Author: jamescalumcampbell

Something is happening to the present participle in England.  The Home Secretary, Priti Patel, says something along the lines of “The Government is bringin’ in a bill outlawin’ the traffickin’ of travellin’ people seekin’ asylum while fleein’ persecution in…”

This tendency to place the tongue behind the superior dentition, rather than occlude the posterior oropharynx, is akin to other recent evolutions in English wot she is spoke.  For example, the “you” sound is vanishing from English English.  Frank Sinatra sang “Noo York Noo York!” (It took me long enough to realise that the first NY was the city, the second the state) “It’s a helluva town!”  But the Beatles sang “You’ve got me going now, just like I knew you would…”

“…like I knew you would whaaaa!”

But now, particularly in London, “knew” or “new” is “noo”.  Notice that, analogous to the decay of the present participle, a narrowing of the posterior oropharynx is being pushed forward into the aperture of the lips.  Listen to, say, Jonathan Ross, or Steve Wright (in the afternoon).  If Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend should become an audio book, I think it should be read by Jonathan Ross.  From Chapter 2:

Mr. and Mrs. Veneering were bran-noo people in a bran-noo house in a bran-noo quarter of London.   Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span noo.  All their furniture was noo, all their friends were noo, all their servants were noo, their plate was noo, their carriage was noo, their harness was noo, their horses were noo, their pictures were noo, they themselves were noo, they were as nooly married as was lawfully compatible with their having a bran-noo baby…

Simultaneously, the “th” sound is going.  I think this is profoundly significant.  Consider that the Anglo Saxons of West Mercia devoted two orthographic symbols to the “th” sound – the thorn and the eth.  And it is vanishing.  Somethin’ is goin’ on wif our yoof, an’ it aint bootiful.  Rather than obstruct the occlusion of the dentition with the lingua, you approximate the upper dentition to the lower lip.  That is to say, instead of sticking your tongue between your teeth, you jam your upper teeth against your lower lip, and create what is known as a “voiceless fricative”.

Then there is the glottal stop, otherwise known as the glo’’al stop.  To produce the glottal stop, you omit the “t” sound in the middle of a word and replace it by a kind of spasm of the vocal cords.  This used to fall, almost exclusively, within the gift of the burgers of the City of Glasgow (Ci’y ah Cul’ure).  No longer.  I first noticed its appropriation by the ruling classes when I heard the then Chancellor George Osborne (I guess trying to be a man of the people) deploy it: “Tha’’s jus’ ti’’le ta’’le!”

Another even more profound example of linguistic migration is that the language of the English street is becoming syllable-timed rather than stress-timed.  You don’t say:

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

…you say:

Seas-on-of-mists-and-mell-ow-fruit-ful-ness.

Everything is stressed.  Ratatatatatatatat!  It’s the juggernaut lingo of a rapper.  Who knows, we may hear later today (at time of writing) in the Queen’s Speech to open Parliament:

“Ma guv’men’s doin’ nuttin’ pendin’ ugh Genral Lekshun…”

There’s a piece of received wisdom abroad about language that argues that, much as we still assign people to a specific class on the basis of the way they speak, there is nothing inherently inferior, or superior, about any specific accent or dialect.  I first heard this argument from Professor Michael Samuels, the Professor of English Language in the University of Glasgow, brother of the actress Miriam Karlin, back in the 1970s.  Prof Samuels himself spoke faultless RP but he happened to be a fantastic mimic and could authentically reproduce any accent extant within the British Isles.  So his “taster” lecture for the course in English Language was very amusing.  That was before we got embroiled in Beowulf.

But is it true?  Is one mode of expression just as good as any other?  I go to a gym in the Stirling Highland Hotel.  There are a couple of guys there in the locker room, Stirling guys, into whose conversation I sometimes eavesdrop.  Can’t understand a bloody word.  And mind, I’m a Glasgow boy; I come from 25 miles away.  If they include me in the conversation, they very kindly modulate their registration, in order to render themselves intelligible.

So I reckon this notion of a standard language (at least one, but by all means more) is very important, if a nation is going to be able to function as a nation.  I was conscious of this thought the other day when I chanced to be in conversation with a young lady on a help desk while I was trying to sort out a glitch on a domestic appliance.

“A ra’’le? Wo’ ra’’le?  How noo’s your App? ‘Ang on, putin’ you on ‘old…”

I said, “I beg your pardon?”

But I was on hold.

In the last 50 pages, or so, of War & Peace, Tolstoy gives a rather jaundiced view of history, in which he disses the idea of “the great man” and proposes that events are a grand amalgam of all sorts of untraceable causes and effects, over which we have little control.  I think of that when I think of the fact that, when I got in touch with a help desk south of the border, I could barely understand what was being said.  We think that the constitutional arrangements of these islands are all about the economy, or our relationship to Europe, or a sense of “identity”, or even “blood and soil”, but I have this notion that Scotland will become an independent nation simply because the Home Secretary is droppin’ her Gs.

Slogged away at the latest tome all day Saturday, trawling through it to cut out the outworn clichés, the dead wood, and all the passages that make me cringe.  You say to yourself, “That works… that doesn’t work…” but after a while you lose perspective and you can no longer tell.  So you have to put it down.  Besides, I was getting cabin fever.  So I put my pen down and went off to the Shenaz in Glasgow (“One visit means many” – indeed, though my last was about 45 years ago) for a delicious lamb bhuna.  They used to serve a starter called “indescribables” so I asked for them and received a look of incomprehension.  I’m turning into my father, who used to order a “Macallam” for dessert.  The Shenaz is on Granville Street opposite the magnificent west-facing frontage of St Andrews Hall – the only part of the hall to survive the devastating fire of 1962.  What a pity I couldn’t just cross the road to hear the RSNO’s season opener.  Instead, I walked the length of Sauchiehall Street to the north end of Buchanan Street and entered the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.

