical students and junior doctors in New Zealand, I always advised them to take advantage of the opportunity to be a Good Samaritan.  I have lost count of the number of times, as a passenger on an airline, I heard the announcement over the public address system, “Is there a doctor on board?”  I always owned up.  The opportunities were immense.  I don’t mean that if you helped out, they would give you a take-your-pick option out of Duty Free, and bump you up to First Class, or even, pre 9/11, up to the cockpit (though all of that was invariably true), but it was chiefly the chance to enter somebody’s life in a very unusual, indeed a unique way, and also for a time to experience something of the fellowship of the aircrew and cabin crew.  Magical.  Of course there was an element of risk.  If you volunteered, you were taking on a duty of care.  If it all went pear-shaped, well, you did your best, but you still might have a case to answer.  Still, in the final SWOT analysis, if you ask me, the opportunities outweighed the threats.  And as the beautiful Keet from Leyden once said to me, “What is life without chances?”  I can only think of one occasion when I didn’t immediately respond to the call.  I was at Auckland International Airport, seeing off a friend very dear to me.  We had ten minutes.  Of course the call would come just then.  Is there a doctor in the house?  I said, “For once, somebody else can go.”  So we had our ten minutes and then she passed through into International Departures.  But the call came again, and this time I responded.  Thus I too was conducted through International Departures to the very flight my dear friend was boarding, practised the medicine, and had a chance to say goodbye once more.      

When we think of the parable of the Good Samaritan, we ask ourselves whether we would be that Samaritan, who helped, or the Priest or the Levite, who passed by on the other side.  Why don’t we ask ourselves if we would be the man half-dead in the gutter?  Even when you’re down and out, it takes a certain grace to accept help.  Why should I feel lofty about delivering aid, and deeply suspicious about an offer of largesse?  Somebody hands me a gift and I think, “This is odd!  What’s the hidden agenda?  What’s the scam?”   

I’m not sure.  Being a little out of practice, I’m not even sure I would so readily rush to the aid of the patient in distress, fearful I would do more harm than good.  I was walking round the Milngavie Reservoir just north of Glasgow today and I saw a very overweight middle-aged man running with his dog up a steep grassy slope, and I thought, “Please don’t collapse!”  He didn’t. 

But still I think, never turn your back on an opportunity.  As that late great octogenarian John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”                       

David Hume devotes a chapter of An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding to miracles.  It is hardly surprising that he is sceptical; he doesn’t believe a miracle has ever occurred.  He lays out an argument in support of this.

His argument is very modern.  It rests on the idea of probability.  If somebody informs you that he has witnessed a miracle, say the resurrection of a dead person, is it more likely that such a miracle has occurred, or that the narrator has either been deceived, or is trying to deceive you?  You might say that Hume is a Doubting Thomas.  Thomas needed to see the thing for himself.  He could have been a role model for enlightened man, in his championship of Doubt as a mainstay of scientific enquiry.   

Hume defines a miracle as “a violation of the laws of nature”, and further, as “a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent”.  These are all-encompassing definitions which no doubt suit Hume’s purpose, although it seems to me that the definition of a miracle should be narrower.  A miracle has to be an intervention that is benign, at least to somebody.  When Uri Geller exerts some mysterious force to bend spoons, we may say he performs magic, but even supposing we thought the magic was in some sense “real”, we would stop short of calling it a miracle.  When the Deity elects to submerge the Egyptian army in the Red Sea, this is an act of providence for the Israelites.  If nobody benefited, we would hesitate to call such an act a miracle, but rather an outburst of bad temper. 

Miracles, such as they are recorded, appear to be rare events.  Of course, Hume would say vanishingly rare.  Hume draws attention to the fact that they seem to belong to history, and do not occur in the present day.  They also seem to occur in remote locations.  Right enough, occasionally one hears reports of teenage girls performing prodigious feats in some remote village in the Andes.  The Roman Catholic Church despatches a team of cardinals to investigate.  Most of us put this sort of thing down to some kind of collective hysteria, no doubt because we have all read our Hume and are therefore enlightened. 

But here is a thought experiment.  Imagine you inhabit a tiny and obscure corner of the universe in which miracles are, in fact, quite commonplace.  They happen all the time.  Would you recognise them as miracles?  Say that you incur an injury; several injuries if you like.  A mechanical breakdown.  We will exemplify this by analogy.  As you park your car on the street outside your house one evening, you note you are running on empty, and a dashboard hazard light warns you the car is low on oil.  On leaving the car you note the front nearside bumper has been stoved in, there’s a gash in the paint work, and you have two flat tyres.  Drat!  Yet sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.  You will phone the garage in the morning.

Next day, you go out to find a panel beater must have been at work in the night for the bumper is whole, paintwork restored, tyres inflated.  The fuel tank is replenished and the dipstick shows a superabundance of oil.  The windscreen has been washed for good measure.  So what do you do?  You just shrug, get into the car, and drive off.  You don’t think twice about it because it happens all the time.

Mind you, sooner or later there will be a terminal event.  Even a Volvo doesn’t last for ever.  But look what happens.  You get up one morning to find the old decrepit jalopy has gone and has been replaced by a spanking gorgeous brand new model. 

But this is all perfectly commonplace.  The laws of physics are the same everywhere, and we are made of stardust, and the universe is so unimaginably vast that something like this must be going on elsewhere.  So we train our telescopes on deep space in the search for self-repairing and self-generating Volvos, but we can’t seem to find any.  The universe is certainly a fascinating and indeed a very frightening place, but it has to be said nothing out there is remotely as interesting as that which takes place in our own obscure corner.  If there is love or laughter or sympathy or poignancy out there, such instances of these remain remarkably coy.    

