Author: jamescalumcampbell

“Fellow citizens,” said President Lincoln at Gettysburg, “We cannot escape History.”

You feel it as you take the ferry from the west coast of Scotland, cross the Irish Sea, and proceed slowly up the long inlet of Belfast Lough.  You feel something remarkably similar when you cross out of Spain from La Linea on to the Rock of Gibraltar.  There is a cemetery at the foot of the rock full of the dead from Trafalgar.  You had thought that the past was a distant foreign land only alluded to in textbooks.  But the rock remains a citadel and a fortress, littered with ancient redoubts and buttresses.  Union flags are scrawled on pavements.  No surrender!  It’s here, it’s now.

Mrs May features heavily in February 3^rd’s Sunday Telegraph (Page 1: “May: I’ll fight for Britain in Brussels”.  And on page 19 she writes to us personally (“I’m going to battle for Britain in Brussels”).  The phrase “Battle for Britain” resonates of course.  Earlier in the week, one of the last of The Few died.  It was announced on the BBC, and then we heard the voice of Winston: “Never in the field of human conflict…”  Nothing is accidental.

Basically, Mrs May wants to renegotiate the Irish “backstop” which now appears to be the main impediment frustrating a UK/EU deal.

I was about to write, “Well, good luck with that.”  But that is not a constructive way to speak.  I really do wish her all the luck in the world.  But all the luck in the world cannot change the unalterable fact that when the UK leaves the EU, there will be a border between the Irish Republic, and Northern Ireland.  From this perspective, it now seems incredible that in 2016, politicians on both the Remain and the Leave side did not draw our attention to this fact.  It just shows you – all these patricians nurtured to lead are just as fallible as the rest of us.

So now they are scrabbling to find some means to square the circle – to take the UK out of the EU while simultaneously maintaining the island of Ireland at least as some kind of economic entity.

I’m not sure that Westminster has the credentials to step up to this problem.  I remember during the troubles John Major commenting on the latest Belfast bombing: “Imagine if this sort of thing were going on in Surrey…”  As a comment it was well meant but it merely served to emphasise the point that Belfast is not Surrey.

I have this notion that our ruling class does not really appreciate the cultural rifts that exist within the regions of the British Isles.  Of course England with its disproportionately huge population (and also its very remarkable history) dominates the nations of the UK.  The other nations tend to be depicted in the mass media in rather cartoonish fashion.  The Scots occupy a Celtic twilight full of whisky and heather and doomed romanticism.  The Welsh are all black-faced coal miners with wonderful tenor voices.  The Irish are whimsical and funny and fey.  It seems inconceivable that peoples so obviously lacking (didn’t an Australian call the Welsh “the village idiots of rugby”?) should want to control their own destiny.

So over the course of the next few weeks we are going to witness Westminster’s attempt to solve the problem of the backstop.  Where to begin?

I wish to make a constructive, if rather unusual, suggestion.

Begin with the second movement to the First Symphony of Arnold Bax.

If I am besotted with the music of Arnold Bax (1883 – 1953), I think it is because he is the only great classical composer whose music might be described as “Celtic”.  Born in London, he early showed signs of remarkable technical music facility manifest in his ability to sight-read complex orchestral scores at the piano.  But in addition, he had a profound creative instinct.  He led what some people would describe as a Bohemian life which took him to Russia, and crucially, to Ireland.  He lived in Dublin, learned the Irish language, and wrote literature under the name of Dermot O’Byrne.

He had a huge compositional output.  He wrote seven symphonies between 1921 and 1939.  I would love to tell you all about them but I really need to tell you about the slow movement to the first symphony, and I mustn’t get side-tracked.

Well, let’s be side-tracked for a moment.  All seven symphonies have three movements.  They are composed, and wonderfully orchestrated, for a very large orchestra.  He was very fond of the device of the epilogue – a quiet and contemplative close to a symphony following its climactic apotheosis.  Epilogues feature in Symphonies 2, 3 (perhaps most notably), 6, and 7.  The epilogue to the second symphony states to the listener quite clearly, “This is not the end; this is merely a pause on a very long journey.”  By contrast, the epilogue to the seventh and last symphony states, in a manner rather subdued but so poignant, “Symphonically, this is everything I have to say.”

He used to come up to Morar, by Mallaig in the Scottish north-west, in the winter, to score his symphonies.  He stayed at the Morar Station Hotel.  I have stayed there a couple of times, on a pilgrimage.  There is no blue plaque.

Who are the great English symphonists?  Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Bax, and Walton.  Yet Bax is almost never heard.  He was knighted, he was Master of the King’s Music, and he is almost never heard.  Why is that?  Is it possible that his political sympathies have relevance?