I nearly didn’t go.  Mahler 1.  I’ve played it, probably around the last time I had a curry in the Shenaz, and didn’t much like it.  One is so dogmatic as a youth.  I thought the opening was a steal from Beethoven 4, that Mahler having run out of themes also stole Frère Jacques, cast in a minor key for the third movement’s bass solo, and that the last movement was pure bombast.  So I was minded on Saturday to cut and run at the interval.

But the RSNO are on top form.  There was a virtuoso rendition of Strauss’ Don Juan, and then the magnificent Karen Cargill sang Alban Berg’s Seven Early Songs which gave me a chance to practise my German.

Herbstsonnenschein.

Der liebe Abend blickt so still herein.

Sometimes I think German is just an English dialect – or maybe vice versa.  Anyway it put me in the mood, so I stayed.

It soon became evident that we were hearing something very special indeed.  As I said, the RSNO are on top form, but I also think this remarkable performance had much to do with Maestro Thomas Sondergard who seemed to know how to get rid of all the accrued barnacles of conventional performance interpretation and get to the core of the music.  I particularly recall the magical introduction and then, following the first movement’s principal theme taken from the second of Mahler’s four Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, the return to the opening material, with all these sounds of nature, when the whole world seems to hold its breath.

The orchestra evidently also thought Sondergard was key to a wonderful performance, because they applauded him consistently throughout the various curtain calls.  They remained seated to allow him to take a bow – which is something of a convention, but then when he gestured to bring them to their feet, they remained seated and had him take another bow.  Seasoned orchestral musicians can be pretty hard bitten.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen the RSNO do this before.

The communal act of music making, and music listening, in concert, can often be disappointing.  The performance can be routine, a run-through; the audience can be restless and inattentive, distracting neighbours with luridly bright mobile phone screens, polluting the soundscape with coughs, ringtones, hearing aid whistles, and even conversation.  Even when everyone, orchestra and audience alike, are giving their all, even then, some magical ingredient, inexplicably, is missing.

For all that, sometimes it just all comes together.  And that may happen, as it did for me on Saturday evening, when you least expect it.  You might record the concert and indeed, the resulting CD would be remarkable, but you can never really bottle the experience of a wonderful live concert.  The music existed for as long as the players played and the audience listened, and now, that unique experience only exists in the archive of memory.

We should not regret that.  Let it go.  Move on.  Next week the RSNO play Arnold Bax, Dimitri Shostakovich, and Sergei Rachmaninov.  Eight of us are going.  We are meeting first for a preconcert dinner.  We have being playing music together for a long time, since, come to think of it, before the last time I dined in the Shenaz.

And Bax – my hero – in concert.  How unusual is that?

Can’t wait.

“Bah,” said Scrooge.  “Humbug!”

To what was he referring?

Christmas.  His nephew wished him a merry one, and offered a panegyric to the festival as “a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time,” to which Scrooge replied, with evident sarcasm, “You’re quite a powerful speaker, sir.  I wonder you don’t go into Parliament.”

And in Parliament, Paula Sherriff on the Opposition Bench and a friend of the late Jo Cox said she was worried about death threats she had received, and accused the Prime Minister of exacerbating an already toxic situation by his use of intemperate language.  The Prime Minister replied, “I’ve never heard such humbug in all my life.”  This remark has proved controversial, not because “humbug” constitutes unparliamentary language, but because it appears the PM was belittling, specifically, a woman’s fear for her life.  Andrew Marr took the PM to task on this on Sunday morning, in Manchester, before the start of the Conservative Party Conference.  Well!  What a car crash of an interview that was!  The PM said that his “humbug” comment was a response to the assertion that his calling Hilary Benn’s Act to make a no-deal Brexit unlawful “The Surrender Act” was inflammatory.  Mr Marr and the PM battled this point out rather unproductively for fifteen minutes.  Couldn’t a quick referral to Hansard sort his out?  I’ll leave it with you.

But what, precisely, is humbug?  For a full exploration down this fascinating avenue I commend to you Professor Harry G. Frankfurt’s sublime tract, On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005).  (I daresay “bullshit” would have been unparliamentary.)

To say that somebody speaks “humbug” is not the same as to say that somebody is lying.  Often, the issue is not so much whether some question of fact is true or false, but whether somebody’s emotional response to reality is sincere.  You might say to a political opponent, “I find your remarks deeply offensive.”  But you are not really offended at all.  You merely perceive a political opportunity to advance your cause.  That is humbug.

I don’t know about you, but I am completely scunnered (good Scottish word) with the political interview.   Mr Johnson and Mr Marr – I hold them both to account.  I can’t understand why so few politicians have cottoned on to the fact that sincerity would be a fantastic vote winner.  If I were a spectral eminence grise hanging around the corridors of No. 10 in my jeans and T-shirt, I’d advise the PM to proceed as follows:

“Do you regret the fact that you described your opponent’s viewpoint as ‘humbug’?”

“Yes I do.”

“You got it wrong?”

“Big time.”

“Shouldn’t you therefore resign?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

And now there is a chance to expand, and elucidate.  The difference between this last question and the ones preceding it, is that while the others are closed questions, seeking a simple answer, this is an open question, allowing you to give a multifaceted, multivariate, and nuanced answer.  It seems to me that the trick of the political interview, from the interviewee’s point of view, is to identify closed questions and answer them monosyllabically.  If the interviewer is hunting for your scalp, don’t give him, or her, anywhere to go.  Just answer in monosyllables, because sooner or later the interviewer will run out of closed questions and be compelled to ask you an open one.  Then you have a chance to state your case.

