Author: jamescalumcampbell

Have you ever been to a state banquet?  I have; twice, after a fashion.  When I was in New Zealand I was for a couple of years the National Medical Advisor to the Order of St John, which sounds very grand, but I was essentially advising the ambulance service on the training of first aiders. During my brief stint I edited the 2^nd edition of the New Zealand First Aid Manual, the authorised training manual of the Order of St John.  Anyway the appointment was at the behest of New Zealand’s then Governor General, Sir Michael Hardie Boys, and I guess that was why I ended up, twice, in Government House in Auckland, at a swanky do.

Well I say swanky, but I can tell you it was nothing like the nosh-up in Windsor Castle for President Trump’s unprecedented second state visit.  Did you see that picture of the big long table, at which the great and the good on either side were separated by a huge floral arrangement of stunning opulence?  It must have made conversation, other than with one’s immediate neighbours, impossible.  By contrast, in Auckland we sat at circular tables each accommodating about a dozen people, and I was surprised on both occasions to find myself sharing a table with the G.G., and Lady Hardie Boys.  They were very charming, and Sir Michael seemed genuinely interested in my work.  I remember there were people present at these dinners, from all walks of life, and we all seemed to share a certain bewilderment that we had received the invitation at all. 

Much later, after I’d returned to Scotland, the Westminster Government appointed a New Zealand high court judge, Dame Lowell Goddard QC, as independent chair of an inquiry into institutional child sex abuse.  Allegedly, a paedophile ring operated within the City of Westminster.  When she was asked how she would cope with the British Establishment, she expressed a similar sense of bewilderment to that I’d encountered in Auckland.  New Zealand, she said, does not have an Establishment.  I thought then of my visits to Government House, and found myself in agreement.  New Zealand, or at least the Eotearoa of the end of last century, did not have an elite.  That is not to say that there weren’t posh schools, wealthy people, a thriving private health sector, and so on.  I even came across a few snobs.  But what there wasn’t, was an elite group so crème de la crème that it was essentially sequestered away from the rest of common humanity.  The gap between the rich and the poor, at least at the time, was relatively narrow.  (Well I say that, but I’m not Maori, nor Polynesian.) 

But if the state banquet at Windsor was anything at all, it was sequestered.  It was conducted, in fact, entirely behind closed walls.  Marine One touched down within Windsor Park.  The President and the First Lady were met by the Prince and Princess of Wales.  They proceeded through the park by horse and carriage, along a driveway lined by the military, but not by the public.  No doubt the security concerns were compelling.  But the President must have been more than satisfied with the resultant publicity shots.  Such Pomp and Circumstance.  Security would have remained top of the agenda throughout the ensuing banquet.  Nobody, after having had a few drinks, was going to heckle the president.  “I just want to set the record straight on a few things…”  The entire shebang took place within a cocoon, and was choreographed right down to the last pas de deux.  I thought the vast, groaning dinner table looked utterly absurd.  It was the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. 

But I for one am relieved that the whole event went off without a glitch.  I wouldn’t have minded so much a breach of etiquette, as a serious and violent incident.  There wasn’t even a lapse of manners.  No doubt the king was charming, and the president seemed to be on his best behaviour.  The question has arisen, was the Prime Minister merely being sycophantic, or did he play a blinder?  I’m inclined to think he did very well, up to a point.  He was polite and courteous.  He expressed differences of opinion, for example, concerning migration, global warming, and the Palestinian two-state solution, without recourse to disparagement or personal attack.

But I’m not at all convinced by the worthiness of the supposed economic prize.  All these Hi Tech Moguls came across on Air Force One and promised investments in British AI worth billions.  We will have once more and yet again the latest manifestation of the Dark Satanic Mills, huge factories consuming vast amounts of energy and cooled by oceanic amounts of water.  What will they be doing?  They will be trawling, or perhaps trolling, the internet, looking at absolutely everything, in order to discern a pattern.  We absolutely must get ahead in the tech race.  Bletchley Park gone mad.  We are creating, have already created, the next Dystopia.     

I will be eternally grateful for the thirteen years I spent in New Zealand.  I believe I witnessed the possibility, indeed the reality, of a society based on egalitarian values, a sense of community, an acknowledgment of the responsibility to look out for one’s neighbour.  That is not to say that bad things didn’t happen in New Zealand.  Of course not.  I saw them, at first hand, in the Emergency Department.  But this was broadly before the age of the internet.  Cell phones were in their infancy.  There were no social media.  People lived, and communed, in the real world.  People didn’t post messages anonymously, going viral, to suggest, for example – I kid you not – that illegal immigrants be gassed.  Who would have thought the road to Auschwitz-Birkenau was this short?   

I’m intrigued that the Far Right has taken to trumpeting Christianity as one of its “core values”.  In the wake of the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk, even President Tump has, unusually, started to invoke the name of “God”.  He has advised Sir Keir to bring the military on to the beaches, otherwise, the UK will be destroyed.  I can only imagine that he has not considered deeply the meaning of Christ’s Parable of the Good Samaritan.  This is a parable which turns our perception of reality on its head.  We are used to the idea of ourselves, from a position of power, lending succour – or not – to the poor and needy.  But the parable puts ourselves into the position of the person who has been attacked, robbed, and left for dead, and asks us to imagine that it is the despised outsider who comes to our aid.  We thus are called upon to identify the outsider as our neighbour.  I have a notion that now, somebody preaching such a doctrine would not get very far in today’s political climate.  How would Jesus fare if were alive today?

I think he’d be crucified.        

There was tremendous excitement in the scientific world last week with the discovery of some sort of echo of a shadow of a footprint of a fossil of a microbe from a few billion years ago on Mars.  Extra-terrestrial life!  This reminds me of a scene – I think from the film Poltergeist – when an investigator of the paranormal brags she once saw a kitchen utensil move a fraction of an inch in the absence of any apparent external agency.  She then opens the door to a room which really is in dire need of an exorcism, and is dumbfounded to find all the cluttered contents flying around in a perfect maelstrom.  I suppose the moral of the tale is that, if there really were something out there, we would know about it.

There are various theories as to why our satellite dishes have not, thus far, picked up any messages from afar.  One is that intelligent beings from elsewhere have taken note of our predilection to violence, and have decided to have nothing to do with us.  Who could blame them?  Another theory is that the tendency to aggression is, literally, universal, and that all civilisations self-destruct before they develop the technology to venture substantial light years abroad.  The universe is teeming with life, but incommunicado.  I believe there is an equation that calculates the number of civilisations there are, based on the number of galaxies, the number of stars therein, and the number of orbiting planets inhabiting the “Goldilocks Zone”.  The equation’s solution is a substantial number.     