It is often said that the second movement of Bax’s First Symphony, which is very dark – I’d go so far as to say it is the most sombre piece of music I know – mourns the loss of Bax’s friends in the First World War.  It may be so, but it is more.  I am convinced it is a commemoration of the friends he lost in the 1916 Easter uprising, and, more, it is a graphic and overpowering depiction of an execution.  You cannot hear it without thinking of Yeats’ poem Easter 1916.

And what if excess of love

Bewildered them till they died?

I write it out in verse –

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.                                                                      

Somebody tried to use my credit card last week, twice.  I learned about it when the fraud squad of a well-known financial institution left a message on my mobile asking me to call them urgently.  They left a number.  Well, I thought, you say you’re the fraud squad but you could be anybody.  So I phoned a different number, the one embossed on my credit card, and asked to be put through to the fraud squad.  This was clearly an unusual route to go down and I had to negotiate so many menus and make so many digital choices that it all melded from the absurd to the farcical to the surreal to the fantastical.  But I eventually got there.  Only to be met by a robotic voice.  Did I recognise the following four transactions?  If so, say “Yes”, if not, press 1 to speak to a human being.  I recognised two out of four.  I pressed 1.

My circuitous route was prompted by another telephonic experience I had a few months ago when a representative of the self-same institution, a financial adviser, called me on my mobile and asked if it was a convenient time to conduct a consultation about my financial affairs.  I must have been in an unusually benign mood that day because I said yes.  “Superb.”  (You’d think he’d just won the lottery.)  “Just a few security questions before we begin.  Is that okay?”  Fine.  “Perfect.”  (If you want to recreate his voice, think of the voice of Martin Patience, the (actually superb) BBC foreign correspondent who reports from some of the world’s most troubled regions.  It is a particular West of Scotland voice, that of a man who might go to rugby practice at Hughenden in the west end of Glasgow on a Thursday night and have a few jars with the guys.)

“Now you must understand that we will never ask you for your passwords in full, so I’m only going to ask you…”  You know the sort of thing.  What is the second letter of your mother’s maiden name?  What is the ninth letter of your password?  I supplied the info.  And then we got on with it.  It was a perfectly amicable conversation.  I won’t say it was productive, as I had no agenda.  But he seemed a nice enough guy.  We chatted about this and that.

It was only later that it occurred to me, in a slow-witted way, that while he had taken pains to establish my identity, I had not taken pains to establish his.  Maybe he was a scammer who had just hacked his way into my account, and was now about to clear it with a series of extravagant purchases.  With that thought on mind, I went on line and researched him.  (Fortunately I had remembered his name.)  Yes, he was a financial adviser with said financial institution.  But I could hardly be reassured.  My caller might have borrowed this particular identity just as, I feared, he was about to borrow mine.

So I contacted said financial institution by another route, and ascertained that he was, insofar as I could tell, who he had said he was.

But I was far from reassured.  I think at this point my worry about the situation had slightly altered focus.  I was less concerned by the idea that I had been scammed, and more concerned by the idea that I might have been scammed.  I was ashamed by the idea that I might have been gullible. I should have said to the guy, “Well you say that’s who you are, but how do I know?”  Maybe I should have been armed with a series of security questions to ask him.

So I phoned said financial institution back and said that I thought their modus operandi was suboptimal. No, not suboptimal, dammit: inadequate.  I was advised that if I had that concern, the next time I was contacted, I should hang up and re-contact the institution by a number I knew to be valid.  This advice was delivered as if, so to say, if you want to be that pernickety, here is a solution that might suit you.  There wasn’t a recognition that the fault might not lie in my paranoia, but in their complacency.

Anyway, to return to last week, we established that two of my credit card transactions were valid, and two were bogus.  My credit card was cancelled and a replacement with a new number sent to me.

Small beer, I hear you say.  And indeed, I wasn’t that much exercised myself.  Scams on the telephone and on the internet have become commonplace.  But I think we have to put this sort of episode into a wider picture.  I venture to suggest that if we think cyber-crime is bad now, we ain’t seen nothing yet.  There are obvious reasons why cyber-crime is bound to expand.  The criminal doesn’t need to visit the scene of the crime.  He can be on another continent and he doesn’t need to rise from his armchair.  He won’t leave his fingerprints or his DNA.  If somebody gets on his trail, he can shut himself down.  He can, essentially, cease to exist.  He can reincarnate himself as another persona.  He can be a thief, or a slanderer, or a stalker; he can drive people to suicide.