As for the interviewer, we really ought to expect something rather more sophisticated than the “yes you did no I didn’t did didn’t” spat that tends to result from confrontation.  If an interviewer has a blatant agenda designed to expose some specific fact, and the interviewee has a blatant agenda to get some other specific fact across, then you are not going to have a meeting of minds.  A skilful interviewer will find a way of getting under the interviewee’s skin.  If he can’t do it, then the whole shebang is… well, humbug.

But confrontation seems to define our entire public life.  With respect to the current impasse in Westminster, one of my neighbours recently suggested to me that it has moved beyond farce to… what?  What is beyond farce?  I wondered about that.

It is certainly just as well that the Government and Her Majesty’s Opposition are separated by two sword lengths, because things are getting a little heated.  There’s a general opinion that people across the board need to tone their language down.  Mind you, insult, and intemperate language are hardly new to the Commons.  Lloyd George said Churchill would “make a drum out of the skin of his own mother.”  Churchill called Ramsay MacDonald “a boneless wonder”, and Attlee “a modest man with much to be modest about”, as well as “a sheep in sheep’s clothing”.

Is Westminster a Whitehall Farce?  There are certainly farcical elements.  The booming voice of the Attorney General, for example, surely comes straight out of a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta.  He reminds me of Pooh Bah in The Mikado.  The general hubbub and waving of order papers is surely farcical.  When the Speaker calls for order but cannot be heard above the din, something very strange happens to his mode of delivery, as if he were being taken over and possessed by some malevolent demon, speaking in tongues:

ORDURE!  Or perhaps: HORS D’OUEVRES!

People are listening in to the Parliament Channel for its entertainment value.  Some of “our European partners” are convinced it is a parody.  It is certainly a Soap Opera.

The comparison with a Soap is worth exploring.  Soaps have changed.  Emmerdale and Eastenders, or even Coronation Street, are hardly The Archers and Mrs Dale’s Diary.  I only ever catch the last few seconds of Eastenders which usually seems to feature some grotesque event like somebody’s house being blown up, while a vicious man and a spiteful woman spit vitriol at one another: “I’ll dance on your grave!”  (Doof doof doof-doof-doof… doh re me fah soh, lah fah…)  An everyday story of London’s east end.  Brahms and Liszt dahn the Battlecruiser, touched the skin and blister for a Lady Godiva.  The trouble is, people actually begin to think this is an accurate depiction of normal quotidian experience, and so it thus becomes.  Everybody starts to behave as if they are taking part in a Soap Opera.  Manners are deteriorating.  Sooner or later, the bad behaviour observed on the telly spills over on to the streets.

Literally.  Some people, once they get behind the wheel, turn into monsters.  Somebody gets into the wrong lane, and signals a request to move into a line of traffic.  But they have made their choice, and no quarter is given.  An effort to signal and merge is greeted with a shrill and sustained blare of the horn from some Chelsea Tractor the size of a Sherman tank.  Then there are the tail-gaters, and the constituency, the very large constituency, that blatantly ignores the speed limit, and attempts to browbeat those of us trying to adhere to it.

And this is as nothing compared with the language and the threats of the social media trolls.

Courtesy is vanishing.  Sometimes when I practise the ritual of courtesy I receive a look of astonishment as if I were an aristocrat from Tsarist St Petersburg prancing a gavotte twixt the Winter Palace and the Hermitage.  A gentleman of the old style.  How quaint.

What lies beyond farce?

Madness.

Doof doof doof-doof-doof… doh re me fah soh, lah fah…

The eminent statistician Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter OBE FRS was on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House on Sunday morning, helping to review the papers.  Prof Spiegelhalter is Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory of the University of Cambridge.  He is concerned with the use and misuse of statistical data in public discourse.  He looked at several reported scientific surveys (“a crop of rubbish”) with headline-grabbing results and reiterated the question, “Who commissioned the survey?”  He was making a point about bias.  One of the other panel members cut in with a throwaway comment to the effect, “Well we know that statistics are 99% made up”, to which Spiegelhalter replied, with more than a hint of sarcasm, “Well I’ve never heard that before!”  Paddy O’Connell in the chair told us that the professor pulled a weary face – useful to know when the media platform is radio.  It’s the old adage attributed to Mark Twain, “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics”, which is often interpreted as a description of a downward spiral of misinformation and disinformation.  But there is another way of interpreting the adage.  There are, on the one hand, lies and damned lies; and, on the other, there are statistics.  I venture to say that this is Prof Spiegelhalter’s message.  The fact is that in this age of fake news, data are under attack, not just because they may be false, but because they may be, accidentally or wilfully, misinterpreted.

It so happens that on Thursday evening I was in Glasgow University to hear the inaugural Bowman Lecture, in honour of a modest and eminent man, courtesy of the School of Mathematics and Statistics, given by the self-same Professor Spiegelhalter.  This public lecture was entitled Trust in Numbers.  The Prof is a skilled communicator and it was no surprise that the lecture was a sell-out.  It was also noticeable that the audience members filling the Sir Charles Wilson Hall were of all ages (I wish I could provide a graph here) including a substantial number of school students.  Given that statistics is sometimes considered a dry subject, this was heartening.

The professor is on a mission; and it is one of public education.  I have to say that I felt right at home listening to his lecture, not just because it was full of medicine (breast cancer, prostate cancer, processed meats and bowel cancer, safe alcohol consumption limits), but precisely because he was enthusiastically conveying a message, in much the way that I vividly recall the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine championing the Emergency Medicine cause during the 1980s and 1990s.  It is always a pleasure to hear somebody who feels passionately about some cause, particularly if they possess the great qualities of rhetoric – coherence, fluidity, responsiveness, and humour.