Hume has another name for a miracle: a “prodigy”.  We tend to use the word for a particular sort of miracle – a person whose gift is so spectacular that it seems to us to be God-given.  It is beyond comprehension, miraculous.  Mozart was a prodigy.  I wonder if Hume got the chance to hear some of his music.  Maybe Hume was just looking for miracles in the wrong place.  The Jupiter Symphony makes any stunt like turning water into wine rather tawdry.

When I was an emergency physician, I lost count of the number of times the paramedics would bring in a survivor from a road crash.  They would be white-faced at what they had witnessed.  “You should see the wreckage.  Carnage!  Honestly doc, it’s a miracle anybody got out of there alive!”

Maybe it was. 

From time to time I get a phone call in the evening from a charming young lady who is an undergraduate of Edinburgh University.  As soon as she asks me if I have fond memories of my own time at the university, I know that she has called me up on behalf of the Alma Mater, to be quite frank, in order to beg.  I’m not at all sure that I approve of the university recruiting undergraduates to devote an evening to the acquisition of funds in order to swell her coffers.  “Not at all sure” I say?  Confound the circumlocution of the litotes tradition.  I think it’s meretricious and grotesque. 

But I don’t say this to the young lady.  At least I haven’t, thus far.  After all, why shoot the messenger?  In fact I usually cough up.  Mind you I baulked last time when she asked me for my credit card details.  I said, “Well that’s not going to work, is it?  With respect, I don’t actually know that you are who you say you are.”  Telephone scams are growing increasingly sophisticated.  I asked her to arrange for the university to write to me by Royal Mail, and I promised to send a cheque by return.  And that is how the transaction was concluded.

However, next time she phones, I’m going to decline to contribute, and I’m going to ask her to tell her supervisors that when the university decided to change the name of the David Hume Tower to “40 George Square”, I decided to divert my charitable giving to another university of which I am an alumnus, the University of Glasgow.

Ouch.

I couldn’t believe it. I actually went into Edinburgh and to the building in question, and sure enough, the plaque by the door read “40 George Square”.  I took a photograph.  Le Bon David has been cancelled.  He has been “disappeared”.  The David Hume Tower is like the character Syme in Orwell’s 1984.  The David Hume Tower no longer exists.  The David Hume Tower has never existed.

The building itself, it has to be said, is something of a carbuncle.  The old George Square must have been beautiful before the high rise monstrosities went up.  Bernard Levin writes scathingly about this in Conducted Tour (Jonathan Cape, 1981).  The BBC commissioned him to tour the great music festivals of the world and describe them.  The Edinburgh Festival is covered in the chapter “The Ghost in George Square”.  Levin went to the Edinburgh Festival at least twenty times from its inception in 1947.  In that year, when he was a teenager, he stayed in George Square.  He writes of this time with great nostalgia.  Edinburgh was his favourite city in the world.  But he is not uncritical.  (There goes that litotes again.  He is critical, dammit.) 

Three sides of the square have been torn down, their eighteenth-century handsomeness being replaced by huge blocks of such brutal and lifeless architectural nastiness that even London… can scarcely match them…  Why are universities such abominable barbarians?

I wonder what Bernard Levin – a journalist never shy to express an opinion with passion – would have made of the cancellation of David Hume?   

It’s not the first time David Hume has been snubbed by the university.  He was denied the Professorship in Moral Philosophy, chiefly because his scepticism, particularly with respect to religion, was held to be outrageous.  No doubt he accepted the rejection with a calm mind.  Ever since his Treatise of Human Nature “fell dead-born from the press”, he endured a lifetime of disappointments, but chose to retain a happy disposition and to plough his own intellectual furrow.  Nowadays, along with Immanuel Kant, he is regarded as one of the two great philosophers of the eighteenth century.  But it just so happens that he passed a remark which in his own time would scarcely have raised an eyebrow, to the effect that he considered one race of men to be intellectually superior to another.  Ergo, he is a monster.

We look back on bygone ages and recognise that our ancestors had blind spots.  When our descendants look back upon us, what will be ours? 

We live in the age of the Pharisee.  I recall that Our Lord, who had plenty of time for corrupt tax collectors, prostitutes, and murderers, had no time at all for Pharisees.

It crossed my mind to do a bit of cancellation myself.  Whom to disappear?  Edinburgh University?  Pharisees generally?  No.  I’m going to take a leaf out of David Hume’s book.  I read in today’s newspaper that the hashtag RIPJKRowling is cancelling Ms Rowling, so far as I can see, because she denoted people who menstruate as “women”.  Much of this sort of persecution – most of it – takes place on social media.  Actually Hume got the same – a barrage of hostile criticism.  He simply ignored it.  He never replied.  That’s what to do.  Cancel social media.  Just log off.                   

All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. 

Leo Tolstoy

You may recognise the urbane, world-weary tone, the ennui that is on the edge of cynicism.  This is the opening sentence to Anna Karenina.

But you know, it’s quite untrue; in fact it is the direct opposite to the truth.  Happy people enjoy and share their own unique happiness.  It is misery that is the great leveller.

I must share with you an example of the uniqueness of happiness.  I had dinner with some very dear friends of mine last week, in Inverleith, by the Edinburgh Botanical Garden.  Gerald Lamont used to be a very serious-minded medical student with a sombre view of human nature (we used to call him Jeremiah Lamentations), but then he had the great good fortune to marry the gorgeous Egyptologist Maggie (like Jerry and Margo from the ancient BBC sitcom The Good Life) and, as somebody said about Paroles (or was it Bertram?) in Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well, he was “dismissed to happiness”.  Now he can walk from his house past Fettes College to the Western General in fifteen minutes, tend the sick and needy, and return home, reliably, to domestic bliss.  Gerry and Maggie have two daughters of great charm and vivacity, Elizabeth and Barbara.  Elizabeth is a medical student and Barbara is still at school.  Barbara is a harpist.  Barbara will break many hearts.  I resist the temptation to advise her not to follow in her sister’s footsteps.  Medicine is a noble calling, but if you are born blessed with an artistic talent, is it not a sin to neglect it?  But I keep my mouth shut.  None of my business. 

