Author: jamescalumcampbell

When the Prime Minister made his sojourn to Scotland last week (former First Minister Henry McLeish called it a “safari”), he inevitably commented on the possibility, or otherwise, of a second Scottish Independence referendum.  Some people think the sole purpose of the visit was to make such comment.  He said that wishing for a second referendum was like not caring what you eat, so long as you eat it with a spoon.

Aside from the spoon remark, Mr Johnson visited troops setting up a vaccination centre in Glasgow’s Castlemilk, and he went to Livingston to visit a pharmaceutical company preparing a new Covid vaccine.  The current First Minister was “not ecstatic” about the PM’s trip.  She might have reiterated the words often seen on billboards during the war: “Is your journey really necessary?”  In Castlemilk, the PM touched elbows with a soldier.  I am puzzled by this social nicety.  You can’t touch elbows and stay two metres apart.

I have been worrying over the spoon simile all week.  What could the PM possibly have meant?  What do the blind table d’hôte, and the choice of cutlery, signify?  Wondering if the analogy were some hackneyed cliché that has heretofore escaped my notice, I consulted the Millennium Edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable.  I looked up “spoon”.  Apparently a spoon is a simpleton, particularly one who is “spoony” in an amorous or sentimental way.  Perhaps Mr Johnson was implying that the Scots are sentimental about a culture, and nationhood, that no longer exists, if it ever existed at all, save on the lid of a shortbread tin, and that, left to their own devices, the Scots would open the tin, find it empty, and so they would have nothing to eat. 

On the other hand, you can be born – perhaps like Mr Johnson – with a silver spoon in your mouth.  This refers to the tradition of godparents gifting a silver spoon to a new-born child.  But there’s no point in having a silver spoon, if there’s nothing to eat.

There are various types of spoon.  There is the runcible spoon, and there is the wooden spoon.

They dined on mince and slices of quince

Which they ate with a runcible spoon.

The Owl and the Pussycat, Edward Lear (1871).

I gather from Chambers that quince is a globose, or pear-shaped fruit of the tree Cydonia oblonga, akin to the Japanese quince, Chaenomeles japonica, and somewhat different from Bengal quince, the bael-fruit of the tree Aegle marmelos.  Quince apparently makes good marmalade.  I have never knowingly tasted it.  “Runcible” is a nonsense word, but Chambers ventures to suggest a runcible spoon might be a sharp-edged, broad-pronged pickle fork.  But how useful would such an instrument be in the consumption of mince and quince? 

Then there is the wooden spoon – a booby prize, originally for the student who came last in the Cambridge mathematical tripos.  How cruel is that?  I sincerely hope the recipients ate their mince and quince with it, with pride.  The great Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy thought the competitive tripos system of cramming set back Cambridge mathematics by 150 years. 

Then there is the spoonerism, or metathesis.  One ludicrous juxtaposition comes to mind: pungent shafts of wit.  Mr Johnson has a reputation for passing remarks which some people find hilarious, others, deeply offensive.

Does any of this bring us any nearer to understanding Mr Johnson’s strange simile?  I think we must conclude that in this case the spoon assumes a kind of talismanic significance beyond its mundane utility, rather like the Stone of Scone, which is nothing more than a slab of rock; but because the Scottish monarchs were crowned upon it, it acquired mystic significance by virtue of what the Antiques Roadshow experts call “provenance”.  It was removed to Westminster, much as – some would say – the Elgin Marbles were removed to the British Museum.  (The stone plays a cameo role in a remarkable – almost Shakespearian – scene in the film The King’s Speech.)  Then in the early 50s an intrepid quartet of Scottish undergraduates removed it from Westminster Abbey and brought it home.  Currently (so far as we know) it is in Edinburgh Castle.  I have seen it, but I have also seen a replica in Scone Castle so who knows?  Maybe there are scores of stone slabs all over the British Isles claiming its identity.  “I’m Spartacus!”  Where were we?  Ah yes, the Spoon of Scone.  This runcible might also be compared with the Scottish Crown jewels, or Honours of Scotland.  After the Treaty of Union of 1707, the Scottish crown, sword of state and sceptre were seen as potent symbols of Scottish independence, and accordingly they were “disappeared”.  Sir Walter Scott was instrumental in rediscovering them, sequestered in a strongbox behind the locked doors of the Crown Room in Edinburgh Castle, where they are now on display, the oldest crown jewels in Europe.     