The difference in statistics between relative risk and absolute risk was colourfully depicted.  Some of the lurid Red Top banner headlines misconstruing then sensationalising a piece of medical research caused great hilarity within the hall.  I was interested in the professor’s view on the latest medical advice about alcohol consumption.  Over the years the “safe limit” has steadily declined.  28 units a week, then 21, then 14, for both male and female.  And then, zero.  No consumption is safe.  Actually, as that graph extrapolates to zero, the evidence becomes distinctly hazy.  Prof Spiegelhalter announced his intention to have a glass of wine after the lecture.  He said, “I’ve created a new statistical unit – ‘NND’.  Number needed to drink.”  He added, “The medics like that one.”  That is because we are familiar with “Number needed to treat”, that is, the idea of the number of patients needed to treat with Therapy A before a positive gain in a single individual is achieved.  (To this, parenthetically, might be added the much less researched notion of ‘number needed to harm’ – the number of patients needed to undergo Therapy A before someone experiences a significant unwanted effect.

I was very intrigued by his concept of “inoculation”.  This was a kind of pre-emptive strike.  Some piece of misinformation is doing the rounds and you disable it by saying, “Isn’t it awful that everybody thinks…” and you reproduce the false information, as if you are supplying the recipient with a little piece of toxic material in order to protect them from the full effect.

After the talk, there were questions from the floor.  One of them was whimsical (or maybe not):  “Would the public understanding of statistical data be enhanced if Eton were abolished?”

Mischievously, the Prof asked, “Is this being recorded?”  And then, tactfully, “I’m uncertain.”  This chimed, because he had spoken about uncertainty, and the importance of owning up to uncertainty.  Here, I was reminded of the antepenultimate episode of a BBC series nearly half a century old, The Ascent of Man, presented by another great scientific communicator, Jacob Bronowski.  To me, Episode 11, Knowledge or Certainty is a little masterpiece.  It starts with an exploration of the portrait of Stephan Borgrajewicz by Feliks Topolski – “Lines, possibly, of agony” – and ends at the crematorium at Auschwitz.  On the way, Bronowski discusses Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the idea that our failure to pin down, say, the exact position and the exact velocity of an electron is not due to the crudity of our instruments, but integral to the world of quantum mechanics.  Bronowski preferred to call this idea the Principle of Tolerance.  Of course, at the time these ideas were coming to fruition, the 1930s, tolerance was vanishing from Europe.

(Parenthetically, if you get a chance to see the Bronowski, you will notice the very limited use of “background” music.  I can recall the sparing use of a solo clarinet – is it from Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time? – composed, and first performed, in a concentration camp.  These days, televised scientific documentaries are rendered unwatchable, certainly unlistenable, by their incessant background of musical drivel.)

George Santayana told us to study the past in order to avoid repeating it.  But history never really repeats itself.  So while the 2020s will not be like the 1930s, they might be even worse, if we lose the urge to separate truth from falsehood, and we become ever less tolerant.  Yet Professor Spiegelhalter is a beacon of light.

So is Glasgow University.  How wonderful to be back in the hallowed cloisters of Gilmorehill.  I was back in these regions again on Saturday.  A medical student sought some career advice.  Why a millennial should choose somebody with my ramshackle CV to impart “wisdom” I can scarcely imagine.  I wouldn’t dream of telling anybody what to do.  Risky business!  But I hope I was a reasonably effective sounding board.  And I am quite sure I benefited more from the encounter than she did.

 

Do you remember The Man from U.N.C.L.E.?

BBC 1 (I think), 8 pm Thursdays, after Top of the Pops.  Now then now then, guys an’ gals…  ‘Nuff said.  It was a one hour slot, in four “Acts”, presumably to accommodate the commercials in the US.

U.N.C.L.E. was the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement and its man was Napoleon Solo, played by Robert Vaughn.  Napoleon Solo – what a fantastic name!  I have a notion Ian Fleming coined it.  Solo had a colleague, a Russian named Illya Kuryakin, played by David McCallum.  McCallum is still with us and so far as I can see has changed very little.  He is Scottish but Illya’s speech had a flat, almost Asiatic quality difficult to place.  David McCallum’s father was a distinguished violinist, leader of the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Sir Thomas Beecham.  The LPO once provided the music for a movie in which Stewart Granger played Paganini.  Yehudi Menuhin provided the soundtrack and even auditioned for the part, an experience that he said he “didn’t disenjoy”.  For one particular scene, David McCallum senior lent his Strad to Granger.  Granger botched the scene and in a fit of temper smashed McCallum’s Strad to smithereens. McCallum, understandably, blanched.  Actually the whole thing was a gag.  Granger had substituted a cheap fiddle for the Strad.  If there is one thing I can’t stand, it’s a practical joker.

Solo and Kuryakin’s mentor was an Englishman named Alexander Waverly who week by week would set them a task to avert international anarchy and collapse.  He had a slurred delivery and a puzzled, bordering on demented, air.  “Gentlemen, time is of the utmost!”  Utmost what?

Vaughn played Solo’s role, I think, at an ironic remove, and largely for laughs.  Solo was irresistible to women.  As another woman succumbed, Illya remarked, with evident irritation, “Napoleon, can’t you ever turn it off?”  If Solo wished to communicate with Waverly he would talk to his cuff link:  “Open Channel D!”  U.N.C.L.E.  had a Nemesis with an absurd name:  Thrush.