Who else was there?  Three waifs from the musical world (and is there anything more waif-like, these days, than the inhabitants of the musical world?), Josephine, flute, Marcus, hautbois, and Philip, bassoon.   Party of eight.  We dined right royally, and moved from the dining room to the living room for coffee.  Barbara said, “Let’s play Blurbs!”

“Blurbs?”

“It’s our invented game.  We need to patent it.”

“Just one rubber, Barbara,” warned her mother.

Rubber of Blurbs?

“Dr Campbell might not be as enthusiastic as you.”

“That’s all right.  He can be Browser.”

Browser?  I said, “What do I need to do?”

“Imagine you go into a bookshop.  Waterstones or Blackwell’s.  You are looking for a piece of fiction, hot off the press.  You search for a title that catches the eye, and you take the book off the shelf and read the blurb.  All you need to do is supply the title, and the rest of us supply the blurb.  We can have three teams of two.  We compose a blurb to fit the title.  Team members alternate, clause by clause, to supply the blurb.  At the end, you will have browsed three books.  The winning team is the one whose blurb is on the cover of the book you choose to buy.  Dad can be adjudicator.”

“Strict rules of Blurbs?” said Gerry.

“Definitely.  Proper names can be stand-alone, clauses may be principal or subordinate, adjectival phrases are permitted.”

I said, “I’ll pick it up as I go along.”

“If I’m the ref,” said father, “Elizabeth and Barbara cannot be on the same team.  They’re too good.  Lizzie you go with Jo, Barbara with Marcus, Mags with Philip.  All set?  I warn you, James, you’d better make your titles imaginative.”

Barbara sat on the carpet in the full Lotus position, rocking gently to and fro.  “Begin.”

“The Piano-Tuner of Punta del Este.”

“Great title!”

“Lizzie and Jo.”

It was so rapid fire that I have difficulty reconstructing the narrative.  But I will do my best. 

“Just another casual murder at the bottom of the world…

“…random, senseless, and in some ways inept…

“…yet there were clues…

“…subtle, barely visible…

“…barely, audible…

“…barely tactile…

“…yet taken together…

“…adding towards a sum greater than the parts…

“…for somebody who could join the dots…

“…and that somebody just might be…

“Mike Fist.”

There was a round of applause.

“Mike Fist?  Is he the piano tuner?  I was looking for a manual on how to look after my Bluthner.  These tuners have become so expensive!” 

“Well, if the book’s not what you expected, you don’t need to buy it.  Next up!”

“How many rickshaws are in Milton Keynes?”

“Niente,” volunteered Maggie. 

“Mags and Philip.”

“Before you begin,” I said, “I’d better warn you I never buy a book whose title has been concocted by somebody sticking a pin at random into a dictionary.”

“Then give us another title,” said Philip, in a bass voice, melodious as a bassoon.

“A Load of Old Codswallop.”

“I think I’ve read that.”

“Really?  All right, I’ll keep it brief.  Junk.”

“When Pippa Graz-Brise-Norton told her friends…

“…she was going to circumnavigate the globe solo in a Singaporean fishing boat…

“…they did their best to commit her to the local psychiatric facility…

“…yet she persevered…

“…Changi to Raffles in 256 days…

“…in aid of Dysmorphic Discombobulation Syndrome (DDS)…

“…a condition with devastating effects…

“…whose reality she passionately champions…

“…despite the obduracy of the medical profession…

“…and whose sinister psychological sequelae…

“…finally drives Pippa to render a confession…

“…of astonishing candour, and generosity of heart.”

I said, “Blimey!”

“Next up.  Barbara and Marcus.”

“Story’s Endit, Pal.”

“He was lying in a gutter on St Vincent Street…”

I said, “Hang on, this sounds awfully like Punta del Este transported to 55 degrees north.  Can we start again?”

“’Kay.”

I said, mischievously, e con malicia, “The Blurb”.

“K. walked into the bookshop and chose a book at random…

“…entitled The Blurb.

“He read the blurb.

“It occurred to K. that if the substance of the book was itself a blurb…

“…then it must refer to another blurb…

“…presumably in another tome, which, in turn…

“…must allude to a further blurb, and that therefore…

“…K. was in a hall of mirrors that vanished off to infinity.  So…

“…should K. venture further into the shop?”

“Solipsistic nightmare,” I remarked.  “Wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole.  I’m going for The Piano Tuner of Tierra del Fuego.”

“Punta del Este,” said Barbara.  “But that’s just cliché.”

“So I’ll buy the cliché.  Congratulations to Lizzie and Jo.”

That night I slept heavily.

The following day I found myself on Princes Street and paused before a bookshop I had not previously noticed.  Blandings.  It was a substantial property on several storeys, and the curvaceous, rather Dickensian windows made up of multiple small panes revealed an attractive display of the latest publications.  I ventured inside.  Where to begin?

The titles of the previous evening remained vivid in my memory.  The blurbs had been so eloquently rendered that I had to believe they had some reality beyond will-o’-the-wisp imagination.  I approached the young lady at the checkout.

“Yes?”

Why is it that booksellers, like librarians, seem to resent us, their clients?  Is it that they suspect we are all mendicants come in, briefly, to escape the elements?

“I’m looking for a book entitled The Piano Tuner of Punta del Este.”

“Who is the author?”

“I don’t know.”

“Publisher?”

“I don’t know.  I’m sorry.  It’s a title I heard last night at my book club.”

She typed rapidly and frowned at the computer screen.  “Can’t see it on the system.  I’ve got How to keep your clavier well-tempered.  A piano tuner’s guide.”

“That’s not it.  Could you try another one?  Junk.  I think it’s a kind of travelogue and inspirational self-help book.”

