Author: jamescalumcampbell

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.

I had an odd experience while doing The Herald crossword his morning.  The clue was “Actress’s brief farewell (7)”.  The solution is Swanson.  (Gloria Swanson.)  A farewell is a swansong so lose the g to make the farewell brief: Swanson.  The odd thing was that I didn’t solve the clue through pursuing this, or any other, process of logic, and I didn’t have any letters already on the grid to help me; it was a blank canvas.  I read the clue, and for no reason I can think of, I thought, “What was the name of that Hollywood actress Joe Kennedy (JFK’s father) had an affair with?”  I was about to dismiss the thought, but past experience has taught me that when an apparently aberrant notion comes into your mind, it often pays to follow it up.  So I took a moment to remember, and there she was: Swanson.

Isn’t that odd?

I’ve had a lot of luck over the years with crosswords.  Up in Perth a couple of months ago to hear the RSNO present a ridiculously rich smorgasbord of lollipops and seasoned roasted chestnuts, I paused at the entrance to the concert hall to have converse with a gentleman, down on his luck, who was calling out, “Who will be my third buyer of The Big Issue tonight?”  I obliged, handed over £2.50, and left him to it.  “Who will be my fourth buyer of The Big Issue tonight?”  So I did The Big Issue prize crossword – one and only time – sent it off, and won the revised thirteenth edition of Chambers Dictionary, which is a handsome volume and heaps better than the Chambers 21^st Century Dictionary which announced itself on the dust jacket as a “Punchy, good-looking trend-setter.”

“Punchy, good-looking trend-setter”?  I ask you.  The sharp suits have even infiltrated the dusty offices of the scriveners and proctors of 1901 Edinburgh.  I offloaded that particular volume to the charity shop.

A month before The Big Issue, I did The Herald’s mammoth “Clootie” which, like currants in a clootie dumpling, intersperses clueless anagrams following a topical Scottish theme.  Prize: £50 token.  I stuck with the dictionary theme and got Collins German Dictionary.  Sehr gut.

And just before that I’d popped into the local village shop to get my morning paper.  Unaccountably, The Heralds had not been delivered, so more or less at random I took The Financial Times.  I sent off the crossword – one and only time – and won How to Sound Really Clever by Hubert van den Bergh (Bloomsbury 2013), the ideal prize for a smart-arse.  I’ve also won a Bloomsbury Concise English, and three Oxford English Dictionaries.  I’ve acquired, and passed on, at least six Bloomsbury Good Word Guides.  When I was a medical student I sent off The Scotsman Saturday crossword under the name of my then girl friend who had gone up to the north-west for a week.  The following Saturday she was coming home and reading The Scotsman on the train.  “Oh look!  Somebody with my name has won the crossword!”

You’d think I’d be sated by now, but I’m on a roll.  Yesterday I sent off The Herald’s “Wee Stinker”.  The prize is a “Wee Stinker” T-shirt (S, M, L or XL?  I chose L) + a £50 token.  I used to have a pint in Curlers on Glasgow’s Byres Rd with a guy who over the years had won ten Wee Stinker T-shirts.  Only last week somebody on The Herald’s letters page was complaining they were too embarrassed to wear a T-shirt announcing their Wee Stinker status.  They tried wearing it at night but it was too hot.  But what would you do with ten Wee Stinker T-shirts?  Over dinner in the Lion & Unicorn on Saturday I heard a dear friend’s friend has just bought a grand mansion in Edinburgh with nine bathrooms.  I said, “What’s the use of nine bathrooms if you’ve only got one a…?” but I was silenced.

Actually they made a clerical error with last week’s Wee Stinker grid (the punchy, good-looking trend-setters must be in charge) so the prize rolls over and is £100.  I posted it on Sunday morning in Sir Andy Murray’s golden letter box on my way to Dunblane Cathedral, so I feel I’m bound to win.  Incidentally a couple of weeks ago a parked car’s handbrake apparently failed and the car rolled into the golden letter box and uprooted it.  The box was repaired and replaced, the locals said, quicker than the Royal Mail can deliver a first-class letter.  For a few days the butcher’s shop opposite was selling “Golden letter-box sausage rolls, at knock-down prices”.