And yet our society is besotted with the digital world.  In every walk of life, politics, social services, education, health, law and order, vast sums of money are spent on sophisticated computer systems which often prove unfit for purpose.  They frequently break down or, worse, malfunction as if out of control in the hands of a sorcerer’s apprentice.  The systems are not secure.  They are easily compromised.  They are porous.  Confidentiality can never be guaranteed.  They are vulnerable to hostile and malignant imported malware.  I think of my own field, medicine.  I have a suspicion that in medicine, the devotion to IT comes in inverse proportion to the appreciation of the invaluable commodity that is human kindness.  Of course computerised technology has a place.  You can’t run a CT or an MRI scanner without it.  And yet it so easy for people to forget that far and away the most powerful tool in medicine is the kindly and experienced doctor, or nurse, who closes out the mad clamour of the world, sits down in a safe sanctuary with the patient, asks: what is it that is troubling you? – and then listens.

Robots can’t do that.

In the 2016 referendum we placed Parliament in a double bind.  Half the electorate said, “Keep us in the EU and we will love you”, and the other half said, “Take us out of the EU and we will love you.”  (I say half and half: a 52 – 48 majority in favour of leaving is barely statistically significant.)  In psychiatry, the double bind was first described by Bateson and his colleagues in the 1950s.  A subject was given two conflicting commands by somebody in a position of authority, and was denied the freedom to articulate that the dilemma was impossible to solve.  To be in a double bind is to suffer extreme anxiety.  It was thought that prolonged exposure to a double bind might be a potential cause of schizophrenia.  In that sense, we may conclude that the House of Commons, collectively, has gone mad.

Mrs May is repeatedly subjected to the double bind.  Last week her government suffered the worst defeat in parliamentary history, and then almost immediately she was reassured by the House in a vote of confidence.  This is like a parent saying “I love you” to a child, while administering corporal punishment.  Mr Corbyn told her to take “no deal” off the table, while the right wing of her party told her to keep “no deal” on the table.  But the EU has told her that her deal is the only deal available, and the House has told her that the only deal available is off the table.

Santayana taught us that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.  Has Westminster been schizophrenic before?

For his preface to Volume 2 of his Autobiography, Bertrand Russell chose The Defiled Sanctuary, by William Blake:

I saw a chapel all of gold

That none did dare to enter in,

And many weeping stood without,

Weeping, mourning, worshipping.

 

I saw a serpent rise between

The white pillars of the door,

And he forced and forced and forced

Till down the golden hinges tore:

 

And along the pavement sweet,

Set with pearls and rubies bright,

All his shining length he drew, –

Till upon the altar white

 

Vomited his poison out

On the bread and on the wine.

So I turned into a sty,

And laid me down among the swine.   

Volume 2 of Russell’s Autobiography starts on the eve of the First World War.  Russell thought of himself as a Faustian figure, for whom Mephistopheles was represented by the Great War.  He thought that Britain’s declaration of war on Germany was an act of collective madness.  He saw the war as a descent into barbarism.  He would have fits of black despair.  He had visions of London as a place of unreality – its inhabitants hallucinations – in which bridges would collapse and sink, and the whole city vanish.  He told T. S. Eliot about it, and Eliot put it into The Waste Land.  Russell’s apocalyptic vision reminds me of the atmosphere of more than one television drama by Nigel Neale – reaching an apotheosis in the sixth episode of Quatarmass and the Pit – in which all the characters, including the protagonists, become mesmerised by a force of evil, and are on the brink of losing their humanity.  The descent into barbarism was experienced by people who were not in charge of their own psyche.  To say that the First World War was “caused” by Prussian aggression or an upset in the European Balance of Power is a bit like saying that the tragedy of Macbeth, Macbeth’s destruction, was “caused” by his vaulting ambition.  Russell realised that the impulse to war had to be understood in psychoanalytical terms.  We go to war, apparently, because it is in our nature so to do.  It is sometimes said the outbreak of the Great War was governed solely by railway timetables – a flippant remark no doubt, yet it carries the sense that events developed a momentum of their own, and people were powerless to influence them.

We see something similar happening in the thirties, and in the run-up to World War Two.  Between 1936 and 1939 Churchill wrote a series of fortnightly letters which appeared in book form in 1939 (Step by Step, Oldhams Press Ltd 1939).  In the second of these, Stop it Now! (April 3^rd 1936) he pleaded with the European powers to come together under the auspices of the League of Nations to curtail Nazi aggression.  “Stop it!  Stop it!!  Stop it now!!!  NOW is the appointed time.”  Churchill lamented the fact that people seemed incapable of seeing an approaching agony, and taking effective measures to prevent it.  Rather, they were “amused from day to day by headlines and from night to night by cinemas.”  Again, there is a sense that people are living in a trance.

If The Defiled Sanctuary is the poem that defines the world just before the Great War, then surely in respect of the eve of the Second World War we must look to Yeats:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.   

