Author: jamescalumcampbell

When is a dog-eared three shilling and sixpenny Penguin paperback worth £56,250?

When it’s Sir Laurence Byrne’s annotated copy of D. H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  It was part of the collection of the late Stanley J Seeger, and it has recently been sold to an overseas buyer.  But its export abroad has been halted by the government, to see if somebody can match the price and keep the volume in the country.  It is said to be “a witness to history.”

I was a bit snooty when I heard about the £56,250 price tag.  “A collector,” I remarked, “with more money than sense.”  But we all have our weaknesses.  Mine is for first edition Ian Fleming books.  I haven’t looked at the collection for a while so let me take an inventory.  It gets better as it goes along:

Casino Royale: one pan paperback and one hardback Penguin Vintage Classics.

Live and Let Die: hardback Cape 2^nd impression 1954 – no dust jacket.

Moonraker: Pan paperback.

Diamonds are Forever: Thriller Book Club first edition with dust jacket, good condition.

From Russia with Love:  Jonathan Cape, first edition, no dust jacket.

Dr. No: first Book Club edition with dust jacket.

Goldfinger: Jonathan Cape reprint with dust jacket.

For Your Eyes Only: Jonathan Cape first edition, no dust jacket.

Thunderball: Cape, first edition with dust jacket.

The Spy Who Loved Me: Cape, second impression with dust jacket.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: two Cape copies, one first edition and one second impression, both with dust jacket.

You Only Live twice: Cape, first, with D.J.

The Man with the Golden Gun, two Cape copies, both first, both with DJ.  And a first American edition (the American Library) in perfect condition.

Octopussy and the Living Daylights: two Cape copies, both first, one with dust jacket.

In addition, I have a Cape first edition Thrilling Cities with dust jacket, in perfect condition, and first Cape editions of John Pearson’s Life of Ian Fleming and Kingsley Amis’ James Bond Dossier.  Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Diamond Smugglers are paperbacks.  In Moonraker, when Bond takes on Drax who cheats at cards, by cheating at cards, he first consults Scarne on Cards.  I have a beautiful hardback edition, with dust jacket…  So it goes on.

So, strictly speaking, I’ve got half the Bond canon in first edition.  Any time I go into a second hand bookshop I have a look for one, but they are getting rarer, and I don’t expect to come across a Casino Royale or a Moonraker.  I picked up most of my first editions for a song, at a time before they really became collectors’ items.  I often wonder, if I did come across a first edition Casino Royale, immaculate in its dust jacket, retailing for £10, would I snap it up, or would I say to the vendor, “Do you realise this is worth £10,000?”

Which brings us back to Lady C.  Why is Laurence Byrne’s besmirched copy so valuable?  The value of an antique often resides in its pristine state.  Hornby Dublo train sets are sought after, and if they are in fine condition within a well-preserved box, the value skyrockets.  But Sir Laurence’s copy of Lady C isn’t even a hardback, let alone a first edition.  Why is it so valuable?  I can answer in one word.

Provenance.

The Crown prosecuted Penguin Books over Lady C in 1960, under the Obscene Publications Act, and lost.  It was a pivotal moment not just in English Law, but in English History.  It was the end of an era, ushering in the Swinging Sixties.  The case against Penguin now seems rather quaint.  Mervyn Griffith-Jones for the prosecution made his famous remark about wives and servants.  Perhaps Sir Laurence scribbled it down on the dog-eared margin.  Even then, it must have sounded to those in the public gallery absurdly patrician and hopelessly out of touch.  Bernard Levin sat through the entire trial.  It gradually became apparent to him that it wasn’t really the book at all that was on trial, nor the publisher Penguin, nor the author D. H. Lawrence.  It was Connie Chatterley herself who was in the dock.

But it’s funny to find Lady C, in a sense, back on trial.  Is that paperback worth all the fuss and the money?  In the world of Lit Crit, F. R. Leavis was and perhaps remains Lawrence’s most avid champion.  When, in his 1962 Richmond Lecture, Leavis carried out his hatchet job on C. P. Snow, saying that, far from being a novelist, Snow didn’t begin to know what a novel was, Leavis chose, by way of example of a great novelist, D. H. Lawrence.  But in his book D. H. Lawrence, Novelist (Chatto and Windus, 1955), Leavis considers Lady C to be a minor work.  He called it a worthy “hygienic undertaking” to redeem physical sex from the charge of obscenity.  But he thought that such an enterprise could not be anything other than an offence against taste.

Just as Leavis did a hatchet job on Snow, so did Bertrand Russell attack D. H. Lawrence.  In the second volume of his autobiography, Russell rejected vehemently Lawrence’s mystic “blood” philosophy, which he later came to consider led straight to Auschwitz.

I’m not impressed by the provenance motive.  A Fender bass guitar is a Fender bass guitar.  But if it was owned by Elvis, it becomes a relic.  How much can it be worth?  In one sense it is worth whatever somebody is prepared to pay for it.  Yet in another sense it doesn’t matter how much it goes for, it’s still a Fender bass guitar.  There is nothing in the provenance that stops it being just a bass guitar.  You could call it “priceless” but you might as well call it “worthless”.  We often use the word “priceless” in a hyperbolic way to mean that some commodity is, or would be, extremely expensive.  Similarly, we might call a piece of intellectual property, like wisdom, “invaluable”.  So, paradoxically, “invaluable” means “valuable” and “priceless” means “pricey”.  Even a programme as venal as the Antiques Road Show sometimes recognises that, in respect of good taste, some items ought not to be priced.  With respect to an heirloom of personal significance to a family, the expert says, “You’d never sell it.”  The owner looks a little taken aback; this is news to him!

