Author: jamescalumcampbell

Apparently today is “Blue Monday”, the most miserable day of the year. You can see why this might be. The Christmas season is well and truly over. Christmas coincides with the darkest time of the year, and consequently is all lit up to offset the effects of Seasonal Affective Disorder. But the lights have gone out, and now we are faced with at least another two months of winter. Perhaps longer. I haven’t seen any snowdrops yet. In Scotland, blizzards are not uncommon in April. If we have been let off lightly thus far, if this has been a preternaturally mild winter, we have the nagging sense that this might merely be the harbinger of imminent extreme weather events.

There are few feasts to offset the gloom. Granted Burns Night is next Saturday, but I’m not a fan of Burns suppers. The triad of Burns, Freemasonry, and Glasgow Rangers is not attractive to me. Mind you, I was born into that side of the west of Scotland’s great sectarian divide. The first football match I ever went to was at Ibrox. Rangers v Stirling Albion. My uncle had a brief word with the man at the gate and I was lifted over the turnstile. It was an introduction to the way the world works. You whisper some arcane formula under your breath and place an index finger against the side of your nose, and doors open, or turnstiles cease to be a barrier to you.

There is a story about a young lad in Glasgow being stopped and confronted by an aggressive man. “Are you a catholic or a protestant?” “I’m nothing.” “Aye, but are you a catholic nothing or a protestant nothing?” In that brief exchange lies all the tragedy of the Old Firm.

Rangers won 4 – 1.

(Parenthetically, the last football match I went to was in Brighton. Brighton and Hove Albion v Shrewsbury. I was in the directors’ box. Finger on the nose and Open Sesame again. Des Lynham, a great Brighton supporter, was there. Charming man. Bobby Zamora was man of the match. By an odd coincidence, as I recall, Brighton won 4 – 1.)

My Dad was a cop in Glasgow. He became as disillusioned with the Old Firm as I did, and just wanted to get out. He used to be on duty at the big matches at Ibrox, Parkhead, and Hampden, and he would smuggle me into some safe enclosure by the terraces. It was not uncommon that the gate at Hampden would exceed 135,000 souls. Then in 1971 a terrible event occurred at Ibrox, a crush, with the loss of 66 lives, and the days of football as a kind of Hajj were over.

So I’m not planning on attending any Burns Suppers or football matches. The next festival is St Valentine’s Day, but if I found myself either sending or receiving a card I would be gobsmacked. The RSNO are doing a Valentine’s concert on February 15^th – with stuff like Khachaturian’s Adagio from Spartacus, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, the Adagietto from Mahler 5, and Ravel’s Bolero. So Classic FM. I’m not going, not because I’m a musical snob, but because I would feel exactly as I felt that day I visited Disneyland in Anaheim LA. I got there, decided I didn’t want a ride in a revolving teacup, and immediately left. I recounted this anecdote to a friend of mine who, wishing to change the subject, and perhaps imagining I have a bigger literary profile than I actually do, asked me when I was appearing on Desert Island Discs. I said that Lauren Laverne could not cast me away as I am cast away already. She said, “Oh fetch me my violin!”

So maybe it really is Blue Monday. But in fact I can’t complain. The real reason I’m not going to the Valentine’s gig is that two weeks today, if spared, I’m off to New Zealand. Emirates, Edinburgh – Dubai – Auckland. Greta would not approve. I’m not sure I approve either, but I’m going by request, to fulfil a task. So let it be.

Incidentally, Desert Island Discs-wise, I wonder which of my eight I would “save from the waves”?

Today, let it be the second movement of Honegger’s Second Symphony. Suitably dark, and dismal, and blue. Then, just when you are at your lowest, and for no apparent reason, a great sense of calmness and serenity is bestowed upon you.

Just for a moment. And then again, it’s gone. Back to auld claes an’ purritch.

 

As I write, the Firm has summoned its senior members to an Extraordinary General Meeting at Sandringham, to discuss the disposition of the Dumbartons.

Of the disposition of the Dumbartons, I have no opinion. In, out, half-in, half-out – personally I don’t mind. I flatter myself that, if I found myself in Prince Harry’s shoes, I’d get out and go to Medical School. (Saying that, I doubt if I’d get in now. I’d fail the UCAT –the University Clinical Aptitude Test – and botch my “personal statement”.) Then again, maybe this pious, smug and self-satisfied devotion to sack-cloth and ashes is entirely misguided. If you are born into a position of privilege, perhaps you should accept it and use the power and influence bestowed upon you for the greater good. Perhaps you should do precisely what the royals do, and give your support, and a voice, to charitable institutions.

But this is less about the Dumbartons than the furore that surrounds them. Their announcement that they planned to withdraw from royal duties happened to coincide with the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, followed in short order by an Iranian attack on a US base in Iraq. The Iranians thought the US were retaliating, and tragically shot down in error a passenger airliner coming out of Tehran, with the loss of 147 lives. A cynic might suggest that all this constituted “a good day for burying bad news”. But far from being buried, the decision of the Dumbartons ran at the top of the news bulletins. The Extraordinary General Meeting was convened pronto, because the disposition of the Dumbartons must be sorted out, not over a period of years, or months, or even weeks, but within days.

Why? Why is this so critical? Why is this an emergency? That is the intriguing question.