McCallum and Vaughn made their names in the two great testosterone-fuelled movies of the 60s – The Magnificent Seven, and The Great Escape.  In The Magnificent Seven Vaughn played an ageing gunslinger who is losing his edge and, with it, his nerve.  He takes on a job, a forlorn task, at the behest of Yul Brynner, not for any high minded motive but because he’s barely surviving on a diet of beans, and needs employment.  (As a kid I remember thinking, that’s not so bad.  Pies and beans – my signature dish.)

In The Great Escape, McCallum played a naval officer (Fleet Air Arm?) incarcerated in Stalag Luft III, and struggling to get out.  The escapees are building three tunnels, Tom, Dick, and Harry.  There is a problem – where do you put all the dirt you have excavated from the burgeoning tunnels?  McCallum’s character comes up with the answer, and he presents it to Richard Attenborough’s Big X.  You conceal bags of dirt under your trousers and release them into Stalag Luft III’s compound when nobody is looking.  (Based on fact, at least according to the Paul Brickhill account.)

Well I don’t know about that.  If I had been a dragon on Dragon’s Den and somebody had brought such a proposal to me, I would have ridiculed it as preposterous.

“Let me get this straight.  You take the soil and put it into bags concealed under your trousers?”

“Yes.”

“Then you wander around the compound and when nobody’s looking, you pull a cord and the soil comes down over your shoes and you kick it into the dirt?”

“That’s it.”

“I’m out!”

But where is this walk down Amnesia Lane taking me?   Nowhere at all.  I’m just diverting myself, in an attempt to obliterate the memory of the first question on Friday evening on Radio 4’s Any Questions?

The programme came from St Mary’s Church in Chesham, Buckinghamshire.  Julian Worricker was in the chair and the panellists were Andrew Bowie, Conservative MP for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine, Baroness Shami Chakrabarti the Shadow Attorney-General, Dr Sarah Wollaston, formerly Conservative and now Liberal Democrat MP for Totnes, and Peter Hitchens, “Fulminator-in-Chief” (according to the chair) for the Mail on Sunday.

The first question was posed by one Sebastian Heath.  What do the panellists consider to be the likeliest outcome of a No Deal Brexit, and upon what evidence do they base their view?

Sarah Wollaston thought No Deal was going to be Apocalyptic.  So did Shami Chakrabarti, who had to take a moment to calm down even before she’d started.  Even Peter Hitchens, a secessionist, thought the leaked Yellowhammer document an underestimate of the impending devastation.  He wants compromise, and favours the Norway option.  Andrew Bowie, being in the unenviable position of having to support the government, dodged the question completely.  Of course Yellowhammer is a worst-case scenario.  And we are striving for a deal… but it is only right and proper… responsible government… bla bla bla.  It was absolutely pitiful.  There was an echo of derisive laughter from the audience.  I found myself yelling at the radio:  Answer the bloody question!

I did admire Julian Worricker’s chairmanship. He didn’t interrupt, although he did gently try to remind the panellists of what the question was.  There is mileage in letting a panellist spout humbug.  The audience is perfectly capable of detecting it, unaided.  I would have liked him to return to the questioner, Mr Heath, and ask him if he was satisfied with the answers he had heard.  I venture to think he would not have been impressed.

At school, our teachers taught us how to sit exams.  Read the question.  Answer the question as it is given, not as you would have it be.  Aeons ago, when I sat at the feet of Dr Hobsbaum at Glasgow University he would hurl work back at me and say, “It’s all assertion with no back-up, Campbell.  Were you drunk?”

Shami Chakrabarti said to Andrew Bowie, “I met you before the show.  You seem a nice guy, but some of these people in No 10 are complete head-bangers.”

Maybe.  But why?

All assertion and no back-up.  I switched off.  Think I’ll go back to watching repeats of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.            

On Wednesday I had lunch in the Cuillin Hills Hotel, in Portree, with my cousin Rachel.  We had a drink, ordered, and enjoyed the relaxed ambience and the beautiful view over Portree Harbour towards Ben Tianavaig.  The lunch, which turned out to be delicious, was perhaps a little tardy.  I went up to the bar and said something along the lines of, “Excuse me, I hope you don’t mind me asking how our order is proceeding, but we are a little short of time…” etc etc.  The meal arrived a minute later.  Rachel said, “That certainly worked!  What on earth did you say?”

I replied that I had said, “Believe me I’m a mild mannered guy, but see that woman over there?  Trust me, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of her, when the crockery and cutlery start to fly around.”

Rachel laughed.

The following day I was in Ullapool.  It was a dreich day.  More, gruamach, as the Gael says.  But I didn’t mind.  I wanted to visit the Achiltibuie Peninsula on such a day.  I have written a novel, working title Speedbird, currently in the deep freeze.  A significant part of Speedbird takes place on the Achiltibuie Peninsula.  Now I’ve often visited, principally to go up Stac Pollaidh, but I’d never ventured further west.  The road that curves anticlockwise round the peninsula is a dead end.  In Speedbird, something bad happens at that dead end.  Being in the vicinity, I thought I’d better check it out.

It was an unnerving experience to discover that what I’d envisaged turned out to be remarkably accurate.  In the mist and rain, Stac Pollaidh itself was completely invisible.  I kept driving west and at Altandhu turned south.  In the mirk, there was no sign of the Summer Isles.  At Achiltibuie I stopped at the shop for a coffee.  The shopkeeper asked me what on earth I was doing down there on such a day.  “You won’t see anything.”

“No, but it’s atmospheric.”

“Atmospheric!  I think I’ll use that from now on.”

So for atmosphere, I listened on my CD player to a performance of Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, because that indeed conveys the atmosphere I would wish to create in Speedbird, and it is the atmosphere of the world beyond Achiltibuie.