Mr Johnson’s spoon, it seems to me, is a kind of lampoon of a symbol of Scottish nationhood, which sentimental and gullible Scots will fall for, irrespective of the hard economic realities that will, or will not, put bread on the table.  When Oliver Twist, desperate with hunger after the pitifully inadequate serving of gruel, rose from his place and advanced to his master to ask for more, he had a basin and a spoon in his hand. 

I believe the spoon comment is Mr Johnson’s initial salvo marking his resolve to campaign for the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party in the run-up to the Holyrood elections in May.  Whether his involvement will be welcomed by the party, whether his participation will be efficacious or detrimental to his cause, remains to be seen. 

But watch out for more spoonerisms.      

Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart (Picador, 2020).

I received a copy of Shuggie Bain as a Christmas present, and I was particularly interested to read a first novel, set in Glasgow, written by a Glaswegian, that has won the 2020 Booker Prize.  “A novel of rare and lasting beauty”, said The Observer.  “A heartbreaking novel… both beautiful and brutal…  Tough, tender and beautifully sad”, said The Times.  There were further endorsements from the Booker Prize judges, and the New Statesman.  Already knowing that Shuggie Bain was all about Glasgow, addiction, and despair, I wondered about that.  Was this adulation from the middle classes a reflection of some kind of voyeurism?  Could a hedge fund manager from the City of London, or a teacher of creative writing at Yale, or even a privately-schooled lawyer residing in Glasgow G12, sitting in his conservatory perhaps reading one of these reviews while sipping a hazelnut latte, possibly empathise with the people in this book?  Would they not read it rather as an anthropologist might study a hitherto unknown tribe newly discovered in the Amazon?  These people would be entirely alien.  The Literati would read about them and discuss their way of life amongst themselves.  Isn’t that remarkable?  

But at the end of the day, I’m sure Shuggie Bain won the Booker because it really is a powerful and vivid depiction of the lives of people trapped in the cycle of poverty, addiction, and despair.  It’s a familiar scenario, and no doubt something similar could be encountered in any city in the world.  Of course Glasgow’s urban landscape, the wretched climate, and the dialect, all have their unique personality, but a reader in New York, or LA, or Sydney, or Auckland, will recognise the ubiquity of urban destitution, and the Glasgow “patter” will be no barrier; quite the contrary. 

The principal character in the book is not Shuggie, whose childhood life we follow for about a decade, but Shuggie’s mother Agnes, whose alcoholism is a kind of wrecking ball destroying everything it encounters.  The narrative is not entirely bleak.  Agnes has her better days.  There is Glasgow humour, but it is beyond dark; it is black.  I found myself caring for Agnes.  Was she going to get better?  Who knows, maybe she would have a kind of “Shawshank Redemption” and escape her prison.  I wanted her to, but I was always anxious for her, and I had a notion that everybody who cared for her would eventually up and leave.  In the end, does she stop drinking, or does she succumb, and lose everything and everybody?  I won’t say.  But I don’t think a spoiler alert is needed if I go so far as to say the last section of the book is cathartic.  I did indeed experience a kind of purgation of pity and terror.              

Shuggie Bain is beautifully written.  I was particularly struck by the originality of Douglas Stuart’s imagery.  Startling metaphysical juxtapositions.  I wonder why this Booker Prize winner has not received more fanfare in Scotland.  I suspect it might be because it is such a painful read.  Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, from Irvine in Ayrshire, herself a bibliophile, called it “A searing, brutal and deeply moving account of poverty, addiction, and childhood trauma”.  Searing and brutal, you may ask, like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, or Hardy’s Jude the Obscure?  Yes, all of that.  But, for me, much more.  You see, I come from Glasgow.  So when I first opened the book I thought to myself, I’m not sure I want to go through with this.  But I braced myself and I read it with an intense sense of familiarity and the sharp shock of recognition.  What a book to choose to read during lockdown!  I was depressed to my boots for about three days. 

Coincidentally, it came to light last week that in 2019 there were 1,264 drug-related deaths in Scotland.  This is the highest rate in Europe.  Nicola Sturgeon has called it a “national disgrace”.  Glasgow is the epicentre of this.  There is a district in Glasgow, just to the east of Glasgow Green, where the average life expectancy of a male is 54 years.  There is a hypothesis that there exists an unknown “Glasgow Factor” that contributes to the appalling morbidity and mortality statistics.  Perhaps it is multifactorial.  Maybe Shuggie Bain is a description of the Glasgow Factor.