I have a special interest in emergencies. In emergency medicine, I and my colleagues were trained to recognise them at the hospital’s front door. We triaged them according to need, in Australia and New Zealand, as follows:

Triage category 1: patient to be seen immediately.

Triage category 2: patient to be seen within 10 minutes.

Triage category 3: patient to be seen within 30 minutes.

Triage category 4: patient to be seen within one hour.

Triage category 5: patient to be seen within two hours.

You may imagine that a cardiac arrest is category 1, and an ingrowing toenail is category 5. In other words, category 5 is not an emergency at all, so that all emergencies need to be attended to within the so-called “golden hour”. Why? Because delay causes harm. The emergency physician works in an environment of deteriorating circumstances. His whole effort is put into reversing, or at least attenuating, deterioration. If he doesn’t start this effort within the golden hour, it may be too late.

You may well imagine that, from the perspective of the emergency physician, the activities of Her Majesty’s Government of late have been completely incomprehensible. It has taken, for example, just over 3 years to restore power-sharing to Stormont. Clearly the collapse of devolved government in Northern Ireland in early 2017 was not an emergency. Again, it took HMG three and a half years from the 2016 referendum to conjure a withdrawal agreement with the EU that could be passed in the House of Commons. No sign of urgency there.

Not that the Ship of State is incapable of moving quickly, when she has a mind. I remember when Mrs Thatcher’s government made a decision to go to war in 1982, the SS Uganda was on a cruise in the Mediterranean with 315 cabin passengers and 940 school children. They were hastily disembarked at Naples and the SS Uganda was commandeered, diverted to Gibraltar, and converted to a hospital ship within the course of a single weekend. The summons to Sandringham conveys a similar sense of urgency. This is a constitutional crisis, just as the relationship between Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson constituted a constitutional crisis in 1936. Churchill supported the king and tried to find an accommodation for his heart’s desire. It would be untrue to say that in this he mistook the public mood. Doubtless he would have followed his lights, regardless. But as Lord Moran, his personal physician told him, he had no antennae. It was Mr Baldwin who realised that the king either had to give up Mrs Simpson, or abdicate. He couldn’t have his cake and eat it. Churchill’s loyalty to the king brought down upon himself much political damage. The Conservative Association at Epping wanted to deselect him. And all the while, Herr Hitler was gearing up for war.

Prince Harry’s namesake, Henry V, mused on the idea of relinquishing kingship. The night before Agincourt:

What infinite heartsease

Must kings neglect that private men enjoy?

And what have kings that privates have not too,

Save ceremony, save general ceremony?

And what art thou, thou idol ceremony?

What kind of god art thou, that suffer’st more

Of mortal griefs than do thy worshippers?

…’Tis not the balm, the sceptre and the ball,

The sword, the mace, the crown imperial,

The intertissued robe of gold and pearl,

The farcèd title running fore the king,

The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp

That beats upon the high shore of this world –

No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,

Not all these, laid in bed majestical,

Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave

Who with a body filled and vacant mind

Gets him to rest…

So maybe Prince Harry, like King Hal, is wondering whether it’s all worth the candle. Clearly, judging from the furore, Her Majesty’s subjects think it is. And as with Wallis Simpson, and as with the royal reaction to the death of Princess Diana, it is public reaction that drives the matter. The Firm realises it is under threat. That is why the SS Uganda is en route, full steam ahead, to Gibraltar.

But this is not solely a matter of the Firm’s wish for self-preservation. We need to realise, as the Firm realises, just how critical they are to the continuance of the United Kingdom. It doesn’t matter whether you are, on either side of the Irish Sea, a Nationalist or a Unionist, and it does not even matter whether you are a Royalist or a Republican; the fact is that the Monarchy is the only thing that keeps the whole rickety shebang of the United Kingdom on the road and in one piece. That is why the role of Prince Harry has become such a critical emergency. Monarchy is either magical, or it is emperor’s clothes. What is on the agenda of the Extraordinary General Meeting of the Firm?

One item of business:

What exactly constitutes…

A little touch of Harry in the night.

 

On the twelfth day of Christmas, it seems appropriate to take an inventory of all the accumulated junk on the front lawn that your true love has just sent you.

But soft! As I write (Sunday evening, January 5^th), is this really the twelfth day? If Christmas Day is day 1, then this is indeed day 12. Or is it tomorrow, the 6^th? Whatever. Or as Shakespeare said, fittingly on the title page of Twelfth Night, “What You Will”. Some people get exercised about this sort of question. Did the decade start on 1/1/20, or will it end on 31/12/20? Isn’t it all semantics?

Maybe not. Let the twelve days run from St. Stephens Day (Boxing Day) to the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6^th). Now the OED defines Twelfth Night, as the eve of the Epiphany. So this is indeed Twelfth Night as I write, and tomorrow is indeed the twelfth day. Sorted! We need politicians who can pull rabbits out of a hat like this, and reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable.

Small beer, I hear you say. You only need to decide whether to take the Christmas cards down on Sunday night or Monday morning. On the other hand, if you’ve got all that stuff on the lawn from your true love, you might want to know the season is really over, before you bring in the pick-up trucks.

