Author: jamescalumcampbell

This Week’s Composer – last week – on Radio 3, was Beethoven.  Actually this year’s composer – every other week – because it is the 250^th anniversary of his death, has been Beethoven.  The week focused on the late string quartets, and ended on Friday with Beethoven’s last work, the Quartet in F major, opus 135.

I heard the Amadeus Quartet play the Op. 135 many years ago at the Edinburgh Festival.  To start at the end, the final rendition of the rather chirpy theme of its final movement is played pizzicato, and I remember Norbert Brainin, the Amadeus’ first violin, made to play the theme arco, before remembering at the last minute that he needed to pluck rather than to bow the string.  I can vividly recall the look of self-disgust on his face as he berated himself.  Afterwards I went back stage and got the autograph of the Amadeus’ viola player, Peter Schidlof.  Shortly after that I actually played the Op. 135 myself in a chamber concert.  I mention it to say that, note for note, I know the piece pretty well; but to be honest I didn’t really understand it.  The inner movements, maybe.  The second movement, Vivace, with its syncopations and abrupt interjections, is astonishingly modernistic; the ensuing Lento assai, cantata e tranquillo, is one of these profoundly reverential and religious expressions, reminiscent of the Cavatina from the Op. 130, and, from the Op. 132, Molto adagio, the Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart.  But the outer movements?  They are quirky; full of humour.  How does it all fit together?

Beethoven even draws our attention to the contrast between gravitas and quirkiness, by giving a title, and an annotated subtitle, to the last movement:

Der Schwer gefasste Entschluss:

Muss es sein?  Es muss sein!  Es muss sein!

The difficult decision: must it be?  It must be!  It must be!

Given that this is the final movement of Beethoven’s final work, the question arises: is this a portent?  Is it an intimation of mortality?

If it is, then it is as if the composer immediately mocks himself for being “portentous”.  Isn’t it interesting that the very word “portentous”, pertaining to a portent, carries with it a pejorative connotation of pretentiousness, just as does the adjective from “pomp” – “pompous”.  Maybe Beethoven had a sense that the Beethoven brand, the ill-temper, the Sturm und Drang, the seizure of fate by the throat, was vulnerable to parody.  The owners of huge personalities often turn themselves in later life into cartoon figures.  Think of Churchill with the polka-dot bow tie, the defiant jowl, the cigar, and the V-sign.  On Radio 3, Edward Dusinberre, the first violin of the Takács Quartet, said Muss es sein? was all tongue in cheek.  Beethoven was reminding somebody who wanted to borrow some music society’s sheet music that he hadn’t paid his dues to the society.  I’d heard previously that it was a remark about his laundry bill.  Enigmatic quotations at the head of music scores tend to be open to multiple interpretations.

A quality of self-parody is quite common in any artist’s late period.  We see it all the time in popular culture.  Elvis retired to Las Vegas, dressed outlandishly, and started doing Elvis impersonations.  Fleming mocked Bond; made him fight Count Lippé with the therapeutic accoutrements of a Health Farm while weakened by a diet of carrot juice.  Later he made him go mad, and try to murder M.  The Beatles sang “You know my name – look up my number.”  And lest we think this transition from farce to the surreal is restricted to popular culture, think of Shakespeare’s last play The Tempest:

Our revels now are ended.  These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air;

And like the baseless fabric of this vision,

The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve;

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind.  We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep. 

The Tempest and Beethoven’s Op. 135 seem to me to be rather alike.  They share a fey quality.     Milan Kundera called the sense of the gossamer fragility of life, and its melting into thin air, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. And in that book, he quotes Muss es sein? from the Op. 135.

The late Beethoven quartets are seen as part of Beethoven’s third, or late period; and musicologists often say that the Op. 135 might have been the start of a “fourth period”.  It’s nice to think that, far from being a statement of resignation, “Es muss sein” is all about embarking on something entirely new.                          