At Horse Sound I descended to the beach and found Badenscallie burial ground, abeam the undulating contour of Horse Island, beautifully maintained, but deserted.  Further down the coast the scattering of houses dwindled and then petered out.  At Achduart the old school house was completely hidden in a copse of trees.  This was virtually the end of the road.

But not quite.  I could see the ribbon of tarmac ascending in the direction of Bon More Coigach.  Here at last I was on the very edge of the world.  I continued with extreme reluctance.  The fact is I was spooked.  I forced myself to the end of the road under a state of intense oppression and finally, with the roar in my ears of the watercourse coming off the mountain, I turned and got the hell out of there.

But I’m glad I went all the way to the end of the road.  Now I know how to bring Speedbird out of its deep freeze, and revive it.  Still, crossing back over the blighted moonscape of Assynt, it took some time to regain a sense of equanimity.  What a relief to make the long ascent past Morefield, over the brow of the hill, and to see once more the Caledonian MacBrayne steamer berthed alongside the twinkling lights of Ullapool Harbour.

Do you have a motto?

Not as such, answers pianist Stephen Hough in Rough Ideas, Reflections on Music and More (Faber & Faber, 2019), but he offers as “a precept shadowing my life”: Everything matters; nothing matters.

I can see how this self-evident paradox might be useful to a concert pianist, indeed to a performer of any kind.  When you study the score, when you practise at the keyboard, every note is significant, and you must research its individual meaning.  You deal in minutiae; you “sweat the small stuff”.  But when you finally walk out on stage in front of an audience, you have to let it all go, otherwise you will be paralysed amid a welter of detail.  You have to take a step back, and see the whole picture.  If you like, rehearsal is an act of differentiation down to infinitesimals; performance is an act of integration back to the whole.  (This last simile is mine; Mr Hough, despite being a polymath, flunked math.)

When I read his motto, I was reminded of something that the six times world snooker champion Steve Davis once said – and again it’s all about performance.  When you walk out into the Crucible Theatre to contest the world championship (and here I paraphrase from memory), you have to think that performing, and winning, means everything to you, and yet that it matters not one whit.  In other words, it’s all about relaxation, calmness, and serenity.  You have already done all the hard work during the thousands of hours of practice.  Now you must deliberately remove all that intricate knowledge from your frontal lobes and consign it to what we sometimes call “muscle memory”, but which our neurologists tell us is really “basal ganglia memory”.  You are on automatic pilot.  You are “in the zone”.  This allows your conscious mind to operate on a higher plane.

All well and good for Mr Davis and Mr Hough, but, having retired from the concert halls of Europe, Everything matters; nothing matters won’t do for me.  I fell to thinking, do I have a motto?  Actually I was asked this very question on a blog-site I think after the publication of Click, Double-Click, and I answered in an off-hand way, as if it were inconsequential, qua favourite colour, signature dish, Beatles or Dylan, and so on.  I chose the last line of the Desiderata – Strive to be happy.  Funnily enough, Stephen Hough doesn’t think striving to be happy is such a good idea.  It is better to strive for a higher purpose, and maybe you will be surprised by happiness along the way.  On the whole I think I accept that.  Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward.

So what to choose?  The old school motto?  Not the unofficial one – it wuznae me – but the real thing: Spero meliora.  I hope for better things.  The irony of Spero meliora only occurred to me after I’d left a school that rather resembled an open-plan state penitentiary.  It presupposes an existing state of disadvantage.  It is inherently crestfallen.  Hope, on this occasion, sounds more like fortitude.

When I left, and went up to University, I inherited two mottoes, that of the Alma Mater, Via Veritas Vita, and, courtesy of the University Air Squadron, that of the RAF, Per Ardua ad Astra.  The latter is not unlike Spero meliora, if heartier and more energetic.  Scramble, chaps.   Via, Veritas, Vita clearly has Christian origins which, if forgotten, would render the motto characterless – any way, any truth, any life.

And I’ve always been puzzled by the jingle attached to the City of Glasgow Coat of Arms, that we were taught from the earliest age:

There’s the tree that never grew,

There’s the bird that never flew,

There’s the fish that never swam,

There’s the bell that never rang.

Just how desperate is that?

So what about something closer to home?  A clan motto?  Rob Roy’s is that of a man with a massive chip on his shoulder.  MacGregor, despite them!

Despite whom?  We may find a clue in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, when Alan Breck Stewart of Appin chances upon Robin Oig MacGregor of Balquidder, youngest son of Rob Roy.

“Mr Stewart, I am thinking,” said Robin.

“Troth, Mr MacGregor, it’s not a name to be ashamed of,” answered Alan.

“I did not know ye were in my country, sir,” says Robin.

“It sticks in my mind that I am in the country of my friends the MacLarens,” says Alan. 

It’s these pesky MacLarens, who insisted on taking precedence before the MacGregors in the church at Balquidder.  Their motto is Creag an Tuirc – the rock of the boar – a promontory high above the Kirk at Balquidder overlooking Loch Voil, and the rallying point for the clan.  In addition to the motto they have a Crest, a Coat of Arms, and I’m particularly fond of the Badge:

A mermaid proper, her tail part up ended Argent, holding in her dexter hand a spray of laurels paleways Vert and in her dexter hand a looking glass Proper, mounted Gules.

You can quite see why Ernst Stavro Blofeld fell for all this heraldry stuff in OHMSS.  On the whole it bored Bond stiff, although he was amused to learn his family motto was “The World is not Enough.”  It seems apposite.