Way I see it, the true love has got mental health issues. This becomes apparent when you apprehend that the gifts he sends are cumulative. (He to her – I’m making an assumption here. But it could be she to him – a prospect even scarier.) That partridge in a pear tree just keeps coming, every day, twelve times; the turtle doves – and remember there are two of them – eleven times; the French hens (trois, écoutez bien) – ten times. And so on. Once you make the inventory, you realise there are 457 pieces on the lawn, a larger number than you may anticipate, because the partridges come as a job lot with the pear trees, similarly the geese with the eggs they are laying, the maids with the cows they are milking, the pipers with the pipes they are playing, and the drummers with the drums they are drumming. What a cacophony.

Then look at the nature of the other gifts. There are six species of fowl, a total of 184 birds. There are in all 140 people, 76 female, 30 male, and 34 gender unspecified. There are 40 cows. There are 12 pear trees, 42 freshly laid eggs, and an unspecified quantity of milk, fresh from the udder. Of various accoutrements, there are 40 gold rings, 22 sets of bagpipes, and 12 drum kits. What a nightmare. This true love, whoever he or she may be, must be suffering from what the psychiatrists call “xenoerotica”.

Ian McEwan wrote a book centred round the idea of xenoerotica, Enduring Love. It’s very clever, in a McEwanesque way. Basically he takes a psychiatric case history and expands it into a full length novel. He presents the novel first, and reveals the case history as an afterward, a format analogous to that employed by Benjamin Britten in his Opus 48, composed for the Scottish viola player William Primrose, Lachrymae. Lachrymae is a series of variations on a theme by Dowland. Britten presents the variations first, and ends with the Dowland theme. There is a sense of paring down, of a resolution in simplicity, and of great calmness. Of course the protagonist of Enduring Love, threatened by an individual invading his life and, metaphorically speaking, filling his curtilage with unwanted paraphernalia, is far from calm. In fact, he is so driven to distraction that – and oddly enough the episode is one of farcical hilarity – he contacts the criminal underworld to obtain a firearm so that he can murder his tormentor. I’m pretty sure this must be how the recipient of the 457 items must have felt.

But perhaps not. Perhaps the recipient was equally crazy. Don’t some toffs behave just like this? 40 cows and 22 bagpipes, hoho har har, what a wheeze. Get the help to pick it all up. The 12 Days becomes a kind of anthem to conspicuous consumption. Isn’t it interesting that fowls of the air should figure so prominently? Ben Jonson says the last word on conspicuous consumption in his play Volpone –

Could we get the Phoenix, though nature lost her kind, she were out dish.

That could almost be a motto for our time. 2020. The year we chose to consume ourselves to extinction? What the hell are we going to do with all that junk on the lawn?

Put it in landfill.

I’ve looked everywhere. Searched high and low. Can’t find it. Is it hiding under a cushion? Has it fallen behind a bookcase? Or the piano? Is it lying under the couch? No show. Not a trace. Perhaps it’s not in the living room at all. Maybe I wandered absentmindedly with it into the kitchen and put it in a drawer. Or the linen basket. Perhaps I lodged it in a filing cabinet with my tax affairs. In which case it is truly lost.

Maybe I took it out of the house. But why on earth? Perhaps I mistook it for my mobile. Could it be in the car? Maybe I put it in the trash can and it’s already in landfill.

But to tell you the truth, I’m not much bothered. There’s nothin’ on the telly! Besides, I’ve located the switch on the TV itself. I can still catch the news. I can switch on, as in the old days, when the world was black and white and your choice was limited. Channel 3 and channel 10. You switched on and waited for the valves to warm up. A Viscount descending into Renfrew Airport passed over the roof of the house and for a minute the picture wobbled. Hancock’s Half hour. Sometimes there was “snow”. There is a fault. Do not adjust your set. Default to the test card.

And there’s always the radio. The Home Service or the Light Programme or the Third Programme. Jack de Manio and Freddie Grisewood and Uncle Mac on Saturday morning, playing There once was an ugly duckling. Yesterday in Parliament. The Stock Market. Gilts eased… This was before the time when we all migrated into the matrix. 007 tracked Goldfinger across Europe in his Aston Martin DB3, using a Sat Nav, and I thought, well, that’s science fiction! Even in the 90s, today’s world would have seemed impossible. I remember a weekly US science fiction show on TV NZ – I don’t know if it came over to the UK. The premise was that each week the hero occupied the body and soul of a man in deep trouble, sorted out his life, and then moved on to his next assignment. In this, he was assisted by a guardian angel who could tell the hero where he was, and when, and who, by consulting what was essentially a smart phone or tablet. Just like Bond’s Sat Nav – impossible! Now everybody is wandering about, in a trance, consulting the same device to find out who they are, what they’re doing, and where they’re going.

So I’ve stopped searching. It doesn’t matter. We must at all costs make sure the gizmos don’t take over. I know what you’re thinking. Not only have I lost my remote, I’ve lost my mojo. I’ve lost it. I’m just a decrepit Luddite taking a futile last stand against the irresistible and relentless forward march of progress. I deny it. Come join me. Dump social media. Log off. Step outside. The world, though damaged, is more wondrous than ever. Everything is so poignant. It seems to me that the colours are brighter, the vistas more breath-taking, the scents more intoxicating, the music more ravishing, and more significant, language more expressive, fruit more luscious, ideas more intriguing, and women incomparably more beautiful.