Although the author denies that Shuggie Bain is autobiographical, he does admit he was very much writing from personal experience.  Douglas Stuart left Glasgow and went to the Royal College of Art in London.  Then he moved to New York.  He got out.

Does Shuggie get out?  You must read the book.  But brace yourself.        

Put my back out this week.  I gotta tell ya – my back is my Achilles heel.

How I did it was quite ridiculous.  I happened to read a letter in The Herald stating that “antidisestablishmentarianism”, 27 letters long, is the longest word in the English language.  “No it’s not!” I cried out loud. “It’s floccinaucinihilipilification!”  (28 letters).  And promptly wrote a Mr Know-it-all rejoinder to the paper.  I did make mention of “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” (34 letters) just to pre-empt any “Dr Campbell needs to wake up and smell the coffee” retorts.  It didn’t work.  The word thrown in my face was pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis (45 letters).  This is the sort of mindless banter we descend into for entertainment during lockdown.

I wish I hadn’t embarked on this wild goose chase.  I happen to have the Oxford English Dictionary, a vast tome and the last word in English usage, encapsulated in a single volume of considerable dimension and weight, which requires a magnifying glass to read (unless, as the daughter of a friend of mine demonstrated, you are 18 years old).  It was while I was manipulating this unwieldy volume that something in the lumbar region went twang.  Since then I’ve been wandering around like a half-clasped knife.

I did make a self-diagnosis – always a risky undertaking.  This was what we call a “mechanical back”.  Nothing to worry about.  All will be well.  I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve experienced an episode like this.  I associate it with poor posture and overuse of the computer.  I experienced many such episodes during my career as a GP but I always managed to drag myself out of bed (supposing it took an hour) and crawl into work.  Our physiotherapist would glance at me and say, “It’s gone out again, hasn’t it?” and she would give me an instant treatment which was balsam, at least for as long as it lasted. 

In hospital, the orthopaedic surgeons hated getting patients with acute back pain referred from the emergency department, because, by and large, they weren’t going to investigate them or operate on them, but merely give them tender loving care.  They would end up blocking a bed.  Now you might say TLC is not part of the orthopaedic remit.  I couldn’t possibly comment.

But I was always very careful with patients with back pain, both in the emergency department and in general practice.  I would go over them with a fine tooth comb, looking out for the dreaded cauda equina syndrome, the missed diagnosis that appears with bleak and monotonous regularity in the pages of the medical defence journals.  99% of the patients had mechanical back pain.  I would lie prone on the surgery floor and demonstrate the exercises aimed at restoring the lumbar lordosis.  Physician, heal thyself.

I have a notion that we doctors don’t really understand back pain.  After all, if we did, we might be better at fixing it.  It’s a bit like dyspepsia.  We used to think we knew what caused gastric and duodenal ulcers, and we performed heroic procedures like vagotomies and pyloroplasties and Billroth 1 and 2 partial gastrectomies.  Then, remarkably recently, an Australian physician showed that the causative agent was Helicobacter pylori and all you really needed was a week’s course of antibiotic.  Now if John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir, had lived in the antibiotic age, he wouldn’t have had to endure a lifetime of tummy ache.  Then again, we wouldn’t have had his creation, the American magnate policing the world on a diet of white fish boiled in milk, John Scantlebury Blenkiron.

But to return to pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis (an occupational lung disease, I presume, of volcanologists), it occurred to me to prolong the excruciating newspaper correspondence by coining a biochemical formula of the sort that can be more or less endless, like 2,3,dihyrdopolybenzoicethyleneglycolicorthopentocyclopentanobisblablabla….ene.  Or again, a German loan word.  The Germans have this great capacity for conjoining and amassing syllables.  They do it with numbers.  5,723,927 is fünf Millionen siebenhundertdreiundzwanzigtausendneunhundertsiebenundzwanzig.  Pithy.  But in the end, I let it go, maintained a dignified silence, shut down the computer, and went for a walk, which turned out to be far more therapeutic.

Now I read The Herald letters column and look out for the daily political diatribes from a well-known corpus of correspondents, guaranteed to make me splutter into my cornflakes.  The world is awash with anger.  Then my back starts aching again.  Maybe lumbago isn’t mechanical at all.  Maybe it’s all in the mind. 