But as the autumn leaves begin to fall, Michaelmas term is fast upon us.  (If you have spent any time at all in academia you never really lose the habit of thinking in terms.)  The start of the academic year is more of a fresh start than is January 1^st.  My father used to say, “Very important year, this.”  He said it every year so I guess every year was equally important.  Maybe he was right.  I used to draw up lists of resolutions, the longer the list, the more fantastical the resolutions.  Now I’ve gone quite the other way, not, I hope, because my horizons have narrowed, nor even because I’ve become more realistic, but rather because I want to focus.  I want to pare everything down.

So…

Motto of the year commencing…

I choose words from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ The Windhover.

Sheer plod makes plough down sillion

Shine.

For the purpose of the Coat of Arms, I might make it as brief as possible.  Sheer Plod is my motto.

Hang in there.

Paleways Vert!           

MONDAY

I see that Bond 25 finally has a title.  No Time to Die.  Surely a camel – a horse designed by a committee, and an unimaginative and terribly risk-averse one at that.  I would have preferred No Time to Diet, which would have fitted the premise that Bond is in retirement but needs to be recalled.  (M could have sent him back to that health farm in Thunderball, Shrublands, to limber up.)  Or better still, Time to Die, which would at least have had the distinction of being a quote from Ecclesiastes, and more à propos, for surely the time has come to lay 007 to rest.  Then no one need worry about Daniel Craig’s successor, and her creed, colour, or sexual orientation.

Ian Fleming never suffered from title-trouble.  Actually the franchise hasn’t exhausted the supply.  They have yet to use, from For Your Eyes Only, The Hildebrand Rarity, or Risico.  But, if the truth be told, Bond died in 1964 with his creator.  Anything after that wasn’t even a pale imitation.  Although Jonathan Cape had enough material to publish Octopussy in 1966, the Bond saga is really brought to an end with The Man with the Golden Gun.  It has as strong an opening as any other Bond book, but then Fleming’s health broke down, and he must have known, as he persevered to the end, that this would be Bond’s last outing.  So, in order to make it quite clear, he ends the book twice, in chapters entitled The WRAP-UP, and ENDIT.  He even awards Bond a gong!  (Of course Bond turns it down.)

Still, if I got the call from Ms Broccoli, for a treatment for Bond 26, it would be hard to resist.  I would put Bond in a care home, making inappropriate advances to the nursing staff.  He discovers Blofeld is a fellow patient.  After all, we don’t know whether Bond really killed him in You Only Live Twice.  They have a preliminary skirmish, probably over a game of Scrabble.  The final debacle is hand-to-hand mortal combat involving wheel chairs and catheter bags.  Only Thrice Time to Endit Another Day. 

TUESDAY

Last week’s blog was so short that I sent it into The Herald, who very kindly published it.  They edited it slightly, but in a sensitive way, so that I was not inclined to throw a Beethovenian tantrum.  The following day, as usual, I checked for rejoinders, bouquets and brickbats, and, none being forthcoming, my eyes drifted to “Impossipuzzles”.  They go something like this:  Geoffrey said, “Have you noticed that Erica’s telephone number is a palindrome?”   Simon smiled.  “Yes, and what’s more, its 11 digits correspond to her age, date of birth, and house number on Orchard Road.”

What was her address?

Lest you be tempted to delve into this morass, I beseech you, don’t.  I just made it up; it’s complete nonsense.  But even supposing it had a solution, I would still strongly advise you not to go there.  Whenever you come across a conundrum posed by somebody who smiles, let it go.  I had this nightmare: I was present at the end of the world.  I saw the Doomsday Machine before me and made acquaintance with its hellish machinations.  (007 actually found himself in this predicament at the end of Goldfinger – the film, not the book.)  Three minutes before Time Zero, I still had the opportunity to avert Total Eclipse.  The keypad of deactivation was at my fingertips.  But I needed help.  What was the PIN number?  Fortunately Simon was at my side.

Simon smiled.  “Funny you should ask that.  It’s Sarah’s age multiplied by the quotient of the reciprocal of Petra and Oscar’s birthdays, squared.”

I spent the last three minutes available to the Universe, throttling Simon.

WEDNESDAY

In the local village shop I amassed an armful of soaps, Domestos, Brillo soap pads, all-purpose cloths, and black rubbish bags, and offloaded them on the shop counter with the remark, “Declaration of Intent.”

“Decoration of a tent?” asked the lady behind me, wife of an army officer, terribly well-spoken.

“Indeed.  Actually it’s a yurt.”  I felt this awful whimsical compulsion coming over me, like one of these insufferably destructive James Thurber characters.  But the shopkeeper, a kind man, saved the day.  “Send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance.”

“What?”

“Send reinforcements, we’re going to advance.  Chinese whispers.”

“Ah.”

THURSDAY

Talking of Chinese whispers, I just caught the end of a segment of Radio 4’s Inside Science and I jaloused a panel of judges were discussing how they had settled on a shortlist of books in a literary-scientific competition.  One of them said, “Well, if I’m not hooked by Page 3, forget it!”  Isn’t that typical of the modern world?  I wonder how Walter Scott would have fared nowadays if he’d had to submit Old Mortality to the Bond 25 Camel Committee.  What would they have made of the erudition, the verbosity, and the exuberant high farce of Scott’s opening chapters?

“Who’s this guy Jedidiah Cleishbotham?”

“My alter ego.”

“Is he value-added?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“He’s got to go.  Dump Cleishbotham.  Where’s that Phoebe woman when you need her?  Pace, Walter.  It’s all about pace.”