 

Outgrowing God, A Beginner’s Guide, by Richard Dawkins (Bantam Press, 2019).

No doubt it has been a perverse thing to do, the week before Christmas, to read a book about atheism. But I was curious. I was curious to know why anybody would go to all the bother.

It is an unusual book in that it lays out an argument without any executive summary; no introduction or preface to set the scene. You just have to read the twelve chapters (six in Part One, Goodbye God, and six in Part Two, Evolution and beyond), and gradually see where it takes you. As I read, I became aware that Prof Dawkins was addressing a young readership. Teenage, I’d say – it is after all a beginner’s guide. I don’t mean the tone is condescending, but it is chatty and avuncular, and the arguments, which are predominantly scientific, mostly biological, are pitched in lay terms, with explanations accessible to a curious and enquiring youngster.

I say there is no executive summary, so perhaps I should attempt a brief précis.

1. There is no reason to believe in something, or somebody, whose existence cannot be demonstrated.
2. Whatever you’re liable to read in the bible, it ain’t necessarily so.
3. The bible is not history; it is myth.
4. The God of the Old Testament is a deeply unpleasant fellow.
5. You don’t need to believe in God in order to be good.
6. Things are getting better all the time.
7. Complex biological systems come about as a result of evolution through natural selection.
8. Improbable events occur incrementally.
9. Biological complexity results from DNA triplet nucleotide bases coding for amino acids assembled to form enzymes.
10. Complex multicellular systems arise from unicellular systems interacting at a local level.
11. Religious belief has an evolutionary adaptive value. Kind of.
12. Amid billions of unfriendly parallel universes, we inhabit the Goldilocks Zone. Take courage!

Fair enough. I suppose I did baulk a little at chapter 12 and the parallel universes, and wondered if there was any more reason to believe in them than to believe in a Creator. Was it G. K. Chesterton who remarked that, once you stopped believing something, you would end up believing everything? But it certainly is true that the universe – or universes – are infinitely queerer places than we had previously imagined. Richard Dawkins was brought up as an Anglican. He lost his religious faith as a teenager because he preferred Charles Darwin’s explanation as to why complex life forms have arisen, over that of the Reverend William Paley. The Reverend Paley propounded the so-called “Argument by Design” for the existence of God. You are walking along a beach and you stumble upon a watch. You examine it, you realise that it is a machine with an exquisitely intricate mechanism, designed for a purpose. There has to be a watchmaker. Well, how much more exquisitely designed are we, with our cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal, renal, locomotor, endocrine, neurological, and reproductive systems? You see where this is going.

But arguments for the existence of God are as arid as those for his non-existence. I don’t know anybody who believes in God because he once examined a watch on a beach. I do know people who believe in God because while they were walking along a beach they suffered a profoundly spiritual experience which they were unable to convey in words. Perhaps they felt reassured that the universe was fundamentally a benign place. Perhaps they felt loved. Perhaps they felt resentful, threatened, and afraid, and did all in their power to silence the still small voice.

But I come back to my initial question. Why bother? Clearly Prof Dawkins is on a mission. He is propounding a doctrine. You might even call it an evangel. He wants to consign religion to the rubbish dump of history. He thinks it’s a load of twaddle. Dangerous twaddle.

It takes a lot of chutzpah to consign an entire area of human experience to the dustbin. Imagine, for the sake of argument, you are sitting in the Georgenkirche at Eisenach, privileged to hear a rendition on the organ of the St Anne Prelude and Fugue in E flat Major BWV 552 given by none other than the composer himself, J. S. Bach. One small problem: you are tone deaf. Bach signed off all his compositions with the dedication Soli Deo Gloria – To the Glory of God Alone. The great master felt that he was merely a conduit conveying a message from, and giving expression to a Supreme Power. But to you, this expression just sounds like an infernal racket. You have a choice. Either you say, what a load of rubbish, this is a fake, a con, emperor’s clothes, a load of bull and so on; or you say, this means nothing to me, but I see all around me people who are moved by something; I can only assume I’m not privy to it.

Amid the grand smörgåsbord of human activity I suppose we all have at least one dish we would assign to the waste disposal. For example, I lack a taste for jurisprudence. My view of the law is Dickensian. I think of Bleak House – endless litigation, suits lost in a welter of mounting costs. The law is an ass. Sometimes it appears to be entirely lacking in common sense. Who would go near it? Of course I realise deep down that actually I know nothing about the law. I am, in fact, a barrack-room lawyer. I once attended a medical conference, in Trump Turnberry of all places, where a lawyer gave a talk about various aspects of medical misadventure. He issued an admonition. “When you go to law,” he said, “you may imagine that you are inviting us to enter your world. But you are mistaken. You are entering ours.” No thank you. Yet I realise it would be folly to dispense with the law. There is a character in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons, suitor to Sir Thomas More’s daughter, who would dismantle the laws of England, like cutting down trees in a forest, in pursuit of the devil. Sir Thomas asks him, once you have cut them all down, when the devil turns on you, the laws all being flat, where will you hide? So I will leave the law undisturbed, until I have need of it.