And now?  Our problem now is not that we are about to make the wrong decision and go down the wrong path, but that we are not even able to articulate the nature of our predicament.  One possible reaction to finding oneself in a double bind is to switch off.  I find myself listening to the news and the wall-to-wall Brexit coverage with a degree of detachment, the way King Lear wanted to sit and listen to the court news with Cordelia when he was withdrawing from life –

Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out…

But then, Lear went mad.

What poem should we choose to reflect our life and times?  Well, it’s Burns season.  What about To a Mouse?       

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,

In proving foresight may be vain:

The best-laid schemes o mice an men

Gang aft agley,

An lea’e us nought but grief an pain,

For promis’d joy!

 

Still thou art blest, compar’d wi me!

The present only toucheth thee:

But och!  I backward cast my e’e,

On prospects drear!

An forward, tho I canna see,

I guess an fear!  

 

 

 

 

 

 

I said to Big Jobs, “Can you get hold of some Kina Lillet for me?”

Big Jobs frowned.  “What the hell’s that?”  I said truthfully, “I don’t know.  I think it might be some kind of Italian vermouth.  Gin and It.  It’s part of a cocktail called a Vesper.”  Big Jobs raised his eyebrows enquiringly.  I had memorised the recipe.  “Three measures of Gordons, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet.”

“Crikey.  Sounds a bit posh.  I don’t think they’ll have it in Agnews.  Leave it with me.”

It was like asking the Scrounger in Stalag Luft III for a crow bar.

*

What is the trick of life?

I had been watching her for weeks, walking dreamily along the open-air corridors of the New Building, always en route to a class.  She wore her school uniform with elegance and distinction.  Sometimes she carried her schoolbag in front of her, like a child.  Her perfect deportment emphasised her tallness.  She had long dark brown hair which sometimes she tied up but more often was free.  Her name was Jennifer Marsden.  She was two years ahead of me in the school.  That alone made my worship of her, if touching and sentimental, futile and pointless.  How could I possibly ache for someone I had never spoken to and only occasionally caught sight of from a distance?  How come she could do this ethereal walk-the-corridor-between-classes thing?  I was sure she could come and go as she pleased.  Nobody would ever tell her off.  It would have been an affront.

And I only ever saw her in the corridor. I fantasised that one day I would walk right up to her and without preamble ask her out.  I would say something like this: “Hello.  It’s Jennifer isn’t it?  I’m James.  I’m in 3AB.  I know this is very sudden, but do you want to come and see the Beatles in Greens Playhouse?”

Impossible.

And yet…

And then one day suddenly and without warning I rounded a corner on the first floor corridor and there she was coming in the other direction doing the holding-the-baby thing this time with a big pile of books and papers and precisely as I walked by and essayed a watery smile the pile of books and papers went everywhere and I had about two seconds to make up my  mind and as I swithered and as she knelt to retrieve her stuff I had passed her and then a class door opened and a teacher emerged and got down to help her and as I walked on I could hear them talking and laughing and I could feel a great taut chilled fist gripping  my heart.

I said to myself, “Never mind.  Next time…”

But I knew there would never be a next time.  Oh yes, I might by good grace have another chance but it would never be that chance.  That particular amalgamation of circumstance, with its unique atmosphere and flavour and poignancy, was lost, irretrievably lost.  That was why my heart was so icy.  I remembered these famous lines from Julius Caesar:

There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

I began to realise why people said Shakespeare had said the definitive word on every human circumstance.  I has missed the tide!  Shallows!  Miseries!  Evermore.  The thing about a window of opportunity is that it is temporal and fleeting.  You have to recognise it, evaluate it, and seize it, all within the space of a split second.

Gone!  Yet Hope returns.  You say to yourself, okay, you blew it, big time.  You stuffed up.  There’s no denying it.  You can’t undo it and you can’t attenuate its effect.  All you can do is forgive yourself; and give yourself another chance.  The trick is to recognise the opportunity when it arises.  Of course the hard bit is that the next opportunity will not look remotely like the last one, the one you missed.  All you can do is keep an open heart and stay alive to opportunity.

*

 

“I’ve got the stuff,” said Big Jobs, speaking in flat tones with the expression of a ventriloquist, barely enunciating though clenched teeth like the Duke of Edinburgh.  “Found it in a place on Woodlands Road.”  He might well have.  Pub land.  The Three in One.  The Halt.  The Arlington.  “5s 6p.  There’s no hurry.  Got your bag?”  I nodded.  The Kina Lillet was passed over in one smooth motion.  It was Friday afternoon break.  He said, “Going to-night?”  There was a party on Banavie Road.  I nodded.  “I’ll bring some along.  You can try it.”