It doesn’t do to splutter into one’s cornflakes.  Far better to read in an open-minded state of calm.  You never know; somebody might write so persuasively as to make one change one’s mind.  “I beseech you in the bowels of Christ,” said Oliver Cromwell, “consider that you might be wrong.”  But if not, and you are compelled to write back, better to do so respectfully, than to carp and snipe.  I saw a letter from a Diehard Remainer taunting the Brexiteers about the stinking fish on the lorries at Dover.  “Brexit going well?”

Ha!  That’s antidisestablishmentarianism’s floccinaucinihilipilification.

Time for another walk.          

There is something positively biblical about the last days of the Trump presidency.  I imagine him, holed up in the Oval Office, the phones silent, sensing his power slipping away as even his staunchest allies seek to distance themselves from him.  Looking out on to Pennsylvania Avenue perhaps he can see the bare-chested men with big beards and Davie Crocket hats, touting enormous semi-automatic weapons, but he can’t reach them as his Twitter account has been suspended, permanently.  On this side of the pond, prominent establishment people who once fawned over him now openly condemn him.  He is yesterday’s man.  Now they court Mr Biden.

I wonder if Mr Trump seriously believes that he won the election.  I think so.  If you believe, not that the truth is out there, that is, that the truth is an external reality which your own sense of self cannot bend to your own will and wish-fulfilment; but if you believe that that which you desire to be so must ipso facto be the case, then you believe that you hold within you the power to define the truth.  Toddlers believe they can bend the universe according to their own will, until they bruise themselves on inanimate objects, and discover there are other beings in the universe who operate according to a different agenda.  “The terrible twos” is the expression of rage which marks the realisation that the toddler is not, after all, omnipotent.  Mr Trump’s refusal to attend Mr Biden’s inauguration is childish and petulant, the toddler’s expression of rage.        

Perhaps delusion goes hand in hand with enormous power.  Is this why King Canute enthroned himself on the beach and ordered the tide to stop coming in?  I have a notion that the members of any exclusive establishment or élite are to some extent deluded.  They begin to believe in their own sense of entitlement.  They can shape the world according to their own will.  Make America great again.  Over here, we will make the UK “world beaters” by wishing it to be so.  Mr Gove passed that infamous remark casting doubt on the value of experts.  Why let hard facts get in the way of a good narrative? 

I believe one of the chief reasons why New Zealand did so well in eradicating Covid-19 was that New Zealand society does not have an élite.  The New Zealand parliament does not have a second chamber, an upper house.  There is no establishment.  When Jacinda Ardern closed the border last March and locked the place down, everybody complied because everybody knew they belonged to a community.  Of course the economy was going to take a hit, but New Zealanders are extremely self-reliant people and they were never going to starve.  (I heard Ian Blackford, leader of the SNP at Westminster, on Any Questions on Friday, say that the number of food parcels being handed out by food banks in South Skye and Lochalsh had increased from 25 per month in January to 180 per week in December.)  But in their reaction to Covid, the Kiwis were nimble.  There was none of the obscurity and obfuscation so beloved of la crème de la crème.  “Well, yes, we might try that of course, but it’s going to be very, very difficult…”   

No doubt 2020 was difficult in NZ.  During the pandemic, Ms Ardern owned up to a sense of Impostor Syndrome.  But then she cast it aside and thought, “Just get on with it.”  Élites are not very good at just getting on with it.  They are too bogged down in their own vested self-interests. 

Meanwhile the Trump presidency – unless the 25^th Amendment is invoked – has 9 days to run.  One thing we have learned in the last four years is that Mr Trump is a very unpredictable man.  I have a notion that he has one last trick up his sleeve, un coup de théâtre to unveil.  I wonder what it’s going to be.

I’m holding my breath.         

On Hogmanay in my local shop I was asked, “How are you bringing in the New Year?”

“Quietly.  A game of Scrabble, Horlicks, and bed by 9.30.”  In the event, I stayed up for the Bells, flicking between Jools Holland’s Hootenanny and Susan Calman’s show on BBC 1.  Sir Tom Jones is remarkable, as are Amy Macdonald and Hannah Rarity.  Hannah did not murder Auld Lang Syne.

Thence to bed.