Somebody accused me the other day of being a cynic, when I opined that all the world’s a scam; that all human institutions are designed by the rich and powerful to ensure the preservation of the status quo, whereby those in charge retain their wealth and power.  Is that cynical?  Come to think of it, what exactly is cynicism?  I looked it up.

Chambers: cynic, -al adjs. dog-like: surly: snarling: disinclined to believe in goodness or selflessness, – ns. Cynic one of a set of philosophers founded by Antisthenes of Athens (born c. 444 B.C.), characterised by an ostentatious contempt for riches, arts, science, and amusements – so called from their morose manners: (without cap.) a morose man: (without cap.) a snarler: (without cap.) one who takes a pessimistic view of human motives and actions; cynicism surliness: contempt for and suspicion of human nature: heartlessness, misanthropy: a cynical remark. – adv. cynically, – n. cynicalness. (Gr. kynikos, dog-like – kyon, kynos, dog, or perh. From Kynosarges, the gymnasium where Antisthenes taught.)

Etymologically, I’m a bit sceptical (sceptical – a word to which I shall shortly return) about the dog.  I’ve never thought of dogs as cynics.  Cats, yes.  They’re always sneering.  But dogs?  Of course, as with human beings, there are a few vicious critters out there, but by and large I find dogs to be friendly and affectionate.  They wear their hearts on their sleeve and they presume we do the same.  They don’t have the cynic’s habit of looking for some sordid motive lurking beneath an act of kindness.

Clearly, to be described as a cynic is something of an accusation; the word is pejorative.  But is that fair to cynics?  After all, maybe their dim view of human nature is quite justified.   But I must say that I baulked at being labelled a cynic, and I protest that I am not cynical.  So what is it about the definition of cynicism that makes the adoption of the cynical attitude undesirable and, indeed, reprehensible?

It’s useful here to consider that relative of the cynic, perhaps a step-brother, the sceptic.  Chambers again:

sceptic, sometimes (and in U.S.) skeptic, adj. pertaining to the philosophical school of Pyrrho and his successors, who asserted nothing positively and doubted the possibility of knowledge: sceptical (rarely). – n. a sceptic philosopher: one who withholds from prevailing doctrines, esp. In religion: one who inclines to disbelieve: an inquirer who has not arrived at a conviction. – adj. sceptical of or inclined to scepticism: (now often) doubtful, or inclined towards incredulity. – adv. sceptically. – v.i. scepticise, -ize to act the sceptic. – n. scepticism that condition in which the mind is before it has arrived at conclusive opinions: doubt: the doctrine that no facts can be certainly known: agnosticism: sceptical attitude towards Christianity: general disposition to doubt. (L. scepticus – Gr. skeptikos, thoughtful, skeptesthai, to consider.)

Now unlike cynicism, scepticism, especially in the culture of the west, is seen as being rather a healthy trait.  The entire edifice of the modern scientific method is founded upon Cartesian doubt.  There is no certainty.  Any theory is only as good as its last experimental verification.  The theory remains vulnerable; perhaps the next set of results will topple it.  That is how science progresses.  Sceptics are open-minded.

In fact, open-mindedness is the quality that differentiates the sceptic from the cynic.  The cynic’s mind is closed.  He has made his mind up.  Once you adopt the mind-set of the cynic, there is no going back.  This is why cynicism is such a dangerous attitude to nurture.  The road to cynicism is a one-way street.  And what lies beyond cynicism?  Hopelessness, and then despair.  Don’t go there.

So when I hear people say that the coronavirus pandemic, if and when it subsides, is going to leave us a better and more caring and compassionate people, I hope my attitude is one of scepticism rather than cynicism.  The fact is that many of the people who were at the top of the heap, before it collapsed like a mountain of sludge on to the poor and vulnerable subsisting in the valley below, now want to reconstruct the heap exactly as it was before.  Yet surely the Covid Pause (assuming it is merely a pause) should make us alter our priorities, to value, cherish, and appropriately remunerate health care workers, carers for the elderly, farmers, crop gatherers, garbage collectors, and many other contributors to society who, the very antithesis of cynicism, aren’t just in it for the money.