He looked dubious.  “Think I’ll stick with the Pally Ally.  Maybe just a taste.”

Back home, I was in luck.  Mum was out at the shops.  I had the place to myself.  I’d decided to make the Vespers up rather than take all the ingredients with me.  I could reasonably conceal one bottle in my coat, but three… the clanking would have given me away.  So I set to with the precision of a laboratory technician.  Three measures of Gordons… two of vodka… half of Kina Lillet… I put it all in a thermos flask.

At the tea table, I endured the inevitable interrogation.  Dad asked, “Who is throwing this party?”  He was a policeman, taking a statement.

“Elaine Cochrane.  Girl in my class.  It’s her birthday.  Quite a lot of the class are going.”  Safety in numbers, I thought.

It was a massaged version of the truth.  Elaine’s birthday had been last week and it wasn’t really a birthday party.  She was in Fourth Year.  Elaine’s younger sister had been allowed to invite a handful of friends.  But I had an instinct that that intelligence might be dynamite.

“Elaine’s parents will be there?”

“Yes.”  I didn’t say, “Yes, I think so.”  I didn’t want to give him any room to manoeuvre.

He gazed at me thoughtfully.  “You’ll be home at ten sharp.”

It wasn’t a request, or a piece of advice, or a guideline.  It wasn’t even an order.  It was a statement of fact.

On the way out, Dad cast a critical eye over my attire.  I’d borrowed my cousin Johnnie’s bronze shortie coat which I wore over a fawn polo neck, my black jeans, and a pair of brown chisel-toed shoes.  He said, “You look like a spiv,” but at least he didn’t order me to change. Mum said, “You look very nice, dear,” and kissed me on the forehead.  “Have you got a present for Elaine?”

Once you start lying you have to keep going.  “She stipulated no prezzies.”  I was acutely aware that my father was an expert in detecting fraud and deception.  “See you at ten.”

I sloshed out of the house.

At that time, l I was obsessed with Bond, and was working my way through the canon.  I’d reached The Spy Who Loved Me.  There was a general consensus that it had been a bit of a misfire from Ian’s pen (for some reason I thought I was on first name terms with the author), and on Desert Island Discs he had more or less acquiesced to this view.  Certainly it had turned out to be less of a commercial success, and Ian’s readership longed for a return to the old formula.  But I can’t think that Ian was displeased with the result of his effort.  I thought it was a wonderful idea, to make the girl the “I” of the story.  It appealed to the true Bond aficionado, this opportunity to see one’s hero from another perspective.  It was a brave thing for Ian to do, frankly, to imagine what it is like to be a woman.  He was always being accused of being a misogynist.  He was certainly blatantly sexist.  When at work, women were an encumbrance, with their frightful emotional baggage.  Look at these remarks about women drivers in Thunderball!  Yet somehow he gets away with it, maybe because many of his heroines go against James’ stereotypic notion, and show themselves to be truly gritty.  Vivienne Michel is a case in point.  I think Ian had this notion (even if James didn’t share it) that men and women were not so different after all, and that if Vivienne spoke and thought much as Ian did, it would sound perfectly natural, come to life, and work.  I thought so anyway.  But how would I know?  You’d have to ask a woman.  It raises an interesting point.  Do women read Bond books?   You might want to ask a woman if she can voluntarily suspend her disbelief, if The Spy Who Loved Me works, if she reads it and is convinced she is listening to the story of a woman.  But first you have to find a woman who has read the book.  Bond books appear to be the playthings of heterosexual males passing a train journey with a little Kiss Kiss Bang Bang fantasy.  Female Bond readers are as rare as female chess players.  If Faye Dunaway plays chess with Steve McQueen, maybe that is just Steve’s fantasy.  Stroking the bishop’s mitre like that.

The party at Banavie was heaving.  It was a party on many levels, parties within parties.  There was a party in the big front lounge with the bay window, and the dining room, and on the stairs, and on the landing, and in the queue to the bathroom, and downstairs in the basement rumpus room which had been cleared for dancing.  And in the kitchen.  Always the best parties are in the kitchen.  I got tapped on the shoulder.  My heart leapt into my mouth.  It was Jennifer Marsden in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt.  She gestured at my thermos.

“Wassat?”

“It’s a Vesper.”

She held up her glass.

“Yes please.”

I poured her a double.

Of course, The Spy Who Loved Me is not only unusual because the female character is the narrator.  James doesn’t even appear until two thirds of the way through.  It’s not a conventional Bond thriller at all.  So what’s it all about?

Sex.

