Author: jamescalumcampbell

There’s a piece of mythology does the rounds, that the Great Plague of London was terminated by the Great Fire of London, which broke out on Monday, September 2^nd, 1666.  The idea is that Pudding Lane and environs were essentially autoclaved.  I say mythology, because just because A precedes B (A here denoting fire and B denoting cessation of plague) doesn’t mean that A causes B.  In fact plague was ravaging other areas of England at the time, but plague receded in the provinces, as it did in London, spontaneously and without the benefit of a conflagration.  And nobody really knows why.

This concatenation of circumstances has its echo in our own time, notwithstanding that there is a role reversal: to wit, plague has stopped fire.  It’s only a few months ago that the climate change activist Greta Thunberg was comparing the climate emergency to a fire.  Our house, she said, is on fire!  Why aren’t we panicking?  She was, and as far as I know remains, highly critical of the international response to global warming.  She thought that the world leaders were merely paying lip service to the idea that we needed to change our way of life, while under the auspices of the combined forces of the great Movers and Shakers of the world, everything was proceeding as before.  As recently as two weeks ago I was aware that things were proceeding as before, while boarding an Airbus A380 in Dubai.  We left the terminal building and boarded a bus which for thirty minutes took us round the periphery of a vast airport.  I observed countless A380s stacked up at the gates.  Just as I was beginning to suspect we were destined to undertake the whole journey back to Scotland on the surface, we reached the holding point.

And paused for a further thirty minutes.  I watched one after another A380 take off.  I thought, we can’t go on like this!  I hope and trust I’m not being sanctimonious about this.  I, sitting secluded in my business class pod, am as guilty as anybody else.  Of course I had a very specific and very important reason to travel blah blah blah.

Anyway…

Suddenly – yes suddenly, with remarkable rapidity, the world’s airline industries have ground (sic) to a halt.  The reason has nothing to do with climate change, but is rather because people realise that aeroplanes have become extremely efficient vectors for the spread of Covid-19, and thus countries are sequentially and rapidly closing their borders.  In short, people are panicking.  If you hadn’t heard of coronavirus, you would not have predicted in a thousand years that Greta’s plea that we panic would have been answered.

So, despite all the gloom and doom, maybe there is a glimmer of hope.  Not only are we flying less, we are driving less.  I heard that in Beijing, for the first time in an age, people have observed blue sky.  Perhaps we should think of the current crisis as an opportunity, an opportunity to reassess our priorities and consider what aspects of life really matter to us.  Last Wednesday morning I left my West Stirlingshire house at 7.30 am and walked down to Flanders Moss.  I never met a soul.  In a neighbouring field I saw a farmer train his astute collie dog in mustering the woolly flock.  Then I said hello to the horses, and the alpaca, and witnessed a skein of wild geese, performing a remarkably choreographed murmuration entirely for my benefit.  I circumvented the grimpen quag, and ascended the observation point for a view of the highland boundary fault line, still glistening with snow, from south west to north east – Ben Lomond, (Stob Binnein and Ben More in the distance), Ben Venue, Ben Ledi, Stuc a’Chroin, and Ben Vorlich – and so on, disappearing up to the north east and Stonehaven.

Pray God we’re not put under house arrest.

I have a suggestion.  Think of the space we now inhabit as a gap year.  I never took one after school.  (I doubt if such a thing even existed then.)  Did you?  There are a lot of things we are not going to be able to do for quite some time.  For myself, I doubt if the RSNO will play again this season, or if either the Edinburgh Festival or the BBC Proms will go ahead.  But I think I can manage.  I have a radio.  I also happen to live in what is essentially a library.  I doubt if I could read my way out of it this century.  What else?

Time to start writing another tome.

With respect to the corona pandemic, Matt Hancock came on the Marr Show on the Ides of March and gloomed everybody up about the extraordinary powers the Government are minded to adopt over the next couple of weeks.  He admitted it was A Very Big Ask, but it is likely that people over seventy (the blanket term adopted was “the elderly”), even if well, will be asked to self-isolate by staying at home for four months.  If I were over 70 and living in England, I would immediately want to know if I were going to be permitted to go out for a walk.  I addressed Mr Marr through my TV: “Ask the Health Secretary if the septuagenarians can go out for a walk!”  But Mr Marr didn’t ask.  So I checked out self-isolation on the official NHS Covid-19 website:

Do not leave the house, for example to go for a walk.

Why not?  I, for example, live in the country.  I can step out of my house and go for a stroll in the Trossachs National Park and never meet a soul.  Or I can step into my car and drive to any number of remote locations.  I do not understand why the government are threatening to put “the elderly” under house arrest.  They didn’t even do that during the Great Plague of London.  On August 12^th, 1665, Pepys wrote in his diary:

The people die so, that now it seems they are fain to carry the dead to be buried by daylight, the nights not sufficing to do it in.  And my Lord Mayor commands people to be within at 9 at night, all (as they say) that the sick may have liberty to go abroad for ayre.