My gut instinct, not founded on any logical construct, but purely visceral, is that we are entirely alone.  After all, we’ve been listening out for over a century now, across the wavelengths of fifteen billion light years.

Deafening silence.

Nary a cheap.

Probably just as well.  At least the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary don’t need to worry about a steady influx of alien immigrants from Alpha Centauri, paying exorbitant fees to Masters of the Universe in order to board obsolete and gimcrack spacecraft, quite inadequate to the task of passing by Jupiter and through the asteroid belt.  Stop the flying saucers! 

I attended a funeral last week.  Actually I attended two on consecutive days.  I think it was Bernard Levin who confessed that he could not quite get used to the recurrent disappearing act of his friends.  The funerals could not have been more unlike.  The first was in Dunblane Cathedral, and was extremely high.  We heard organ music by J. S. Bach, and Olivier Messiaen.  First Corinthians Chapter 1 was read in 17^th century prose in its entirety.  The psalmody was austere.

The second was in a new crematorium to the north of Glasgow.  The ceremony was entirely secular.  The celebrant was very warm hearted.  We heard Sinatra sing My Way, and Louis Armstrong, It’s a Wonderful Life.  Both ceremonies were very enriching, and the “afterwards” heart-warming.  Lovely purvey.

I’m a Glaswegian, but Glasgow is notoriously territorial, and you do not need to venture far in the city to get lost.  (Fortunately I had sat-nav, even if it did let me down in the end.  “You have reached your destination.  It is on the right.”  On my right was a field.  I had to ask a passer-by.  The crematorium was several fields to the north.  Close, but no cigar.)  Anyway I found myself driving north up Springburn Road in the direction of Bishopbriggs.  Through a working class area, mile after mile, the street lampposts carried saltires.  This had nothing to do with Scottish Nationalism, and everything to do with migrants and asylum seekers.  The rhetoric on social media is daily becoming more intemperate.  It is no longer “stop the boats”, but “sink the boats”.  And much worse than that. 

I dare say the saltires were being unfurled by the extreme right, but flying a flag is a bit like flying a kite.  Or like publishing a book.  Once it’s out there in the public domain, you no longer have any control over its meaning and purport.  The words may be your intellectual property, but the ideas are up for grabs.  The flags were positioned halfway up the lampposts, presumably because this was as far as the ladders would extend.  But it gave the impression of an array of saltires all flying at half-mast.  We were therefore in a state of mourning.  The flag is lowered to half-mast in order to give precedence to the death flag, which, while invisible, is there.

I suppose the two contrasting funerals served to emphasise two different ways of looking at the world, and the universe; the sacred way, and the secular way.  We may search for an underlying meaning, and purpose, to our lives; or we may say that life is inherently meaningless or, as Albert Camus might have said, absurd.  That same dichotomy comes up when we contemplate our position in the vastness of space-time.  We may ask, if we on this tiny blue speck are entirely alone, what could that possibly mean?  Or we may say that the very question is meaningless, and absurd.  Sometimes I have the feeling that deep space, and deep time, are merely an illusion.  Maybe the Spanish Inquisition had it right all along.  We really are, contrary to expectation, at the centre of the universe.  But then again, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. 

 But I can’t get terribly exercised about these deep philosophical questions.  Maybe it’s a lack of imagination on my part, but they don’t bother me.  It is the human condition to see everything through a glass darkly.  Doubt is, of itself, an article of faith.  I suppose I found some sort of resolution on Sunday evening, playing my viola in Stirling, in concert in The Church of the Holy Rude.  The acoustic was very forgiving.  I had a short solo.  It rang out across the tremendous space.  I said to the conductor afterwards, “Gosh, what a sound.  Was that me?”  She laughed and said, “Yes, it was you.”

We forgathered in St Michael’s Church in Linlithgow yesterday at 3.00 pm, The Antonine Ensemble, to rehearse for an evening concert.  Just at the downbeat, all hell broke loose with a series of stereophonic caterwauling wails echoing around the vast spaces of the kirk.  It was another dress rehearsal – for a putative national emergency.  All the phones had gone off, including the “phasers on stun”.  Not mine.  I’d deliberately switched mine off and left it in the car.  This was not of itself an act of non-compliance, but just my routine.  I never take my phone into concerts, even in switched off mode, for I just don’t trust it.  And I switch it off when I’m in a restaurant, and indeed at every social gathering.  I just have no desire to be connected.  I have no desire to fact-check something on the net halfway through my soup course, or to review my holiday snaps.  “Snaps”.  There’s a word.  Alan Bennett might use it. 

But I have to admit, even had I not been in company, I would have switched the damn thing off.  Just to be egregious, literally e grex, out of the herd.  I do not wish to be herded.  I do not wish “the authorities” to inform me, at least electronically, that I am in imminent danger of fire, flood, plague, pestilence, or terrorist attack.  It strikes me that this latest government wheeze is all part of a hidden agenda to inure us to the fact that we have all yet again donned khaki, and we must be ready to repel the invader.  A pox on their app. 

A decade ago, even a year or two ago, I would have written that without a care in the world.  But now I am conscious that putting something like that out into the public domain is not without its risks.  Maybe I’m contravening some public order legislation. Incitement to non-compliance, or something.  It’s hard to ignore the fact that the UK is gradually becoming more authoritarian.  We’re all going to carry ID cards.  Actually I have no particular objection to ID cards, because as a matter of fact – I’ve just conducted a quick inventory – I already have 19 of them in my wallet, not counting my Ground coffee loyalty card (other baristas are available).  What I object to is that apparently I have to have the ID on my phone.  It’s all a part of this gradual slide into a state of Total Digitalisation.  One’s presence in the Cloud is mandatory.  There is no escape from the catastrophic dystopia we have already created.

The fact that, yesterday at 3.00, even the mobiles on silent mode emitted a siren, is highly significant.  Winston Smith could turn the volume down on his telescreen, but he could not switch the device off.  There followed an explanation, given in emollient tones, that this was merely, on this occasion, a drill.  Who dreams up stuff like this?       