At dawn on New Year’s Day I walked the two miles from my village to Flanders Moss, a nature reserve of great beauty, and tranquillity.  Me, the sheep, and the horses, we had the world to ourselves.  A beautiful winter’s morning.  There was a near full moon in the north-west, and I saw the sun rise over the Carron Hills in the south-east.  (Next time I saw the moon, in the evening, it was an enormous bright golden sphere rising in the east.)

Back home, I tuned in to the New Year’s Day concert from the Musikverein in Vienna.  Riccardo Muti was conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, before an empty hall.  That orchestra seems to be able to play the Viennese Waltz as nobody else can.  Before the traditional encore of The Blue Danube, Maestro Muti gave a speech, in English, reminding our world leaders of the healing power of music and the importance of nurturing culture.  Of his colleagues, he said, “We give flowers, not… things that kill people.”  Maestro Muti is in his eightieth year, though to see him you would hardly believe it.  When I was an LSO groupie I recall one of their first violinists saying to me, “Muti!  Bastard!  Absolute martinet!”  The spectre of Toscanini was summoned.  Yehudi Menuhin records in his memoirs that he rehearsed with Toscanini in his apartment at the Hotel Astor on Times Square, New York.  During the rehearsal, the phone rang – three times.  On the third ring, Toscanini rose from the piano, not to answer the phone but to disconnect it by heaving the electrical fitment off the wall in a tangle of wires, bits of wood, plaster, and dust.  This the sort of thing you can do if you are a Maestro.  

Well, I think Maestro Muti must have mellowed; his message was beautiful.  For the gig, he was put up in Vienna’s old Imperial Hotel which abuts the Musikverein.  He, and a handful of business men, had the place to themselves.  Muti said he felt like the hero in his own apocalyptic disaster movie. 

In Scotland, Saturday January 2^nd was a sombre day, being the 50^th anniversary of the Ibrox disaster.  2/1/71 was also a Saturday, and the traditional New Year Old Firm match took place at Rangers’ home ground.  It was by all reports a dull match played in dull and bitterly cold conditions.  It only came to life in the last two minutes, when Celtic scored, and then Rangers equalised more or less on the final whistle.  One all.  In high spirits but in good humour, a crowd of 80,000 dispersed. 

There was a crush on Stairway 13, a stairway at the north-east corner of the stadium leading down to Cairnlea Drive and thence to Copland Road, the nearest subway station, and in the space of just a few minutes 66 souls suffered death by asphyxiation or suffocation.  An early theory was that the excitement of the late goals had caused the departing crowd to turn back, but this theory was later discredited.  The event only took place after the final whistle had blown.

As with so many sombre events, the assassination of JFK, the murder of John Lennon, I remember where I was at the time.  I had been at Arlington Baths, and I had got on a bus on Woodlands Road, heading west – so a 10, a 10A, or a 59.  Somebody on the bus told me a major disaster was unfolding at Ibrox.  My father, being a policeman, was on duty at the ground.  It is a mark of my teenage zero emotional intelligence that I don’t recall thinking that this event would probably be the worst thing my father would ever have to deal with in his career.  I wish I’d had the gumption to express to him my sympathy and to offer what modicum of support I could.  But I guess I was just living on another planet. 

Die Wiener Philharmoniker, und ich, wünschen Ihnen… Prosit Neujahr!!! 

Last week I posted a particularly nerdish acrostic, and I was pleasantly surprised to be contacted by a couple of people anxious to have sight of the solution.  Ergo…    

Solution to Cascade

ACROSS

1 Christmas Factor

6 sonic

9 imp

11 reagent

13 spaghetti

14 erotica

15 elope

16 isotope

17 extravert

18 Aida

19 amber

22 airy

23 despotic

25 pasta

27 Britannica

30 turtleneck

31 pombe

32 limacine

35 ages

38 adopt

39 Tsar

41 isochrone

44 iambist

25 basil

46 aerator

47 non-linear

48 italics

49 yea

50 playa

51 Tatiana Romanova

DOWN

1 Chinese cabbage

2 surgical

3 stereotypical

4 astronaut

5 roadie

6 schoolmaster

7 nitrogenase

8 Crimea

10 proctor

12 academe

13 speed

20 spat

21 Shakespeariana

26 Haemophilia A

28 impedimenta

29 Noel

33 myristica

34 Neo-nazi

36 ghostly

37 charisma

40 sober

42 kidnap

43 street

The legend deciphered

The Cascade is based on the haematologist’s classical blood coagulation model, in which a series of molecules are sequentially activated, for example in response to trauma, to prevent blood loss by forming a clot.  Classically, 12 molecules were identified.  A thirteenth was later added.  They are activated in reverse order.  The initial trauma activates Factor 12.  Activated Factor 12 is Factor 12A.  12A activates Factor 11 to 11A which in turn activates Factor 10 to 10A, and so on.  (The current working model has become rather more complex.) 

