Author: jamescalumcampbell

Amid the relativistic distortion of lockdown time, when the minutes crawl past like a scarab dung-beetle and the days fly by like a Japanese maglev train, we are all of us, especially those of us who live alone, getting a little eccentric.  I, for example, have started talking to my sole confidant, my Christmas cactus, Noel, who sits on my living room window sill.  Didn’t the Prince of Wales once say he talked to his plants?  That, I believe, was the origin of the expression, “the loony prince”.  I don’t think it’s so crazy.  I’ll tell you what’s crazy: it’s when the cactus talks back.

Yesterday I was sitting on this very chair facing this very computer screen, when I heard a soft and reticent cough from behind my right shoulder.  I glanced round.

“I’m a little dry.”

“Would you like a glass of water?”

“Please.  Not too much!  Thanks.”

I sat back down.

“What are you writing?”

“My blog.”

“Ah.  What’s the topic this week?”

“Dunno.  Sometimes I just open up a Word doc and blether.”

“That is all too often self-evident.”

“You’re getting very pass-remarkable!  Okay, smarty pants, give me a theme.”

“Desert Island Discs.”

“Why?”

“Because, with social distancing, we are all Robinson Crusoe now.  And face it, even before this enforced isolation, you were cast away.  So why not choose your eight discs?  Music is a favourite subject of yours.  Actually, you can be a bit of a bore about it.”

“Steady on!”  But I took him up on it, and started writing.

One day when I am rich and famous, Lauren Laverne will invite…

“I wouldn’t start like that.”

“Why ever not?”

“It’s self-indulgent.”

“Nonsense!  I was being ironical.  My readership will understand.”

There was a silence.

I started again.

Since the early days of its inception in 1942, Roy Plomley…

“Verbal upholstery.”

“What?”

“Padding.  ‘Early days’ is redundant.  An inception will clearly take place on an early day.  Incidentally, do you know who Roy Plomley’s first castaway was?”

“No idea.”

“Take a guess.”

“Winston Churchill?”

“Close, but no cigar.  His son-in-law, Vic Oliver.”

I started again.  But now I froze.  The fact is, the cactus had made me self-conscious.  I had acute writer’s block.  I tried various permutations and combinations, each time pressing delete as if I were screwing a sheet of A4 into a tight ball and tossing it into the waste paper basket.  Personally I blame word-processing.  It offers too much opportunity for revision.  I bet you it would even have screwed up Thomas Gray:

The plowman homeward plods his weary way

Homeward the plowman plods his weary way

His weary way homeward the plowman plods

Weary his plow the plod wards home way the

“If you don’t mind my saying so,” said Cactus, “your work practices are lamentable.  Your modus operandi is completely anarchic.  Why don’t you decide what you are going to say, and just say it?  Compile a list of your eight records, write a blurb for each, and Bob’s your uncle.”

“Okay.”  I made a list.

1. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, variation 16.
2. The Presto from Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 130.
3. Der Leiermann from Winterreise, Schubert.
4. Prelude in E minor, Op. 28, No 4, Chopin.
5. Tell Me Why, from A Hard Day’s Night, The Beatles.
6. Prelude in F minor, Op. 32 No 6, Rachmaninoff.
7. Kinderstück, for piano, Anton Webern.
8. Nana, from Siete canciones populares espanolas, Manuel de Falla.

“Interesting list.  Do I sense you have a criterion of value?”

“Brevity.”

“Why so?”

“I want to hear each piece, complete.  I hate ‘bleeding chunks’.  I’ve allowed an average of two and a half minutes per disc., twenty minutes total.”

“A limited repertoire, but have it your way.  Now, the blurb.  Continuez.”

“The Goldberg.  I want Glenn Gould.  The 1981 recording, mind.”

“Sublime.”  I wish I could capture the sarcasm in Cactus’ voice.  He wasn’t mocking Bach.  He was mocking me.

“Something from the late Beethoven quartets.”

“Now that is echt.”

“I cannot live without them.”

“Oh please.”

“Winterreise.”

“It’s so bleak!  Wunderlicher Alter,

“Soll ich mit dir gehn?”

“Then the Chopin.”

“Melancholy again.  You’re a sad old git, aren’t you?  Still, Frederic told me he was particularly fond of this one.”

“Come off it, Noel.”