You make think I’m a Luddite, but actually I carried my first mobile phone in 1987.  It was the size of a brick, and resembled a walkie-talkie John Wayne might have used on Juno, or Omaha.  The battery was the size of a car battery.  I used it in New Zealand when I was on call to provide a liaison between Middlemore Hospital in South Auckland, and Auckland International Airport.  So I know a little about disaster preparedness.  There were three levels of call-out.  The first was purely advisory, and reported a potential hazard.  For example, an incoming 747 had shut down one if its four engines, a surprisingly common occurrence.  The second level indicated a more serious threat, and demanded my presence at the airport.  The assembly point was at a perimeter fence, near the Domestic Terminal, bearing the sign “Don’t park here ever”.  There I would park, and wait, with the emergency services, hopefully to be stood down.  We gathered there routinely when there was “purple airspace”, that is, when a Royal was flying in.  Why that specifically constituted a hazard I have no idea.  Maybe the Royal was at the controls.  The skies were cleared.  The traffic due for departure was kept on the ground.  Pilots, say, from American Airlines would call up the tower and ask, “What’s the problem?” – knowing perfectly well what the delay was due to, and no doubt wishing to cause a little discomfort.

The third and final echelon of call-out was, of course, for a crash.  In my ten years of undertaking this job, that only occurred once.  A freight plane on a night flight out of Auckland crashed in the Manukau Harbour, and I spent the night out on a boat while the frogmen dived where the aircraft wreckage was floating.  I had the melancholy task of declaring one of the two pilots deceased.  I remember that apart from a gash across the front of her shin, there wasn’t a mark on her body. 

Shortly after this, I was sitting on a committee in Middlemore tasked with revising the hospital Disaster Plan.  I was very conscious that at the time it was very underdeveloped.  One of the managers prepared a report suggesting that we were in a high state of readiness.  I pointed out that in fact the report depicted a scenario that was entirely divorced from reality.  But the report was ratified.  I think this was the first time that I came across the phenomenon of politicians (in the widest sense), managers, committee members, members of think tanks, Quangos, people in various ways divorced from the “coal face”, who would construct a plan, often in the form of an algorithm, which had no relationship to reality. 

This is why it is no damaging that so many of our politicians have attended elite schools, elite universities, and entered upon a research fellowship, sponsored by a political party, never once having suffered life’s vicissitudes, as they are suffered by the disadvantaged.  There was, was there not, an air of farce about last week’s latest “Cabinet Reshuffle”.  You go to bed one night as incumbent of one of the great offices of state, and you wake up in the morning as incumbent of another.  I have no confidence that the incumbents within the Westminster Bubble can recognise what a disaster is, let alone respond to it.                                       

Glyndebourne came to the Royal Albert Hall last Wednesday with Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (semi-staged, sung in Italian, with English surtitles).  The opera also came, so I’m told, with a health warning, or rather, what is known as a “trigger warning”.  The Marriage of Figaro depicts unwanted sexual advances, and aggressive behaviour.  Don’t say you weren’t told.

Such premonitions can rouse feelings in the audience ranging from mild amusement, to unabashed hilarity; from irritability, to frank outrage.  It’s health and safety gone mad I tell you.  What a snowflake society!  But such warnings are not new.  For as long as I can remember, the BBC has advised that some programmes “may disturb those of a nervous disposition”.  Quatermass and the Pit. 

Still, perhaps the opera world has gone a little far on this occasion.  The Royal Opera House is warning the Tosca audience, not that Puccini’s opera depicts torture and execution, which it does, but that the interval bell, summoning people to their seats, is frightfully loud.  And apparently people can be threatened by the sound of applause.  It is suggested that clapping be replaced by silently holding one’s hands in the air and gyrating them, a procedure that would certainly scare the hell out of me. 

I’m not unduly exercised about trigger warnings.  I knew, and respected, somebody who would never listen to Mozart’s Cosi fan Tutti because the opera seems to encourage infidelity.  It never bothered me.  But then I can’t speak Italian.  But if the truth be told, when it comes to opera, I’m completely philistine.  The plots are frequently such a tangled web as to be unfollowable; and besides, they last for ever.  I really can’t see me going back to hear Götterdämmerung again.  I sat in agony in a very uncomfortable seat in the gods of Glasgow’s Kings Theatre for five hours.  Five hours!  Life’s too short.  Give me an orchestral concert every time.  Ninety minutes of music, with an interval. 

And I don’t really “get” recitative.  It’s the classical world’s version of rap.  It’s there to advance the convoluted plot, if you can be bothered.  I’d rather the cast just spoke the dialogue, as in Beethoven’s Fidelio.  Listening to recitative on the radio you can hear all these hackneyed modulations on the jangling harpsichord, against the background of thumps and bumps as people galumph about the stage.  I don’t think Ralph Vaughan Williams cared much for the harpsichord.  Didn’t he describe it as the sound of two skeletons copulating on a tin roof?  Or am I doing him a disservice?  But I shouldn’t be this dismissive.  Some opera I deeply admire.  Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle (tellingly, only in one act).  And I love Madame Butterfly, but I might hesitate to go to see it again.  It’s just too painful.  You see, it really needs to come with a trigger warning.  

I remember the late Sir Terry Wogan could be very dismissive of BBC announcements commencing, “If you have been affected by issues raised in this programme, you can seek advice and counselling by calling this number…”  But then Sir Terry was a national treasure and therefore could be as politically incorrect as he liked.  You might argue that issuing a trigger warning goes against the element of surprise that might be crucial to the impact of a play or a film.  Think of the notorious shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho.  The only advanced warning at the time was that the film was rated “X”, which meant it was horrific, or carnal, or both.  Psycho depicts a brutal murder made all the more horrific by the scything downbows of Bernard Herrmann’s string orchestra, sul ponticello, resembling the repeated stabbing actions of a knife attack.  What on earth would have been the reaction of the first audiences, who had no idea what was coming?  One can only imagine the voluble response of a community of people taking moments to digest and process what they had just seen, and then trying to settle down again.  Hitchcock must have anticipated such a reaction, because he allows time for the audience, with a series of silent shots focussing on Janet Leigh’s inert body on the shower floor, the bloodstained water trickling away.  It’s curiously beautiful.  A catharsis.

Something similar is evident in the Roman Polansky film of Macbeth.  Now there is a film that really ought to have come with a trigger warning.  It is a depiction of absolute evil, and when I recognised early on in the film that that was what it was going to be, I had to make up my mind whether to get up and leave, or stay the course.  I stayed the course.  I’m glad I did, because I think that I garnered some inkling of what Aristotle meant by “catharsis”, the purgation of pity and terror.  Towards the end there is a lightening of atmosphere, literally.  The outdoor sets acquire greater natural light. 