To return to the legend:

13 clues form a CASCADE in diminishing order of solution length.  Each of these clues defines its own solution, and gives its length, in an inactive form…

These solutions are, in descending order:

Tatiana Romanov

Shakespearian

Churchillian

Haemophilia

Impediment

Britannic

Myristic

Charism

Erotic

Crime

Play

Aid

Ye

These solutions need to be “activated” before entry to the grid, by addition of the letter A.  Hence Tatiana Romanov becomes Tatiana Romanova, Shakespearian becomes Shakespeariana, and so on.  In addition, the clues defining these solutions also define the next solution in the cascade in its active form.  Hence, for example, the clue to erotic (14 across) must also define Crimea:

Nightingale theatre arousing to Eric (6).

The cascade is cyclical because the last clue in the cycle activates the first:

49 ac: You old Bond girl! (2)

“You old” is ye, activated to yea.  The Bond girl is from From Russia with Love.  Tatiana Romanova.

The most difficult two clues in Cascade are 1 across, and 26 down, because they require specialist knowledge.  Hack these, and you’ve hacked the whole thing.     

1 across:  9, protective against 26B (9,6)

Factor 9 in the clotting cascade is “Christmas Factor”.  If you lack Christmas Factor, you develop Christmas Disease, otherwise known as Haemophilia B.  Haemophilia A is Factor 8 deficiency.  “Weightless without women” is “eightless”.  “Encumbrances” defines the next solution in the cascade – Impedimenta.

I know what you’re thinking.  I need to get out more.   

I must apologise to you, gentle reader, for Cascade, yesterday’s cruciverbalist’s overindulgence.  I am searching round for any extenuating circumstance that might mitigate this appalling lapse.  All I can say is that this is the season of overindulgence.  You consume an enormous turkey roast (in our case, pork – me and Nigella Lawson) and settle down to a Christmas crossword puzzle of gigantic proportions.  Have another mince pie, ho ho ho. 

I especially apologise that Cascade is not particularly legible.  I used a specific software package to construct the grid, but it and my blog site weren’t talking to one another.  I was minded to pack it in, but then I was on a mission, damn and blast, and determined to find a way.  Well I got there.  Bit of a Pyrrhic victory you might say.  I don’t seriously expect anybody to solve this acrostic.  Nonetheless I will post a solution – if I can figure out how – come the New Year.  Perhaps I will enlist the help of a teenager who will click the mouse on a few icons and say, “There you go.  It’s intuitive!”

Still, I’d rather occupy the twilit zone twixt Christmas and New Year doing a crossword than reading the 1243 pages of the EU-UK trade deal.  That’s longer than The Count of Monte Cristo!  And I imagine a lot less gripping.  I think I’ll stick with the executive summery. 

Christmas is traditionally a quiet day, and this year, with the travel restrictions, unusually so.  I walked up Callander Main St at dusk and it was entirely deserted.  I half expected to see tumbleweed wafting down the centre of the road.  Boxing Day brought Storm Bella.  Charlotte Bronte would have said, “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day”, but with the same stubbornness that made me post Cascade, I got happed up, went out, and got soaked to the skin.  Invigorating!  We had a light covering of snow on Sunday morning.  It was a beautiful winter’s day.      

So where are we?  Fourth Night, I think.  I always remember that come January 2^nd, my mother would sigh with relief and say, “Thank goodness it’s over for another year.”  It’s traditionally a time of resolution, but who can now resolve to do anything, other than soldier on? 

An forward, tho I canna see,

I guess an fear!

But then while I was drying out and warming up after my encounter with Bella, I read, in one gulp, Viktor E. Frankl’s Yes to Life, In Spite of Everything (Penguin Random House, 2019).  Inspirational.  Dr Frankl makes a particularly powerful case against the idea of assisted suicide.  He speaks from a position of some authority.  He did after all survive Auschwitz.  Behind the wire, I don’t think I’d last a single day.  But who can tell?  We are taught to pray to be delivered from the trial.   