In times of national, or international, crises, people want to come together.  My father told me that during the war, the churches were full.  He crossed the Atlantic in a troop ship and during Sunday morning service on deck the assembly sang For those in peril on the seas with great fervour.  It is the irony of the Covid-19 crisis that we may need to face it largely in isolation.  Of course human beings are remarkably good at finding unique solutions to unique problems.  The sight of the Italians coming out on to their balconies for some community singing was very touching.  Quintessentially Italian – it could have come straight out of a Puccini opera.  Actually the snatch of song I heard sounded more like Verdi.  Music is very important in troubled times.  I went along to the RSNO in Glasgow on Saturday night, not knowing if the concert of Stravinsky and Beethoven might be cancelled at the last moment.  It went ahead, though the audience was sparse.  Sunwook Kim played the Emperor concerto, standing in at short notice for an indisposed Fazil Say.  I’m sure we all benefited from Mr Kim’s beautiful rendition of the Adagio un poco mosso.  At the end, Maestro Sondergard gave a short, spontaneous, and heartfelt speech thanking us all for coming and urging us to stay healthy in the hope that we might all shortly meet again.

Well I fervently hope so.  Of course there’s always Radio 3.  If I’d timed my recent visit to NZ a little later I see that I would have had to be quarantined for fourteen days on arrival, but at least I would have had the solace of the RNZ concert programme, which is extremely good, and dominated by the big NZ orchestras, soloists and chamber ensembles.  There is an astonishingly big pool of talent.  Recently it all came under threat when the concert station was threatened with loss of its radio frequency and absorption into another radio station, while the freed-up frequency was to be given over to a radio station targeting young people.  There was a public outcry and fortunately the idea has been dropped.  For the moment.  But it is surely a warning shot, and people who care about culture need to remain on the highest alert.

Here, people are encouraging the use of social media in order to temper the sense of isolation.  It wouldn’t work for me.  Je suis l’étranger.  Albert Camus, the author of La Peste, would well have understood the absurdity of the existential crisis we face.  How to come together, when we are so far apart?  I don’t know; but I don’t at all fancy the idea of giving, to this particular Westminster government, “extraordinary” powers.

It’s a lovely morning here in West Stirlingshire, and I’m going out for a walk.

 

A dear friend from India phoned me last Wednesday evening.

“Hey Big Mac!”  (He calls me “Big Mac”.)  Where are you?”

“I’m in the Orewa Surf Club.”

“Surf Club?  Are you surrounded by babes?”

“Babes to the left of me, babes to the right of me.”

One of them, particularly charming and vivacious, told me that she had never read a book.  I was incredulous.  “You mean you’ve never opened that entity between covers, with words in chapters?”

“Oh, I’ve opened one, but I’ve never actually read one.”

In Rotorua, before I embarked on my sojourn to the Deep North, I wrote down on a piece of paper, for the benefit of my traveling companion, the details of our upcoming trip back across to the other side of the world.  “In the event of my being kidnapped by gypsies, all you need is your passport, and this information.”  She photographed it with her phone.  Personally, I’m going the other way, like John Milton, in his blindness, inspired to write Paradise Lost.  “Pen and ink, Mary!”

Some people take a Kindle on holiday and I can understand the utility of that, but I prefer to pop into second-hand bookshops, buy a tome, read it, and pass it on.  On my last visit to BookMark, 15 Victoria Rd, Devonport, Auckland, I took A Life of My Own by Claire Tomalin (Viking, 2017), a Hatchards signed copy in excellent condition.  There was a tenuous NZ connection here because I already have Claire Tomalin’s Katherine Mansfield, A Secret Life (Viking, 1987).  I crossed the road to Devonport Public Library to sit down and finish Robert Harris’ first fictionalised account of the life of Cicero, Imperium, and, in keeping with my resolve to pass a book on each time I buy one, I took the Harris to the hospice shop further up Victoria Road.

I quite enjoyed the Harris although I’m not sure I would call it, as he does, a novel.  It is more a fictionalised biography.  It is clearly exhaustively researched, and purports to be by Cicero’s slave secretary Tiro, who devised his own shorthand (he invented the ampersand) and was therefore a prototype parliamentary reporter, and who apparently did write a life of Cicero, which has been lost.  If I hesitate to call Imperium a novel, it must be because I have a preconceived notion of what a novel should be, rather after the fashion of F. R. Leavis, who said Hard Times was the only true novel Dickens ever wrote.  (Leavis thought the great English novelists – I should say novelists writing in English – were Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad.)  When she was an undergraduate at Cambridge, Claire Tomalin took exception to Leavis’ hostility to Dickens and wrote an essay as to why Dickens is a great novelist.  Who knows, maybe Leavis read it because he and Queenie changed their minds and started to extol the works of the great man.

I still have a sense of achievement when I finish reading a book.  After all, it does involve commitment and concentration.  When I read Moby Dick last year I treated the task as if I were undertaking an austere weight-loss or get-fit programme.  It is a long novel, but it has 135 chapters, some of them shorter than a single page, so I resolved to read a chapter a day over four and a half months.  I stuck to the regime religiously.  It was an effective way to read, because Moby Dick is highly compressed, a prose poem, all about an obsession.  It is operatic.  It occurred to me that Benjamin Britten could have set Moby Dick.  In fact he chose a much shorter piece by Herman Melville, Billy Budd, which has something of the same quality of extreme experience, book-ended by an old man’s bleak attempt to apprehend a terrible event.  When I read Claire Tomalin’s autobiography I noticed that somebody as steeped in Letters as she, also only read Moby Dick in later life.