It seems to me that a preeminent characteristic of scientific enquiry that is lacking in Outgrowing God, is humility. I think Prof Dawkins should go for a walk along the beach. There are other stories about learned men walking along the beach. Isaac Newton described his life’s work in terms of beachcombing. He said, “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Isaac Newton is widely thought of as the greatest scientist ever to have lived, yet, as Richard Feynman has pointed out, his laws of motion are wrong. Principia was published in 1687 and superseded by Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity in 1905. So F = ma lasted 218 years. Now Richard Dawkins says Darwin is “right”. But that is a profoundly unscientific thing to say. To say that Darwin is “right”, or that his theory is “true”, is akin to a statement like “The purpose of the heart is to pump”. In Medicine, and I think Prof Dawkins would approve of this, we are taught to avoid statements that are teleological. You may say, “The heart functions as a pump”. Darwin’s Origin of Species was first published in 1859 so we may say that it has not been significantly challenged for 160 years. But that is not to say that it is “true” or it is “right”. All we can say, until something comes along to contradict us, is that his hypotheses appear to fit with our understanding of reality. Prof Dawkins also says with respect to the theory of evolution, that there are only “a few details left to clean up”. The same was said of physics at the end of the nineteenth century. Then look what happened.

I return to Prof Dawkins walking along the beach. Somerset Maugham tells the story of an eminent man, a “Great Religious”, who encounters a primitive elder in some remote corner of the empire, PNG perhaps. He comes prepared to disabuse the savage of his ancient superstitions. (Maybe not so ancient. Think of the Cargo Cult. Or the worship of the Duke of Edinburgh.) As it so happens, he meets him on a beach. The elder arrives by boat, disembarks, and gracefully walks across the water to reach the shore.

I wonder what Prof Dawkins would do if, walking on the beach, he had a Damascene moment, and heard the still small voice, “Richard, Richard, it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.”

I suppose he would check into the nearest psychiatric clinic.

Soli Deo Gloria.

Felice Navidad!

 

 

 

 

 

Should we applaud between movements?

At the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday night, Nicola Benedetti played the Sibelius violin concerto with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. The auditorium, including the choir stalls, was full, with people standing in the passage ways. Ms Benedetti exerts a power over the West of Scotland classical music public, currently enjoyed by no other exponent. The performance was magnificent, and well received. And yes, there was applause between the three movements. I don’t think Ms Benedetti minded; she had a chance to retune the Strad.

Until comparatively recently the musical cognoscenti used to frown on applause between movements. It was thought to break the musical spell. People thought of it as a sign of philistinism. They might look down their noses at the people who clapped. They might have sniffed and said, “So Classic FM.” They might have looked around the packed auditorium and noticed that the constituency was not quite as grey-haired and middle-class as normal. They might even have considered that some of Ms Benedetti’s popularity rested on the fact that she is, as Ms Austen might put it, “personable”. Maybe the fact that she is an extraordinarily gifted and musical violinist, with a rare ability to avoid cliché and explore the music’s inner meaning, is neither here nor there. Anyway, I recall Ms Benedetti herself once said, “I’m not going to apologise for the way I look.”

But the conservative view on clapping between movements has become outmoded. It’s now seen as being rather stylish. Indeed, at the BBC London Proms, it is almost de rigueur. I became particularly aware of this when I heard a Proms performance of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony. People always applaud at the end of the third movement, a rousing Scherzo. Of course the last movement of the Pathétique is a heart-rending Adagio. Most conductors manage this by silencing the audience with a backward gesture of the hand and proceeding directly into the Adagio, but at the Proms I noticed the conductor allowed the applause to be sustained, and to die out naturally, and only then did he embark on the final movement. Good plan, I thought. It is the most natural thing in the word to applaud at the end of the Scherzo. We are only returning to the mores of a previous era. After all, in Haydn’s time, the audience would stand up and applaud during movements, with delight at some captivating new harmonic invention. Now I can’t see that happening during a contemporary première, any time soon.

I gather that some people are afraid of applause. Apparently it can cause “trauma”. There is a move afoot to supersede applause with a silent gesture of the hands and arms, known as “jazz-waving”. This strikes me as infinitely more sinister and bizarre than any amount of hearty applause.

For my part, I’m quite relaxed about clapping. If it seems that spontaneous applause is merited, go for it. I’m far more irritated by incontinent coughing (particularly bad on Saturday night – but then, weather-wise it was a foul evening) and by people examining their illuminated mobile phones, even supposing they are muted. (Phasors on stun, as James T. Kirk would say.)

There is however one place in music where clapping really has to be eschewed and despised, and that also occurs in Tchaikovsky. The Fifth Symphony. It is at the dominant seventh chord just prior to the silence preceding the last movement’s final iteration of its grand theme. If you think that’s the end of the piece, well, you just haven’t been listening.

The subject of jazz-waving as a means of averting PTSD came up at a party in Aberdeen on Sunday night and a young lady pulled a face and said, “Snowflake generation.” Then, in an apparent non-sequitur, “All these women who say they’re traumatised because some guy put a hand on their knee twenty five years ago, they need to get over it.” It crossed my mind to remark that the day a gentleman desists from placing a hand on a young lady’s knee will signal the imminent extinction of the human race, but then I thought – gender politics, don’t go there. I settled for, “Now you may very well think that. I couldn’t possibly comment.”