“I sat on Jane Stirling’s mantel at that time, in Strachur.  We cacti can be extremely long-lived.”

“Then I had to have something by The Beatles.”

“Tell me why.”

“They remind me of my youth.”

“So glad you can lighten up.”

“Then I believe Serge speaks for himself.”

“Ah.  The six and a half foot scowl.”

“And the Webern?  Mysterious.”

“It’s certainly a mystery to me.  Still, it only lasts 46 seconds.”

“And finally, the Falla.  These resonant single piano notes, plucked, as it were, almost at random, falling like water drops into a deep Andalusian pool.  La nostalgia.”

“Olé!”

“How’m I doing?”

“Splendid. What’s left?  Book?”

“Lectures in Physics, by Richard P. Feynman.”

“How pretentious is that!  You just want everybody to think you understand quantum physics.  What a fake!  Luxury?”

“As a matter of fact, darling, I thought I’d take you.”

“I am not allowed.  Luxuries have to be inanimate, and useless.”

“Well, at least you fulfil one of the criteria!”

There was a dense silence.  I realised I’d gone too far.  I tried to rescue the situation.  “What about my one disc, saved from the waves?”

Deathly silence.  He was sulking.

“Oh come on, Noel, don’t let the sun set on a quarrel!”

Silence.  I went to bed.

Last night, I had a terrible nightmare.  I had long known that my cactus was exuberant.  All I needed to do was give him fresh soil in a bigger pot, and he would continue to burgeon.  If I continually replenished his needs, there was no reason why he should not occupy the entire space of the Kibble Palace in Glasgow’s Botanical Gardens.  But it was amazing that Noel should accomplish such growth within the space of a single night.

I woke at 3 am.  I became aware of the fact that Cactus had burgeoned to occupy the space of my entire house.  By some grotesque prehensile manoeuvre, his spatulate leaves had prised open my bedroom door.

“Sorry!  Couldn’t sleep.  Fancy a talk, old man?”

“Noel, it’s 3 o’clock in the morning.”

“Re the one to save from the waves, it’s got to be the Webern.  You could spend a lifetime listening to it every day, and you’d never get to the bottom of it.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When the idea was first mooted that septuagenarians be put under house arrest, the former home secretary David Blunkett came on the Jeremy Vine show and said that under such a regime he would be worried he would go gaga.  (“And since I’m here, Jeremy, may I say the music you play is really terrible!”  There is nothing so entertaining as an ex-politician let off the leash.)  It is evident that politicians are turning their attention to a lockdown exit strategy, not just because the economy has taken a hit, but because they realise people are champing at the bit.  The pay-off between people’s health and people’s wealth is not straightforward; what use a sound body if you are both destitute and bonkers?

That must be a concern; you only need to look at the appalling surge in domestic abuse.  But I’m not sure the effect of lockdown on mental health has been much researched.  We might get some surprises.  I can think of a few special groups worthy of study, to wit…

Compulsive hand washers: people who occupy the bathroom for hours on end are well known to drive the rest of their family to distraction.  Perhaps the encouragement to go right ahead, rather than fuelling the habit, would result in a paradoxical reversal of behaviour.  You can take this hygiene thing too far, like President Trump.  Disinfectantwise, I guess he was only thinking on his feet.  Winging it.

Social media addicts: teenagers addicted to their devices, finding them to be the sole means of communication with their friends, might develop an irresistible desire to down tools, escape, and have a face-to-face conversation in real time.  What a revelation that might turn out to be.

Solipsists: these supremely narcissistic egoists who believe their own existence to be the only absolute certainty (cogito ergo sum), faced, in their isolation, with the proof that after all they are quite right, might feel a shudder of horror at the prospect of universal loneliness, and go out in search of a soul that is other.

Sophists: their specious reasoning will be seen for what it is, because everything is pared down to a condition of complete simplicity and people can see clearly the things that matter – to be fed, watered, clothed, shod, sheltered, valued, blessed, and loved.

Recluses: (I count myself an associate of this society, if not a fully-fledged member with paid up dues: after all, to join would be somewhat self-defeating)… will perhaps drop the urge to echo Greta Garbo’s famous line, I vaunt to be alone, and when the ban is lifted, we will rush out and join the local golf club, church guild, acapella, bell ringers, Rotary, Probus, Mandarin for beginners, bridge club, Scrabble club, and Toast Masters.