FRIDAY

Far-fetched?  Donald Trump wants to buy Greenland.  That’s the sort of thing one of these megalomaniac Bond villains would aspire to.  Then, when he is frustrated, he takes the hump.  M says to 007, “James, I’d like you to take a turn up to Bluie West One.  Something strange is going on.”  Bond surveys the dossier, raises an eyebrow, and echoes Miss Elizabeth Bennet’s remark in Pride & Prejudice to her father, re Mr Collins.

“Can this man be sensible?”

Curious to get a taste of the Countess of Dumbarton’s guest editorship of Vogue, I picked up the September edition in Tesco.  Leafing through it was a bit like wandering through Duty Free at an international airport.  The Countess in her editorial more or less apologises for all the ads.  Comes with the territory, says HRH.  The mag features 15 powerful and influential women; there’s a spot for a 16th but it is empty – presumably the Countess being modest.  Actually if you look at the empty silver rectangle you see a reflection of yourself so maybe this serves as a challenge and a dare.

I have to confess I only recognised three of the women represented – Greta Thunberg, Jacinda Ardern, and Jane Fonda.  It’s worthwhile checking out “Cover Looks” on page 51.

First row, from left: Adut Akech wears jacket, £1,950. Poloneck, £890.  Trousers, £650.  All Celine by Hedi Slimane.

Gemma Chan wears tuxedo shirt, £1,700, Ralph Lauren collection.

Greta Thunberg wears T-shirt, and hoodie, her own.

Actually, that is really all you need to know.

In Part 1 of Gulliver’s Travels, A Voyage to Lilliput, Gulliver describes the ongoing war between the two mighty empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu.

It began upon the following Occasion.  It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking Eggs before we eat them, was upon the larger End: but his present Majesty’s Grandfather, while he was a Boy, going to eat an Egg, and breaking it according to the ancient Practice, happened to cut one of his Fingers.  Whereupon the Emperor his Father published an Edict, commanding all his Subjects, upon great Penalties, to break the smaller End of their Eggs.  The People so highly resented this Law, that our Histories tell us there have been six Rebellions raised on that account; wherein one Emperor lost his Life, and another his Crown.  These civil Commotions were constantly fomented by the Monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the Exiles always fled for Refuge to that Empire.  It is computed, that eleven thousand Persons have, at several times, suffered Death, rather than submit to break their Eggs at the smaller End.  Many hundred large Volumes have been published upon this Controversy: but the Books of the Big-Endians have long been forbidden, and the whole Party rendered incapable by Law of holding Employments.  During the Course of these Troubles, the Emperors of Blefuscu did frequently expostulate by their Ambassadors, accusing us of making a Schism in Religion, by offending against a fundamental Doctrine of our great Prophet Lustrog, in the fifty-fourth Chapter of the Blundecral (which is their Alcoran).  This, however is thought to be a mere Strain upon the Text: For the Words are these: That all true Believers shall break their Eggs at the convenient End: and which is the convenient End, seems, in my humble Opinion, to be left to every Man’s Conscience, or at least in the power of the chief Magistrate to determine.   

It is said that the controversy between the Little-Endians and the Big-Endians represents that between the Reformed Church, and Roman Catholicism, and that Lilliput and Blefuscu represent, respectively, Britain and France.  But great satire has a universal and timeless application, and for as long as men and women adopt causes, take sides, and get hot under the collar, there will be Little-Endians and Big-Endians.  Perhaps politicians should be advised to keep a copy of the above extract from Gulliver on their desk, and then when they feel disposed to draw “red lines” over some issue, consider whether the issue in question is so important after all.

Had Jonathan Swift been alive today, I wonder what he would have made of the current political situation in these islands?  I imagine, quite a lot.  As a Dubliner he would certainly have had something to say about the Irish Backstop, whose historic origins would have been perfectly familiar to him.  And he would have had something to say about the two distinct schisms that now divide, and threaten to obliterate, the principal political parties at Westminster.  He would have recognised, in the current Phoney War that exists while Parliament is in recess, a rich source of absurdity and farce.  I think he would have subjected the entire House to sustained and merciless ridicule.

I was not long resident in the Island’s principal Metropolis, a great, sprawling, and I think once magnificent Centre of Commerce, when I was afforded the signal Honour of attending a Convocation of the Representatives of the People.  This took place in a rococo Palace of considerable Splendour, perched on the edge of the River, and, on closer Inspection, evidently in dire Peril of collapsing therein.  The Parliament assembled in a drab and narrow oblong Hallway within the Bowels of the crumbling Edifice, of Dimensions fit to accommodate some three hundred Persons, though twice that Number had assembled to hear the Monarch’s principal Minister give account of governmental Affairs.  The Press of the Assembly, the incessant Noise, and much hither-and-thither toing-and-froing lent the Occasion a fretful, febrile and indeed fetid Atmosphere.  Anon, became it apparent to me that the Questions asked of the Minister were hardly Interrogatives at all, but merely Fillips, or Snares, designed to exalt and uphold, or to undermine and to trip, the Monarch’s Government.  Indeed, the Answers to all Questions put, were already known to all in Attendance, such that the Convocation represented less a Meeting of Minds, as an Elaborate Gavotte.  All the Assembly seemed preoccupied with Manners, the traditional Niceties of arcane Procedure, and the inhalation of Snuff.  I attempted at one Moment to apprehend the Argument of the Principal Minister, on some Point relating to Trade with Foreign Empires.  “If a Chinaman,” said he, “wishes to sell me a Ping-Pong Ball for a Ducat…”

“Wiff Waff!” brayed the Phalanx of Members behind him.

“…What Business is it of our Friends across the Channel?”

At this Moment the Uproar became so intense that the Officer-in-Charge was incapable of making himself heard.  As to the Value of Ping-Pong I have no Opinion, for I have no Education in the Dismal Science.