Anyway I took my acquisitive cruciverbalist’s smug complacency into Dunblane Cathedral where, in line with the lectionary, the rich were getting it in the neck.  Psalm 49.  And then the parable of the rich man who has so much grain he doesn’t know what to do with it.  So he knocks his barns down and builds even bigger barns so he can accommodate all his stuff.  What an idiot, or, as the authorised version puts it, “Thou fool…”  In my extended family we use “Barns, barns” as a short hand for berating one another if we seem preoccupied with the accumulation of junk.  I don’t think I’m particularly acquisitive – or if I am, I’ve made a hell of a mess of any pursuit of material wealth.  The only thing I have a tendency to hoard is books.  It crossed my mind to give them all away to the Andrew Carnegie Library in Dunfermline which is a favourite haunt of mine (the great man did after all pay me through Med School), but a family member counselled me not to do anything rash so I sit here, surrounded by tomes.  I have my books!  It’s like that Simon and Garfunkel song.  I am a rock.  I am an island.  Anaesthetic and dry-eyed.

But to return for a moment to Ms Swanson, it just shows you we don’t have the first inkling how the human mind works.  I watched a captivating programme on BBC 4 the other night all about Game Theory.  Two people, a middle-aged man and a young women, were playing “Share or Steal”.  They would simultaneously show one another an icon bearing the word “Share” or “Steal”.  It’s a kind of simplified version of “Scissors cut Paper”.  If they both showed “Share” they would share a very substantial sum of prize money.  If they both showed “Steal” they would both walk away with nothing.  If one showed “Share” and one showed “Steal”, the stealer would take all.  They had a protracted negotiation during which the middle-aged man persuaded a very vulnerable young woman that he would do the right thing by her.  So he showed “Share” and of course she showed “Steal”.  I wish I could describe the look on her face at the denouement.  Quite chilling – but of course completely riveting telly.

Then in the next game one of the contenders appeared to have found a solution to the apparently insoluble recurring question of Game Theory – “What’s the other guy gonna do?”  He said, “Irrespective of what you say or do, I’m going to show ‘Steal’.  But I promise to share the prize money with you.”  What’s the other guy gonna do?  If he shows “Steal”, they both walk away with nothing.  His only chance of winning is to show “Share”.  It looks foolproof.

But is it?  Some people are just bloody-minded by nature.  They might reply, “I’m going to show ‘Steal’ because I no longer care about the money.  I only want to take you down a peg or two.  But if you show contrition, and show ‘Share’, I will share with you.

The trouble with Game Theory is that it relies on people thinking and behaving logically.  Fat chance.  If you want to win a crossword prize, listen to what your unconscious is trying to tell you.

Apropos the Smiths’… (10)

…outburst, take note!  (11, 4)

It’s summertime, and everybody’s on the move.  I seem to recall that in one of his lesser-known novels – Kangaroo maybe – D. H. Lawrence was extremely dismissive of the whole idea of being a tourist.  He loved the idea of travel but he thought of tourism as a kind of hallucination of travel, an indulgence of the well-to-do who would foray abroad and then return home to bore their friends with photographs of famous locations such as Venice or Florence.  But only this week a lady on the radio announced with great sadness that she was ending her love affair with Florence, simply because it is now crammed with tourists.  You might call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Tourism: the tourists’ voyeurism disturbs the location.  Look at that extraordinary picture of the hundreds of tourist-climbers queuing to negotiate Hillary’s Step en route to knocking Everest off their bucket-list.  What would Sir Ed have made of it?  But you don’t need to go abroad to witness this phenomenon.  Last Tuesday I walked the seven hills of Edinburgh and three of them – Castle, Calton, and Arthur’s Seat, were mobbed.  I heard every language under the sun.  The Isle of Skye is overrun with visitors to the Fairy Pools, the Old Man of Storr, and the Quairang.  They’ve run out of parking lots and toilet facilities.  My mum was from Skye (actually the island of Soay); I’ve been going to Skye all my life, and for the most part it has been utterly deserted.  Then the extraordinary, Tolkienesque escarpments of Trotternish were discovered as a film location, and the hotels hiked their prices up to £400 a night.  Last time I was in Skye it was to attend a funeral, and I couldn’t get any accommodation on the island, so ended up staying on the mainland, near the Mallaig – Armadale ferry at the Station Hotel in Morar, where Sir Arnold Bax wintered to score his symphonies (the tourists don’t know that, and wouldn’t care anyway).  On the mainland, the far north has become another tourist trap.  A single track road has turned into the Indianapolis 500.  In Shetland (my friend the Viking tells me) enormous cruise liners are anchored off Sumburgh.