Sometimes when I flick on the telly at lunchtime for the one o’clock news I catch the end of Bargain Hunt, in which two teams of two, each with the aid of an expert, compete to buy and sell three ancient items of dubious value, plus or minus “the bonus buy”.  The losses seem generally to outweigh the profits, which in either case are pretty modest, and nobody, least of all the BBC, gets hurt.  “Join us for some more bargain hunting, yes?”  They link arms and kick an imaginary football.  I worry at this point that somebody is going to do their back in.

“Yes!”

This I feel should be the spirit in which “provenance” is viewed.  I like to think that if my second impression copy of John Lennon In his own Write (Jonathan Cape, 1964) happened to bear the draft lyrics of No Reply, in the author’s hand, on the inside cover, I’d say to any prospective buyer, “It’s beyond price.  You can’t afford it.”

We also sometimes use the word “priceless” to mean “hysterically funny”.  Somebody says to you, “That Penguin paperback went for £56,250”, and you reply, “That’s priceless.”

 

Thumbing through a copy of J. K. Galbraith’s book on the 1929 Wall St Crash in Waterstones on Saturday I was amused to read that Galbraith had searched in vain in a US airport for the same book, and had, rather self-consciously, approached the book seller.  “Er, looking for a book on the financial crisis by a guy I think named Galbraith.”

“What’s the title?”

“The Big Crash.”

“Not the sort of title we’d have at the airport, sir.”

Also on Saturday I got this yellow flier from the SNP through my door.  Stop BREXIT: Vote SNP.  In 2014 Scotland voted to stay in the UK, and then sent 56 SNP MPs (out of a total of 59 MPs) to Westminster.  Then in 2016 the UK voted to leave the EU.  Scotland, as it happens, voted to stay in the EU, but as she had already voted to be a “region” of the UK this mattered not one whit.  This predicament is, I venture to say, peculiarly and particularly Scottish.

Then on Saturday evening I went to the RSNO, in preference to watching Eurovision.  Hong Kong, America, Finland, and England were represented, almost as cosmopolitan as Eurovision.  If Australia can be in Eurovision, then I think Japan should join in.  They would be contenders.  Surely Japanese reality TV and Eurotrash are closely aligned.

Then in The Sunday Times I came across a fantastic mixed metaphor.  Mrs May was writing to persuade her Parliamentary colleagues to vote for a yet-once-more revamped Withdrawal Agreement Bill (the WAB).  Her pitch – Withdrawal Agreement Bill will be a bold new offer to MPs – was rather hard to find: outside lane, Page 13.  But on the front page, next to a charming picture of the Duchess of Cambridge, The Sunday Times was giving notice of the ERG’s determination to vote down the WAB: “If (Mrs May) loses she has surely trumped her own ace and will have to fold…The WAB is toast.”

And one more gem I heard on the radio from a political pundit: “My crystal ball is broken, going forward.”

What are our options?

1. The WAB is passed, and we leave the EU “in an orderly fashion.”
2. The WAB is not passed and Parliament once more attempts to reach consensus in finding another deal. However the EU reminds Westminster that the WAB is the only deal in town.
3. Mrs May resigns and a new Prime Minister enters No. 10. But this of itself does not alter the impasse.
4. A General Election is called and the new Prime Minister is returned, or a new new Prime Minister takes over. But this again of itself does not alter the impasse.
5. Parliament gives the nod to a “People’s vote”. Since the WAB is toast, and since it had been the only deal in town, this can only offer two options:
6. Either we revoke Article 50 and stay in the EU, or…
7. …We crash out.

On Thursday I intend, if spared, to vote in the European Parliament Election.  It will certainly be the strangest election in which I’ve ever exercised my franchise.  Many of the UK candidates, while they are in it to win, don’t ever wish to take their seats.  Their preoccupation is more with Westminster than with Brussels.  It is Mr Farage’s avowed intention to break up the Westminster two party system.  Polls suggest his Brexit Party is the front runner.  If they do well, Mr Farage intends to demand that his party form an integral part of the team negotiating the UK’s exit from the EU.  He will be in a better position to push for a hard Brexit.  He wants to leave under WTO rules.  On the other side, some of the parties, for example the Lib Dems and the SNP, are campaigning to stop Brexit and stay in the EU.  When the 2016 referendum result was announced, a lot of democratically-minded politicians said, “We’re all Brexiteers now.”  Both the Conservatives and Labour voted to trigger Article 50.  But it appears that Tory and Labour are both being eclipsed in this argument, as the prevailing points of view become more polarised.

Maybe there was never any possibility of a fudge.  Maybe leaving the EU really is like a divorce.  You can’t be married just a wee bit.  You’re either in or you’re out.  Ah yes, but who gets the house, the contents, the car, the white goods, the CDs etc?  Well, leave it to the lawyers.  At least it would be cathartic.  So here are three predictions:

1. We crash out on Halloween.
2. The next Prime Minister will be called Jeremy.
3. There will be a very significant alteration to the constitutional arrangements within these islands.

There is one other possibility.  And considering that the UK came last in Eurovision, we should be alert to it.  There hasn’t been much attention paid to the effect all this is having in Continental Europe.  Those occupying the Westminster Bubble are inordinately narcissistic.  We continuously hear that the EU will come back to us, cap in hand, begging for trade.  But the EU must be concerned for its own integrity.  If the Brexit Party does well, and the returned members take their seats in Brussels, their remit will be to create mayhem.  The EU must be well aware of this and I expect they are already workshopping certain scenarios.  There is always the possibility that we could be expelled.