“Author and publisher?”

“Sorry.”

“I’ve got Junk: How to Declutter.”

“No.  Would you mind trying one last one?”

She looked at me, wondering if I had some weird personality disorder and relished playing bizarre practical jokes on total strangers.  I remembered a sketch by “The Two Ronnies”, when Mr Barker wound up Mr Corbett in a hardware store.  I said, “The Blurb.”

She sighed.  “Author?”

Then I had an inspiration.  I remembered ‘K’.  “Franz Kafka.”

“Publisher?”

“Everyman.”

Sher typed rapidly.  “Here it is.  Der Klappentext.  Berlin: Verlag Die Schmiede, 1927.  We’ve got it in store.  You’ll find it downstairs.  In the basement.”

I was completely thunderstruck.  “Thank you very much.”  I glanced at the wide staircase with its elegant dark wood balustrade.  I turned for the exit, and Princes Street.  I became aware that the other occupants of the shop had formed a phalanx between me and the door.  I was reminded of the final scene in Maeterlinck’s Pélleas et Melisande.  It was then that I realised that the other occupants of the shop were not fellow browsers, but were all employees.  I was the only customer.  A gentleman in a frock coat with a hideous smile and very bad teeth said to me, “My name is Moser.  I am the manager of Blandings.  You must descend to retrieve your book.”

“I’ve changed my mind.  I wish to leave.”

“That is not possible.”

“Are you telling me that you forbid it?”

“Not at all.  I am telling you that for the man in the street, the man, now, in Princes Street, there is no such shop as Blandings.  Blandings, Dr Campbell, has been created solely for you, and now that you have come into its precinct, no further customer can enter, since Blandings no longer exists for him, just as Princes Street no longer exists, for you.”              

For some years now I’ve been resisting the pressure to acquire a smart meter to monitor my electricity usage.  Won’t one form of electronic surveillance just lead to another?  It’s a snoopers’ charter I tell you!  But I finally succumbed to the persuasiveness of the electricity board – “Dr Campbell, traditional meter reading is being phased out.  Your smart meter is ready to be fitted.  Please choose one of the following times at your convenience…”  

I have to say they were very good.  They came on time and the whole thing only took about half an hour.  It has been salutary to monitor my energy usage.  It is reassuring to wake in the morning, glance at the monitor, and see the dial at zero, despite the fact that the fridge, the broadband hub, and the phone are all ticking away.  I put on a few lights and the usage goes up to tuppence an hour.  I sing a ditty from Mary Poppins – “Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence an hour.”  Then I put the kettle on.  Good grief! 

The fact is, the smart meter has turned me into a miser.  I sit, like Scrooge, in a greatcoat and three jumpers, with the lights out.  And I don’t have gas.  Now electricity, per kilowatt hour, is about six times as expensive as gas.  How can that be?  A friend of mine has her own personal windmill and sells electricity to the national grid.  She watches the vanes go round and says, “Kerching, kerching.”  Yet I’m glad I don’t have gas.  I think we should leave the fossil fuels under the seabed.  Spend a bit more and save the planet.  It’s only money.  On Saturday evening I allowed myself the luxury of watching The Last Night of the Proms.  Two hours of music for a groat.    

It occurs to me that its 125^th outing, on Saturday, really was The Last Night of the Proms.  Nothing lasts for ever.

It was a lovely concert, if, for obvious reasons, ill-attended.  The BBC Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Dalia Stasevska, and they were joined by South African soprano Golda Schutz, who sang the aria Deh vieni, non tardar from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, Richard Strauss’ Morgen!, Night Waltz; ‘The Glamorous Life’ from Stephen Sondheim’s A little night Music, and, from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, You’ll Never Walk Alone.  Magnificent voice.

Lisa Batiashuli was due to play Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending but unfortunately she was indisposed.  The remarkable Nicola Benedetti stepped in at short notice.  She has previously played The Lark at a Prom, and indeed she has previously played (Max Bruch) on the last night, so she was right at home.  Wonderful. 

I greatly enjoyed the modern short pieces – Andrea Tarrodi’s Solus, and Errollyn Wallen’s Jerusalem – over clouded hills, a BBC commission and world premiere, whose dissident take on a cherished anthem perhaps served as a reminder that, on this night, everything could not be as it once was.  There was a truncated whistle stop tour of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.  The piper playing outside Dundee’s V & A with the backdrop of the Tay Bridge was extraordinarily good.    

So we moved on to the area of controversy – whether or not to celebrate Britain’s imperialist past.  Actually the controversy appeared to evaporate.  Thomas Arne’s Rule Britannia was given an “authentic” rendition by the BBC singers, which turned it into a museum piece.  Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No 1 was similarly pared down, and Parry’s Jerusalem was in its composer’s original form, with organ accompaniment.  Benjamin Britten’s version of the National Anthem is always arresting.  Auld Lang Syne was not sung.  Maybe the absence of an audience made it impossible. 

Splendid concert, spoiled by some naff production.  I could understand cutting to a scene from Wiltshire during The Lark, but the Old Man of Storr?  Nothing could be less evocative of Skye’s wild Trotternish silhouette, and the terrifying buttresses of the Quairang, than RVW in his most pastoral mood.  Maybe the stark recognition of that grinding, forced juxtaposition is the reason why Saturday night might have been the last hurrah.  I just can’t see 6,000 souls in September 2021 packing the Royal Albert Hall to the rafters and waving Union flags.  As I write, Westminster is about to debate whether or not Her Majesty’s Government should break the law in a specific and limited way.  Sir John Major and Tony Blair, in the Sunday Times, urged Parliament to defeat the government.  Good luck with that.