My own preference is to get off the beaten track.  But here I encounter a difficulty.  If I extol the virtues of unknown locations, will I thus contribute to the pollution of their pristine environment?  Well, not having 2.4 million followers (as far as I know), I’ll take a chance.  Proceed north-west out of Glasgow.  The Loch Lomond road will be jammed solid so at first it’s not very promising, but stick with it, and when you turn left at Tarbet the traffic will begin to thin.  You skirt the edge of Loch Long at Arrochar, pass the Cobbler on your right, and make the long ascent to the Rest and Be Thankful.  Down the other side, you might be on the way to Oban, but instead, turn left and head for Loch Fyne, and you will have the world to yourself.

Proceed further into this magical territory.  Pass through St Catherines on the way to Strachur.  Chopin stayed here, with Jane Stirling (the tourists don’t know that, and wouldn’t care anyway).  Now hang a right and skirt the loch before leaving it to take the long defile through Glendaruel.  You are heading for Colintraive but before you get there, turn right.  Now you are here.  The Cowal Peninsula.  Argyle’s secret coast.

Beguiling Argyll.

Shh!  Dinny tell ony buddy.                                    

We’ve all had a bit of a loonie week.  I have this idea for a comedy sketch.  The scene is Mission Control, Houston, the date, July 20^th, 1969.  The lunar module is on its final descent.  The atmosphere is thick with tension.  Somebody said you could smell the fear.  Yet these young whizz kids, crouched in deep concentration over their consoles, have been buoyed by the pep-talk they received that morning from the Flight Director, the man with the crew cut and the white waistcoat, Gene Kranz.  “We came into this room as a team, and we will go out as a team!”

But now he needs a Sit-Rep.  Are the computer systems flagging up any problems?  Is there any indication to abort the mission?  Or are the astronauts clear to land?  Kranz interrogates the principal players in his team, rapid fire.

Cap-Com!

Go!

Fido!

Go!

Retro!

Go!   

Inco!

Go!

Telmu!

Go!

Guido!

Go!

Surgeon!

…

Surgeon?

A pause.

Whazzat?

Are we go, Surgeon?

Aw haud on a sec, Jim…

Surgeon is fumbling with his machine.  Surgeon is played by Ford Kiernan, the Scottish actor who plays Jack Jarvis in Chewin’ the Fat and Still Game.  You take one look at him and you just know he is the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I know Kiernan could play this role because I seem to remember him in a sketch where he found himself on a football pitch with a group of highly skilled footballers.  The ball fell at his feet out on the wing and he was required to cross it in to the box.  He eyed the ball and then the goal and then the ball, all the while prancing around performing various redundant balletic movements, extravagant arm gestures indicating his intentions.  But he was basically two left feet.  The football sketch and the astronaut sketch are one and the same.  That Jack should be in that situation is ridiculous.  Painfully ridiculous.  We laugh at it because we recognise an archetype.  It’s the recurring nightmare of turning up at school or college or at work in your pyjamas.  There is no more cringe-worthy situation than to find yourself an impostor among experts.

It’s well recognised that quite a lot of people who occupy high-profile positions of power and responsibility harbour a deep sense of humility and unworthiness.  This is known as Impostor Syndrome.  They look at themselves and ask, am I really up to the task?

Back at Houston, even if you did know what you were doing, it would take some nerve to abort the mission.  But I suppose the responsibility would not rest with you, but with Kranz.  You would merely be flagging up a potential problem.  After all, the on-board computer flagged up a 1202 and Kranz said it was okay.  Then it flagged up a 1201 and that was okay too.  But suppose the Surgeon had told him one of the astronauts had developed a tachyarrhythmia?  That might be outside Kranz’s field of expertise.  He might say, “Does it matter?  Is it critical?  Your call, doc!”

What a nightmare.  You definitely wouldn’t want Jack at the console, faffing about.  “Aw, go on yersel’, Jeannie!”