I read Claire Tomalin’s Life on the plane on the way home, pausing at page 300 when we changed at Dubai, and finishing it somewhere over Iraq.  It is a vivid mix of family and professional life in literary London.  She found her own true literary genre, and métier, as literary biographer, late in life.  She has experienced more than her fair share of both professional success and personal disaster.  Her account of the loss of her young daughter, who committed suicide during a depressive illness, is devastating.  She has been able to convey a sense of the unbearable bleakness and blackness of that vile and incomprehensible condition.

Claire Tomalin had to come to terms with the digital age.  With the move to Wapping in the mid-eighties, she resigned as literary editor of The Sunday Times.  Her letter of resignation to Andrew Neil is pretty damning.  Yet she does concede in a footnote that Neil later found his true métier in television.  And indeed, she always conveys a generosity of spirit towards those who caused her hurt.

Andrew Neil told Claire Tomalin that books were a sunset industry.  When she resigned from The Sunday Times she was chastised by others for leaving, because she owed it to Eng. Lit. to stay on.  But, as she says herself, English Literature kept going pretty well.

 

A medical student asked me, “Why did you become a doctor?”  I said, “Because I hit writer’s block.”  She laughed.  And a distant cousin: “What attracted you to medicine?  Was it the wish to care for people, or was it the intellectual challenge of the discipline?”

I thought, “Now that’s a good question.  There is the dichotomy.”  It had better be one or the other, or better still, a combination of the two.  If you are attracted by wealth and status, if you are doing it because your “public” (ie private) school think you are just the man for it, forget it and go into the City.

I wasn’t being entirely flippant – actually I wasn’t being flippant at all – when I said I hit writer’s block.  As soon as I was taught to read and write I became a scribbler.  I always wanted to write books.  My mentors were encouraging.

But pause here for a quick parenthesis.  I caught Little Women in the cinema in Kaitaia (of all places) yesterday.  Jo March always wanted to write.  She looks to her friend Herr Bhaer for some candid criticism, but finds his candour very hurtful.  He says of her literary effort, “I do not like it.  I do not think it is good.”  I suppose he might have been a little more tactful.  He didn’t mean that she lacked talent, merely that she had yet to discover her genre.

For myself, I never received criticism so harsh.  (There’s still time.)  As a matter of fact, I was my own worst critic.  I remember a particularly painful exchange with my English teacher in my last year at school.  He handed some work back to me and said, “Every good indeed.  It’s nearly publishable.”

Slain by the morganatic compliment.

And I replied, with the smug hauteur of youth, something along the lines of, “Can’t you tell it’s crap?”

I may have been a pompous prig, but to an extent I was quite right.  You can’t write truthfully of real life unless you have some experience of it.  This is the dilemma for the writer.  You can’t shut yourself up in a garret; you have to live in order to have something to write.  So you must chuck your hat into the ring and enter the fray.  Was it Doris Lessing who said that the dilemma for the writer is not how to write, but how to live?

So I became a medical student and disappeared for forty years.

The trouble the writer encounters when embracing another walk of life is that he will always hold something back.  Yes you can be interested, captivated, enthralled, and even passionate.  The one thing you can’t be is committed.  Ultimately, your mind is elsewhere.  Personally I got lucky.  I was a medical student in the 70s when life in the UK was so miserable – remember the strikes, the 3-day week, the winter of discontent, the power cuts – that I might as well withdraw into a monastic cloister and study.  Then I found I was good at taking histories.  And why shouldn’t I be?  Taking a history is like writing a story.  And the greatest skill a doctor can have is the ability to take a history.

Forty odd years later by the grace of God I got lucky again and published a book.  If I hadn’t been a doctor I would not have been able to write that particular book.  God does indeed move in a mysterious way.

I was musing on the great improbability of the ramshackle shape of my life last week when I re-entered the hallowed portals of the department of emergency medicine of Middlemore Hospital in South Auckland.  Middlemore is the busiest emergency department in Australasia and, to cope with an average of 370 patients a day, it requires adequate staffing, facilities, and human resources.  I have blogged about these before, but make no apology for revisiting the statistics which, for those in touch with the specialty of emergency medicine, speak for themselves.

95 beds with oxygen and suction, 6 resuscitation rooms, 26 full time equivalent emergency medicine consultants, 18 registrars in training, 9 junior doctors, 6 fellows and medical officers of special scale, 120 full time equivalent nursing staff.

When I first came here in 1986, the department’s medical staff comprised 13 junior house officers, supervised by a part-time surgeon and a career “casualty officer”, God bless him.  But by then, the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine was two years old, and spearheaded an enormous drive to create a new specialty.  The forefathers of emergency medicine realised that the traditional way of practising acute hospital medicine, of junior doctors doing their best to keep patients alive until they could be reviewed by a consultant during the morning ward round, was no longer fit for purpose, if indeed it ever had been.  The possibilities for intervention in acute care, and the array of therapeutic options, have meant that expertise must be readily available at the hospital front door.  The development of the specialty of emergency medicine now seems an inevitability.