Celibates: might go out on a date.  They won’t even use Tinder.

Monastics: might abjure the vow of silence and congregate for a chinwag.

Secret solitary drinkers: might hasten down to the pub for a game of dominoes.  They might resist that extra drink squeezed in between rounds, even though they are “chappin’”.

On-line gamblers: might also congregate in the pub for a game of Shove Ha’penny.

Desert Island Discs Castaways: sick to death of Bohemian Rhapsody, the one they saved from the waves, will build a boat.

All well and good.  Still, when this thing is over, if it ever is, I do hope we don’t toss the baby out with the bath water, and can manage to retain some of the rediscovered lost wonders of the world.  Pollution in Hope Street Glasgow is down 50%.  I’ve always loved the name Hope Street.  I wish to walk in Hope.  I wish it to be Conscience’ Tree-lined Boulevard.  Here in the country, 36 miles to the north of Hope, I wake to the sound of birdsong.  In the morning I write, and in the afternoon I can walk down my lane and in a hundred yards be in open country.  No traffic.  No jets.  There is stillness, and silence.  I have discovered a very beautiful walk to a remote lochan where, in this remarkable spell of spring weather, I can sit with hare and deer and watch a huge heron swoop effortlessly across the rushes.  I hear the first cuckoo of spring.  Writing ideas come, unbidden.  On the way back, I can wave to a farmer in the distance, working the fields.  He is putting bread on my table.  Who would you rather have beside you at a time like this, a farmer or a hedge fund manager?

Back home, I write down my literary ideas before I forget them.  I am currently writing a tome.  I have written 47,000 words in the last three weeks.  It has been a gift.

 

Surfing the net (as you do), I chanced upon This is Your Life – an ancient Eamonn Andrews show, where the guest was Group Captain Sir Douglas Bader CBE, DSO & Bar, DFC & Bar, DL, FRAeS.

(Not that I’m likely ever likely to be asked on to This is Your Life, but, personally, I hate surprises.  I have a notion that if I’d ever had the green book and the microphone shoved in my face, I would have been very ill-mannered and said sod off.  But who knows?  Why would you disoblige dear friends who had gathered together on your behalf?)

Now Sir Douglas was a notoriously prickly character, and I wonder if Eamonn had any reservations about approaching him.  He was ambushed during a charity do where he was dispensing largesse, and he took the whole thing in good grace, as if it were a marvellous wheeze.  Back at the studio, there was a glittering parade of the great and the good.

I was curious to hear about Sir Douglas because, oddly enough, I’d had a description from first hand at close quarters.  A friend of my father’s happened to be a POW in Stalag Luft 3, where Sir Douglas was incarcerated before his transfer to Colditz.  “Bader?  Frightful fellow!”  I have to say my father’s friend did not have a good word for several other high profile POWs, who apparently continuously goaded the Germans who would then extract reprisals, of a more or less petty nature, on everybody in the camp, to increase the general level of discomfort.  Sir Douglas had a reputation of a man who was inherently belligerent, foul mouthed, bullying, aggressive, rude, cocky, and generally insufferable.  He seemed to have been a “marmite” pilot; you either loved him or loathed him.  Bader and Bob Stanford Tuck, for example, clashed, although their relationship later warmed.

Well, from This is your Life, I had the impression of a man who had mellowed.  But who can say?  Perhaps he was advised that, on the show, all he needed to do was smile and say nothing, which was pretty much what he did.  Perhaps there was an indication of control freakery in his propensity to direct his guests to their seats, even before Eamonn had the chance to interview them.  A commander, then.  Eamonn dealt with this with the utmost tact.  There was plenty of reference to Bader as hero and inspiration, fearless and indomitable, and if there was any reference to the darker side of his sheer bloody-mindedness, it was generally in the form of a quip.  Stanford Tuck told the well-known anecdote of Bader being transferred out of the prison camp, passing a line of German soldiers, and “inspecting the buggers”.  I thought that was perhaps a tactless expression in view of the presence of Adolf Galland, but no doubt General Galland had heard it all before.  Galland’s own anecdote was remarkable: when Bader was shot down, the Luftwaffe invited him to tea (this must have been before the death of chivalry), and Bader asked if he might sit in the cockpit of a Messerschmitt 109.  Galland duly obliged.  Then Bader asked if he might take off and fly one circuit round the aerodrome.  I had the impression that if he had given his solemn parole not to attempt to escape, his wish might have been granted.  But it was a request too far.  Maybe Galland realised that Bader, once airborne, would attack.