For an object lesson on how not to chair a television panel discussion programme, look no further than Question Time (Thursday May 9^th, BBC 1).

A chairperson should be like a football referee.  In a well officiated football match, the referee is invisible.  He has probably had a word with the respective team captains as the coin is tossed, and set down the rules of engagement.  Observe the rules, he says, and I will not impede the flow of play.  For that reason he might let an infringement pass, albeit temporarily, to see if an advantage to the other side accrues.  He won’t penalise bad play; only foul play.  If he has an opinion as to a team’s performance, and how it might be improved, he keeps it to himself.  He may be invisible, but he has clout, in the form of yellow and red cards.  Therefore the players should behave themselves.  The fans on the terraces take all this for granted.  They would be indignant if the referee showed bias towards one side, and flabbergasted if he took possession of the ball, and ran with it, like Sir Stanley Matthews, the Wizard of the Dribble.  What would such an intervention signify?

Anarchy.  If the referee behaves badly, the players will do the same, and then the bad behaviour will spill on to the terraces.

Anarchy pretty much describes Thursday’s Question Time.  On the panel: Amber Rudd, the Work and Pensions Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, Shadow Economics Spokesman, Anna Soubry of the newly formed Change UK Party, Nigel Farage of the newly formed Brexit party, and entrepreneur and Labour donor John Mills.  Four questions were asked, three of them Brexit-heavy.  I paraphrase:

1. After a week of great come-backs, will Theresa May do the same in getting her Brexit deal through Parliament?  

“You’re thinking of the footie?” enquired Fiona Bruce.

“Maybe.”  And maybe that’s what brought my football analogy to mind.  It wasn’t long before Ms Bruce got on the ball, the first of many unscheduled and redundant interruptions.  She abandoned her detached position above the battle and stepped into the heat and dust of the arena.  But isn’t that what the other panellists are there to do?  Frankly it’s a bit of an affront, that she should steal their thunder.  If somebody is spouting humbug, somebody else on the panel will be sure to take them to task.  The trouble with the chairperson stepping into the fray is that she will lose perspective.  Actually she lost perspective, thrice, when she failed to understand a question from an audience member, when she forgot to ask Nigel Farage Question 2, and in Question 4, when she failed to understand the meaning of an exchange with Mr Farage, following yet another of her interruptions.  Once she had entered the arena, the match was no longer being refereed, and it is hardly surprising that panel members began to talk over one another, exchanges became strident and bad-tempered, the audience felt free to howl with derision, and to shout out without invitation, despite the fact that their heckling could not be clearly heard on air.  Ms Bruce tried to rein in the assembly, reminding people that the Brexit debate had become toxic, but by then she had lost all authority, and her intervention made not one whit of difference.  And we were still on Question 1.

2. Would a change of Prime minister break the deadlock? 

The trouble with a football match that has gone out of control is that the spectators are no longer interested in the finesse of the Beautiful Game, but only in how down-and-dirty it can get.  For the record, Amber Rudd thought the Conservative Party should hold its nerve, Jonathan Reynolds wanted a General Election, Anna Soubry fears Boris as a possible successor, John Mills thought Mrs May should quit ASAP and a successor should attempt to renegotiate a better deal with the EU.  Mr Farage wasn’t asked.  So…

3. Should Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn be worried about the Brexit Party?

… So he answered Question 2 when asked Question 3.  He hopes the PM stays PM for as long as possible because the more she makes a hash of it the better the Brexit Party will do.  I think it was self-evident that Mrs May and Mr Corbyn should be very worried about the Brexit Party.  Love him or loathe him, Mr Farage is a formidable political performer.  He shares with Mr Trump an ability to make a connection, and to hold an audience, perhaps even to mesmerise it.  His answers may well be simplistic and pat, he might for all I know have made it all up on the back of an envelope, but the mainstream parties can’t seem to find a way to challenge him and to undermine his arguments.

4. How can the falling GP numbers be revived?

Thank goodness for a non-Brexit question.  It had been all over the news that day.  England and Wales used to have 66 GPs per 100,000 population, and now that number has fallen to 60.  Actually in Northampton, from where the programme was going out, the number was 55.  As for the question itself, I can’t think any of the proposed solutions were terribly original.  The usual tropes: train more doctors; practise in a different way; put more money in; recruit more; go to the pharmacist.  The most eloquent and coherent statement came from an Italian doctor in the audience who was a local GP.  She described how the critical problem in General Practice today is not one of recruitment, but of retention.  Doctors are leaving the UK in droves, because they are so unhappy.  Half way through her statement, Ms Bruce opined, “I can hear from your voice that that upsets you.”  First a referee, then a player, and now a commentator.

Of course, question 4 is not really a non-Brexit question.  Everything concerns the place of the individual in a community, a society, a nation, a state, a continent, and a world.  Nobody in the panel had apparently stopped to wonder what is making the medical profession so unhappy.  What are the doctors trying to escape from?  The toxicity of Question Time?

Mr Farage said about the European elections on May 23^rd, “I’m trying to win.  I want to break up the two party system.”  Anna Soubry and Nigel Farage agree about one thing, that politics is broken.  But I think if anybody was satisfied with the way Question Time went, it would have been Mr Farage.  He might well have rubbed his hands together with glee.  A good night’s work!

Well, Gavin Williamson, erstwhile Defence Secretary (of all people) turned out to be the leak.  At least according to Mrs May.  It was like something out of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  He had to go.  Yet he protesteth his innocence vociferously.  He swore on the life of his children.  That reminded me of the time Mr Gummer got one of his kids to eat a hamburger on telly during the Mad Cow Disease crisis.  I think they should keep the kids out of it.  Don’t swear on anything or anybody.  As Our Lord said, let your yea be yea and your nay be nay.