I had another illicit substance with me, more easily concealed about my person.  A packet of Wills’ Whiffs.  Ever since I’d seen a picture of President Kennedy out on a yacht looking very macho with a stogie between his teeth I’d thought, yep, that’s the image for me!”  Looking back on it, I had some pretty dodgy role models.  I was under the misimpression that it was JFK who had said

A woman is only a woman

But a good cigar is a smoke.

He didn’t.  But he could easily have done.  For JFK, sex was even more purely recreational that it was for James.  Actually, James by comparison is almost puritanical, certainly more gentlemanly.  JFK warmed to James, had From Russia with Love among his top ten favourite books.  And interestingly, his most cherished book, his Desert Island book if you will, was Pilgrim’s Way, The US title for John Buchan’s Memory Hold the Door.

Anyway, JFK didn’t compare women with cigars, although he did have something to say about smoke.

“There’s no smoke, without a smoke machine.”

The target at the centre of the world’s greatest conspiracy, was himself a conspiracy theorist.

So who did promulgate this unconscionable philosophy?  About women and cigars I mean.  I could propose a likely short list, like a multiple choice question:

A  Winston Churchill

B  Mark Twain

C  Rudyard Kipling

D  George Bernard Shaw

E  Groucho Marx

In the end, I didn’t smoke my Wills’ Whiff.  I felt like too much of a prat.  Instead, I bummed a Stuyvesant off Big Jobs.

Down in the rumpus room, shoulder tap again.  “It’s Vesper Man.”  Jennifer giggled.  She was gone. Vespered.  “Dance?”

“Sure.”  I couldn’t believe my luck.  She took my hand and pulled me on to the middle of the floor, centre of the throng.  Abruptly the rock’n roll stopped to be supplanted by a ballade, Roy Orbison’s In Dreams.  Normally it was one of these little awkward social corners you needed to negotiate, to dance a slow number with a stranger, not be a masher, not be too gauche.

But she grabbed my arms and pulled them round her neck and buried her sweet alcoholic breath in my neck.  And for three minutes the world came to a stop.  Four minutes.  It’s quite a long track.

I love In Dreams.  Its form is curious, not like a pop song at all.  It doesn’t have two or three verses and a chorus.  It just starts with one idea and then moves to another idea, and another, and yet another. Its growth is organic.  It is like a symphonic rhapsody.  And it works.

And I loved the Big O.  Didn’t Elvis say he had the best voice in the universe?  There was a disparity between the way the Big O looked and the way he sounded.  He sounded superb and he looked a bit geekish.  That was why he wore the dark glasses.  The shades helped the man to become the voice.  And the voice helped me to become the man.  Periodically her friends would shriek at her, tease her.  “Jennifer!  What you doing?  Child snatcher!”  But she would just laugh uninhibitedly and ruffle my hair.   At the end she gave me a big vodka-soaked snog.

In Dreams…

I loved Jennifer Marsden for giving me the time of day, not because of her friends, but despite them.  She was a free spirit.  She didn’t give a damn.  I thought of her as a girl who would quite happily have gone into a bar and ordered a pint of lager and drank it, alone, if she felt like it.  She had no need to hide behind anybody, man or woman.  She was her own dazzling self.  And she gave me a moment of stillness, arrival, of blessed release from striving.  I would even get home for ten, without remorse.

I retrieved my bronze shortie and struggled through the throngs and found Big Jobs and handed him the thermos.

“Enjoy!  Shaken, not stirred.”

 

Was it in The Italian Job that a feckless bunch of crooks accidentally blow a car up?  Michael Caine says, “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”  You can hear him say it in that much-mimicked East London accent.  I suppose it’s an oblique way of stating that, in the movie industry, especially in close-up, less is more.  Hence the title of Sir Michael’s memoir, Blowing the Bloody Doors Off (Hodder & Stoughton, 2018).  Bloody good, actually.  I was prompted to get it by hearing The Great Man Himself on the radio reading an extract, and I found it quite gripping.  I bought the book and I wasn’t disappointed.  It was the ideal book to read at the end of the festive season, prior to the resumption of normal service.  (And may I say, the resumption of normal service fills me with dread.  Westminster is about to reconvene, and the carping and sniping will doubtless start up from where it left off.  It left off, as I recall, with Mr Corbyn allegedly calling Mrs May a stupid woman, prompting Mrs Leadsom to remind Mr Speaker that he had not apologised for calling her a stupid woman, prompting Mr Speaker to inform the House in a protracted roaring bellow that all of that had already been dealt with.  I think it was at that point that I thought, they’ve all taken leave of their senses!)  All the more reason for reading Blowing the Bloody Doors off.  I highly recommend it.  Despite the fact that a lot of it is set in Tinsel Town, it belongs to the real world.  It is grounded.  It is life-affirming, optimistic, encouraging, inspirational, humane, and very well written.