There are some things you can’t do in a specific and limited way, like falling in love, falling pregnant, committing murder, succumbing to Botulinum toxin.  (“I’ve got a touch of Botulism!”)  Also, there are some circles you cannot square.  Actually there are no circles you can square.  Try as you might, you can’t leave the European Union and then pretend that a border isn’t going to be created, somewhere.  I have an idea that Mr Blair might be able to say once more, “The kaleidoscope has been shaken.”  Where will we all be a year from now?  So many imponderables: constitutional issues, Brexit, global warming, pollution, mass migration of peoples, mass species extinction, Covid.  I can’t see the BBC resuming “normal service”.  The Last Night of the Proms was certainly different this year.  Next year, if it exists at all, I think it will be unrecognisable.   

Gotta Get Theroux This

My Life and Strange Times in Television, Louis Theroux (Macmillan 2019)

How obtuse of me not to get that “Theroux” meant “through”; I had imagined some American TV producer with an appetite for the bizarre picking up a strange artefact relating to some obscure mid-west religious sect, and thinking of Louis.  But then the penny dropped, and as I read on, I actually began to say to myself, “Gotta get through this” – because I found it a tough read. 

Not tough like Proust.  Gotta Get Theroux This was readable and interesting.  I think it was just the subject matter that got me down.  Maybe I just didn’t want to be around weird people for that length of time, but there must have been something compelling me to read on, just as something must have nudged me last night to watch Louis Theroux: Life on the Edge (Sunday, 9 pm BBC 2).

I am intrigued by the Theroux brand, and product.  Looking at that wide eyed, dead pan expression of his on the cover of his book, you can see why he is sometimes described as “faux naïve”.  On telly last night he interviewed a man who went into a trance, and was possessed by an extra-terrestrial who proceeded to address us in a voice with a somewhat electronic timbre.  Louis’ expression remained dead pan.  Is that the point?  Is he laughing at the people who invite him, with his film crew, into their homes?  And if we laugh along, is not that a kind of voyeurism?     

Oddly enough, I am reminded of a TV presenter from a previous generation who also had a fascination for the bizarre, particularly among the rich and famous – Alan Whicker.  He had a similar knack of using his charm to gain the confidence of the interviewee.  He could also live life on the edge; didn’t he once interview Papa Doc?  Alan Whicker became something of a cult figure.  Cult figures inevitably begin to parody themselves.  The glitzy lives lived within gorgeous palaces by the eye-wateringly rich were all described in slickly crafted journalese delivered with a characteristic nasal whine.  Monty Python cloned multiple Alan Whickers slouching around with microphones, doing a piece to camera in the same nasal whine. 

But I’m inclined to think there is nothing “faux” about the Theroux persona.  And I don’t think he’s taking the mickey.  Of course he is aware that he is exploring strange worlds, and that many of his interviewees will come across, frankly, as crazy.  He must also be aware that should tensions arise, should the interviewee suspect that he is being observed critically, this can make for compulsive viewing.  Yet Louis is clearly interested in his subjects, insatiably curious about their world view, open-minded, and, initially at least, non-judgmental.  That is why he is able to delve so deeply into other people’s lives.  It can be no surprise that much of his work has been in the United States, not just because the US is home of the weird – “only in America” is the accepted trope – but because there is a tradition of openness and hospitality that would be welcoming and generous to the courteous young man from England.  Of course it could all turn on a dime; if they decide you are not what you appear… well, that’s what introduces a certain tension to these documentaries. 

It is sometimes said that the last thing any reporter should do, is to become part of the story.  That Louis Theroux has ignored that dictum is perhaps the defining element of his originality.  The edges get blurred.  Sometimes he is a mix of a doctor, a pastor, and a social worker.  There is an episode in which he follows the life of an alcoholic who continually seeks detox, defaults, and scarpers.  Louis stuck with him.  Well, he was making a TV programme.  But he was also doing something else.  He steps voluntarily into people’s shoes.  That comes at a cost.  And perhaps that is why Gotta Get Theroux This is such a difficult read.  Surely his most famous – infamous – subject, was Jimmy Savile.

Savile haunts the book.  Louis keeps returning to him, as one might palpate an abscess to see if it remains excruciating.  Was he fooled?  Did he get it all wrong?  Is he consumed with guilt because he rather liked Jimmy? 

Heavy stuff.  I think my copy of Gotta Get Theroux This is heading for the charity shop.  Yet no doubt the next time Louis has a chat with some Nazis armed to the teeth and ready to inaugurate the new world order, I will eavesdrop for a while.  It’s as well somebody’s keeping tabs on what’s going on out there, and that that somebody should remain sane.  I don’t know how he does it.                                 

What a relief that the Proms are back.  Granted there is no audience present, and the great auditorium of the Royal Albert Hall is plunged in darkness, but the orchestra is there, and the music is live.  Over the last couple of months Radio 3 has broadcast some magnificent historic Proms from the archive; I think especially of Barenboim’s Wagner feast with his West-East Divan Orchestra, and Dudamel’s showcase of Latin America with the Simon Bolivar, which brought the house down.  All well and good, but there is nothing to surpass live music, which has been such a great miss for nearly six months now.

So on Friday the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Sakari Oramo performed at the First Night of the Proms.  Aaron Copland’s Quiet City, with these poignant solos for trumpet and cor anglais, seemed apposite.  And they played Beethoven’s Eroica.  I’ve heard the Eroica a lot during Beethoven’s 250^th anniversary, but it never fails to have an impact.  Was it my imagination, or did the requirement for social distancing actually lend clarity to all the orchestral lines?

Last night, Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra played Vaughan Williams’ Fifth Symphony.  Another inspired choice.  The spiritual nature of the music suits this vast, deserted space.  I remember going to the Albert Hall to hear RVW 8.  The eighth is dedicated to John Barbirolli, and Sir John was supposed to conduct it that night, but he had passed away in the interim, and it was Charles Groves who at the end of the performance, I remember, held the score up before the audience in a gesture of acknowledgement to “Glorious John”. 