I wonder why the daily news doesn’t come with a trigger warning.  After all, especially these days, it’s pretty bad.  Granted we may be pre-warned about some particularly graphic piece of television footage of an act of violence, or its aftermath.  But the newsreader does not say, “You may not wish to hear about the overnight attacks in Kyiv, or the relentless bombing of Gaza City.” The facts are allowed to speak for themselves.  That is not to say they are not sometimes concealed, no doubt more often than we know, for political reasons.   

So I guess trigger warnings have a place.  But you may easily see how they could get out of hand, and lose potency.  Like crying “wolf”.  The second movement of Haydn’s Surprise Symphony contains a surprise.  You have been warned. 

A sociable week, just gone, with friends who have remained friends since the 60s.  Sometimes I have a feeling that time, the passage of time, is an illusion, and that in some sense I struggle to define, or articulate, everything is here and now.  Perhaps this is what T. S. Eliot was banging on about in Burnt Norton, the first of the Four Quartets, time being “eternally present”.  We dined together in Glasgow, we who have been making music together for more than half a century.  One of the party was off the next day to Ireland to visit family.  I raised a glass and said, “Calm seas and a prosperous voyage.  How long does it take?”  He shrugged.  “Couple of hours.”  Our host quipped, “I thought it was about 10 minutes.”  Musical joke.     

En passant, I popped into the Scottish Antiques Centre near where I live, and inevitably emerged with three books under my arm, vowing to move on three other books by leaving them in the village phone box which has become a book depository.  What did I get?

For Whom the Bell Tolls.  Not the original John Donne No man is an island.  Not Hemmingway’s Spanish Civil War novel.  But, as the subtitle says, “Light and Dark Verse by Martin Bell” (Icon Books, 2011).  That explains the somewhat unoriginal title.  It took me a while to figure out it was a play of words on the name Bell, the man in the white suit.  He was a BBC war correspondent, then an independent MP, and also, as the book reveals, something of a poet.  I think the poems are terribly good.  I suppose some people would describe the verse as doggerel, and perhaps the poet as poetaster, but I think there is a power here, characterised by a journalist’s plain speaking and lack of obscurity.  He uses all sorts of forms: “quatrains, couplets, a sonnet, a ballade, limericks and even a clerihew.”

Clerihew?

Chambers – a humorous poem that sums up the life and character of some notable person in two short couplets (started by E. Clerihew Bentley in his Biography for Beginners, 1905).

Bell’s clerihew has Tony Blair as its subject, and is not terribly complimentary.  Neither is the more substantial Principal Witness, on the same subject.  I think through his experience as an independent MP Martin Bell became thoroughly disillusioned with the mother of parliaments.  He was there during the expenses scandal.  Bell wrote his first poem when he was 19, and then not another one for more than 50 years.  This is what happens when you get absorbed in a profession.  Where does the time go? 

Talking of 50 years, on Saturday I went to a Golden Wedding luncheon in St Andrews, of some dear friends of mine.  Their wedding in Perth seems like yesterday.  I played my viola there while they signed the register.  Unaccompanied Bach.  I wonder now I had the nerve.  The golden anniversary was a sweet occasion.

I was playing my viola again yesterday in Polmont, with the Antonine Players, a string ensemble.  We are rehearsing for two concerts in September, in St. Michael’s Parish Church, Linlithgow, and again the following week in the Church of the Holy Rude in Stirling.  Mozart, Vivaldi, Rutter, Walton, and Skalkottas.  Like the golden wedding, here is another link with the past.  The Vivaldi Concerto in B minor for 4 violins was, as far as I remember, the first piece of music I ever took part in, as a public performance.  That’s well over 50 years ago.  The music is fantastic.       

Second book under the arm: Nevil Shute, The Rainbow and the Rose (Heinemann, 1958).  You know you have a problem when you start buying books you already own, and have read.  Stop me if I’ve told you this before.  I think I’ve already blogged about the occasion I picked up a paperback copy, from Toppings in Edinburgh, of this, the one book that was missing from my handsomely bound Edito-Service S. A., Geneva edition of the complete works.  But this one is a first edition, in good condition.  I’ve already moved the paperback on.

I’m fond of Shute.  Like Martin Bell, he had another profession, that of aeronautical engineer.  You can read all about it in his autobiography, Slide Rule.  The title says much.  He belonged to the pre-computer age, a different time captured so wistfully in his books.  I’m always interested to read fiction written by people with a hinterland.  John Buchan.  Ian Fleming.  They have life experience. 

Third book under the arm: Jane Wilhelmina Stirling (1804 – 1859), the first study of the life of Chopin’s pupil and friend, by Audrey Evelyn Bone (printed by Starrock Services, Chipstead, Surrey, 1960).  A signed, limited edition.  So interesting to read about Chopin’s time in Scotland, with descriptions of Chopin’s recitals in Glasgow and Edinburgh, respectively in Merchants’ Hall in Hutcheson Street, and in the Hopetoun Rooms, venues that still exist today.  The reviews from the Glasgow Herald, and The Scotsman, were, are, remarkably perceptive. 

Chopin enjoyed the hospitality of the Scottish aristocracy especially in and around Dunblane.  There is mention in the book of the Leighton Library, which houses some very old and very rare first editions.  I’ve never visited, but in Dunblane Cathedral yesterday I chatted with a Leighton curator, and have promised to drop by.

Also in the cathedral yesterday, Kevin the organist played as a prelude Modest Mussorgsky’s “Promenade” and “The Old Castle” from Pictures at an Exhibition; and then, as a postlude, of course, “The Great Gate of Kiev”.  It was no accident that that should have been played on the anniversary of the liberation of Ukraine from Soviet Russia in 1991.  Where has the time gone?  And what the devil has happened in the interim?  Mark Carney, the leader of the Western World, was present. 

But it does one good to avert one’s gaze from the constant Doomscroll.  I’ve had a very pleasant week, a week of fellowship.  As ever, I eschewed social media, totally.  You may say, a chronicle of small beer.  But better that than a kettle of stinking fish.    

On Saturday evening in the Royal Albert Hall, the Aurora Orchestra performed Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, as part of the BBC London Proms.

From memory.

A prodigious feat.