Mr Williamson’s last act as Defence Secretary was to meet with the submariners at Faslane.  But by the time they held the controversial service at Westminster commemorating 50 years of Trident, Penny Mordaunt had taken over.  She had been Secretary of State for International Development, and her place (it’s a bit like trying to solve Rubik’s Cube) was taken by Rory Stewart.  It’s not that long since Mr Stewart took over the prisons, swearing to sack himself if he didn’t solve the drugs and violence crisis.  That pledge seems no longer to pertain.  Meanwhile, John McDonnell the Shadow Chancellor is telling us that Mrs May herself is a mole, leaking confidential information from the Tory-Labour meetings trying to find a path to Brexit.  But there’s no readily available means of sacking Mrs May, much to the chagrin of Iain Duncan Smith.

I’ve never been able to understand cabinet reshuffles.  How can you head up a department for a few months and then jump ship and head up another?  How can you possibly master each brief?  At least the civil service can keep things ticking over while you’re trying to mug the stuff up.  Look at Stormont!  No government for more than two years now.  And life – well, with one very notable exception – goes on.  I can contrast that (I’m sure you can too) with my (your) own professional experience.  If I didn’t turn up for work, either in the Emergency Department or the General Practice Surgery, even for one day, there would be pandemonium.  Harms would ensue; some of them might be fatal.  This was why I and my colleagues would often, no doubt ill-advisedly, drag ourselves into work when we felt like death, because we didn’t wish to place an intolerable burden on our already overstretched colleagues.  The idea of not turning up for two years?  Well, after about three days, as we say north of the border, I would have got my jotters.

Back at Faslane, the safes in the nuclear subs hold the Prime Minister’s “letters of last resort.”  You can read about them in The Silent Deep, The Royal Navy Submarine Service since 1945 by Peter Hennessy & James Jinks (Allen Lane, 2015).  When the balloon goes up, big time (as becomes apparent when Radio 4 ceases to broadcast,) three submariners read the PM’s letter to find out what to do.  In the broadest terms, I suppose this must be an order either to retaliate, or not.  But I wonder if this is nothing more than a piece of propaganda, all part of the bluff-and-grope strategy of a nation state wishing to appear belligerent and slightly unbalanced.  You could hardly conjure a modus operandi less democratic than to have the PM in the isolation of Chequers take a decision, over a Ouija Board for all we know, about how to bring the world to an end full of bangs and whimpers.  Apparently she doesn’t need to run it by anybody or even let anybody (the three submariners aside) know her decision.

But to return to the porous National Security Council, I’ve heard it suggested that Mr Williamson was indeed the leak, only he doesn’t know it.  I imagine political journalists are rather adept at extracting information from people.  They are not so much constructing a story from scratch, as filling in missing pieces of a jigsaw.  They might interpret an involuntary facial tic as a nod and a wink.  I know, again from my own professional life, how easy it is inadvertently to betray a confidence without noticing.  When people go phishing, you have to be on the highest alert.  Fortunately I was assisted in this by my appalling memory for names.  I could remember the lesion, but don’t ask me who it belonged to.

When Mr Williamson swore on the lives of his children, somebody phoned the Jeremy Vine Show on Radio 2 to say that that proves he did it.  But I don’t think you can draw any conclusions from it one way or another.  Personally, I think it was the tarantula.

I devoured the latest Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me, subtitled And People Like You (Jonathan Cape, 2019).  I’m a McEwan fan and I’ve read the whole canon.  Mind you, his books are a little like Chinese meals.  There is no satiety.  After The Children Act I waited impatiently for the next one, and here we are.  They made a film out of The Children Act, and I will hazard a guess, two guesses, that they will make one out of Machines Like Me, and that Ben Whishaw (Q in the Bond movies) will play the machine.  Just a hunch.

I’m not quite sure why I admire McEwan, because I seldom find his characters simpatico, and I would have no wish to meet them or move among them, in their metropolitan environment.  Yet his books are page turners, and this latest is no exception.  It’s a vision – dystopian to my mind – of where Artificial Intelligence might take us.  It concerns an android, Adam, so sophisticated as to pass for Homo sapiens.  McEwan elects not to place Adam in the future but back in the 80s, but the 80s of an alternative universe in which Britain has lost the Falklands War, Tony Benn is leader of the Labour Party, the Beatles have reunited, and Alan Turing, an establishment elder statesman, is alive and well.  This backdrop, at once familiar and totally unrecognisable, provides a zany lop-sidedness against which Adam’s existence becomes almost believable.

Alan Turing is another reason why Machines Like Me could end up in film.  Benedict Cumberbatch played him in a film largely concerned with his decryption work during the war at Bletchley Park, The Imitation Game.  The thesis of The Imitation Game is that if you are interacting with an intelligence whose mode of expression suggests consciousness, then there is no reason to suppose that consciousness is absent.  You might say that Machines Like Me is an exploration of all that such an assumption might imply.

Do you suppose Adam the android goes AWOL?  As in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, and Robert Harris’ The Fear Index, that’s generally what such creations do.  If he does, we should hardly be surprised.  Already such events are happening in reality.  It now seems highly likely that two recent near identical disasters in civil aviation were caused by a computer taking control of the aeroplane and flying it into the ground while the pilots were unable to do anything about it.  In aviation, when the gremlins start to act up, the captain takes control and flies the aeroplane.  This side of the Pond he says, “I have control,” and on the other side, “My aeroplane.”  What a shock to make that statement only to find that the real captain of the aircraft is not in the cockpit.  In any walk of life, when the systems begin to malfunction, you must have a way of shutting them down while still being able to carry out your basic tasks.  Under no circumstances should you allow Adam to disable his own Kill switch.