At this point I was about to write (a) “I’m not holding my breath” or (b) “Well good luck with that” or (c) “It is what it is”.  But the Masters of the Universe want to hear us echo these sentiments because it means we have stopped challenging the world’s injustices.  So I abjure and renounce the threadbare clichés of the cynic.  I am chastened by this accusation of cynicism.  I hereby quit the cynical habit.  You can say to me, “Well, good luck with that” – but only if you really mean it.

About a year after I started to learn the viola at school, I started to vibrate; that is, I discovered the technique of vibrato.  But I concealed the fact from my viola teacher.  Now why would I do such a thing?  Why didn’t I say, “Mr Kinghorn, I’ve been practising vibrato.  May I show you?”  Was I scared that Mr Kinghorn might belong to the school of Sir Roger Norrington, and frown on such decadence?  I hardly thing so.  He was a delightful man, and a great viola player.  He played for the BBCSSO.  But I didn’t want to show him my newly acquired skill; I just thought it was too swanky.  At the time, I recall we used to call people who got too big for their boots ‘Psueds’.  You are liable to adopt the Caledonian Cringe early in life.

It’s all very well for me, with hindsight, to berate my younger self for such reticence.  But now, I find myself doing exactly the same thing.  In my Tuesday evening virtual German class, we have an exercise wherein we each describe to the class what we have been doing throughout the previous week.  It so happens that for the past six weeks my life has been completely dominated by the book I’ve been writing.  I have woken in the morning and with it already on my mind.  I have scribbled away from 8 am until 2 pm.  Then I have gone for a two hour walk.  Further ideas have come to me, without any conscious effort on my part, especially during the latter stages of the walk.  The spring broom has been in full bloom, and I associate these ideas with the experience of pausing before the gorgeous deep golden blossom and smelling that profoundly aromatic, marzipan scent.  Back home, I’ve jotted the ideas down before they are forgotten, and in the evening I have carried on scribbling.  The last thing on my mind, before sleep, has been the book.  The book at bedtime.

Now my German classmates don’t know anything about this.  I would never bring it up.  Writing a book?  It’s just too swanky.  And I wouldn’t dream of telling them I’ve published two novels, and the third is due out in the New Year.  Oddly enough, it would be okay if another class member brought it up.  “I hear you’ve written a book.”

“Ich verstehe, dass du ein Buch geschrieben hast.”

“Ja.  Drei Bücher.”

“Wie heißen sie?”

“Klickdoppelklick, Die Sieben Qualen von Alastair Cameron-Strange, und Schnelligkeitvogel.”

“Interessant!”

Anyway, I think the class will be spared this, as I’ve finished tome No 4.  So if I’m asked tomorrow what I was up to yesterday, maybe I’ll be able to say in truth that I practised my viola.  The latest tome is just shy of 65,000 words.  I’ve never had such great fun writing anything – not even as a child.  And as you can imagine, it has been a gift that it has come along during lockdown.  “Gift?” I hear you say.  “Are you saying you are a conduit giving expression to some higher power?  Who do you think you are?  Mozart?  Next you’ll be a guest on Private Passions.  Michael Barclay will have you read – portentously – a paragraph from your tome, and then you will choose Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations because it is ‘sublime’.  What a pseud!”

But I don’t care what you say.  It has been a gift.  This is how I know the book is now finished.  When I passed the gorgeous crotal bloom yesterday the fresh ideas I received belonged to something entirely different.

So, Dienstag Abend, what will I talk about in German?  With the lockdown, because each day is much like another, we’ve all been scratching our heads to come up with fresh material.  The difficulty of practising social distancing in supermarkets seems to be a recurring theme.  Maybe it was the experience of standing in line outside Sainsbury’s the other day that made me wake up this morning with the crazy idea that I would compose a limerick.  I will say to the class, “Don’t panic!  It is not rude.”  It’s not as daft as it sounds.  It is a simple form as verse forms go, and limericks tend to be written in the past tense.  That’s grand, though why one should leap fully formed into my head I have no idea.