Then in 2008 I was back in the hall for the fiftieth anniversary of RVW’s death.  The BBC Symphony with Sir Andrew Davis played the Tallis Fantasia, the Serenade to Music, Job, and the Ninth Symphony.  Extraordinary.  What a responsibility that night for the orchestra’s leader Stephen Bryant, who had extended violin solos in every piece.  I remember Andrew Davis pointing at him with a wry smile, so to say, I told you you’d be wonderful.   

And in the same 2008 season I was back to hear the rarely performed Sinfonia Antarctica, as it so happened, the night the conductor Vernon Handley passed away.  I recall the uncanny ethereal quality of the wordless voice of soprano Elizabeth Watts, coming from a gallery on high, and conjuring the pitiless majesty of the inhospitable southern continent.

Why, last night, was RVW 5 so apt?  It seemed to me to be a reminder of all that is to be cherished in England.  Post Covid, let’s hope our dear English cousins don’t get “back to normal”. Let’s hope they get back to RVW.

Of course two weeks is a short season.  The Last Night will be here in no time.  The singalong, with these bellicose party pieces, has become controversial.  The silver lining to the cloud of Covid, you might say, is the opportunity to hear the music without the words.  The question is, will six thousand souls be back in the hall in 2021 to declare that, whoever else in the world may be enslaved, so long as we rule the high seas, it won’t be us?

I’m not holding my breath.  The BBC have tried to put a stop to it before.  Sir Malcolm Sargent died in 1967, and in 1969 it was mooted then that Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory be scuttled.  But the audience were having none of it. 

North of the border, we have similar running sores.  The Scottish Government tried to legislate against the singing of sectarian songs at football matches, and failed.  We agonise about our National Anthem.  Flower of Scotland?  Wee bit hill and glen?  No wonder our rugby players keep dropping the ball.  Highland Cathedral?  What a dirge.  Scots wha hae?  Bit bloodthirsty.  Welcome to your gory bed. 

Maybe we shouldn’t take the thing too seriously.  Most National Anthems are humbug.  I’d sooner sing The Drunkard’s Raggit Wain than Flower of Scotland.

He stands at Jimmy’s corner,

Till Jimmy cries him in,

To see if he’s got ony bits

Or mibby, ony shin…

(Or, in another version, gutta-percha shin.  Other translations are available.  My grannie in Saltcoats used to sing it to me, and then say, “Is that no pitifu’?”)

Personally, I favour Auld Lang Syne.  So, incidentally do the prommers.  It ends the Last Night every year, even if the prommers don’t know the words.  They are kindly, and of gentle sentiment.  It might be argued that Auld Lang Syne is an international rather than a national song.  That’s just fine.  Anybody in the world can feel free to sing Scotland’s National Anthem.  Let’s bring it home.                    

Sean Connery turns 90 tomorrow.  Seems hard to believe.  The Herald Magazine on Saturday ran a piece on him, and BBC2 repeated a 2015 tribute, followed by a screening of Entrapment (1999).  The Herald has a picture of James Bond leaning on his Aston Martin DB5 (strictly speaking it should be a DB3), against an Alpine backdrop, in Goldfinger (1964).  Surely the picture shows that Connery was – is – the definitive Bond.   

And yet, initially, Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, thought otherwise.  Possible contenders for the Bond role included David Niven, James Mason, and Cary Grant.  But Dr No was a low budget movie and it is said that these actors would have been too expensive.  With hindsight, we may say it is just as well.  The Bond phenomenon was something quite new and really needed a fresh face.  Saying that, it seems to me that Cary Grant could have played Bond.  He shared with Connery (if it is possible that such a phenomenon can be shared) a quality of isolated uniqueness.  It is difficult to think of Grant, or Connery, or Bond, as belonging to any particular social milieu.  Archie Leach from Bristol joined the circus, disappeared, and reappeared in Hollywood as somebody who had buried his past and reinvented himself.  Grant was tremendous at light comedy, but Alfred Hitchcock recognised in him a quality of underlying menace, which would have played well to the Bond role.  On the other hand, when Dr No came around in 1962, Grant was 58 years old.  Connery was 31.  

It is hard to conceive of two persons more removed from one another in terms of social class, than Ian Fleming and Sean Connery.  Fleming went to Eton and Connery was a milkman in Fountainbridge, Edinburgh.  Yet it seems they both eventually recognised the qualities they each possessed.  Fleming once remarked that when he was writing his novels, he didn’t have an image of somebody like Connery in his mind, but that now, with hindsight, he would.  And on BBC2’s tribute, Connery remarked that he had got on very well with Ian.  He said he was a very interesting man, somebody of immense knowledge; a snob of course, but then – he offered it as an apologia – he went to Eton.     

It is easy to imagine that without Connery, the Bond films might have fizzled out.  But there were other important contributions too.  The soundtracks contributed to the exotic and intensely colourful atmosphere.  The original Monty Norman theme with its garish brass outbursts sits well with the atmosphere of threat; Shirley Bassey’s rendition of Goldfinger is extraordinary.  And the supporting cast was always well chosen; I think especially of From Russia with Love’s Red Grant (Robert Shaw) and Rosa Klebb (the remarkable Lotte Lenya).

But despite all that, despite the fact that we await the unveiling of Bond 26, I don’t think a satisfactory film of an Ian Fleming novel has ever been made.  The combination of extreme menace with high farce – it’s all there on the page; why would you wish to tinker with the script?  Maybe the movie moguls are afraid our attention span isn’t long enough.  Perhaps Sean Connery recognised that the Salzman and Broccoli creation was limiting him, and he moved on, only looking back over his shoulder once.  But you might argue that he carried on playing Bond, as Bond might have been in his later years.  He ended up an elder statesman of machismo, intimidating younger male leads like Kevin Costner (“He puts one of your men in the hospital, you put one of his men in the morgue.  That’s how you get Capone!”) …and Nicolas Cage (“Do your best?  Losers do their best!  Winners **** the Prom Queen!”)    