The Apollo astronauts for the most part seem to have shared a deep sense of humility.  They were all overawed by the sight of our beautiful blue planet.  I was intrigued to hear Apollo 8’s Frank Borman say that, once they’d gone round the moon a couple of times, they’d seen enough.  By far the most interesting sight in the night sky was an earthrise.  During a broadcast to planet earth on Christmas Eve the astronauts famously read the Genesis creation myth from the Bible.  This notion of seeing the earth from space and realising that it is a planet, perhaps unique, to be cherished, seems to have been the prevailing take-home message from all the Apollo astronauts, not least those of Apollo 11.  Funnily enough this week I read Greta Thunberg’s Nobody is too small make a difference (Penguin 2019).  Ms Thunberg’s plea for the health and safety of the planet is even more powerful than that of the astronauts.  There’s a steady flow of correspondence to The Herald expressing polarised views about the necessity versus the futility of striving for zero carbon emissions.  What’s the point, when China is burning all that coal?  What difference does it make what I do, when the whole world is hell-bent on doing something else?

Well, Ms Thunberg tells us the answer.  Nobody is too small to make a difference.  There is a story of a black American serviceman posted to Scotland in the fifties.  He was on a bus in Glasgow with his wife and a Glaswegian got up to offer his wife a seat.  She said, “Back home, nobody ever gives up their seat to a black person.”  The Glaswegian replied, “In Glasgow, we give up our seat to a lady.”  (For all I know, this might nowadays land the gentleman in deep trouble but let’s not go there.)   Anyway, the serviceman and his wife eventually went home, to Montgomery Alabama, where they happened to recount their Glaswegian episode, to Rosa Parks.  So you just never know how your actions are going to resonate.  The world needs gifted people who think they are impostors, precisely because it is run by impostors who think they are gifted.

As for Ms Thunberg, I think she’s completely remarkable.  She reminds me of Joan of Arc.  She’d be about the same age.  I used to think Jeanne d’Arc was a French myth, but now I’m not so sure.  People like that come along, about once every millennium.

For the rest of us, we must just hope we aren’t Ford Kiernan’s Jack Jarvis, struggling at the computer console.  We may have insight into our own frailty, but take little reassurance from that.  Just because you suffer from Impostor Syndrome doesn’t mean you aren’t a real fake.

In The President is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson (Century 2018, Arrow Books 2019), a malignant external agency plots to cripple the United States of America through a cyber-attack.  A computer virus will disable everything that is connected to the Internet.  The code word for this Armageddon is Dark Ages.  President Jon Duncan paints a grim picture of how a new Dark Age will unfold.  Everything with a power switch will be affected – washing machines, coffee makers, DVRs, digital cameras, thermostats, machine components, jet engines, elevators, grocery-store scanners, train and bus passes, televisions, phones, radios, traffic lights, credit card scanners, home alarm systems, laptops, heating systems, refrigeration, the water supply, the electricity grid, hospitals, planes, trains, cars, banks, law enforcement, currency…  This is the nightmare; the dystopia of connectivity.

Although this attack is levelled specifically against the USA, President Duncan realises it is going to affect the whole world.  So he asks for the help of the whole world to defeat the assailants, whoever they may be.  He arranges a summit meeting.  He invites the German Chancellor and the Israeli Prime Minister.  He even invites the Russians.  But not the Brits.  So much for the Special Relationship.  In fact, I don’t think the United Kingdom even has a cameo role in this thriller.  And remember it was an Oxford Rhodes Scholar, President Clinton, who wrote it.

Is it any good?  It has 128 chapters.  It is not so much a novel as a treatment for a movie that is two hours and eight minutes long.  (The manuals on how to write a screenplay remind you that a page of dialogue is a minute of screen time.)  The President is Missing is certainly cinematographic.  It has filmic clichés such as car chases and shoot-outs, the idea of an inner cabal containing a mole, and a race to find a computer password as a clock runs down.  A thriller can be a novel.  But this is not a novel, in the way that, say, Thunderball is a novel.  A novel needs to subvert its own clichés.  I wanted to know what President Duncan thought of the cyber world he was trying to protect.