But of course it wasn’t inevitable at all.  It was a hell of a struggle.  Emergency Medicine had to take on, politically, the combined might of the royal colleges.  The men and women in the front line at this battle were quite extraordinary.

I don’t believe this battle has ever been fought in Great Britain, let alone won.  What is the biggest revolution to have occurred in acute health care delivery in the last forty years?  It is the realisation of the idea that acute hospitals need to be “front-loaded” with expertise.  That (with the exception of a few centres of excellence} this has not occurred in Great Britain, is a tragedy.

I don’t say everything in Middlemore is perfect.  Far from it.  In many ways Middlemore ED is a victim of its own success.  The more you can do, the more will be asked of you.  The environment can be extremely busy, crazily so, and the stresses immense.  Yet, in this my recentest visit, I had the sense of a happy atmosphere, and morale, while challenged, still high.

For myself, looking around this hi-tech department, I can no longer believe that from 1994 to 1997 I was its Clinical Head.  There have been three more Clinical Heads since me.  That all four of us were present during my visit (just as 2 years ago) was for me, extremely poignant.  I am proud to have played a small part in the development of emergency medicine.  Yet I remember one morning in 1999 waking up with the certainty that I’d done my bit.  I’d moved on to Auckland Hospital and the Medical School by then.  I said to my colleague, “Peter, I need to go home.”  He said, “Take all the time you need.”  I said, “No, I need to go for good.”

Over the next twenty years I often wondered about that decision.  Yet, from the perspective of this visit, I’m certain it was right for me.  Inevitably, this time round, things seem a little less substantial to me – or maybe I am the ghost.  At any rate I can recall and indeed re-experience that intense longing to be home.  This very morning I woke up and thought, I need to go home.

After Middlemore I went back up to the far north and revisited Te Paki Stream, Waipapakauri, and Lake Gnatu, once more, imprinting them on my memory.  I have an idea I may not be back for a while.

         

A medical student asked me, “Why did you become a doctor?”  I said, “Because I hit writer’s block.”  She laughed.  And a distant cousin: “What attracted you to medicine?  Was it the wish to care for people, or was it the intellectual challenge of the discipline?”

Te Paki Stream is very dry, thanks to the prolonged drought.  I came here on Sunday morning, kicked off my shoes and sloshed down what water remains, past the enormous dunes to the broad expanse of Ninety Mile Beach, where I touched water.  I must have come early, because in the forty minutes it takes to reach the ocean, I never saw another soul.  This is how I remember this special place, as it was when I first visited, more than 30 years ago.  When I turned and walked back to the toi-toi grass on the dunes I thought I saw a tall young man, in shorts and T-shirt, being questioned, interrogated perhaps, by two men incongruously dressed in city suits, carrying with them an air of officialdom.  But it was only a mirage, from part 2 of the trilogy, The Seven Trials of Cameron-Strange.  Actually the proper title is The Seven Trials of Alastair Cameron-Strange, but the publisher persuaded me to drop the “Alastair”.  Too many notes, Mozart.

By the time I started heading back from the ocean, the buses had arrived and were lurching downstream, mountain bikers as outriders, while people were hurling themselves off the tall gleaming mountains of sand on tea trays, a bizarre kind of luge.  There was recently a fatality when somebody tobogganed under a bus.  It was a (characteristically New Zealand) “accident” waiting to happen.  But then, an “accident waiting to happen” is not an accident.  On Saturday there were seven road deaths in New Zealand.  Appalling.  The killer is speed.  Is there any way young New Zealand men could be persuaded to abjure the machismo of speed?  Safety is a culture.  You adhere to the speed limit because you know the culture of safety diminishes adverse events.  Aviators understand this.  Here, road users do not.  In New Zealand the effect is compounded by a general laissez-faire culture of risk-taking.  The same newscast which announced the Saturday road toll also announced various other mishaps on land, sea and air.  Last time I was here, a youngster came to grief diving off a high wharf on top of his pal down in the water below.  The general opinion was that youngsters must not be deterred from diving off wharfs.  I took the ferry from Russell to Paihia and was intrigued to find the vessel was in the command of a ten year old boy.  Last week I was on the same ferry and I was similarly intrigued, amused, and bemused, to read a notice on board:

In the event that the skipper becomes incapacitated…

There followed instructions on how to manipulate the levers to bring the vessel under control, and how to radio the coastguard for help.  It occurred to me that perhaps te airline companies should issue similar advice during the pre-flight safety briefing.  You might say that the scenario of both pilot and co-pilot being simultaneously incapacitated is vanishingly unlikely.  Isn’t this why they must never eat the same thing for lunch?  Then again, there could be a catastrophic loss of cabin pressure.  “If the aeroplane has a nose down attitude, pull back on the control column until straight and level flight is regained.  If resistance is encountered, switch off George.  George is located…  To issue a Mayday call…”

Just outside Kerikeri, I had lunch with a friend and ex-colleague.  She and her husband have recently purchased a section, about six acres, with a simple but extensive clapperboard bungalow, and adjoining piscine, for the price of a modest tenement flat in the west end of Glasgow.  That price wouldn’t get you anything in London.  Nor in Auckland, for that matter.  Yet there they are, splendid house with a pool, lush grass parkland, surrounded by trees bearing avocado, persimmon, pears, nectarine, and macadamia.  You can’t grow macadamia on Canary Wharf.  What can you do?  Buy and sell money.  London is “an important financial centre”.  I have no idea what that is.