They’ve been doing it for some years now, and, if memory (sic) serves me right last year they even played The Rite of Spring by heart.  To date I’ve been a little sceptical about the whole enterprise.  I mean, like, what’s the point?  I thought of it as a parlour trick, a gimmick.  On Saturday the performance was preceded by “a musical and dramatic exploration” of the symphony.  I confess I gave it about a minute.  I would have much preferred a pre-concert talk to a dramatization, perhaps in the preferred format of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, of a dialogue between conductor and a member of the orchestra.  But the musical and dramatic exploration was too reminiscent for me of another Radio 3 programme, Words & Music, which each week explores a theme through the juxtaposition of music and the spoken word.  Next to the unadulterated music, the thespian luvvies always sound so hammy.  Anyway I switched off.  If I sound a little jaundiced put it down to Shostakovich 13, Babi Yar, which was performed the previous evening at the same venue.  Shostakovich 13 is a setting for bass solo, and orchestra, of words by the poet Yevtushenko.  Its first movement depicts the horror of the Nazi massacre of Jews during the Second World War in, of all places, Kyiv.  Even this late in Shostakovich’s career, the Soviet authorities tried to suppress the 13^th Symphony.  They wanted to depict Babi Yar as an atrocity inflicted upon the entire Russian people, rather than the Jews.  Several bass soloists were leaned on, and pressured not to take part, and who could play them?  At last one held his ground, as did the conductor.  You can read all about it in Time’s Echo, by Jeremy Eichler.  All of that might have been worth a pre-concert talk.    But maybe I’m Shostakovich-ed out.  Like Mahler, he has become the darling of the concert-going audience.  But I promised to switch on again after the interval and hear the fifth symphony.

I would say I know it well.  I first heard it in concert when, following the tragic fire in the St Andrew’s Hall, the beleaguered RSNO were playing in a run-down Glasgow cinema, the Gaiety, in the middle of a sea of mud that was the building site of the M8 which, for better or worse, cut a swathe through the heart of Glasgow.  So that must have been late 60s, early 70s, when Shostakovich was very much in the land of the living.  I remember, of course, the arresting opening, and the first movement’s serene melody’s first exposition in the first violins’ high register.  At the time, in the west, Shostakovich was far from the mainstream figure he was shortly to become.  But shortly afterwards I got the chance to play the symphony.  I recall we performed it in Glasgow University’s Bute Hall.  There is no better way of learning a piece of music, one might even say, by heart. 

In the event, I was greatly taken by the Aurora Orchestra’s performance on Saturday evening.  Maybe there’s something to this business of playing from memory after all.  Even with vast forces present, it sounded like chamber music.  An intense collaboration.

It’s not without its risks.  I suppose jeopardy must partly be the attraction for the audience.  A high-wire act.  I once attended a piano recital in the Perth Concert Hall given by Mitsuko Uchida.  She played the last three Beethoven Sonatas, Op. 109, 110, and 111, not only from memory – de rigueur in the case of a concert pianist – but also as a single entity, without interruption.  That has become another gimmick in the concert world, the amalgamation of disparate pieces.  I’ve heard Sibelius 7 follow Sibelius 6 without a break, and I’ve with increasing frequency being hearing works by different composers being run together, for example Berg’s 3 pieces running straight into Webern’s 6 – a car crash if ever there was one.  So when Madame Uchida presented Ops 109 – 111 as a single piece, I held my breath.  The last time I’d heard her play, in the same concert hall, she had again performed Beethoven, the Sonata in A Op. 101, and then the next sonata in the catalogue, the towering Sonata in B flat, für das Hammerclavier, Op. 106.  During the last movement of the Op. 101, there was a power cut.  Mitsuko Uchida carried on playing in the pitch dark.  But when it came to the fugue, she had to stop.  She said in a characteristically Japanese whisper, “I cannot play the fugue in the dark.”

So she might have suspected that gremlins were lurking in Perth.  Sure enough, during the last movement of the Op. 110 – another fugue – she had a memory lapse.  It was as if she had taken a wrong track in a dense forest, and she was trying to improvise a way back.  Even, perhaps especially, for a listener, it was a remarkably discomfiting and unnerving experience.  She had to stop.  So I’m always happy to see music stands on the concert stage, even if they are only there for an emergency.   

The hoopla surrounding Shostakovich 5, no doubt a cause for dramatization, concerns the extremely negative reaction by Stalin to the “formalist” fourth.  Shostakovich had to produce “a Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism” otherwise he could expect the nocturnal knock on the door from the KGB.  He kept a suitcase packed ready for the occasion.  So the prevailing wisdom is that Shostakovich was indeed performing a high wire act, by producing a work which would satisfy the authorities, while simultaneously driving its real meaning underground.  Is the apparent triumph of the symphony’s close ironic?  Nowadays its rendition is much slower, and more strident, certainly than it was when I first heard it in the Gaiety Theatre.  I suspect the idea that the mood of celebration is fake, is probably true.  Shostakovich’s music is often sardonic.  Perhaps it shares something with the pre-war Berlin cabaret music of Kurt Weill, a sense that all is not well, that all is not as it would appear.  We hear it again in the music of Alfred Schnittke.  A solo violin gives a beautiful rendition of Stille Nacht, ending on a grotesque dissonance.  If Shostakovich’s music sounds as if it was composed in a lunatic asylum, it’s probably because in essence it was. 

I wonder what Shostakovich would have made of the Alaska Summit, last week, and of the Oval Office meeting that is about to take place, as I write, today.  At least President Zelenskyy has support from several European leaders this time, but I’m not sure how the meetings will be structured, or whether Zelenskyy will need to brave the lions’ den alone, before the others join him.  Moreover, I see J. D. Vance has just finished his holiday in Ayrshire and left Scotland, flying out of Prestwick on Air Force 2.  So it’s conceivable we could have a re-run of that frightful interview earlier in the year.  When Stalin died in 1953 – on the same day as Prokofiev – Shostakovich must have breathed a sigh of relief.  You can hear it in the last movement of the tenth symphony.  Now he might say, “Here we go again.”  I wonder if Mr Putin admires Shostakovich.

My favourite Shostakovich Symphony is his last, the 15^th.  It is full of quotations, ironies, quirks, and, like the viola sonata, a sense of finality, even of impending death.  The metronomic use of percussion at its close is mesmerising.  The clocks are ticking.           

Up with the lark on Sunday morning to drive 120 miles to Aberdeen for lunch.  A 240 mile round trip for lunch may appear excessive, but I can assure you the tapas was quite, quite non-pareil.