I think it was around 3 pm Saturday (Eastern Standard Time, chapter 70 in the book) that I answered my phone and the recorded voice said, “Your bank account details have been compromised and £600 is about to be transferred to a foreign location.  For more details, press 1.”  I hung up and went back to chapter 70.  Scam phone calls and emails have become so commonplace that they no longer disturb my affect.  But Dark Ages are already with us.  We are ushering in a new Dark Age, as Winston might have said, in psalmody:

Made more sinister

And perhaps more protracted

By the lights

Of perverted

Science.

But you never hear a politician, in this or any other country, challenging the way in which cyber technology is taking over every aspect of our lives.  The juggernaut of an inevitable “progress” is not to be avoided.  And when the gremlins start to infiltrate the systems, what do you do?  You make the systems ever more sophisticated.  Thus you embark upon a cyber arms race.

But would it not be better for us to retain our primitive analogue skills?  In aviation, when the radio systems fail, you navigate by mental dead reckoning.  When the Direction Indictor fails, you learn to do compass turns, and build in the necessary lag time.  When the gyroscopes topple, you instrument-fly on a reduced panel.  If an engine fails, you feather the prop and fly on one engine.  If the other engine fails, you pick a paddock and carry out a forced landing.  You practise, over and over again.  You learn to land at night with the instrument panel shut down and the cockpit in darkness.  Yet, not once but twice, the poor pilots of the Boeing 737 Max were unable to override the computer systems and fly by the seat of their pants.  Neil Armstrong overrode the lunar module’s computer and flew visually.  I wonder if the United States would be able to put a man on the moon now.

In medicine, it’s easier.  Of course technology has transformed the diagnostic suite and the operating room.  But the consulting room really has very little use for digital technology.  Yet the purveyors of perverted science have infiltrated that sacred domain and continue to do so.

Alexa, what is chickenpox?

Gimme a break.

Do you remember Tonight, with Cliff Michelmore?  Cy Grant would sum up the week’s news in a calypso.  Here’s my calypso of the week:

Politically, it has been a week for getting up people’s noses.  First of all the Brexit Party turned its collective back on the European anthem.  This was obnoxious not because it showed disrespect to the European Parliament – no doubt the feeling is mutual – nor to Ludwig van Beethoven, who is after all beyond harm; but rather to the quintet of young musicians, who from what I could hear were playing very beautifully.

Alle Menschen werden Brüder…

Aye, right.

But who knows, perhaps it will become a tradition, like standing in Messiah for the Hallelujah Chorus.  From now on, during any performance of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, when we reach the Ode to Joy the audience will stand up and about-face.

Then the Chinese got up our noses when their ambassador told us in no uncertain terms to stop butting into Hong Kong’s affairs.  He was almost immediately summoned to the Foreign Office.  Then we stopped an Iranian oil tanker in Gibraltar’s territorial waters apparently en route to Syria and in breach of EU sanctions.  (Strange place, Gibraltar.  Young men cruise around in open-top sports cars with sound systems blaring.  No surrender!  Gibraltar is like Belfast; she suffers from PTSD.)  So our ambassador in Teheran got the summons to be informed this was an act of piracy.  Of course Iran is in the news a lot these days.  Ever since President Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal the Iranians have been striving to refine weapons-grade uranium.  The UK doesn’t wish to fall out with Iran.  I find it odd that nobody ever mentions the fact that President Rouhani is an alumnus of Glasgow Caledonian University.  Maybe the Foreign Office doesn’t know, or doesn’t care.

Anyway, two unrelated incidents involve one former and one present British colony.  The Empire strikes back.

(Incidentally, all the pictures of Hong Kong in the news reminded me of the thrill of landing at the old Kai Tak airport, when at about four hundred feet you felt you could reach out and pluck the clothes drying on makeshift lines hanging from the high rise apartments.  In 1979 I passed through en route from Papua New Guinea to London, carrying as hand luggage a package containing a long bow with arrows made in the Highlands of Enga by the lepers at Yampu.  The Hong Kong douaniers inspected it and were terribly interested.  “Do you hunt?”  I tried to explain it was merely a memento.  Amazingly, they let it pass.  But the packaging had been ripped apart and the flight was about to go so I ended up boarding carrying a naked bow and a bundle of deadly arrows.  Try that, forty years on.)