To the current zeitgeist, certain aspects of the Bondian world view have become untenable.  Didn’t Judy Dench’s M call Bond a dinosaur?   As a child, I was rather obsessed with Bond novels.  I have a vivid recollection of summer 1964, walking from the garden into the kitchen of a house in Midhurst, to hear on the radio that Ian Fleming had died.  He was 56.  Bond had, essentially, killed him, or at least the 100 pack-year habit of the Morlands specials, with the characteristic three gold bands of the RN.  Looking back, I don’t think Bond was a very good choice of role model.  It’s not so much the cigarettes and whisky and wild wild women that I regret; it’s the fact that Bond was a loner.  Early on in life, I came to believe I was living in an inimical carnivorous world, and I would need to survive through my own wits.  It would never have occurred to me to seek out a mentor and say, “I’m struggling with such-and-such.  I can’t see a way through.  Can you help me?”  It never occurred to me that I really didn’t need to do it all on my own.

But that is what makes Connery so remarkable.  He never belonged to any old boy network.  Big Tam the milkman never went to Eton.  My father caught sight of him on one of the Scottish links courses and remarked that, while his fellow golfers seemed each to have their entourage, he was alone, carrying his own clubs. 

So tomorrow I will raise a glass to Sir Sean.  Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. 

Shaken, not stirred. 

Half a century ago, Professor Bryce convened a meeting of the Higher Ordinary English class at Glasgow, to advise us on whether, come Michaelmas, we should proceed to Junior and then Senior Honours.  Unless we were prepared to immerse and lose ourselves completely in the “Realms of Gold”, he said, then we should not go down that path, but rather, and quite honourably, complete an ordinary degree.

A class member stuck his hand up and said, “Realms of Gold are all very well, professor, but I want to teach English in school, and under the current rules, unless I have an honours degree, I will not be able to become a principal teacher.”

Prof Bryce frowned.  “Really?  I had no idea.”

That’s the trouble with these pesky exams: they matter.  So if your future health and wellbeing, prosperity and happiness depend on your grades (or you think they do), you will naturally seek out a mentor who “teaches to the test”.  Forget the “Realms of Gold”.

Exam setters are well aware of the fact that “teaching to the test” can be an extremely non-educational experience, so they try to devise exams which will identify and reward originality and creativity in the candidate, rather than the parroted mantras of somebody who has been drilled.  I remember Question 2 in the Ordinary General Philosophy (Logic) exam at Glasgow:

2. Is Question 2 a proper question?

Fortunately, you could pick and choose your questions.  I thought, don’t go near it with a barge pole.  You will be lured, as by a Siren, on to the rocks.

What is the purpose of an exam?  During the educational phase, it is a means of demonstrating, to yourself and to others, that you are ready to progress to the next phase of learning; and at the end of the educational phase – speaking from the vocational point of view – it is a means of demonstrating that you are competent to perform a task.  I suppose exams are a necessary evil.  After all, you could hardly let a surgeon loose in an operating theatre, or a an airline pilot in a cockpit, without first checking that they were up to the task, and subsequently periodically checking that they retained their competence.  There’s even some justification in allowing that examinations be a stressful experience, because the examinees will doubtless encounter stressful situations during their career.

But it seems to me that exams ought to be straightforward; not necessarily easy, but in their format largely predictable.  They should be like a driving test.  You demonstrate that you are able to carry out a series of tasks safely and competently.  You don’t need to be Lewis Hamilton.

My heart ached for the young lady who phoned into Any Questions on Friday to ask why it was that, her teachers having advised she was going to get a bunch of A+ A levels, a computer algorithm decided to award her a bunch of Ds.  I don’t think she was reassured by the barrage of obfuscating prevarication that ensued.  Don’t worry – I’m sure there’s been a mistake.  All you need to do is appeal.  How long will it take?  Three weeks.  But today, that answer no longer applies, and nobody is quite sure what’s going to happen.  But something will turn up.  The expression “Kafkaesque” is overused but surely pertains to this young lady’s situation.

Why is life made so difficult for young people?  Take medicine.  If you want to get into Med School, in addition to a clutch of A*** +++ advanced A levels, you need to craft a faultless “personal statement”, present yourself to an interview panel and satisfy its inbuilt prejudices that you are doctor “material”, and sit the absurd UKCAT test which is an exercise in mental gymnastics akin to the Sunday Telegraph’s fiendish crossword Enigmatic Variations.  Then you must render succour to a lost tribe in the Amazon during your summer hols, and come back with a Covid vaccine distilled from the Cinchona bark.

Meanwhile, here, a sick person can’t find a doctor for love nor money.  Well, maybe for money.  We need to train more doctors.

I think if I’d been Health Minister – Education Minister, sorry, Freudian slip – this year I’d have tried to organise on-line exams.  It would have been easier in some subjects than in others.  The essay form would be easiest to manage.  You switch on your laptop on the appointed day and at 9 am the exam paper appears.  You submit at noon, with a declaration that your submission was all your own work, and you never looked at a book.  So, an opportunity to lie and cheat; no change there, then.

The scripts submitted could have been used to moderate the assessments of teachers.  I think the students would have preferred the opportunity to show what they could do, rather than be compartmentalised by some sophisticated computer program that was designed to be applied to a population, and not to a unique individual.  Human souls are unquantifiable.  They are not designed to fit an algorithm.  They are created to become immersed in the Realms of Gold.