Picked up Sin by Josephine Hart (Chatto & Windus, 1992) in a second hand bookshop in Russell.  I’d already read a trailer for Sin in Hart’s first novel Damage.  (I feel Dge should be pronounced after the French fashion, perhaps because the film starred Juliette Binoche, a femme fatale who destroys a feckless and very troubled Jeremy Irons.  Sin boasts another ogress in the darkly beautiful Ruth, hell bent on her own and everybody else’s destruction.  I get impatient with the hapless men these terrible ladies devour, those who cannot recognise monsters for what they are and cut them dead.  If they did, the women would instantly recognise their cover was brulée, and move on swiftly in search of other prey.  Still, I remember being arrested and deeply impressed by the haunting opening page of Damage – I read it with that sharp shock of recognition that it itself describes.  And if Damage and Sin come together as a single nightmarish vision, then maybe the closing page of Sin attempts to provide a palinode and to alleviate the unremitting bleakness.

Meanwhile I find myself in Waipapakauri – ACS territory.  He strolls, deep in thought, around Lake Gnatu, under the canopy of Manuka trees and beside the freshwater rush, Kuta Eleacharis sparelata.   At the entrance to the Waipapakauri Hotel a sign says, “Bikers – no gang insignia in the bar”.   I wondered if I should take off my Middlemore Hospital T-shirt.  My old stomping ground Middlemore was constructed in South Auckland in 1943 when New Zealand anticipated an invasion by the Japanese.  Two years previously, after Pearl Harbour, a military airfield was developed here in Waipapakauri.  The threshold of one runway is crossed by State Highway One, and the only remnant of the aerodrome is a shrine comprising a simple plaque at the foot of a carefully preserved three-bladed propeller at the side of the road.

ACS would certainly pause here.  He is at home by Lake Gnatu, where the wild turkeys cross the road between Rotokawau and Ngakapua Road.  He went to school at Paparore, by Sweetwater.  Call it absurd, but he, and his small coterie of loved ones, are alive and well – at least to me.  I see them now strolling down Rosemay Lane, beside the lake.                    

 

 

 

In Thames, Coromandel, while waiting for a friend to come off the bus from Auckland, I found myself standing beside a life-size bronze statue of Sir Keith Park.  Sir Keith was born in Thames.  He served in the First World War, in the RFC, and then stayed on in the RAF so that by the outbreak of the Second World War he had risen to senior rank (Air Vice-Marshal), and took command of No. 11 Group, defending London and south-east England during the Battle of Britain.  By all accounts he was a much admired and respected leader, taking care of his pilots, dropping in on them in his personal Hurricane to ask them what they needed.

September 15^th is traditionally Battle of Britain Day.  In Their Finest Hour, the second volume of his history of the war, Churchill describes vividly his visit, on that day, to the 11 Group Operations Room at Uxbridge.  He observed the WAAFs pushing the models of the advancing Luftwaffe squadrons across the channel on the large map below him.  Radar indicated influxes of enemy aircraft, 50+, 80+, sometimes even 100+.  All the RAF fighter aircraft of the south east were scrambled.  Churchill asked Sir Keith what reserves were available and he was told there were none.  Apparently he looked grim.  At the conclusion of the battle when it became evident that the RAF had won the day, Churchill coined his remark, “Never in the field of human conflict…” in his car on the way back to London.  He thus created the legend of “The Few”, then went home for a four hour nap.  As you do.

Not quite.  Actually Henry V, or more accurately Shakespeare, first conjured the idea of “We Few, we happy Few” on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt.  While with Hal the notion of the Few was something of a PR stunt, I suspect with Churchill the sentiment was entirely sincere, even if simultaneously he recognised the potency of the expression.  I doubt if he would have appreciated Messrs Cook, Moore, Bennett and Miller taking the mickey in Edinburgh in Beyond the Fringe twenty odd years later.  “Sir, I want to join the Few.”  – “You can’t, there are far too many.”

Shakespeare’s Few and Churchill’s Few get conflated in the wartime film of Henry V with Lawrence Olivier in the title role.   William Walton composed a wonderful score for that film, and it is no surprise that he was approached again to supply music for the 1969 film, “The Battle of Britain”.  But the collaboration this time was not entirely successful.  I suspect that Walton’s music simply dwarfed the screenplay, and so it could only be utilised in a prolonged shot of aerial combat almost divorced from the rest of the film.  Yet Walton remains, it seems to me, the archetypal composer of the Second World War, and such marches as Crown Imperial and Orb and Sceptre seem to capture the idea of the Few legend, even if that legend is somewhat removed from reality.