The Germans held Bader in great awe.   When he was shot down, he only managed to bale out by detaching one of his tin legs that had got jammed under the rudder pedals.  The Germans let the RAF drop off a replacement leg.  Mind you, that sortie was appended to a routine bombing raid.

I would have liked to hear a little more of Bader’s aggressive side.  It might have shed some light on some of the great battles within Fighter Command, 12 versus 11 group, Trafford Leigh Mallory versus Keith Park, the Big Wing versus the individual fighter.  As with any large organisation, the senior officers of the RAF vied with one another for power.  Men like Park, and Sir Hugh Dowding, were eventually pushed out.  This is the side of the story one hears less about.  I suspect the definitive history of the RAF is yet to be written.

So throughout the show, I was intrigued to discover whether I was looking upon a great hero and an inspiration during the Battle of Britain, or a pain in the neck.  They played a clip of the actor Kenneth More, who played Bader in the film Reach for the Sky, suffering the catastrophe that was the defining moment of Sir Douglas’ life, the slow roll at low level in 1931 that all went pear-shaped and cost him his legs.  I say “defining moment”, but of course the real defining characteristic of the man was precisely that he refused to allow this single incident to define his life.  But it was interesting to observe the reaction of the man watching his own daredevil act of folly, the crash that so nearly cost him his life.  Maybe it was all down to the stiff upper lip, but I had the odd impression that Sir Douglas was watching something that had happened to somebody else.

Equally intriguing was his reaction to the guests in the studio and to the televised tributes from afar.  He greeted his friends and colleagues with warmth and affection, always rising to shake hands or embrace those who came to the studio.  Some of the guests were extraordinarily distinguished, including, in addition to Stanford Tuck and Adolf Galland, Johnnie Johnson, Vera Lynn (she called him Duggie), the actors John Mills and James Stewart, and, by mail, Elizabeth R, the Queen Mother.  He greeted them all with cordiality but, I thought (with the possible exception of the Queen Mother), a certain emotional detachment.  I wondered, is this a complex character or, on the contrary, is there a profound simplicity here, a man who is defined by just a few overwhelming impulses, the impulse to aggression, for victory, and for recognition, alongside the total absence of the impulse to fear?

On the fiftieth anniversary of the breakup of the Beatles, I revisited their 1968 album, entitled simply The Beatles, but universally known as The Double White Album.  I got out my ancient vinyl first edition and listened to it, complete.  I did so with some reluctance, even trepidation; I’m a little frightened of The Double White Album.

How did I find it?  I think even the most ardent Beatle fan would have to admit it is uneven.  Isn’t Helter Skelter – with all its gruesome associations – the worst track the Beatles ever recorded? George Martin once remarked that it might have been better if the Beatles had been ruthless with the blue pencil, and pared the whole thing right down to a single LP.  That begs the question, what to retain and what to discard?  I thought it might be an interesting exercise to reproduce The Beatles, abridged version.

In one sense it seems a straightforward exercise.  There are thirty songs, so you need to remove about half of them.  Here’s my list to have survived the cut, in the order in which the songs appear in the original.

SIDE 1:

Back in the U.S.S.R

Dear Prudence

Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da

While My Guitar Gently Weeps

Happiness is a Warm Gun

Martha My Dear

Blackbird

I Will

SIDE 2:

Julia

Mother Nature’s Son

Long, Long, Long

Revolution 1

Honey Pie

Savoy Truffle

Cry Baby Cry

It’s a personal choice, and I’m sure many devoted Beatle fans would have chosen most of the ones I left out.  I opted for the melodic, and lyrical, rather than the aggressive and raucous.  As Gerald Moore once said, “Never sing louder than lovely”.

But now comes the really difficult choice.  What order to put them in?  It is not enough just to churn out a cadre of songs.  They have to fuse into a meaningful whole.  What would “The Single White Album” convey?  And this is where, I think, the entire project is shown to be futile. It doesn’t matter how you shuffle the pack, the end product is always going to be far inferior to the original, warts and all.