These events were shocking enough, but even more shocking was the insouciance of the reaction from some quarters.  There was no recognition of the fact that these events were not like other civil aviation disasters caused by pilot error, mechanical failure, bad weather, bad ground to air communication or more likely, a multifactorial concatenation of circumstances, a combination of all of the above.  In its sinister aetiology, this was of a different order.  Yet our capacity for forgiving machines their vagaries seems inexhaustible.

Our love affair with IT and AI in 2019 is just like our love affair with the automobile circa 1964, around the time Dr Beeching ripped up the rail system.  Once we were gridlocked we came to regret that, and I believe once our cyber systems pack in, not necessarily because they are hacked, but just because they are too damned complicated, we will similarly rue the day.  I don’t care for this Brave New World.

Last week, the National Security Council met to discuss whether the Chinese telecoms firm Huawei should be involved in building the UK’s 5G phone network.  That Mrs May favours Huawei, apparently against the advice of some ministers and officials, has been leaked.  Who leaked it?  MI5 might be called upon to seize mobile phone and email records.  There is a certain irony in the National Security Council’s assessing whether or not Huawei’s systems might be “secure”, while the council itself is as leaky as a sieve.  That could have come straight out of a novel by Ian McEwan.

Good Friday: wrote to The Herald, a response to a letter from a General Practitioner.  The vexed topic: Assisted Suicide.  His was a nuanced letter, carefully stated and well expressed.  This was no surprise, as the writer is a regular contributor to the paper.  I know him.  We went to the same medical school, and greet one another at RSNO concerts.  So while my response expressed an opposing point of view, I hope I was polite and courteous.  It occurs to me that it would be best to extend that similar level of courtesy to people I don’t know.  There’s nothing to be gained from cheap point scoring.

But why write to the papers?  I can think of a few reasons, perhaps worth rehearsing, why not to write:

1. You might not be published. This can be disappointing, particularly if you’ve put some care and effort into the composition, you are pleased with the result, and feel you have a point worth making.  I used to be crestfallen when I got rejected, but I’m much more philosophical about it now.  It’s no big deal.  Bernard Levin used to remind himself that his carefully crafted articles for The Times were wrapping the fish and chips that night.  Sometimes I’ve regretted writing something and hoped to goodness it wouldn’t get published.  Naturally on these occasions such sinful follies appear in print the very next day.
2. You might be published, but in an abridged, edited form. I used to have Beethovenian tantrums about this, and imagine myself seizing the editor by the throat and ranting: “Don’t change a word!”  But again I’m more relaxed about it now, so long as the essential meaning isn’t distorted.
3. When you write, particularly on a contentious issue, you are sticking your head above the parapet, so people are liable to take pot shots at you. It pays to check for ripostes and rejoinders the next day: “Dr Campbell needs to wake up and smell the coffee.  Can he really be so naïve as to imagine…?  I won’t be making an appointment at his surgery any time soon…”  And so on.  It doesn’t do to be too thin skinned.  And remember, you’re not checking for injuries to the amour propre, rather looking for counterarguments that again need to be rebutted in an ongoing debate.  Some of the comments are liable to be “robust”, but at least The Herald won’t publish anything downright offensive.  If you want the offensive stuff, go on line.  I once did.  Never again.  I can’t say I’m liberated from all that junk because I was never entrapped.  I don’t really understand why young people get dragged down by online abuse.  Just Log Off.  Easy for you, you old codger, I hear you say.  You’re past it anyway.  You have no idea of the pressures…  Well I don’t accept that.  And I’m impatient with those who mentor the young, who feel constrained to say that there are good sides too to social media.  No there aren’t, not if somebody is driving you to despair.  Switch the bloody thing off and crush it under foot.  But I digress.  Back to reasons for not writing to the papers.
4. You, in turn, might find that it is you yourself who are the intemperate and loud-mouthed bully. When I find myself spluttering indignantly into my cornflakes over some piece of (to my mind) arrant nonsense, I remind myself that it pays not to fire off a quick broadside, but to take time out for reflection in silence.  I remind myself of the words of Oliver Cromwell (I’ve said this before but it’s worth repetition) “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”  So order your thoughts, and compose yourself before composing your piece.  Don’t be mean and sarcastic, avoid the “argument ad hominem”, and address the issue, whatever it may be.  If you are only writing to vent your spleen, maybe it would be better to maintain a dignified silence.  I once made a pact with myself never to write to the paper unless I had something positive and constructive to contribute.  Unsurprisingly, the frequency of my correspondence diminished.
5. There is the ever present possibility that you sound like a barrack-room lawyer. You have no time for nuance; your arguments are pat.  A statement of the bleedin’ obvious, mate.  Or, as we say north of the border, story’s endit, pal.  This I fear.
6. You might make a mistake. It might be trivial, or it might be serious.  Either way, it is liable to be pounced upon.  I remember once, in a letter whose content I’ve long since forgotten, invoking the Writ of Habeas Corpus.  Next day: “Habeas Corpus won’t do Dr Campbell any good north of the border.  He means ‘The Protection gin Wrangfu’ Imprisonment Act’…” or some such.  Clever dick.
7. You might make an error of judgment. You might unconsciously betray a prejudice that goes against the current zeitgeist.  We live in a Pharisaic age.  “Dr Campbell should hang his head in shame…”  I particularly dislike the “hang his head in shame” imagery.  People who hang their heads in shame are defendants in a show trial.  Their belts are removed so they have to hold their trousers up while standing in the dock.  They are clearly guilty.