But I believe the 1969 film of the Battle of Britain does actually capture something of the reality of the events it records.  I was in the University Air Squadron and the RAF Volunteer Reserve long enough ago to have experienced something of the atmosphere of the time.  I spent a fortnight flying out of an RAF base in the south of England in 1971, when the base’s Commanding Officer was in fact a Battle of Britain Ace.  One of our flying instructors flew a Spitfire in the making of the 1969 film.  There is a particularly painful scene in which a rather feckless rookie pilot narrowly avoids landing with his undercarriage up, and is mocked behind his back by his fellow pilots.  His squadron leader, played impeccably by Robert Shaw, gets him back in the air, pretends to shoot him up from behind, and gives him a right good bollocking.  Never fly straight and level for longer than ten seconds!  But you know, education by intimidation doesn’t work, and it’s no surprise that in the end, the rookie pilot doesn’t survive.

Does the doctrine of the stiff upper lip survive?  At the weekend I was on the playing fields of King’s College in Auckland, where King’s were playing Auckland Grammar – always a grudge match – at cricket.  (Incidentally, Keith Park was a pupil at King’s.)  The atmosphere felt more English than England.  I don’t know the first thing about cricket but I couldn’t help but be enormously impressed by the players’ skills, the sheer speed of delivery, and the accuracy of the fielding.  Yet there was a gentleness about the ambience.  I happened to catch sight of a vade mecum carried by one of the boys.  “Mr McKay’s 10 tips that may not seem important, but are actually vital.”  There followed some sound advice about the importance of being polite, courteous, sensitive, and kind.  I guess one or two of them seemed a bit dated.  “Always give up your seat for a lady.”  These days that might earn you a slap.

“Always tuck your shirt in.”

You decide.

Anyway, Kiwis in my experience remain sensitive and kind.  At least until they get behind the wheel of a car.  Then some appalling Jekyll and Hyde metamorphosis takes over.  My friend whose boy goes to King’s thinks it’s a rugby mentality.  Driving a car is a contact sport.  The yearly NZ road fatalities are just shy of 400.  The NZ population is less than that of Scotland.  Last time I looked, the road toll for the whole of the UK was of the order of 1800.  But the UK population is of the order of 66,000,000.  So NZ has a problem.  I have a problem, because currently I’m a road user.  All I can do is say a prayer, buckle up, adhere to the speed limit (they think I’m certifiable), and then prepare for the utterly unexpected.  Scramble, chaps.

How strange to find myself transported to the bottom of the world, and into high summer, courtesy of an Emirates A380, all in the course of a day.  Travel is becoming an increasingly dislocating experience.  Aircraft and airports all look much alike.  There is no view, and no sense of time.  In Sci-Fi movies, travellers through interstellar space are put into a state of suspended animation so that the tedium of the journey is abolished.  A Business Class ticket is essentially a general anaesthetic.  It lays you flat and knocks you out.  You are in a private world.  Even though I had a travelling companion, I was separated from her by the bulwark of my pod.  (We met periodically in the lounge bar.)  And a first class cabin is a kind of quarantine.  The richer you are, the more isolated you become.  The endpoint of exclusivity is solitary confinement.  We paused in Dubai.  Another immensely long corridor, an escalator, a train, another lounge.  I solved the Times crossword to stay awake.  There were only a dozen people at the gate lounge when we reboarded.  That was because the economy cabin was beneath us and entirely separated from us.  You might never have guessed at its existence.  We were living in a gated community.  Back into the pod.  Seventeen hours to go.  Have another breakfast.

I watched a movie.  Berlin, I love you.  Berlin, ich liebe dich.  It was an interwoven montage of love stories, like Love Actually, but much edgier.  There is an atmosphere of danger in Berlin, like the atmosphere of the thirties, never far away, captured by the New Zealand writer James McNeish in his two books on the great New Zealand middle distance runner James Lovelock, The Man from Nowhere, and Lovelock.  Lovelock ran the perfect race to win the 1500 metres at the Berlin 1936 Olympics.  Harold Abrams commentated for the BBC.  Lovelock subsequently became a doctor and worked in New York.  He was a deeply enigmatic character, whose tragic and violent death in a New York subway was deeply mysterious.

And I read Graham Greene’s The Human Factor.  To say it concerns a double agent is like saying Hamlet concerns the Prince of Denmark.  Actually it concerns, well, Love actually.  It is troubled and compassionate,

But talking of New Zealand, here we are.  I checked into the Esplanade on the waterfront of Devonport Auckland and stayed until the jet lag had dissipated.  I’d been warned I’d find NZ much changed, but Devonport, where I used to live, remains largely as I remember it. Same old wonderful second-hand book shop.  I went in and, continuing the Greene theme, got a lovely first edition The Honorary Consul.   Then back out into the dazzling sunlight.  I always navigate through Auckland via volcanoes, and these certainly are little changed.  Six of them lie on Auckland’s North Shore – Onepoto, Styak’s Swamp, Lake Pupuke, Mount Victoria, Mount Cambria and North Head.  When I ran the 48, these, in that order, were my last six, a distance of about 17 kilometres.  Now I have revisited them and I know that Auckland remains essentially what it was.