The book is full of technical advice for the young actor, much of it widely applicable to any and every walk of life.  Know your stuff, be prepared, turn up on time, keep your temper, and treat everybody with respect.  I know that will work for a doctor as much as for an actor.  The more prepared you are, the more relaxed you will be, and the more in control of your nerves.  How true.  And believe in yourself.  Michael Caine’s path to professional success was not an easy one; he took many knocks and suffered many set-backs.  But he never ceased to believe in himself, and he never gave up, despite the fact that powerful and influential mentors advised him to do just that: pack it in.  Didn’t John Lennon receive the same advice?  You’ll never make anything of your life!  What a dreadful thing to say to anybody.  Fortunately, Michael Caine didn’t take any notice.  So, if perchance you are feeling despondent about the world, and if the death-watch beetle of cynicism is encroaching, read Blowing the Bloody Doors Off.

And yet…

I’m not casting aspersions when I say I’m not going to read it again.  Sir Michael Caine is not Sir Walter Scott.  I’m going to pass it on.  The thing about inspirational texts of this nature is that they are only useful up to a point.  We are all unique individuals with unique lives to lead.  Neither I, nor you (I dare say), are Michael Caine.  Therefore our destinies lie elsewhere.  You need to extract those elements of the inspirational text that are useful to you, and forget the rest.  Of course it is perfectly possible that you encounter something that blows you off your feet (it’s these bloody doors again), you have a Damascene moment, and an epiphany, that changes your life.  But it is more likely that in the cold light of day you will find that somebody else’s epiphany is not your epiphany.

I’m actually writing this on Epiphany – January 6^th.  Epiphany is the church festival commemoration of the manifestation of Christ to the wise men of the East.  On January 6^th I like to reread T. S. Eliot’s 1927 poem of the Epiphany, Journey of the Magi.  It is an extremely evocative description, recounted retrospectively and from a long distance, of a difficult winter’s journey, by camel, over snow-covered mountains, culminating in a descent into a valley.  The magi can find no information; the information is all there, but it is symbolic, and they can’t see it.  Yet they eventually reach their destination, and indeed they experience their epiphany.

Sometimes you hear this poem read in church, and I often wonder whether people, perhaps expecting the sweetness and childlike simplicity of a nativity play, really apprehend what is being said.  For the magi, the Christ child represented the end of “the old dispensation”.  They looked at a birth, and saw death, their own death.  They went back to their kingdoms, but nothing would ever be the same again.  For them, Epiphany was an absolute agony.

That rings true to me.  You sometimes hear “successful” people recalling the moment that changed their lives.  “It was such a small thing, yet it turned my life around, I flew, and I never looked back.”  I doubt it.  Blood, toil, tears, and sweat.  In Rep, Michael Caine kept a bucket off stage because he was liable to throw up through sheer nerves.  Inextricably bound up with the exultation of epiphany is the realisation that to embark on a journey is going to cause you considerable loss, and profound discomfort.

But if it’s what you have to do, go for it.  Sometimes sixth formers tell me they are thinking of going into Medicine.  What do I think?  I talk it up.  God knows we need young people of imagination and aspiration in Medicine.  I would never say, as I hear some of my colleagues say, “Don’t!  Bloody nightmare!  What’s your Plan B?  Go into banking!”  I tell them, quite truthfully, “It’s fabulous.  It changed my life.  It took me all over the world, and I never looked back.”  But I don’t gild the lily.  It’s challenging, yes.  Roller coaster ride.  (I stop short of telling them about the bucket sitting off-stage.)  I quote the magus: “I would do it again.”  But not the poem’s enigmatic final line.  When it comes to last lines, I prefer Michael Caine’s:

Go and blow the bloody doors off!      

What has His Royal Highness Prince Charles’ appearance on Michael Barclay’s Private Passions (Radio 3, Sunday at noon) to do with a road crash (Glasgow, Sunday at 4)?  Let’s see.

I listened to Private Passions while driving into Glasgow to visit somebody recuperating from a fall.  I think Michael Barclay is the best interviewer on the BBC.  Of course this interview was always going to be slightly different; Michael wasn’t going to be on first name terms with his guest, at least on air.  But he handled what might have been a socially awkward situation with the utmost tact and charm, and he was able to ask quite penetrating and occasionally challenging questions without prying.  It was a real conversation.  His Royal Highness remarked twice, “You’re very well informed!”  I rather admired his choice of music which tended on the whole to lift the spirits.  Beethoven, Haydn, Wagner (twice)…  No Elgar.  No Parry, come to think of it.  HRH clearly has a strong sense of the absurd, and there was much gentle laughter.  He came across as rather modest, even self-deprecating.  Michael asked him what career, with his many interests, he might have pursued if he had not been born into his particular situation.  Impossible to know, was the reply, but whatever it might have been, he didn’t imagine he would have been very good at it.