So.  Plenty of reasons not to write to the papers!  Why on earth would you ever do it?  It’s simply the creative impulse.  You conjure an idea that you want to share, and you try to express it as succinctly and coherently as you can.  Mindful that column inches are at a premium, you go through your draft and cut out all the deadwood, all the clichés and redundant expressions, the self-indulgences, and the purple prose.  You murder your darlings.  Then you read it through once more and think, “Am I going to regret this?”  But, taking the long term, isn’t it true that you always regret the sins of omission more than the sins of commission?

So you take a deep breath and press “send”.

A weekend in Glasgow is always a walk down Memory Lane.  The Scottish Chamber Orchestra played The City Halls, Candleriggs, on Friday night – a hallowed venue, beside the fruit market in the Merchant City.  Chopin played here.  And Dickens gave one of his famous public recitations.  After the disaster of the fire that destroyed the St Andrews Hall, and after the purgatory of an orphaned Scottish National Orchestra playing the mud-bespattered Gaiety Theatre in Argyll Street, in competition with the pile drivers forging the M8, the SNO under Sir Alexander Gibson found a home in Candleriggs, and this is the era I remember each time I come here.

The SCO opened with Ginastera’s Variaciones Concertantes, a showpiece for every instrument in the orchestra, opening with a mesmerising duet for cello and harp, with subsequent solo contributions from viola, violin, and bass.  Everybody in the SCO is a virtuoso.  Then Bertrand Chamayou played the Ravel Piano Concerto in G.   Another virtuoso display, with, between the jazzy outer movements, such sadness and poignancy in the sustained Adagio assai, reiterated by the cor anglais.  Then Beethoven 4.  The orchestra seized us by the throat.  Debussy said that Beethoven was a wonderful composer whose music was spoiled by aggression.

The RSNO is currently touring the United States, but fortunately the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland played the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday.  That is apt, considering the new partnership the NYOS and the RSNO have forged, and it was also fitting that the NYOS should have been conducted by the RSNO’s Principal Guest Conductor Elim Chan.  Steven Osborne played Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto.  I’m sure it was an experience the members of the NYOS will never forget.  In this most technically demanding of all concerti, Osborne gave it everything.  That he should have been able to return to the platform and play the D major Prelude Opus 23 No. 4, with infinite delicacy and tenderness, was astonishing.

After the interval, the NYOS played Andrea Tarrodi’s Liguria, and then the Ravel orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.  Composed in 1874, what a modernistic and demonic piece it is.  There was great sonority from the brass ensemble, and some wonderfully intricate wind playing.  I was particularly struck by the saxophonist in Il vecchio castello.  What a talent.

Meanwhile, the RSNO were playing the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts near Sacramento.  Sibelius, Rachmaninov, and Prokofiev, in a programme I heard in Glasgow a few weeks ago.  A treat for the good folks of Sacramento.  With the RSNO away, I suppose in the Royal Concert Hall on Saturday night we had a foretaste of how the RSNO might be in twenty years’ time.  When I heard the NYOS last year they played Copland 3 and I was struck then by the extraordinary strength, depth, and sonority of the strings.  On Saturday the string sections were notably smaller, and it crossed my mind that maybe the depth of available talent had similarly grown smaller.  Nicola Benedetti, who is patron of the NYOS junior orchestra, is a tireless champion for free music tuition in schools.  Is it fanciful to imagine that the erosion of such free tuition has so quickly produced an adverse effect?  Thanks to such free tuition, I was playing Mussorksy’s Pictures in a Glasgow youth orchestra around the time the pile drivers were knocking hell out of the Gaiety.  I think it was far easier at that time, compared with now, for somebody from a modest background to find a path into music.  But the gap between rich and poor has never been so stark in my lifetime.  You only need to take a short walk from Waterstones Sauchiehall Street to the concert hall at the top of Buchanan Street to see, in every doorway, people clinging to the margins of existence.

It seems to me that if we pass by the derelict on our way towards the ivory tower of classical music, the refined pursuit of the alumni of private schools, if music becomes divorced from real life, then music will die.  Every time (nearly every time) I hear a piece of contemporary music, I wonder if it isn’t dead already.

But I mustn’t be pessimistic.  To hear the NYOS, and to hear the whoops of appreciation from their young friends in the audience, gives me hope.  So long as they remember to switch off their devices.

Achtung!  Intensivtraining!

German studies continue.  My reverse Brexit – but that’s another story.  The study of another language makes one consider anew one’s own native tongue.  I wonder what it is like to learn English as a second language.  English isn’t terribly inflected – no accusative and dative endings to worry about.  Gender is purely biological, men being masculine, women feminine, and things neuter.  (Okay ships are female – there’s always an exception.)  Plurals are remarkably regular – just add s: thing/things; or es for sake of euphony: box/boxes.  Child/children is an exception but I struggle to think of another unless it’s a Latin loan word: medium/media or stigma/stigmata.  No, the real difficulty with English lies in mastery of idiom.  You see the problem if you examine just one facet of English grammar, say, tense.

Tenses are a bit complicated.  German has one present tense, English at least three.  Ich komme:  I come, I do come, I am coming.  You might add a fourth: I am used to coming; or even a fifth: I be coming.  But most native English speakers hearing the latter would conjure the image of a pirate with a wooden leg and a parrot on his shoulder.  He might be hunting for pieces of eight (eight?  Eight what?) – using a map bearing the legend, “Here be dragons.”