 

Should we be sad that the Apostrophe Protection Society has decided to throw in the towel? Apparently they have decided that “ ’ ” is a lost cause. The apathy of the hoi polloi hath puddled their clear spirit. That enigmatic Pimpernel of Punctuation, visiting shop frontages by night with the stealth of Banksy, not so much to insert missing elements as to delete superfluous ones (“Fresh pea’s and bean’s”) has put his paint brush into the can of turpentine for the last time.

Should we mourn? After all, George Bernard Shaw was minded to drop his apostrophes in words, as he would spell them, like “dont” and “wont”. So there is a literary precedent. Maybe the apostrophe really is redundant. What purpose does it serve? Well, it’s (sic) probably worth rehearsing, as it appears that people genuinely struggle with its (sic) correct use. The apostrophe indicates a missing letter. Hence, returning to the Shavian example, “I don’t” means “I do not”. It’s easy. That is, it is easy. Its value is clear. That is, the apostrophe’s value is clear. Then again, maybe not. What about “won’t”? “I won’t” means “I will not”. It’s all a question of euphony. “I willn’t” is difficult to say (the Scots “I willnae” is much easier). You can see there has been an evolution during which the apostrophe’s precise function has become corrupted. So maybe people who struggle with apostrophes have a point. Chambers defines “its” as possessive or genitive of “it”, and points out that “its” did not appear in English until the end of the 16^th century, the older form being “his”. “Its” does not appear in the 1611 King James Authorised Version of the Bible, although it was subsequently inserted in 1660 (Leviticus chapter 25, verse 5). (Incidentally, once in the bowels of Glasgow University library I had the privilege of holding in my hand – I wasn’t even wearing white gloves – a volume whose previous owner had written on the inside cover – “John Donne his book.”) We would write “John Donne’s book” – so again we see the apostrophe stands in for a missing letter or letters.

German has a genitive case but sees no use for the apostrophe. Die Zähne des Kindes waren faul geworden. The child’s teeth had decayed. Interestingly, there is some evidence that the genitive case is withering in German, in favour of the dative. Die fünfte Sinfonie von Beethoven. German elides lots of words just as English does. The German en route to the movies does not say “Ich gehe in das Kino” but rather “Ich gehe ins Kino” and certainly not “in’s Kino”. There’s also a tendency amongst young people to drop the convention of spelling all nouns with a capital letter. You can see that the digital age has got a lot to do with this. How many of us using a search engine like Google bother to use capital letters when typing in an instruction to search, such as “demise society preservation apostrophe”? What is the point of addressing a machine with nicety of style? Young Germans are also dropping the ancient orthography of the scharfes s or eszett (ß) in favour of ss.

Perhaps there is a worldwide trend in action here. Since most communication among “the younger set” seems to be via text, Facebook, Twitter, What’s App and a myriad of platforms I’ve never heard of, maybe language is turning into George Orwell’s dystopian version of Esperanto, Newspeak. Maybe the dropped apostrophe is just the thin end of the wedge. Do we have any need for punctuation at all? Here, the literary precedent is James Joyce, and the famous monologue of Mollie Bloom at the end of Ulysses.

I hope Ill never be like her wonder she didnt want us to cover our faces but she was a welleducated woman certainly and her gabby talk   

Come to think of it, do we really need to leave spaces between the words? Email addresses largely miss them out. Comeandjoinus@willothewsisp.com

It’s a nightmare. I’m going to get out my tub of whitewash, and start patrolling the High Street by night.

It is salutary to go on the web and search for “human population of the world”. You can easily find an estimate of the population in real-time, steadily increasing as the seconds tick by. When I found the site, the number read 7,747,727,296. By the time I had written it down, the number had risen to 7,747.727,452. I did a quick computation. The world needs to create a new London, with all its infrastructure and facilities, once a month.

But we don’t talk about it. We talk about related issues – plastics, pollution, climate change, deforestation, but we shy from the question of overpopulation. It’s the mastodon in the auditorium.

Talking of auditoria, I’m interested in the imagery of politics qua theatre. Politicians frequently talk about “the world’s stage”. For example, we have to be in Europe, or indeed out of Europe, if we are to play a meaningful role on “the world’s stage”. Similarly, politicians refer to “the top table”. We must retain and renew our nuclear deterrent if we are to remain at “the top table”. These expressions are used so frequently that, like many other tired metaphors, they have degenerated to the condition of cliché. But I think they might be worth re-examination.

Shakespeare, not surprisingly, used the stage as metaphor quite frequently. In As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII, Jaques says

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players…

He goes on, in a tone of gentle mockery, to describe the seven ages of man; mewling, puking infancy, tedious schooldays, febrile love, jealous war, pompous societal gravitas, the slippered pantaloon of retirement; and, lastly…

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

And in Macbeth, Act V, Scene V, scepticism becomes cynicism:

Out, out, brief candle.

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

So it is far from obvious that the world’s stage is an enviable location on which to find oneself. After all, even if art holds the mirror up to nature, what happens on stage is not real; it is make-believe.