Then the PM, and the two putative PMs-apparent headed north of the border to extol the Precious Union, thus managing to get up the noses of at least half the population of Scotland.  When Mr Hunt told an audience of Scottish Tory party members that, if and when Ms Sturgeon requested another Indyref, he would assume an air of “British” politeness and reply with an emphatic “No”, this appeared to go down well within the splendid confines of Perth Concert Hall; but Mr Hunt ought to remember that lots of other people were listening in.  They were saying, wait a minute!  Ms Sturgeon is our First Minister.  We elected her!

Then the former head of MI6 no doubt managed to get off-side with the whole senior political class when he informed us that really they weren’t of sufficiently high calibre; they just weren’t up to the job.  We are all having a collective nervous breakdown.   And finally the current British ambassador to the US told us (though he didn’t mean to tell all of us) that the current US administration is inept and incompetent and the White House dysfunctional.  Will he get a summons to the State Department?  I doubt it.  I rather think the POTUS couldn’t care less.  I did note that the Foreign Secretary disowned the ambassador’s opinions.  He said these opinions were personal and the holder was perfectly entitled to hold them, and that it was perfectly appropriate, indeed, essential, that he express them (in confidence).  I think this was Mr Hunt assuming an air of “British” politeness, while simultaneously hanging the ambassador out to dry.  It has been suggested that the next British ambassador to the US could be Nigel Farage.  I don’t think Mr Farage would turn his back on the Stars and Stripes.  Mr Hunt expressed full confidence in the president.  After all, if the UK is getting up the noses of Europe, we daren’t get off-side with the US, especially as we are already off-side with the Chinese, the Spanish, and the Argentinians.  (Not to mention the troublesome Scots.)

Who to insult next?  Perhaps Gary Lineker, that modestly paid BBC employee, will express astonishment that the participants of the recently concluded football World Cup, God bless them, could understand the off-side rule.

In between episodes five and six – the finale – of Stephen Poliakoff’s Summer of Rockets (BBC2, Wednesday) I read Cita Stelzer’s Working with Winston (Head of Zeus, 2019).  It’s not the first time I’ve remarked in this blog on how the concurrent exposure to two different works of art can create a kind of unexpected synergy in the way we appreciate them.  The Poliakoff is a drama set in England circa 1958, during the Cold War, and the Stelzer is an account of the careers of twelve remarkable people who undertook secretarial duties, or “took down”, for Winston Churchill.  Therefore, at least in time and place, there is a degree of overlap between the book and the television drama.  Indeed, Winston even has a cameo role in Summer of Rockets’ Episode 1, when the Russian-born, Jewish inventor Samuel Petrukhin fits him with a state-of-the-art hearing aid.

Recently a visitor to my home glanced at the small bust on the mantelpiece, and at the bookshelf of Churchilliana, and asked me, “Why do you admire Churchill?”  And I wondered, is it because he could turn a good phrase?  Is it more personal than that?  Is it because, but for him, I would have started to learn German a lot earlier than I did, and in a rather more uncomfortable school?

Sometimes I think of demoting him.  I say to myself, “It’s past, let it go, move on.”  He was a Victorian aristocrat, old-fashioned even as a young man.  He inhabited a different age.  I read a book like The Patient Assassin by Anita Anand (Simon & Schuster, 2019), which recounts in a very personal way the events that took place at Jallianwala Bagh, the walled garden in Amritsar, on 13 April 1919 (Ms Anand’s grandfather was there), and even though Churchill denounced this atrocity (frightfulness, he said, is not part of the British Pharmacopoeia), I still find myself thinking it is time to move on.  I could take his bust down and remove it with the books into the spare room, along with his portrait.  I could call it “The Churchill Room.”  I could say to my guest, “I’ve made up The Churchill Room for you.  Is that all right?”  And then something happens, and he stays in my living room.