The roads between Stirling and Aberdeen are good.  It’s about the only substantial trip you can make in Scotland on roads that are “dualled”.  Barring the unforeseen, it’s a two hour trip for me door-to-door, if taken non-stop, without causing offence to the average speed cameras.  If however you hang a left at Perth and head for Inverness, the road intermittently narrows.  The proposed dualling of the A9, politically, has become a festering sore, reminiscent of the traffic light at Pulpit Rock, Loch Lomond-side, which held up the northbound traffic out of Glasgow for about half a century.  Fortunately at Perth I hung a right, and proceeded in the direction of Dundee.  Admittedly the road narrowed to a single lane due to roadworks, but it was still too early for the traffic to have built up.  I whiled away the time listening to BBC Radio 4.  The Sunday morning service came from Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh.  The festival is in full swing.  I was in Edinburgh a few days ago and I don’t think I have ever seen the Royal Mile so mobbed.  But escape from the Old Town and cross the Meadows, and you would never know there was a festival on.

Morning service took me to Dundee and was shortly followed by Broadcasting House.  I caught up with the news.  Listening to the news is a bit like virtual “Black Tourism”, or “Doomscrolling”.  I can only take it in small doses.  So President Putin is going to meet President Trump in Alaska.  That surprised me.  Maybe somebody will take out a citizen’s arrest on President Putin, though I doubt it.  Perhaps Putin will say to Trump, “You know, Donald – may I call you Donald? – Alaska used to belong to us.  Coming here, I see and feel the remarkable similarities with Kamchatka.  It really falls within our sphere of influence.  It is, after all, quite separate from the rest of the United States.  So we are going to take it back.  That may shock you, but you need to understand it within the wider historical context.  You on the other hand should feel free to take Canada.  We wouldn’t interfere with that.  And Greenland?  I’m not sure.  Perhaps we could make a deal.”

That may sound absurd, but I would guess it’s pretty much how things will go, except that the territory at issue will be Ukraine.  The two Big Men will carve the place up.  There will be swaps and exchanges – it’s very complicated.  Meanwhile President Zelenskyy, who has skin in the game, has not, at least at time of writing, been invited.  The Great Powers have been drawing lines on the map like this for centuries.  When Foreign Secretary Balfour drew up his Declaration in 1917, I don’t think he consulted much with the Arabs.  And look where we are now.

Talking of foreign secretaries, David Lammy has been entertaining J. D. Vance, et famille, at his grace and favour pile, Chevening, in the Cotswolds.  There’s even a rumour that J. D. may come up here, specifically to Ayrshire, though not to Trump Turnberry.  Maybe the President talked up “Scahtland” to the Vice-President.  I wish him a happy holiday, but I can’t forget that dreadful audience endured by Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, when he was berated for not expressing sufficient gratitude, and was told his opinion was worthless.  “You don’t have the cards.”  Now they’re doing it again, by cutting Zelenskyy out of the Alaska talks.  That is why, it seems to me, the talks will break down, and President Trump will need to wait a little longer before receiving his Nobel Peace Prize.

But enough doomscrolling!  I stopped at Foinavon, north of Dundee, for coffee and a glance at the Sunday Times.  They are featuring extracts from Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir Frankly.  I’ve said it before: one word titles are all the rage.  Radio 4’s recent series about the HS2 scandal (infinitely worse that the dualling of the A9 scandal) was entitled Derailed, and even as I write, there’s a programme on about tourism in the Persian Gulf – Engulfed.  The people who make up one word titles don’t seem to realise that they have become a cliché.  With respect to Frankly, somebody wrote into the Herald the other day and said, “Frankly, I don’t give a damn.”  A cheap jibe.  Of course, the jibes on social media are infinitely worse.  No wonder Kate Forbes is not standing for re-election in Holyrood next year.

On to Aberdeen.  My Satnav took me to a high speed charger to top up for the return journey.  The Granite City was sparkling in the sunlight.  I sat outside, had another coffee, and did the Sunday Times crossword.  It’s a very good crossword.  Inventive.

To lunch with dear friends.  Truly scrumptious.

Here let us feast, and to the feast be join’d

Discourse, the sweeter banquet of the mind;

Before I knew it 5 pm was fast approaching.  So I hit the road and took the journey in reverse.  Safe home by 7.15, despite a bit of gridlock between Dundee and Perth, but I listened to Pick of the Week.  Len Pennie the Scottish poet (see poyums) was wandering around the Edinburgh Festival and picking highlights.  An eclectic selection!  It was very nice to hear Scots vernacular on Radio 4.  People still make assumptions about intelligence based on accent.  I’ve been reading Born to Rule, the Making and Remaking of the British Elite, by two professors of sociology, Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman (the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2024).  Has the British elite changed its character over the years?  The book examines over 125,000 entries in that great historical directory, then and now, of people in the UK who have “made it” – Who’s Who.  They also looked at the changing tastes of people appearing on Desert Island Discs.  Whether such academic approaches in the world of sociology are sound, I wouldn’t know.  With respect to the education of the elite, The prevalence of the Clarendon Schools, particularly Britain’s nine most elite schools – Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Merchant Taylors’, St Paul’s, Rugby, Shrewsbury, Westminster, and Winchester – thence on to Oxbridge, persists.

Believe it or not, I’ve been in Who’s Who.  Not the UK one, but in New Zealand.  Whether or not it still exists I have no idea.  My stint in the RAF Volunteer Reserve, courtesy of UGSAS, the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde Air Squadron, was listed as “military service” – much to my father’s amusement.  Back here, I’m not sure how represented Scots men and women are in Who’s Who.  Perhaps we should have a separate edition – Wha’s Wha.

Gordonstoun, the exclusive school in Moray (the king is an alumnus), has just bought 17 brand new Steinway pianos.  They don’t come cheap.  A Steinway concert grand takes over a year to build and may cost well in excess of £100,000.  I dare say the pianos purchased by Gordonstoun will not all be nine feet long, and surely the school got a discount and a good deal for a job lot.  But still, they must have cost a pretty penny, at a time when many state schools are struggling to afford books, jotters, and a lick of paint.  I gather Gordonstoun is off-loading all its old pianos onto neighbouring schools – the trickle down effect. 

It all serves to bolster the idea that music, classical music, is for the prosperous.  You only need to look at the ads in the current BBC Proms brochure.  Winchester Cathedral (be a chorister), Alleyn’s, City of London School for Girls, Wellington College, The King’s School Canterbury, Knightsbridge School, Westminster Abbey Choristerships, Brighton College, The Pilgrims’ School, Dulwich College, City of London School, Merchant Taylors’ School, Rugby…  Young talent can be nurtured by EFG Private Banking, and, at the other end of life, world-class, personal healthcare can be offered by King Edward VII’s Hospital, Marylebone.  It’s all there in the brochure.  But mainly the ads are for schools.  You can read the same thing north of the border. Periodically, The Herald publishes a series of ads for private schools in Scotland, featuring pictures of young people in a state-of-the-art laboratory, wearing safety spectacles, engrossed in a scientific experiment; or out in the rugby field (the playing fields are enormous), learning team spirit and esprit de corps; and most of all in the school orchestra.  First and second violins, violas, celli, basses, harp, flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets, trombones, and percussion (this sounds like an outline to Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra) all represented.  Something for everyone, and another chance to learn, literally, how to act in concert, while forming lifelong friendships and enthusiasms.  Without doubt these ads are effective.  Even the tone-deaf parent will recognise networking (that which Jane Austen termed “useful connection”) when they see it, if not hear it.      