Related to “the world’s stage” is that other frequently recycled cliché: “the top table”. This conjures an image of university academics dining in hall; or of the hierarchical seating arrangements at a banquet, perhaps a wedding feast. Jesus had something to say about aspiring to sit at the top table. He recommended that you put yourself into a lowly position, and who knows, maybe the host will invite you to sit with him. On the other hand, if you put yourself at the top table, you might have to suffer the humiliation of being demoted. In geopolitical terms, the top table’s current makeup arose out of the Second World War. The Allies – Britain, the United States, and Russia – sat at the top table. Nowadays, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council constitute the top table and key to membership is that you must be a nuclear power. Hence the Security Council comprises Britain, the US, Russia, China, and France.

Being at the top table is a little like being on the world’s stage. You occupy your own universe and you may have little idea as to what is going on in the real world. You think what you are doing is tremendously important, but to the majority of the seven billion, seven hundred and forty seven million people, and counting, for all you know, it is all beside the point. I heard some people on the radio at the weekend who aspire to sit at the top table and occupy the world’s stage. All that is wrong with the current state of our politics was summed in in the last three minutes of Any Questions, BBC Radio 4, on Friday night, repeated on Saturday afternoon.

Chris Mason (Chair): Just time to slip in one last question.

Questioner: Are any of our current politicians worthy of the term “statesman”, or “stateswoman”?

Chris Mason: Give us a name, but not from your own party.

Grant Shapps (Conservative): general affirmation that most politicians are people of integrity and good faith (despite cynical groan from the audience.) And a name – Yvette Cooper.

Steven Kinnock (Labour) – lots of Tories, but they were all sacked by the PM. (Hearty applause from the audience. This was obviously too much for Grant Shapps, who rather spoiled his hitherto straightforward answer with a sour remark about all the Labour members defecting because they couldn’t stand the anti-Semitism.) Give us a name, Steven: Rory Stewart.

Delyth Jewell (Plaid Cymru) – used to think Jeremy Corbyn was a man of decency – but now devastated by his lack of conviction…

Ben Habib (MEP, Brexit): can’t think of a single one, especially not the leaders. And by the way what Boris says about Brexit blah blah blah we’re out of time.

Pitiful.

Grant Shapps nearly managed, and then, goaded by a political opponent’s cheap gag, threw it away. Steven Kinnock – owner of the cheap gag. Delyth Jewell – turned what appeared to be a compliment into an attack. Ben Habib – didn’t get out of his political rut to answer the question.

We are being weighed in the balance and found wanting.

Meanwhile, an update on the Mastodon in the Auditorium.

7,747,851,818

And in the time it took me to write it down

7,747.851,853…

November 25. Just under a week to go before the official start of winter, but already the NHS news reports are sounding pretty wintry. Down south, the BMA has got into a spat with the government over the viability of GP home visits. Here, there is a horror story about a patient’s miserable experience seeking out-of-hours care, and an interminable wait in an out-of-hours GP clinic. For the next three months we can expect that the NHS will be under intolerable strain. There may be more horror stories to come. Yet paradoxically, the more the NHS appears to fail, the more it will be upheld as a sacred cow which must under no circumstances be sold to Mr Trump. Since we are in the midst of an election campaign, we can expect some extravagant financial gestures of goodwill in the NHS’ direction. We may also be sure to hear that there are technological solutions to the NHS’ woes, particularly in the fields of Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence. You know the sort of thing. Robots caring for the elderly.

As somebody who has been there, done that, and got the T-shirt (if I may say so) in the fields of emergency medicine and general practice, I’m always struck by the absence in these arguments of consideration of what might constitute a tolerable burden for a GP (or indeed an emergency physician) in their day-to-day practice. Yet this seems to me to be a valid starting point: think of what an individual can reasonably do and then integrate that computation into the whole picture.

I offer no evidence base here, but rather an assessment based on personal experience. A contented GP who in the long term is not running the risk of burnout will see no more than 100 patients per week. Fifteen minute appointments. What would that look like in reality?

Something like this:

Monday: morning surgery 0900 – 1130: 10 patients

11.30 – 11.45: Coffee.

11.45 – 1400: admin, home visits (say 3), liaison with colleagues, and lunch, scheduled according to need.

1400 – 1630: afternoon surgery: 10 patients.

1630 – 1800 admin and any further home visits (say 1).

Total: 24 patients. Enough already. Ask any GP. After you’ve seen 30 patients in a day you begin to get tetchy. But some busy urban GPs are seeing in excess of 40 patients a day. It’s unsustainable.

I should say a word about what constitutes “admin”. The most important elements are the surveillance of correspondence and laboratory investigation results, and further contact and correspondence with colleagues, particularly within the secondary and tertiary sectors (ie hospital specialists).

Tuesday might look a bit like Monday.

Wednesday morning also looks the same, but Wednesday afternoon is free, because it so happens that Wednesday is the GP’s night on call (yes, I’m advocating bringing the responsibility of out-of-hours care back to the GP surgery). So after 1800, the GP remains in the surgery or health centre, and provides out-of-hours cover for the practice, and probably a group of neighbouring practices who will return the favour on another night.  (Because this burden is being shared with other practices, this may not be a weekly commitment.)  Ideally, he or she will be accompanied by a practice nurse. (Working alongside a colleague is so much more rewarding than working alone.) The evening and night’s activity will involve consultations on site, and home visits. A driver will be provided.

Thursday: the day post night on-call is a non-clinical day. If the night has been busy, the GP will need to sleep. Otherwise the day is devoted to the GP’s special interest – research, administration, further education and professional development etc.