What is the Double White Album all about?  You get a sense of its tone of voice listening to Mother Nature’s Son.  John Denver did a cover of this song and you can see why.  It’s wholesome and outdoorsy and kind of “Rocky Mountain High”.  Or is it?  If you listen to the Beatles’ original, it is something quite other.  It’s as if McCartney takes a musical genre, and distorts it.  And that is true of virtually every track on the album – all thirty of them.  Right from the start, when we land back in the USSR to the whine of jet engines, nothing is but what is not.  A spoof Beach Boys number is transported from California to some hidden realm beyond the Iron Curtain.  We move immediately into Dear Prudence, and have entered Lennon’s strange, fey, sunlit, psychedelic world.

Everything is ironic.  And everything is experimental.  Some experiments work; some don’t.  Some, like the fragment Wild Honey Pie, are simply abandoned.  McCartney utilises other musical forms throughout.  Rocky Raccoon with its honkytonk piano is Hillbilly.  Honey Pie (as opposed to Wild Honey Pie) is a 1920s take-off, faithfully recreated, but parodied to the point of absurdity.  Don’t Pass Me By with its tuneless fiddle (it might even be a viola) is a kind of self-mockery of the tradition of allowing Ringo Starr to sing, once.

The songs are still recognisably by the Beatles, but you can feel the individual band members moving apart, heading off in their own direction.  Harrison’s four songs surely represent his strongest contribution to any of the group’s albums.  The mood is one of disillusion, and dissolution.    His guitar really does weep.  Piggies is an Orwellian expression of revulsion at humanity, and then, with Savoy Truffle, fancy writing a song about dental decay!  Long Long Long, which closes Side 3 is I believe – within the bizarre frame of reference of the Double White – the strongest song of all.  Its mysterious ending, with its cry of despair, borders on the tragic.

Lennon’s songs are gritty and edgy and wistful and disturbing.  They visit realms where one may not wish to follow.  Julia is sad, but detached, damaged.  It typifies the mood of the album.  It is joyless.  What, indeed, is it all about?

The Double White Album is all about disintegration, a gradual psychological and spiritual falling apart.  It passes from irony, to sarcasm, to cynicism, to black despair.  And where does that take us?  It takes us to the final tracks that close side 4.  It would be impossible to create an abridged Double White that omitted the last two tracks, much as we might find them repulsive.  The culmination of the Double White is its penultimate track – Revolution 9.  It is the most avant-garde piece the Beatles ever recorded.  It is a depiction of a descent into delirium.  It’s a far cry from She Loves You, but if you miss it out, the Double White makes no sense.

And what follows it?  You might think Good Night would offer some kind of balm, but far from it.  Now, the destruction is complete.  This is a spoof of a late night closing down sequence of a TV station.  It depicts the anodyne, anaesthetised half-awareness of someone who has been reduced to nothing.  It is Winston at the end of 1984.  Absolutely ghastly.

The Beatles is a formidable double album, but I’m not sure I’ll give it another visit 50 years hence.

I don’t know about you, but “lockdown” is beginning to irritate me.  Not so much the state of house arrest to which the word alludes, but the word itself.  The word “lockdown”, or the phrase “lock down”, does not appear in my battered seventh edition Chambers English Dictionary (1990), but it is in the revised 13^th edition of 2016.

Lock’down n an act of confining prisoners to their cells, esp as a means of restoring order; any general cessation of activity, esp in response to a crisis.

I wonder if “lockdown” is a trans-Atlantic loan word.  I associate it with these dreadful events that occur in the United States with dismal frequency when somebody goes berserk with a semi-automatic weapon.  The police converge on the scene and put the residents in lockdown.

But here, we don’t traditionally lock people down; we lock people up.  Isn’t it ironic that, while the Health Secretary is threatening to lock us all up for flouting the social distancing rules, the Home Secretary is minded to release a significant proportion of the prison population?  Good luck to them I say.  I suspect that many prison inmates are like many hospital patients: they ought not to be there.  The prisoner leaps to lose his chains.  I see them emerging, to the sublime chorus from Beethoven’s Fidelio:

O welche Lust, in freier Luft

Den Atem leicht zu heben!

Here, lockdown is often associated with a terrorist act.  This may be why I associate lockdown with another irritating usage: “the floor”.  After an atrocity, somebody is interviewed on Westminster Bridge.  “I heard a noise like a car backfiring and instinctively I hit the floor.”