There was a young lady from Crewe,

Who hated to stand in a queue.

She’d always decline

To join in a line

In case she met someone she knew.

Now, how’s that going to go in German?  Incidentally, here is my favourite limerick of all time:

A certain young lady from Crewe,

Got stung in the neck by a hornet.

When asked, did it hurt?

She said, not at all,

It can do it again if it likes.

But why do all these young ladies always come from Crewe?  I have this notion that this is why Crewe is a major rail junction.  People flock there in their thousands in the vain hope of meeting a certain young lady.

But to return to my German class:

Es gab eine Fräulein aus Crewe…

(Und so weiter…)

 

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Welcome to the next generation of CINCHONISM (Conference Internet Chat on Interactive Social Media).  Today, I give you…

Zounds

Actually, that should read Zounds!

The exclamation mark is important.  These unveilings are invariably relentlessly upbeat.  I am a fresh-faced Harvard dropout in jeans and T-shirt, pacing the stage of a large amphitheatre and addressing, through a tiny microphone that looks like a mole on my cheek, the shareholders of my company Bookcase, who, when the curtain goes up on the ensuing video presentation, rise to give me a standing ovation as lengthy as that bestowed upon the Politburo of any totalitarian state.

But I have to admit, we are not quite ready for the roll-out.  Still, stakeholders need to be kept in the loop going forward.  So I will make some predictions as to how Zounds! will evolve.

Consider where we are now.  I attend my German class, virtually, on a Tuesday evening (Dienstag Abend).  We use Microsoft Teams.  Who makes these titles up?  Teams?  It’s so corporate.  I guess I’m just not a team player.  But Teams, the package itself, is fine.  There are usually half a dozen of us.  I sit crouched over my Hewlett-Packard Stream and can see and wave to my classmates.  The sound is good, the class goes well, and there are few glitches.

But now take a look at Zounds!  Let’s say, again, that Zounds! convenes a meeting of six.  For this, you will probably sit at your dining table.  The other five attendants will join you, in hologram.  The ambience of the class, as it once was in reality, will be faithfully recreated.  You might even forget that you are not actually in a room full of people.

But there’s more.  The deluxe version will add in tactile software.  Aldous Huxley anticipated this in his dystopian Brave New World when he superseded the movies with “the feelies”.  Now you can shake everybody’s hand.  Next up, olfactory software.  Freshly baked scones and freshly brewed coffee will be favourites on the run-up to the break.  Attendants may wish to enhance their presence with a signature fragrance.  Bookcase intends to market Virtute perfume and Itplume aftershave.

Of course there will be teething problems.  These could be distressing to sufferers of synaesthesia.  A voice could become malodorous, a holographic representation of a hand might become a pressure on one’s knee.  There could be complicated and far-reaching misunderstandings.  The entire confection could explode in a puff of incense reminiscent of the heavily perfumed late compositions of Scriabin.  What a nightmare.

The real worry is that there actually will be people working on this stuff.  In the midst of our current predicament, there is a piece of received wisdom doing the rounds, that digital technology has been a godsend in our social isolation.  Personally, I don’t buy it.  Don’t get me wrong; I think it has a place.  Back in the 1990s when I was Senior Lecturer in Emergency Medicine at the University of Auckland, I ran video conferences with emergency medicine registrars in Waikato.  They worked well, and I was saved a 300 kilometre round trip.  But that was all I used it for, just as now, my German class is all I use it for.  The real threat of the digital age is that its purveyors try to convince you that the product on offer is indispensable.  A technology comes along, and its promoters get major organisations like the Police or the NHS to take it on, at vast expense, only to discover that it doesn’t work because it doesn’t fit the bill.  I stopped practising medicine just around the time when IT enthusiasts were pushing the idea that email and tele-consultations were better than a face-to-face encounter.  The irony is that, for the time being, they are right.  This feels to me like a grotesque practical joke, as if some malignant classical deity has inflicted a curse upon us.  We will become the stuff of myth, a people consigned to an eternity of remoteness.