From Auckland I went south west to Raglan, thence to Rotorua, to be reunited with all my cousins.  We foregathered on the shores of Lake Tarawera of a hot Sunday afternoon.  My cousin happens to be a Baptist minister so I was privileged to be there when he baptised his niece, an 18 year old medical student, in the lake.  I was surprised to find myself emotionally completely undermined.  I could have been on the shores of the River Jordan.

 

At 11 pm on the 31^st of January, did you celebrate, or perhaps commiserate, with a glass of bubbly? Personally, I didn’t. But I still had an hour to run of my dry January. Horlicks, and to bed with a book. Earlier in the day I’d heard Nigel Farage and Kenneth Clark in conversation on the Jeremy Vine show. They were terribly affable. In fact, the arch-Remainer congratulated the arch-Brexiteer on his political victory and paid him an extraordinarily fulsome compliment in saying that he had been the key player in the whole Brexit movement. But then, there is nothing to be gained at this stage from point-scoring. Kenneth Clark has retired; and who knows, maybe Mr Farage will suffer an existential crisis in seeing the withdrawal of his whole raison d’être. What now? Yet I suspect neither a man who enjoys a good cigar nor a man who enjoys a good pint will suffer much. It was even a bit of a relief to hear a couple of politicians not tear strips off one another.

But the European flag is still flying over the Scottish Parliament. I suspect it won’t be long before the Westminster government accuses the SNP of being like the Japanese soldiers in Manchuria in 1945, who didn’t know the war was over, and who disappeared into the jungle, unaware of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Actually, as I write, there are rather a lot of EU flags fluttering outside Holyrood. But it’s not really a Remain rally; it’s an IndyRef2 rally. Here, “going forward” as they say, IndyRef2 will become, has become, the next big constitutional debate. A significant constituency within the SNP will clamour for a second referendum, binding if the PM allows it, consultative if not. I suspect the First Minister will resist this. She wants to persuade all Scotland of the political case. She wants to move when she is convinced she will win. She has work to do.

Meanwhile the Cabal of Nat-bashers who write regularly into the letters page of The Herald continue, well, unabashed. They have two themes. One is that the Scottish Government should stop beating an antique drum, should recognise that they lost the referendum in 2014, and should “concentrate on the day job” – schools, health, education, policing, transport… The other is that both Nicola Sturgeon and her predecessor, Alec Salmond, said that the 2014 referendum was a “once in a generation” opportunity, and that therefore they should, at least for a generation, drop it. These points are iterated and reiterated, and I sometimes wonder if members of the Cabal get in touch with one another to ask, “Whose turn is it to write to The Herald?”, because such letters don’t always appear in reaction to any specific political utterance or event. Perhaps there is a belief that if you state something often enough, the message will be taken as read. So in fact, the two points are conflated: the SNP should recognise they have lost the argument, and get on with running Scotland.

I’m not convinced by either argument. It seems to me that when Mr Salmond and Ms Sturgeon invoked the “once in a generation” mantra, they were arguing as follows: “You may be apprehensive about voting ‘Yes’ with your heart because you are scared of the risk, specifically, of becoming poor. On some subsequent occasion you might be minded to vote ‘Yes’ when you are persuaded of the economic argument. But not now. Not in this uncertain and dangerous world. But you need to realise that this might be the only chance you will get. The next chance will fall to a future generation.” That is really what Mr Salmond and Ms Sturgeon were saying. They anticipated Mr Johnson’s intransigence.

Then there is this business of the day job. As far as health, education, policing etc. go, it would be perfectly easy to argue that Scotland does rather better in these departments than other parts of the UK. But indeed the idea of politicians “running the country” strikes me as being rather absurd. The job of government is to introduce legislation and the job of parliament is to debate, and occasionally pass legislation into law.  Politicians don’t run the country. You and I run the country. The running of the country is the Grand Integral of the myriad human interactions taking place on the beat, at the chalk face, in the doctor’s surgery, at the waste disposal tip, at the shop counter, in the nursery, in the care home, and in a million and one other locations. If I were the First Minister I would want to persuade the electorate that they as individuals have the knowledge, skills, wisdom, arts, sciences, culture, coherence, eloquence, and above all self-confidence to run the country.

But a lot of professional Scots think of “The Nats” as a bunch of highly strung, highly excitable and intoxicated individuals in faded plaid waving saltires and airing grievances on the fields of Bannockburn and Culloden. All these doctors and lawyers and bankers and accountants look upon those campaigning “all under one banner” with horror, much as Colonel Talbot looked upon the followers of the Chevalier Charles Stewart in Scott’s Waverley.

Now all this was mere spleen and prejudice in the excellent Colonel, with whom the white cockade on the breast, the white rose in the hair, and the Mac at the beginning of a name, would have made a devil out of an angel; and indeed he himself jocularly allowed, that he could not have endured Venus herself, if she had been announced in a drawing-room by the name of Miss Mac-Jupiter.

Colonel Talbot berated Ms Sturgeon last Tuesday at my German class. “Once in a generation she said! Why doesn’t she get on with the day job?”