An English learner might imagine that the simplest form of the present tense (“I come” in the above example) would be the commonest in use, but actually to describe that which we are doing in the present, we hardly ever use it.  If I say, “I play the viola”, you would not imagine the instrument to be under my chin right now.  I might more accurately say, “I am in the habit of playing the viola from time to time.”  A German speaker might ask me, “Play you the viola?”  Or a French speaker, “Is it that you play the viola?” or more likely, “You play the viola?”  But an English speaker would say, “Do you play the viola?”  I might reply, “Yes I do play the viola”, but such a reply would resonate with a certain emphasis, so to say: “Yes I do play the viola.  How did you know?”  It’s a minefield.

The odd thing about the simple present tense is that when it is used sequentially, it is understood to be a form of dramatized past tense.  The drama thus recounted may be either fictional or non-fictional.  “He stands up.  He yawns, he stretches, he takes a few paces towards the dresser.  He opens the top drawer.  He takes out a squat, snub-nosed, heavy metallic object.  It is a Walther PPK…”  To write a novel in the present tense much more than a century ago would have been incomprehensible.  It was the rise of cinema, and subsequently television, that made such a mode of expression intelligible.  We tend to watch a movie in the present tense.  That is its impact; it is happening in the here and now.  Then historians borrowed the technique.  You might hear a historian pontificating on Lord Bragg’s In Our Time: “Churchill is in a bind.  He must show loyalty to his chief, but he knows that Halifax, a peer, is in an impossible position, and that therefore it is Churchill for whom the king, albeit reluctantly, must send.”   Personally, I don’t care for either novels or histories to be recounted in the present tense.  But I’m prepared to put up with it, if the material is of interest.  I seem to recall that Robert Harris’ novel about the Dreyfus affair is in the present tense.  I thought it was awfully good, and I admit I stopped noticing after a while.  But still, there is something portentous about the past masquerading as the present.

Is there any such thing as a novel written entirely in the future tense?  A poem, maybe?  Yeats’ Lake isle of Innisfree?      

The various past tenses in English can be as confusing as those in the present.  I have gone, I went, I used to go, I was going.  We don’t say “I have went”, though I don’t suppose there is any reason why we shouldn’t, went being the past tense of the verb to wend.  That reminds me of the wee Glasgow boy whose mother asked him how he had enjoyed his first day at school.

“Och, ah wish ah hadnae go’ed.”

Naturally his mother corrected him.  “You mean, you wish tae goad you hadnae went.”

Then there’s the pluperfect – the remote past seen from the perspective of the past:  I thought… I had thought…  I don’t suppose there is any reason why this recherche into temps perdu shouldn’t carry on ad infinitum; the hall of mirrors of reminiscence – I had thought, I had had thought, I had had had thought…

But the real can of worms, in English, is the subjunctive.  The English learner might wish to think twice before going there.  It’s an optional extra.  Many native speakers, perhaps the majority, never use it.  The subjunctive is rather hifalutin, almost a class thing.  Perhaps for the foreigner that is its lure.  Master it, and you receive the keys to High Society.  You move effortlessly amid the Establishment, One of Us.  Avoid it, and you remain an artisan, calling a spade a spade.  But of course the real trick with the subjunctive is to master it, and then never use it.  It’s like a nuclear deterrent, invisibly making its presence felt.  Kipling’s If might have been written entirely in the subjunctive, but it sits under the surface.  Its blatant use is an affectation.  If you adopt the subjunctive, you become a theoretician moving in a rarefied atmosphere; a dandy, a fop.

A distinction is made between the present subjunctive (“If I were a rich man…”) and the historic subjunctive (“Then I thought, would that I had been born rich…”) but the whole essence of the subjunctive is that it lies outside the realm of quotidian experience.  It is not a tense; it is a mood.  In considering what might have been, you step through a sliding door into a realm beyond time.  “Would that I had known then what I were later to discover.  Had it been so, I had done better.  Had I taken more cognisance of that which, heretofore, I had had removed from my consciousness, I had had wiser counsel.  I had better had done nothing.”

A German learning English might say to himself, “I had better avoid that.”  Yes, you had better had had.

All Herr Müller wanted to do was order an espresso in Prȇt.

April 1^st.  What a relief yesterday to move the clocks forward an hour.  No kidding.  Did I hear a rumour that Brussels has issued a directive – no, an advisory – that EU states settle on a time and stop monkeying around with their clocks?  I imagine Westminster will pay scant regard to that, even supposing the UK ends up contesting the EU elections on May 23^rd.  So come October 27^th, we will be back on GMT, or, as the RAF chaps put it, Zulu.  Or, as the aviation world puts it generally, UTC.  UTC stands for Universal Co-ordinated Time.  Why not, then, UCT?  The received wisdom is that the acronym UTC is a sop to the French, who have a penchant for placing the adjective after the noun.  But then, why not TUC?  Did the Trades Union Congress get in first?  How about TCU?  Temps coordonné universel.  Whatever.  The aviation world is full of three letter acronyms.  The atmospheric pressure at sea level in millibars (or hectopascals in the System Internationale) is the QNH, while the atmospheric pressure at airport surface level is the QFE.  But QNH and QFE stand for nothing at all.  They’re just gobbledegook, designed to confuse the enemy.

But to return to Zulu, or Zulu + 1, I’ve adjusted all the clocks in my house.  I note the computer on which I scribble away has done it automatically, as has my mobile phone.  The clock in the car is on permanent summer time.  I like to think that is because I too choose always to remain on summer time, but actually it’s because I can’t figure out how to adjust the clock.  I ought to get the manual out of the glove box and look it up but I can’t be bothered.  Similarly, I should find out how to jam the car radio’s annoying habit of constantly interrupting Radio 3 with a travel report.  The surprise lurking in the slow movement of Haydn 94 is obliterated by an update on the snow blocking the road twixt Cockbridge and Tomintoul.  The Cockbridge-Tomintoul road has been blocked for as long as I can remember.  When Freddie Grisewood chaired Any Questions, and the newscaster told us what the Queen was wearing, the Cockbridge-Tomintoul road was blocked.