No you did not sir.  Westminster Bridge does not have a floor.  You got down on to the ground.  A floor is definitely an internal entity.  Outside, you may drop to the pavement; you may lie prone in the gutter; supine on the asphalt; prostrate on the tarmacadam.  But you cannot be spread-eagled upon the floor.  And you most certainly cannot “hit” the floor, unless you punch it, presumably out of a sense of frustration.  Nor, come to think of it, can you “hit the deck”, unless you happen to be on a boat, or perhaps an antipodean verandah.

I know what you’re thinking: I need to get out more.  But that’s the point: I’m in lockdown.  Is it cabin fever?  Am I stir crazy?  “Coastie”.  (My father ended the war in West Africa.  RAF Coastal Command, Accra.  People who were going a bit peculiar were said to be “coastie”.)

Of all the myriad business and social enterprises that are currently suffering, I haven’t heard any mention of the sex industry.  Physical distancing and the sex industry seem hardly compatible.  I expect the incidence of telephone sex has gone up.  Sex workers must surely have taken a hit, but nobody seems to be mentioning it.  Maybe it has all slipped under the radar, and the work proceeds apace, much as before.  I don’t suppose the industry is much regulated by officialdom.  And after all, both the professionals and their clients are used to living with a degree of risk.  Whenever anybody asks me for an example of an oxymoron, I always say “safe sex”.  Dating, I gather, goes on much as before.  I think if Mr Hancock tried to put the lid on that he would be on a fool’s errand.

I’m still going for my daily exercise, which I trust remains legal, and keeping my distance.  Yesterday I walked down a farm track two miles from where I live, turned into a beautiful glade, full of daffodils, entered the remains of an ancient broch, and stepped back three thousand years.  I hardly saw a soul.  Those I did see I hailed from a safe distance.  People are cheerful.  The only walkers who don’t seem to know about social distancing are canine.  Thankfully the dogs are mostly cheerful too.  I did have a run-in with a couple of nasty brutes the other day.  I happened to be wearing a bright orange jumper and I have a notion the dogs didn’t take to it.  Maybe they thought I was on an Orange Walk (let’s not go there).  Of course, social distancing makes it more difficult for the owners to control their dogs, so maybe it would be better if the dogs were on a leash.

Which brings me to my third irritant:  (this is like being on Room 101) – dog owners who can’t control their dogs.  When I was in General Practice I lost count of the number of times I conducted a home visit and met the following scenario.  I would ring the doorbell and a huge hound in the hallway would go berserk.  The owner would enter into a prolonged diplomatic negotiation with the hound, explaining he had to be nice and welcoming for the doctor.  Upon entering, I would be slobbered upon.  I would be taken into the living room to see an elderly grandparent, dog still in attendance, and tremendously excited by this novel visitation.  I would politely suggest that the dog be put into another room for the duration of the consultation.  The owner would be puzzled by this.  Why should a family member be excluded?  But he would acquiesce.  Another prolonged diplomatic negotiation would ensue, the dog would be removed, and the consultation would begin.

Then, incomprehensibly but inevitably, the dog would escape.  Slobber slobber.

But I mustn’t let this enforced captivity turn me into a curmudgeon.  Much else is happening in the world.  The labour party has a new leader, a Japanese mathematician has apparently solved the abc problem with a 400 page proof only twelve people in the world can understand, and one of our neighbouring stars has just been devoured by a black hole.  And of course, let us not forget, today, the 700^th anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath.

It is not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.    

 

The extent to which the coronavirus is dominating our lives was reflected in Saturday’s edition of The Herald.  Its main section has 24 pages and they are almost entirely devoted to the pandemic.  COP26 likely to be postponed, PM and Health Secretary have virus, on-the-spot fines for flouting the lockdown, estimated infections in Scotland 65,000, military helicopters to assist rural communities, drinks firm to produce hand sanitiser, Tunnock’s teacake production stopped…  Actually it would be easier to list the articles that are not Covid-19 related: apart from the weather forecast, nothing at all until page 10, where there is a tribute to the Govan songwriter Bill Martin who has died aged 81.  Even the ads, for Lomond Gallery, Glasgow Rangers, the Bank of Scotland etc., are all about keeping the show on the road at this difficult time.  Page 12 is more or less virus-free, but the full page ad on page 13 is back on message: BT – stay connected in isolation.  Page 14 is devoted to obituaries, which you may or may not consider a respite, then on page 15 we are back to Covid-19.  Then the leader on page 16: There is light amidst the darkness.  Then it is a measure of the impact on Scottish public life of the Alec Salmond trial, that there are two articles dealing with the aftermath of Mr Salmond’s acquittal – but even then, that aftermath has been put on hold pending the (putative) end to the pandemic.  The two Letters pages (18 and 19) are dominated by coronavirus, and there is disgruntlement that the Prince of Wales should have headed for his second home in Royal Deeside and allegedly skipped the queue to get tested.