I said, “Ich komme hier, nur Deutsch zu sprechen und lernen.”

 

Glued, all week, to Diaries and Letters 1930 – 39 by Harold Nicolson (Collins, 1966) and now, having finished them, his Diaries and Letters 1939 – 45 (1967), all edited by Nicolson’s second son Nigel. I read them with a mix of fascination and revulsion, fascination with the intimate glimpse into an enthralling historical epoch, and revulsion at the mindboggling snobbery and crass stupidity of the ruling classes.

There is a difficulty about editing a diary for public consumption. How much explanation do you append, to references to people, places and events, without which the diary will be indecipherable, and where do you put such information? In a bulky appendix, or, page by page, in footnotes? If the latter, the page offers a busy aspect, and batting your eye up and down can be a wearisome and dislocating experience, easy to lampoon:

DIARY                                                            27^th January 1930

Lunch at the Charcuterie* with Fruity**, Shakes***, Milton Babcock-deBrunswick****, the Axminsters***** and the Count Alborado del Grazioso*****. Winston came in…

*Exclusive west end eatery run by the renowned gastronome René Descartes

**Fruity Beaconhurst, equerry to King George V

***Simon “Shakes” Mildew, owner of the Clarion-Despatch

****American industrialist and bootlegger

*****Jack Axminster, Conservative MP for Surbiton East, and his wife Angelique, a great society beauty

******the opera impresario and voluptuary

It could all be tedious in the extreme, but for the fact that Harold Nicolson kept the company of Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, the Prince of Wales, Max Beaverbrook, Joe Kennedy, and so on. A diplomat, born in Tehran, son of a diplomat, educated at Wellington and then Balliol, he was born to move in such circles. He left the diplomatic service at the end of 1929, started a career in journalism, and opened his diary on January 1^st 1930. The career in journalism didn’t last, but the diary did, and he wrote it up daily until October 1964. He entered politics and won a seat at Westminster in 1935, which he held for ten years. He carried on writing. He was briefly in government during the war. So he was in a position to give first-hand accounts of meetings of political and historic importance. These descriptions are what give the diaries their power; so too the letters, largely written to and from his wife the author Vita Sackville-West. Theirs seems to have been a happy and successful marriage, even if described as “open”.

Nigel Nicolson once asked his father why he kept a diary, and he got a suitably offhand and typically Anglo-Saxon reply, like a shrug of the shoulders. It wasn’t for publication; it wasn’t for the benefit of friends or family; and Harold Nicolson, having typed out his daily entry, seldom revisited it. That makes it sound like a futile undertaking, yet I suspect I know what his purpose was. I know, because for a long time I kept a diary myself. I started it during my last year at school and I ended it – and shredded it – about five years ago, not long after I became a published author and started publishing a weekly blog. For me, it was a form of therapy. Writing a diary is like having an imaginary friend. I stopped because I realised that I no longer needed it, and it was far better to talk to somebody else than to talk to oneself. So the blog took over where the diary left off. Like Harold Nicolson, I seldom looked back at the entries I had made over the years, so that made it easy to put it through the shredder. I haven’t regretted it.

But I recognise the tone of the passages of introspection that occur in Nicolson’s entries. While there is a deep sense of gratitude for the opportunities that allowed him to experience so much, for the richness of his immense social circle, and most of all for the enduring happiness of his family life, he also conveys a sense of personal failure to fulfil all his potential in public life and in literature. But I’m not sure he really means it. If he did, I think he would have ditched the diary and become politically more ambitious and more assertive. On the whole, I’m glad he didn’t do that. Temperamentally, he was an observer. Had he been otherwise, we wouldn’t have had these vignettes of the big political figures of the 30s, in informal talks, recorded verbatim. Winston is everywhere, and as I read further (I’m currently deeply immersed in 1941), increasingly so.

So much for what is fascinating. What is repulsive? It is something that Nicolson recognises in himself, and struggles to define or articulate. It as an attitude of mind made up of loftiness, hypercriticism, disdain, detestation, and hatred. Actually it’s snobbery. But he can’t see that that is what it is, because his whole social milieu is a class-ridden construct of snobbery. Actually Harold’s not that bad. Vita is far worse.

But it strikes me that nothing much has changed in Great Britain over the past 100 years. Our Prime Ministers still go to public school and Oxford, where they study “Greats”, or, if they are really trendy, “PPE”. I don’t think it was much of a preparation for life back in the 30s, even less so now. I’m fascinated by the 30s, and by the way the Great Powers were incapable of stopping a descent into barbarism, even when some of them, perhaps most of them, had the best of intentions.

If faced with similar challenges, would we do any better now? Perhaps we are faced with them, only we fail to recognise what the challenges are. The trouble with living in the present is that we don’t have the benefit of hindsight. It is difficult to tell the difference between an opportunity and a threat. For example, this Friday, January 31^st, either you will raise a glass to the Palace of Westminster and invoke a few “bongs” from the Queen Elizabeth Tower; or perhaps you would rather invoke the words of a previous Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey. “The lamps are going out all over Europe, and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”