There is I believe universal relief (or relief universal) when the clocks spring forward, just as there is consternation when they fall back.  The end of October signals the onset of Seasonal Affective Disorder.  The nights are fair drawing in.  Each year there is a debate as to whether we stay on GMT, or on British Summer Time, or we keep swapping, or indeed revive British Double Summer Time.  There may be a town/country split on this; there is a farmers’ lobby, and a lobby vociferous on behalf of children creeping reluctantly to school.  The kids themselves couldn’t care less.  In their feral world, they have far better things with which to concern themselves.  But I have a modest proposal to put forward.  Rather than change the clocks, we should change our habits.  If it’s too dark in the morning to send the kids to school, wait until it gets light.  In other words, shorten the working day during winter.  The children will be delighted.  So will the adults, who should all go into the office an hour later and come back an hour earlier.  Hunker down and mend the fishing nets.  The only reason for going out in the dark is to undertake “works of necessity and mercy.”  If I were a sitting MP I would put it forward as a Private Members Bill.  But Mr Speaker, that man in the green chair so cavernous that it makes the incumbent look like Richard Matheson’s Incredible Shrinking Man, would never allow it.  Lead balloon territory.  We cannot allow ourselves to fall behind these incredibly driven and industrious Chinese.

But is this not a most beautiful time of year?  I wandered lonely as a cloud, floating, in this instance up and down the vales and hills of the Switchback Road heading north out of Glasgow, and the banks of daffodils were truly stunning.  I’m sure Mr Wordsworth really was stunned too.  I’m less convinced about his emotional state while walking over Westminster Bridge on September 3^rd, 1802.  Granted the Palace of Westminster is a very beautiful building, but then again it wasn’t there in 1802.  Call me dull of soul, but surely the sun can more beautifully steep something other than ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples, eh?  I mean, what is so “Dear God” about sleeping houses?

Westminster has put me in a mood.

In these troubled times, when wise and benign world leadership is in short supply, who would not be impressed by the New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern?  Following the Christchurch atrocity, she has been able to articulate the desire of New Zealanders to live in peace and not at war, to love and not to hate.  She has been able to reach out to people of every age and from every social and ethnic background, and to articulate grief, resolve, and hope.  Politically, she was able, within 72 hours, to win the broadest support for a reform of New Zealand gun laws, and within a single week she has essentially banned military-style semi-automatic guns and assault rifles.  That is utterly extraordinary.

I can’t help but compare the New Zealand “can-do” attitude, her self-reliance, and her resilience, with the Brexit impasse here in the UK.  This holds true irrespective of one’s desire either to leave or to remain within the European Union.  Here in the UK we have grappled with a problem for nearly three years and achieved, precisely, nothing.  Remember, “Nothing is decided until everything is decided.”  Well, nothing is decided.  I believe this tells us something about leadership.

In a Liberal Democracy (as opposed to a Dictatorship), faced with a crisis, what does a Leader need to be, and to do, in order to step up to the plate?

1. She needs to feel that she has certain skills, attributes, insights, and inner convictions that make her suitable for the job.
2. She needs to feel that the challenge before her is worth taking on. Personal ambition may be a help or a hindrance, but is neither necessary nor sufficient to ensure she is equal to the task.  She might even take up her post with extreme reluctance, driven by a sense of duty or even of Destiny.  What matters in a crisis is that she comes with a coherent strategy.
3. She must on no account have a hidden agenda. She must be open and straightforward.  She mustn’t use the real crisis facing the people as a surrogate for a perceived crisis affecting a particular constituency.
4. She must be collegiate. She should consult widely.  She should listen in particular to opponents, and carefully weigh opinions that she may not necessarily wish to hear.  She should remember the words of Oliver Cromwell, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”
5. She should strive for simplicity. That is not the same as being simplistic.  The art of achieving simplicity, simultaneous with being right, is very complex.  She must study a mass of detail, and make sense of it.  She looks at all the trees and tries to see the wood.  She must search for an underlying solution to the problem, the way a physicist looks for a unifying equation that is both simple, and beautiful.
6. Once armed with a solution, she must convince, and gain the support of not only a cabinet, a constituency, or a party, but the whole body politic.
7. She must stick to her guns, and deal with set-backs and unforeseen impediments. She might echo the words of Winston to the boys at Harrow, “Never give in.”  But she should also remember that even somebody of such sublime inner resolve as Winston added a rider: “Never give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense.”

On Sunday we saw on our television screens images reminiscent of a John Buchan “shilling shocker”, of men in Ulsters emerging from shooting brakes before a Buckinghamshire country mansion.  The atmosphere of the Buchan world, of grey eminences wielding the sinews of power to influence world events, is a world away from the open society of Aotearoa.  We are befogged.  Our leaders have proved unable to make sense of the predicament they face.  They have not found a simple solution.  And the opposite of simplicity is not complexity; it is obfuscation.

Another “critical week” has started.  It would be a brave man, or woman, who is ready to predict what is going to happen.  Frankly, I would be amazed if Westminster pulled a white rabbit out of a hat.  If they can’t find a way through to a solution, events will develop a momentum of their own.  Brexit is turning out to be an “all or nothing” phenomenon.  Either we abandon the whole project, and stay in the EU, or we walk away.  Abort, or crash out.