I wonder if our governments have considered the really dark side of Covid-19.  Dame Vera says, “We’ll meet again”, but suppose she’s wrong.  Suppose there is no vaccine, no treatment, no spontaneous regression, and suppose every time we foregather, the R number goes up.  It is an unpalatable thought, but I hope our politicians have at least considered it.

Now let us suppose that a vaccine is produced by Big Pharma, but it is hellishly expensive.  Ten million dollars a shot.  The NHS cannot possibly look at it.  So the vaccine becomes the property of the super-rich.  Now you have a select group of individuals who are immune.  They can be issued with a Covid-free passport, and they can go anywhere they like, do anything they like.  You might suppose they might elect to use their immune status for the benefit of mankind, and volunteer as carers and home helps, secure in the knowledge that they are safe.  Or is it more likely that they will continue to mix with their own, in a club that is, literally, exclusive?  They will be inheritors of the earth.  Air travel will be impossible, unless you have a Covid-free passport and a private jet.  You can hop from one five star gated community to another, and life will go on.

Meanwhile the rest of us, vulnerable to viral infection and still in lockdown, must endure a circumscribed life of stay-at-home, take a walk, and go to the supermarket, with a mask, once a week.  The awful thought is that people, enthused with the latest digital technology, will think they’ve never had it so good.

Zounds!

 

In Primary School we were introduced to Leisure, a sonnet, of sorts, from the 1911 anthology Songs of Joy and Others by the Welsh poet W. H. Davies (1871 – 1940):

What is this life if full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when wood we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

 

Perhaps it is confabulation on my part, but I have a memory of being sharply reprimanded by the teacher, for looking out of the window, while we were studying this poem.  “Campbell!  What planet are you on?  Get your nose back into that book!”  Or words to that effect.  Even then, the irony of the situation was not lost on me.

We also read W. B. Yeats’ Lake Isle of Innisfree:

 

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the-honey bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

 

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

 

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

 

Recently, quite fortuitously, I have discovered my own Innisfree.  It is a lochan two miles to the north of my village.  No road leads there.  You can only go there, crossing the countryside on foot.  I went yesterday, stopping beneath the boughs to stand and stare, along with the sheep and cows.  In the woodland I saw no squirrels, but I saw deer, and hare.  Birdsong was ever present, and the steady hum of insects.  It was a sunny day, a little colder than it has been, but very bright.  The streams of fresh clear water were indeed full of stars.  Two thirds of the way to my lochan there is a hill which affords a wonderful view of my village.  From here, it looks rather continental European; I could be in Provence.  There was beauty all around.  I have to admit I didn’t observe any dancing feet, nor any bewitching smiles, because all the way out to the lochan I never passed a soul.  I was alone in my bee-loud glade.

Is it my imagination, or are there clear signs that nature has benefited from “The Covid Pause”?  The air seems fresher, the water cleaner, livestock more content, and wildlife more plentiful.  I wonder if our fellow creatures have an awareness that there is a new dispensation.  Surely they take delight in the silence.

Our politicians are in a bind.  They are being pressurised to provide a route map back to “normality”, but how can you draw a map when you do not know the contours of the terrain to be crossed?  There is no treatment for coronavirus, and no vaccine.  There is no firm evidence that immunity can be acquired, let alone retained.  We might hope that the pandemic spontaneously regresses, as most pandemics have done in the past; but there is no reason to assume that it will.  We don’t know whether April has indeed been the cruellest month.  We may have to live (or die) with this thing for the foreseeable future.

