Author: jamescalumcampbell

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

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

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

In the event that the skipper becomes incapacitated…

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Always tuck your shirt in.”

You decide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

DIARY                                                            27^th January 1930

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

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

**Fruity Beaconhurst, equerry to King George V

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

****American industrialist and bootlegger

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

******the opera impresario and voluptuary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.