I don’t suppose I’d have liked him much.  How would I have got on if I’d been summoned to “take down”?  (Only one of the twelve secretaries Stelzer describes was male, Patrick Kinna.)  The relationship Churchill had with the young ladies has been dramatized in the film Darkest Hour with Gary Oldman playing Churchill and Lily James playing the secretary.  The narrative of a young lady, initially nervous, intimidated, and bullied, sticking it out and eventually becoming devoted to her boss, is essentially the narrative of Stelzer’s book.  But is it true?  Personally I don’t think I could ever become devoted to anybody who bullied me.  If Churchill had called me a bloody fool for typing in single rather than double space, I like to think I’d have taken the paper from the typewriter, crumpled it into a ball, chucked it at him, said, “Why don’t you ‘take down’ your own bloody speech?” and stormed out.  And that would have been that.

But it was an entirely different world.  It was extremely class-ridden.  These young ladies, impeccably trained graduates of Mrs Hoster’s Employment Agency, no doubt walked the walk and talked the talk, but even they would have fallen short of the top drawer.  Churchill’s way of life, with huge teams of lackeys responding to his beck and call, now seems unimaginable.  Once asked whether he could cope with day-to-day life all on his own, he remarked, “I could boil an egg; I’ve seen it done.”  He seems to have been extraordinarily inconsiderate.  One of the young secretaries shared with her colleagues a joke, in which she imagined saying to Churchill, “Miss So-and-So has been in a serious accident.”  To which WSC replies, “Oh.  Will she be able to take down?”  The irony is that this very scenario came to pass.  The secretary informing Churchill of her colleague’s incapacity always regretted that, when asked if the injured lady could take down, she had not replied, “Well, it’s her ankle that’s injured so I suppose she could.”

Summer of Rockets simply reeks of class.  Samuel Petrukhin, the Russian émigré, wants to mix with the right people and turn himself into an English gentleman.  He would have his teenage daughter presented at court, come out, and attend all the balls of the season.  She herself can’t stand the idea.  Already she has moved into a different world.  But Petrukhin himself is also ahead of his time.  He is fascinated by gadgets, and has an inkling of the way they might take over the world.  When his young son takes ill with appendicitis and is rushed to the hospital as an emergency, none of the duty doctors can be located.  Petrukhin has already invented and is trying to market a new device, and he struggles to give it a name – bleep, bleeper, beeper, pager, staff locator…  He realises that hospitals would be an ideal environment in which his invention would be useful.  He himself never goes anywhere without his locator, sitting in his lapel pocket, much like a mobile phone now.  The military might also find a use for this new device.  And of course MI5.  It functions in the drama much as a talisman of the new age.

(Parenthetically, the bleep did become a talisman for the doctor.  There were three status symbols – the white coat, the stethoscope, and the bleep, and I can still recall a sense of pride when first pacing the wards with all three.  But I soon came to realise that the bleep was as much a curse as a blessing.  It went off so often that you could never get anything done because you were always off somewhere to find a telephone.  I remember asking a staff nurse to hold my bleep – essentially to be my secretary, to “take down” – so that I could see the patients.  But she was reluctant.  What if there were a cardiac arrest?  The arrest bleep in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary was low-pitched, slow tempo, and sinister.  I ran into an old colleague last year who admitted that whenever he heard a faint echo of that sound his heart still missed a beat.)

I’ve loved the atmosphere of the Poliakoff world ever since I first saw Shooting the Past. In some ways his dramas are rather old fashioned, like a speech of Winston Churchill.  They can begin, and meander, rather hesitantly.  The tempo is quite slow.  Scenes are set and characters drawn.  There is attention to detail, an aesthetic of beauty, and a literary self-consciousness.  Plots and subplots can be diverted down unusual avenues with many twists and turns.  What is Summer of Rockets all about?  It depicts a world full of secrets, in which nothing is quite as it seems, and nobody (with the possible exception of Samuel’s young son Sasha) tells the truth.  Who to trust?  The British establishment?  The military?  MI5?  The mysterious Lord Arthur Wallington, so masterfully played by Timothy Spall?  In the end, Petrukhin puts his trust in Hannah, his wayward daughter.

Poliakoff has his critics.  Again like Churchill, he can be regarded as passé.  Yet Summer of Rockets was full of contemporary resonances.  More or less concurrent with the showing of the final episode, Mr Putin announced that the values of liberal democracy are obsolete.  His remarks didn’t seem to cause much of a stir; they almost passed unnoticed. People nodded sagely in agreement.

So I glanced up at Winston, on his central point on my mantelpiece, and decided he had better stay.