I heard a politician on the radio the other day say that the third runway at Heathrow is “on hold”.  And I thought, no, no.  The third runway at Heathrow is history.  Having touched Innisfree, why would we ever want to go back?  Surely our whole modus operandi has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.  Why would you want to get on a crowded train and commute large distances to and from work?  Why would you want to sit in a traffic jam on the M25 listening to the travel report on Radio 2 – “mayhem clock and anti”?  Why would you want to build HS2, at enormous cost and with enormous environmental disruption, just in order to shave half an hour off a train journey?  Why would you want to borrow millions of pounds to buy a cramped apartment in central London, and spend a lifetime paying off the mortgage?  Why would you want to send your children to a private school, so that they can “get ahead”?

Count me out.  I’m done with all that din.  I want to hear my lochan’s water lapping.

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

In Primary School we were introduced to Leisure, a sonnet, of sorts, from the 1911 anthology Songs of Joy and Others by the Welsh poet W. H. Davies (1871 – 1940):

What is this life if full of care,                                                                                                          We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs                                                                                                  And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when wood we pass,                                                                                                    Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,                                                                                                        Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,                                                                                                      And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can                                                                                                      Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,                                                                                                                We have no time to stand and stare.

Perhaps it is confabulation on my part, but I have a memory of being sharply reprimanded by the teacher, for looking out of the window, while we were studying this poem.  “Campbell!  What planet are you on?  Get your nose back into that book!”  Or words to that effect.  Even then, the irony of the situation was not lost on me.

We also read W. B. Yeats’ Lake Isle of Innisfree:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,                                                                                    And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:                                                                Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,                                                            And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,                                              Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;                                              There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,                                                                And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day                                                                            I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;                                                                While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,                                                                 I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Recently, quite fortuitously, I have discovered my own Innisfree.  It is a lochan two miles to the north of my village.  No road leads there.  You can only go there, crossing the countryside on foot.  I went yesterday, stopping beneath the boughs to stand and stare, along with the sheep and cows.  In the woodland I saw no squirrels, but I saw deer, and hare.  Birdsong was ever present, and the steady hum of insects.  It was a sunny day, a little colder than it has been, but very bright.  The streams of fresh clear water were indeed full of stars.  Two thirds of the way to my lochan there is a hill which affords a wonderful view of my village.  From here, it looks rather continental European; I could be in Provence.  There was beauty all around.  I have to admit I didn’t observe any dancing feet, nor any bewitching smiles, because all the way out to the lochan I never passed a soul.  I was alone in my bee-loud glade.

Is it my imagination, or are there clear signs that nature has benefited from “The Covid Pause”?  The air seems fresher, the water cleaner, livestock more content, and wildlife more plentiful.  I wonder if our fellow creatures have an awareness that there is a new dispensation.  Surely they take delight in the silence.

Our politicians are in a bind.  They are being pressurised to provide a route map back to “normality”, but how can you draw a map when you do not know the contours of the terrain to be crossed?  There is no treatment for coronavirus, and no vaccine.  There is no firm evidence that immunity can be acquired, let alone retained.  We might hope that the pandemic spontaneously regresses, as most pandemics have done in the past; but there is no reason to assume that it will.  We don’t know whether April has indeed been the cruellest month.  We may have to live (or die) with this thing for the foreseeable future.

I heard a politician on the radio the other day say that the third runway at Heathrow is “on hold”.  And I thought, no, no.  The third runway at Heathrow is history.  Having touched Innisfree, why would we ever want to go back?  Surely our whole modus operandi has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.  Why would you want to get on a crowded train and commute large distances to and from work?  Why would you want to sit in a traffic jam on the M25 listening to the travel report on Radio 2 – “mayhem clock and anti”?  Why would you want to build HS2, at enormous cost and with enormous environmental disruption, just in order to shave half an hour off a train journey?  Why would you want to borrow millions of pounds to buy a cramped apartment in central London, and spend a lifetime paying off the mortgage?  Why would you want to send your children to a private school, so that they can “get ahead”?

Count me out.  I’m done with all that din.  I want to hear my lochan’s water lapping.

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

 

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.