I don’t knock it.  But I’m sorry that classical music seems to be becoming more exclusive.  It wasn’t always thus.  There was, for example, a golden age in Glasgow when music tuition was free to everyone.  I was handed a viola, and received lessons from a brilliant player in the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.  I attended summer schools, free.  There were three Glasgow Schools’ orchestras, as well as ensembles for brass, wind, and jazz.  When I left school and went to university I had the enormous privilege of becoming the viola tutor in the Glasgow Schools Third Orchestra.  Some of the young people who came through went on to have very distinguished musical careers.  Much of this has gone.  Instruments and tuition are no longer free, therefore beyond the reach of many.  I guess with austerity, when the city fathers told us we all had to tighten our belts, music was the first thing to go.  It was, so it was said, a luxury, an adjunct.  Nowadays a young person is much more likely to be handed a tablet, than a violin.  A violin is very nice, but it’s not “value added”.  It won’t “create wealth”.  Of course the private schools know this is not so.  They make music an integral part of the school ethos.   

But it can be remarkable how the musically gifted will find a way, no matter the disadvantages of their starting point.  A couple of weeks ago I attended a recital in Dunblane Cathedral, the inaugural concert of the newly established Three Rivers Festival, given by the extraordinary young Scottish pianist Ethan Loch.  He played a varied romantic programme of Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, Debussy, as well as a suite of his own (he composes) which I found rather reminiscent of Rachmaninoff.  When he plays, he himself sounds a bit like Rachmaninoff the pianist.  His encore was an improvisation.

And the disadvantage of his starting point?  Ethan Loch has been blind from birth.  His achievement defies comprehension.  How could he possibly have learned these pieces?  Well, he learned them first, by listening to them.  He is the ultimate exemplar of somebody who plays “by ear”.  But even putting an impediment aside, his performance was remarkable.

He didn’t play a Steinway.  It was a Bösendorfer.  Other brands are available.                                 

Mr. Netanyahu tends to express anger when journalists suggest to him that the Israeli Defence Force is not appropriately exercising a duty of care over the two million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip.  Apologists for the Israeli Government come on to the Today Programme, or PM, on BBC Radio 4, to suggest that plenty of aid is entering Gaza, but that the United Nations are failing to distribute it, but rather allowing Hamas to steal it.  Such assertions are in stark contrast to the eye witness accounts of aid workers on the ground, from such highly respected organisations as Médecins Sans Frontières, or Save the Children.  In any case, representatives of the Israeli government indulge in a spot of whataboutery.  What about Dresden?  What about Stalin’s appropriation of Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War?  The West tended to blame all of that on Hitler.  I have a notion that invocation of the spectre of the Führer is seldom helpful in the promulgation of any topical geopolitical argument.

The trouble is, Israel does not allow international journalists access to Gaza.  It’s a war zone, too dangerous.  Heaven forfend they are not allowed entry in case they report the truth.  Of course, Gaza is not really a war zone in the conventional sense, war being a state of hostility between two (or more) states.  Rather, this might be described as a “war on terror”, George W. Bush’s expression that led to Afghanistan, and Iraq.  Israel wishes to destroy Hamas.  Any collateral damage is unfortunate. 

But here is another piece of whataboutery.  Throughout the Troubles, the IRA used violence as a tool in pursuit of the goal of a united Ireland.  They never carried out a single act as atrocious – at least in terms of scale – as that of Hamas’ attack, murder, and abduction of Israelis on October 7^th 2023.  On the other hand, they did attempt to wipe out the entire British government by detonating a bomb in the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the 1984 Tory Conference.  On February 7^th, 1991, they fired three mortar rounds at 10 Downing Street, in an attempt to assassinate John Major and his Cabinet.  Brutal acts were carried out on both sides.  Remember Bloody Sunday in 1972.  26 unarmed protestors were shot in the Bogside, Derry.    

But what the British government did not do was indiscriminately bomb Catholic enclaves in Belfast. 

In its reportage, Mrs Thatcher insisted the BBC use an actor to dub the words of Gerry Adams, so as to deny him “the oxygen of publicity”.  At one time, subsequent political developments would have seemed inconceivable: the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the rapport between Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, Her Majesty shaking hands with Mr McGuinness, visiting the Republic and addressing the Irish President in Irish Gaelic. 

It is said that the pictures of dehydrated, emaciated, starving children on our television screens have shamed the Israeli government into calling a temporary ceasefire and opening up the borders to aid.  What they have also done has highlighted the pusillanimous nature of our international institutions.  There has been much hand-wringing, but little by way of positive action.  Surely it is possible for the free world to avert a human catastrophe.  Where there’s a will there’s a way.  Remember the Berlin Airlift.  But we seem to have lost our capacity for concerted action, both at home and abroad. 

It seems to me that the United Nations needs a radical makeover.  Its centre of power is based on the way of the world as it was in 1945.  Now, the permanent Security Council comprises the USA, Britain, France, Russia, and China.  It is no coincidence that these are all nuclear powers.  Might is right.  Yet they are in a minority.  Of over 200 nation states, only nine have the bomb.  People who feel themselves to be powerful inevitably develop a sense of entitlement; they tend to throw their weight about.  Look at President Trump.  He thinks it’s okay to touch down on Scottish soil, alight from Airforce One, and lecture us on our wind farms, and immigration policy.  It would be like Keir Starmer going into the Oval Office and telling Trump to fix the US gun laws by cancelling the Second Amendment, then re-establishing the Gulf of Mexico.  I think he would be told to mind his own bleeding business.

Blessed are the peacemakers.  There is a lot of talk just now about NATO members increasing their defence budgets to 3%, and ultimately 5%, of GDP.  The Government is glooming us up seemingly for the imminent prospect of war.  We are to be on a “pre-war” footing.  The trouble with such prophecies is that they tend to be self-fulfilling.  Might it not be better to put all that sovereign wealth into the creation – or rather further development, for it already exists – of a United Nations peacekeeping force?  This would involve, to an extent, the voluntary relinquishing of a degree of sovereignty to an international body, such as it would have the power to identify a world crisis that has become intolerable, and do something about it.         