All you can do is that which you are supposed to carry on doing.  When I was a youngster I was full of resolutions, but now I only make one. Keep scribbling.                       

On this winter solstice evening I will cast a glance – weather permitting – towards the western sky and try to catch sight of the predicted close alignment of Jupiter and Saturn, to form an apparent star of unusual luminescence, not seen for four hundred years.  Whatever chaos reigns on planet Earth, it is reassuring to know that the majestic clockwork still ticks along over our heads.  These planetary bodies are like the Mississippi; they just keep rolling along.  Maybe this is what the Magi saw.

I was thinking of the Magi on Sunday evening while attending a Zoom ceremony of lessons and carols.  Sometimes on these occasions – though not on this one – you hear a recitation of T. S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi.  It is a remarkable poem, rich in imagery and symbolism.  But it is not a comfortable, far less a comforting poem.  On the contrary it is profoundly disturbing.  It closes with the expression of a death wish not unlike the death wish of another winter traveller, the protagonist of Schubert’s Winterreise, who pauses at a wayside inn, Das Wirtshaus, which is actually a graveyard.  The traveller enquires if there is any room in the inn.  Two songs later he observes a phenomenon of the heavens, much as the Magi may have observed Saturn-Jupiter.  Die Nebensonnen.  Ice crystals in the atmosphere refract the sun’s light to give an illusion that there are three suns – “mock suns” – aligned in the sky.  The traveller turns his back on them.

Im Dunkeln wird mir wohler sein.

I’d be better off in the dark.

Schubert’s forlorn lover travelled on foot, the Magi by camel.  We travel by Airbus A380 and we plan to travel by HS2.  The earth flashes by unseen.  It’s more a hallucination of travel, a kind of vertigo. 

Eliot’s poem seems to me to be the poem of this time, our time.  We can no longer be at ease in the old dispensation.  It has become clear even over the past twenty four hours that a vaccine is not likely to provide us with a quick fix for the predicament we are in.  The English Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said that the situation is out of control.  The Prime Minister’s bullish prediction earlier in the year that we would be back to normal by Christmas sounds more than ever like the predictions of August 1914 – Berlin this Christmas, then home.  In fact, if this thing only lasts for the duration of the Great War, we might count ourselves lucky. 

But surely the old dispensation is gone.  Surely we must not attempt to resume normal service.  Apparently not.  Last week the Supreme Court overruled the environmental objections to a third runway at Heathrow, and allowed planning to proceed.  HS2 is alive and well.  All roads lead to London.  Under the old dispensation, aeroplanes were taking off and landing at Heathrow every forty five seconds.  Why on earth would you want to cut this down to thirty seconds?  Why would you want to cut a swathe through the hedgerows of England just to get from Birmingham to London twenty minutes quicker, and make the journey sixteen times every hour?  I suppose it is because our beloved leaders are intent on making Britain great again.  London is a hub.  London is the centre of the world.  A “world leader”.  It does not seem to matter that casting an Airbus A380 into the air every minute is not compatible with the survival of the natural world, so long as we can get back to our old habits of conspicuous consumption.

There are these wonderful lines in Ben Jonson’s Volpone which exquisitely capture the death wish of the old dispensation:

…and could we get the Phoenix,

Though nature lost her kind, she were our dish.

Count me out. 

When a societal institution such as a school or a prison or a hospital is seen to be failing, the authorities, by which I mean the government, or a branch of government, or a government-appointed agency, moves in and places the institution under “special measures”.  The people running the show are either sacked or, perhaps more humiliatingly, rendered subordinate to a new dispensation.  (It’s like that scene in the movie Diehard in which the FBI descend upon the Nakatomi Plaza business tower block which has been taken over by the euro-gangster Alan Rickman.  The chief cop introduces himself to the Feds and says, “I’m in charge here.”  Special Agent Johnson (no relation to the PM) says, “Not any more.”)  So now the old guard need to do as they are told.  In the real world, the new directive from on high often takes the form a plethora of protocols under which the ousted and humiliated erstwhile seniority must cease to think creatively and merely carry out their allotted task by numbers.  They are required to stifle any initiative they may feel they have had, and function as cogs in a machine.  I say “plethora” deliberately, because the damning report that has come from the Royal Commission, or the independent judge-led report, may offer, and insist upon, a fantastic number, like three hundred and ninety six, or so, of recommendations.  