Friday – normal day.

Saturday and Sunday: must be covered as with any weekday evening. Depending on the local arrangements, the GP might have to fulfil a single weekend shift approximately once a month. If that shift happens to be Sunday night, then for the following week the GP’s protected day will become the Monday.

That works out as a working week of about 60 hours, which sounds a lot, but around 18 of them will constitute time on call, including the average weekend commitment, and 9 of them will be protected for non-clinical activities. That is sustainable.

In order for doctors to achieve this lifestyle, their patient list (per full-time equivalent GP) needs to be a flock of around 1,000 souls. GPs are paid partly on a per capita basis. If you look after 1,000 people, you won’t get rich, but you have a chance of being happy. We need to train and retain more GPs.

In the endless debate about how the health service is run, you seldom hear opinions about modus operandi at this level of detail. Instead, the BMA tells the Health Secretary the GPs are too busy to do house calls, and the Health Secretary tells the BMA that house calls are mandatory. Shouldn’t the health secretary be asking the GPs what they need, and shouldn’t the GPs be replying with – well, something along the lines of what I’ve just written?

Do you remember the Hamlet cigar advert?  There were a series of them that shared the common theme of the cigar as a cure for fretfulness.  The one I remember best was a shot taken from the edge of a golf bunker.  The golfer in the bunker was not visible but you could tell he was there because you could hear the recurrent sound of wedge (or perhaps mashie, or niblick – you can tell I’m not a golfer) versus golf ball.  A spray of sand rose above the lip of the bunker – but not the ball.  There may have been barely audible grunts of exasperation from the invisible golfer.  Then, a pause.  The rasp of a match, and now, instead of a spray of sand, cigar smoke, to the accompaniment of the advert’s signature theme – the air from Bach’s third orchestral suite, BWV1068.  It was all deeply calming.

I used to have a penchant for a good cigar.  Who knows, maybe the Hamlet advert was its root cause.  Advertising can be insidiously successful, though not always.  Another famous tobacco ad was for Strand cigarettes.  The recurrent theme this time was of a man in a raincoat lighting up on an inclement night in a deserted cityscape.  The strap line – “You’re never alone, with a Strand.”  But then Strand bombed.  The received wisdom was that people did not like to consider themselves as pathetic lonely old men in need of a drug to offset their solitude.

One of the last times I smoked a cigar was on the last night that it was legal in Scotland to smoke in a public place.  The place in question was Cromlix House in Perthshire, an establishment now owned by Sir Andy Murray.  I was in the company of a young lady who happened to be a smoker, and it was very relaxing to puff on a Havana cigar in front of a blazing log fire.  I can’t remember what cigarette Julia smoked – not Strand.  It seemed churlish not to have this experience for the last time (of smoking in a hotel, not I hope, enjoying the company of a young lady).  In his autobiography My Last Sigh, the Spanish film director and surrealist Luis Bunuel gives a deeply seductive description of how to prepare and drink a dry martini, pointing out that alcohol and tobacco are essential accompaniments to lovemaking.  (And in Thunderball, when Bond picks up Dominetta Vitali by buying her a carton of Dukes, king-size with filter in a Nassau shop, he invites her for a drink, pointing out that smoking goes with drinking.)  Bunuel does, however, end his panegyric to alcohol and tobacco with a palinode – don’t smoke or drink because they’re bad for you.

In the absurd days of the Quality Outcomes Framework which used to drive General Practice in this country, doctors got Brownie points for recording patients’ smoking status.  I used to ask patients, “Do you smoke?”  “Yes.”  Tick the box.  “Just in case nobody has ever told you, it’s very bad for you.”  I knew a GP who actually prescribed cigarettes.  There is some evidence that smoking might attenuate attacks of ulcerative colitis.  This GP would advise patients with that affliction to smoke a few cigarettes every day.  How many?  He said five.  (I think he was getting his “five a day” message mixed up.)  I dare say the General Medical Council would have taken a dim view of this particular aspect of his pharmacopoeia, but I don’t think anybody ever dobbed him in.

Fortunately, Cuban cigars are so ridiculously expensive (you are more or less setting fire to bank notes) that I’ve got my habit down to about one a year.  So I need an alternative cure for fretfulness (heaven knows, perusing my morning paper, there’s more than enough to be fretful about) and fortunately I have such a cure on my doorstep.  I take a turn down to Flanders Moss, a stretch of peatbog in West Stirlingshire stretching from Thornhill to Aberfoyle.  You could easily disappear into this Grimpen quag, but fortunately there is a boardwalk affording a kilometre circuit, from which you can enjoy magnificent views of the southwest origin of the highland boundary fault line that stretches from Loch Lomond to Stonehaven.  Now, the big peaks, Ben Lomond, Venue, Ledi, Stuc a’Chroin and Vorlich, and in the distance, Ben More and Stob Binnein, are snow-capped.

Sometimes I stop and talk to the horses.  People walk their alpaca down here.  Alpaca are another wonderful cure for anxiety.  They are good company, so alert, so interested in what’s going on, always smiling.

So I “take a turn round the moss” and, at least for a time, the cares of the world recede.  I don’t have to light up, yet I can still hear the long, soothing melodic line of Bach’s Air.