A month or two ago, whilst dining in the Lion & Unicorn, a friend of mine, who happens to be a dietitian, asked me if I were losing weight and, if so, was I doing it accidentally or deliberately?  I said yes, and assured her that it was quite deliberate; I was not, as far as I knew, suffering from a wasting disease, knock on wood.  My diet, if it can be called that, commenced last September when I was in Krakow.  It was hardly a punishing regimen.  I would take a substantial cooked breakfast in the hotel in the morning, and then walk it off with extensive treks around the Vistula, punctuated by boarding a tethered vessel for a beer, out on deck in the sunlight.  I had started at 76 kg, and it was my ambition to reach 70 kg (12 stone to 11 stone in old money), the weight I was when I was 21 years old.  As I am about 6 feet tall, this represents a drop in Body Mass Index (BMI) from about 23.5 to 21.6.  (My computer gives 22.7 and 20.9, but I think it’s including a factor for ethnicity.)  The BMI is one’s weight in kilograms divided by the square of one’s height in metres.  A BMI between 20 and 25 is regarded as normal.  If above 25, you are overweight; above 30, obese; above 40, morbidly obese.   It’s said the BMI is somewhat old hat; better simply to put a tape measure about one’s girth.

Anyway, this week I achieved target.  I was rather helped by the fact that for the past week I have had a stinking cold.  I lost my appetite, as well as my sense of smell, and taste.  Covid, you ask?  Well, I wondered too.  But the SARS-CoV-2 Antigen Rapid Test was negative.  Appetite suppression is a well-known strategy for achieving weight loss, and many therapies, both medical and surgical, are based upon it.  But I’m not sure whether Big Pharma has turned its baleful eye in the direction of the suppression of the sense of taste.  For the avoidance of any doubt, I’m not advocating the adoption of such a strategy.  What if the sense of taste never came back?  Litigation would ensue.   

Weight loss, or, for that matter, weight gain, is all about thermodynamics.  The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed.  It is a conservation principle.  Your weight will reflect the amount of energy you absorb, that is, your calorific intake, and the amount you burn, simply by living and breathing (the basal metabolic rate), and by exercise.  If you eat more and exercise less, you will gain weight, and if you eat less and exercise more, you will lose it.  No sophisticated dietary theory can gainsay that fact.

But I dare not be smug.  I wouldn’t underestimate for a moment the severe challenges that people who are morbidly obese face, especially when they grapple with their problem.  I’m not, I hope, “fat-ist”.  The most crass and tasteless fat-ist remark ever passed must be, “There was never a fat person came out of Belsen!”  The implication is that the ideal spa for the overweight would be a concentration camp.  (They seem to be all the rage, these days.)  We are much more inclined to accept that eating disorders resulting in BMIs well under 20 are deeply mysterious, and intractable.  They certainly can’t be solved by telling a young lady (or a young gentleman for that matter) to pull herself together and go and eat a Big Mac.  By the same token we should, at least, afford courtesy and compassion to the obese.

Still, I’m a little impatient with our political masters who are trumpeting weight reduction injections as The Next Big Thing.  I’m told half the green benches are occupied by people who take them.  They spend all day in the chamber, in committee rooms, or tearooms, glued to their smart phones and tablets, and they wonder why they are overweight. 

The relationship between thermodynamics and the diet industry is somewhat akin to the relationship between thermodynamics and the dismal science of economics.  In both spheres, we ignore the stark realties of thermodynamics at our peril.  I am convinced that the great crashes in economics that have occurred over the years, the South Sea Bubble, the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression, and more recently the crash of 2008, have resulted from a wilful denial of the laws of thermodynamics.  You imagine that you can create something out of nothing.  Plain Vanilla operations are supplanted by “exotic derivatives”.  You might imagine we would be chastened by the 2008 crash, but on the contrary our denial of the basic laws has moved on to a further level of sophistication.  Now, it seems to me, we are in defiance of the Second Law.  Let me explain.

For as long as natural philosophy and engineering have existed as sciences, cranks have been submitting designs to patent offices, of engines that self-propel indefinitely.  Of course none of them work.  Einstein thought that the Second Law – there is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine – was the most basic law in all physics, and the one least likely to be overturned.  In fact, to date, the Second Law has underpinned not only all the sciences, inorganic and organic, it has provided the foundation for all of our human communities and societies.  The ancient professions are all founded on the Second Law.  We have doctors and nurses because our bodies are falling to bits; we have criminal lawyers because we are corrupt; we have the clergy (at least, thus far) as our souls are mired in iniquity; we have educators because our minds are disordered, of not blank.  Even, perhaps especially, the trades are founded on the second law.  We have roofers and plumbers and joiners because, by the natural order of things, things fall apart.

But look what’s happened.  Many of our institutions, banks, insurance companies, retail outlets, haver attempted to become fully automated.  They are set up as perpetual motion machines.  Every human conundrum can be reduced to a series of drop-down menus, and every human solution can be produced by an algorithm.  The cranks who choose to defy the Second Law have even invaded medicine.  The doctor in your pocket.  Heaven help us.  This is why we spend our lives on the telephone, pressing the key pad and working our way laboriously through the menus; or on hold, listening to Pachelbel’s Canon.  Meanwhile the Fat (sic) Cats who have set up this Dystopia, are lying on the beach, like Alan Rickman’s character in Die Hard, earning 20%.

Life’s not like that.  Every human conundrum is unique.

I’ve always been interested in the Laws of Thermodynamics.  There are actually four of tem – 0, 1, 2, and 3.  It was James Clerk Maxwell who realised, retrospectively, that the notion, largely taken as read, that if say, a thermometer recorded the same temperature in system A and system B, then systems A and B had the same temperature, was actually an a posteriori rather than an a priori proposition.  It had to be proved.  This became the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics.    

The Third Law states that a temperature of absolute zero (0 K or -273 degrees C) can never be achieved, as such a condition of absolute stasis would allow us precisely to measure a particle’s position and velocity, in defiance of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. 

I have this fanciful notion that when populist political leaders measure the world, and pin it down, call it as it is, apparently say what everybody is thinking, and do so  through their own dogmatic lens, they defy Laws 0 and 3.  Bit of a stretcher, I grant.  Enough already.  I’m going for a walk.