(Parenthetically, I wrote to The Herald letters page myself earlier in the week when they reported that the Morar Hotel in Inverness-shire is going to honour the memory of the composer Sir Arnold Bax with a bronze plaque.  I have stayed twice in the Morar Hotel, and on the last occasion I suggested to the management that they put up a plaque.  I’m sure it wasn’t my suggestion that resulted in the plaque, and I wrote not to claim any credit, but in praise of Bax’s wonderful symphonic output.  I wasn’t surprised that The Herald didn’t publish my letter.  After all, Bax is something of a minority interest, and I was competing with the wall-to-wall viral load.  Mind you, I think they missed a trick.  It’s at times like these that we need Sir Arnold.)

Where was I?  Page 20 – the puzzles page.  In troubled times, the puzzles page becomes even more important than usual.  It is vital that the puzzles page be proof-read with great attention, because an error, for example publishing the wrong set of clues with the wrong crossword grid, causes real distress.  Many people find puzzles to be very therapeutic when they are feeling fretful.  I’m sure the current regime of general house arrest is compounding the stress.  The Herald must recognise this, because all week they have been providing us with a backlog of cryptic crosswords to keep us amused.  This emphasis on puzzles right now has a certain poignancy, because one of The Herald‘s longstanding cruciverbalists, Myops, has passed away at the age of 80.  He was a retired Glasgow Classics teacher named John McKie.  I met him in the Curlers Bar on Byres Road one night and asked him if he used software to compile his puzzles.  He never did.  Just pencil and paper.  Amazing.  Some of us crossword nerds used to gather of a Tuesday evening in Curlers to make up cryptic clues.  So I offer this, in memoriam John McKie:

Social Security: listened in on the radio – two mics in No. 11 (4,8)

Answer supplied below.

Then, the business pages:  I can’t say I generally follow the vagaries of the stock market.  How best to manage your portfolio when the dreaded downturn happens.  In these difficult times…  And on the back page, Distillers eye exports comeback after virus.

For all the wall-to-wall coverage, we actually know very little about this new disease.  We don’t know how widespread it is, how capable we are of mounting an immune response, and how long such a response would last.  And while we know a few risk factors – being male, being old, heart disease, diabetes, smoking – we don’t really know why some people are particularly susceptible to the agent’s virulence.  And that is why we are afraid.

But is this obsessive wall-to-wall coverage entirely healthy?  Our media have form here.  Remember Brexit.  Brexit was wall-to-wall, and we had no idea then that The Next Big Thing was just round the corner.  Now, what else is going on in the world?  I don’t just mean that the Morar Hotel is putting up a plaque to Bax.  What is happening in Yemen, in Syria, in parts of Africa?  I can’t imagine all the wars and rumours of wars have suddenly been put on hold.  What of the world’s poor, whose condition is already so dire that they may scarcely notice this added burden?  At home, we are only living under the conditions that our grandparents would have regarded as the norm – the possibility of being suddenly struck down by a virulent and remorseless pathogen.  So what do you do?  You follow the government’s advice re social distancing, and carry on.

It would be a crass utterance indeed to declare one was enjoying the current regime, but I can’t say I’m unhappy.  I walked from my home down deserted country lanes yesterday morning.  I live directly under the flightpath of all the British air traffic heading for North America, but there were no aeroplanes, and no vapour trails, in the azure sky.  South of me, the A811 cuts its swathe from east to west straight across the central belt; the steady hum of traffic was absent.  All I could hear was birdsong.  It was like being in a Thomas Hardy novel.  I think it was the closest I have ever been to recreating life as it might have been before the industrial revolution.  I recalled the first sentence of Desiderata:

Oh!  But first: the clue.

Herd Immunity.

Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.          

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.