I wonder if the members of Her Majesty’s Government have any idea how close they are to being put into special measures.  It doesn’t matter whether you were a Brexiteer or a Remainer.  The idea of wrangling, for four and a half years, over the terms of the UK withdrawal from the EU, and at the end of that time coming up with nothing, is not merely unacceptable, or reprehensible, or damning, it borders on the absurd, the surreal, and the insane.

I think it was the F1 world champion Sir Jackie Stewart who once said that, while there are many people who can open a deal, there are very few who can close one.  In any walk of life, you need to be able to differentiate rehearsal and performance, training and racing, swotting for a test and sitting the test, debating and voting, coming to a decision, and enacting it.  The preparation is important.  In medicine, the doctor takes a careful history from the patient, carries out a physical examination, undertakes targeted investigations if necessary, collates data, reaches a diagnosis, considers how the diagnosis uniquely affects the patient, settles upon the proposed treatment, or management, of the patient’s illness, and then writes the prescription.  It has been a long and complex process, but in the end, the only thing that really matters is the prescription.  It doesn’t matter how elegant the consultation and diagnostic process has been; if you don’t decide on a treatment, and initiate it, the entire process has been futile. 

Of course doctors worry that their choice of treatment is misguided.  They may agonise over the decision.  They may confer with colleagues.  But in the end, that prescription still has to be signed off.  Failure to do so is an abnegation of responsibility and a tacit admission of utter failure, and defeat.

In terms of the current EU/UK negotiations, Michael Martin, Ireland’s Taoiseach, understands this.  He has said that an inability to get a deal over the line would be “an appalling failure of statecraft”.  But I do believe there are people in government who cannot discern the difference between process and progress. 

I don’t think the electorate will take kindly to the notion of a No Deal Brexit, not necessarily because World Trade Organisation rules are not the best, but because the government will have taken four and a half years to arrive at an arrangement which, in broad outline, could have been signed off, in 2016, on the back of a fag packet over morning coffee.  It is at that point that the electorate will send in Special Agent Johnson. 

What will he do?  Well, he will probably do all the things that governments do to failing schools, prisons, and hospitals.  He will introduce some stringent rules.  The diplomatic practice of “working through the night” at the last minute will have to stop.  Surgeons and airline pilots know they are dangerous people when they are tired.  Exhausted politicians or diplomats are not likely to make good decisions.  They need to manage their time better.  And the “working dinners” will have to stop.  Surgeons don’t munch a pie behind the sterile mask while removing an appendix, pilots don’t balance a Vindaloo on their knee while landing at Heathrow.  Of course, it goes without saying that the Palace of Westminster’s bars will have to close.  There are no bars in schools, prisons, or hospitals.  Special Agent Johnson will send in functionaries with clipboards who will perform time and motion studies.  Perhaps they will get the MPs to clock in.   

But much as the Schadenfreude of watching politicians squirm under the new austerity tempts me, I don’t really want them to don the straitjacket of three hundred and ninety six recommendations.  It always seems to me that, when a judge places an institution into special measures, the bigger the number of recommendations, the less likely it is that the judge has uncovered the real root of the institution’s problems.  He has not seen the wood for the trees.  Of course the devil is in the detail, but in any complex analysis, you need to be able to encapsulate the whole issue in terms that are simple whilst not simplistic, rather in the way that a theoretical physicist will study an immense number of apparently disparate phenomena, and come up with a unifying equation of great beauty and simplicity.  That sort of synthesis is not easy.  You need to be able to discern the fundamental structure of a problem, and then persuade your colleagues that the model you have created, and the solutions it generates, are correct.  The ability to model the world, and then convince colleagues of the model’s applicability, is what constitutes leadership.  That is as true of the problem of Brexit as it is of the problem of any ailing institution. 

Fishing rights, a level playing field, and rules of arbitration in disputes are said to constitute the barriers to a deal.  And yet the question of the Irish border remains.  It has always seemed to me that the Irish question is what has made a Brexit solution impossible.  At least it is impossible unless you are prepared to think the unthinkable, like Einstein, standing on a railway embankment watching a train being struck twice by lightning.  It’s impossible, unless you are prepared to think the unthinkable.

“The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise to the occasion.  As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.”  Where is Abe Lincoln when you need him?  I have a notion that if Abe Lincoln were Special Agent Johnson, he would advise us to revise these islands’ constitutional arrangements.