I wrote to The Herald last week, for the first time this year.  Speech after long silence.  I’d become scunnered by letters launching vitriolic political attacks on opponents, without any apparent provocation, and full of assertions devoid of any reasoned argument.  I decided not to write to the newspapers unless I thought I had something constructive to say.  Then an issue came up, and I felt a letter, like an illness, coming on.  The issue was precisely that about which I blogged last week.  Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary in England, has suggested – perhaps even insisted – that remote consultation in General Practice be the new norm.  Now I happen to think that that is A Very Bad Idea.  Mr Hancock would call me a “naysayer” but there is nothing negative about the advocacy and the championship of the sanctity of the beautiful medical consultation.

But I raise the issue again this week, not to explore it further, but merely to provide an example of an issue over which people take sides.  Why do we form one particular opinion over another?

Ever since I got chucked out of somebody’s house for expressing a particular political view, I’ve sought a means, in social situations, to lower the temperature when I sense that rigorous debate is beginning to get out of hand.  A useful strategy, I have found, is to ask the person who expresses a view diametrically opposite to my own, “Why do you think that?  What is it about that viewpoint that particularly attracts you?”  It started as a technique, adopted simply to maintain a convivial atmosphere, but I have since found that – most of the time – I become genuinely interested in the origin and substance of the opposing point of view.  I would go further.  It seems to me that unless you have some understanding of, as it were, the opposite bench’s way of looking at the world, and even some sympathy for it, you probably haven’t thought your own opinion through, with any rigour.  So I ask the question, and I try not to hope that my debating opponent will trip themselves up with their own inconsistencies; rather that I will find out what makes them tick.  And who knows?  Maybe their argument will convince me, and I will have to change my mind.

I have two books that sit uncomfortably beside one another on my book shelf: The Two Cultures, by C. P. Snow (Part 1 first published, Cambridge University Press, 1959, 50^th Anniversary Printing, Canto, eleventh printing 2008), and Two Cultures?  The Significance of C. P. Snow, by F. R. Leavis, with an essay on Sir Charles Snow’s Rede Lecture, by Michael Yudkin (Chatto and Windus, 1962).  I periodically reread them, as I did this week.  F. R. Leavis’ attack on C. P. Snow is the ultimate exemplar of a deliberate attempt at demolition, not only of an argument, but of a personal reputation, without any apparent attempt to acknowledge that there might be some legitimacy in the opposing viewpoint, and perhaps even something worth salvaging.  I’ve written about this before and I don’t want to go over old ground.  Actually when you strip away all the personal animosity the core of the argument doesn’t seem to amount to any big deal.  Snow thought that scientific academics didn’t understand literary academics, and vice versa, and that that state of affairs was not good for society.  Leavis, being a literary critic, did what literary critics do; he subjected Snow’s essay to a merciless analysis.  He completely dismantled Snow’s argument, and left it in pieces.  It’s a blood bath, if you are attracted to that sort of thing.  Leavis characterised the broad sweep of Snow’s utterances as “panoptic pseudo-cogencies”.  He might have taken the view that Snow had expressed himself very clumsily, and then sought to uncover that which Snow was trying to say.  In other words, he might have asked Snow, “Why do you think that?  What is it about that viewpoint that particularly attracts you?”  But that would have gone very much against the grain of mid-twentieth century literary theory: if the text does not convey the meaning, the meaning is not there.  Leavis rubbished Snow’s thesis that there existed “two cultures”.  Yet paradoxically, precisely because he refused to concede anything to Snow, to engage sympathetically with him, because there was a total absence of meeting of minds, he rather demonstrated that Snow had a point.  There can be no doubt that Snow touched a nerve.

The distinguished American critic Lionel Trilling thought that Leavis’ critique was broadly right, but he deplored Leavis’ tone.  It was tantamount to his declaring, “Sir, you are not a gentleman.”  The other essay included in the two books in question, by the biochemist Michael Yudkin, is in my view the best piece of writing in the collection, because it makes all of Leavis’ points, while still affording Sir Charles courtesy and respect.

A deeply contentious issue, of course, has dominated the news this week.  A huge quantity of highly inflammable material has sat for years sequestered in a port in close proximity to a living, breathing city.  An accident waiting to happen.  When the explosion comes, those who survive are incensed at the incompetence of a corrupt government.  I refer of course to the repository of nuclear weapons at Coulport, which happens to be 25 nautical miles from my house.

Hiroshima was remembered on Friday, Nagasaki on Sunday.  In the current pandemic when live music has virtually been silenced, I was privileged to hear a live performance of Debussy’s Berceuse Héroique (1914) pour render Hommage à S. M. le Roi Albert 1er de Belgique et à ses Soldats.  It is a sombre piece, of great strength and moral power, incorporating at its core La Brabanconne, the Belgian national anthem.  Debussy was commissioned to compose it, and he said, perhaps apologetically, it was “the best I could do.”  But I think he meant it.  It’s right up there amongst his greatest works.  A fitting piece to hear on Nagasaki Day.

Brian Quail, a retired Glasgow classics teacher who writes eloquent letters to The Herald and The National in support of dismantling the hellish contraptions at Coulport, used these sombre anniversaries to write again in furtherance of the cause.  I am with Mr Quail – no, I can’t say that.  I don’t have his guts.  He lies down in front of the convoys en route to Aldermaston, gets arrested and goes to jail.  But I agree with his viewpoint.  His is a moral stance.  Yet I must try to understand somebody like Mrs May, who does not look like a mass murderer (then again, what does a mass murderer look like?) standing in front of No 10 saying she would “push the button”.  If I woke up tomorrow morning and found myself prime minister, would I really be prepared to alter the delicate balance of power, and unilaterally disarm?

Yes I would.  Even pragmatically, I think Coulport is an accident waiting to happen.  There has always been the possibility of detonation by mischance – a computer glitch (Failsafe), a terrorist heist (Thunderball), a rogue general (Dr Strangelove).  Add to these now the curse of our own age, managerial pseudoscience as purveyed by IT enthusiasts in sharp suits.  It’s about rebranding the CASD to keep our feet under the Top Table and lead the world going forward.  Yah yah yah.

BOOM!