Later, we were walking in the west end of Glasgow as dusk fell, enjoying the preternaturally mild winter weather.  It is the sixth night of Christmas, and the broom is in bloom.  My companion asked me what my Hogmanay blog would be about.  I said truthfully that I hadn’t a clue.  Maybe I would write up some sort of reprise of 2018, with a putative glimpse into 2019.  Or I would hear something on the car radio on the way home that would set me off.  Something would turn up.

At that precise moment came a crash so loud that I instinctively ducked.  Something had exploded right beside us.  I turned to my right, and saw the immediate aftermath of a road crash.  At least three cars were involved.  Everything on a busy thoroughfare came to a halt and people emerged from their cars to investigate.  It was actually my companion who alerted me: “You’d better go take a look.”

I glanced into the three cars and conducted a quick triage.  The girl in the front passenger seat of the most crumpled car looked very unwell to me.  Pale as a ghost.  I asked her how she felt but she could only moan.  I took her pulse.  Thready.  I went round to the driver’s door.  It was jammed but I wrenched it open and laid her supine across the front seats.  But there was a lot of smoke in the air and I realised we needed to get her out.  I tried to ascertain as best I could that she had neither a neck injury nor a back injury and then, with some help, as gently as I could, I got her out and on to the pavement.  I asked around, “Has anybody phoned for an ambulance?”  I can’t say I got a reliable answer.  So I dialled 999.

“Emergency.  Which service?”

“Ambulance.”

“Ambulance.  What is your phone number?”

I gave it.  Then I said, “I’m at a road crash that has just occurred at the junction of X and Y.  I think it has already been reported.  I’m a doctor phoning to say one patient is very unwell and we need a ‘blue light’ ambulance immediately.”

“Where are you?”

“As I said, at the junction of X and Y.”  I even gave the post code.

“Which city?”

O Lord.  Maybe they’d outsourced to Delhi.

“Glasgow.”

“And the location?”

I gave it again.

“Could you spell that?”

Well, the road on which this crash occurred is extremely well known, at least to Glaswegians.  I said, “Look, I’m just making this call to ask you to get an ambulance here as quickly as possible.”

“Are you on duty?”

“No.”

“In that case I have to go through a protocol with you.  Is the patient conscious and breathing?”

“GCS 14.”

I don’t know how that went down.  Actually, she was really GCS 12, but she had no English, and I had a sense she might have communicated better in her own language.  I endured a lengthy catechism that I could sense had been devised by a manager entasked to provide a bulwark against the last litigious onslaught.

There followed a delay.  It is very frustrating to provide bystander care to a patient in the absence of the tools of the trade.  There is very little you can do.  It was a great relief to me that she pinked up, that her pulse improved, and that she was able to communicate through her husband, who had some English.  The police arrived, and seemed to be absorbed directing traffic.  A paramedic arrived, and wandered around appraising the scene but made no contact with patients.  Lots of emergency vehicles arrived but nobody came near us.  Eventually the ambulance turned up and my patient received attention.  The trick of being a good Good Samaritan is to step in, make a difference, and then get out.  I hope I correctly identified the point at which I was no longer needed, and disappeared.

Is she okay?  I don’t know.  To know that, you need to be the emergency physician who sits down beside her, takes a very careful history with the aid of an interpreter, and conducts a very careful physical examination.  I hope she’s all right.

But I don’t think the response of the emergency services was that impressive.  It took about half an hour for the ambulance to turn up.  Finally, there were a lot of emergency vehicles and personnel on the scene, but a curious lack of meaningful activity.  I did find myself thinking, this wouldn’t happen in New Zealand, in Australia, in the United States.  This is a peculiarly British response.  Never volunteer, keep your head down, and if there is a protocol to follow, trudge through it.  UK emergency service personnel don’t have a high opinion of themselves.  They know their place.  Our society is hierarchical.  People do as they are told.

Hierarchical societies tend to espouse “social mobility”.  The only way out, is up.  Hedge Fund managers are more valued than carers.  But social mobility is tosh.  The human interactions that really matter are intimate, and one-on-one.  Jesus taught his disciples this when he washed their feet.  The interactions that really matter happen at the kerbside, in the gutter.  And we are not automatons.  We are not pieces of software.  You can’t create an effective emergency service by getting everybody to follow an algorithm.  You need to roll up your sleeves, step in, and talk to people.

I thought of Michael Barclay’s question to Prince Charles: what would he have done had he not been heir to the throne?  I turned the question on its head, and asked myself, what would I have done if I had been heir to the throne?  I suppose my answer must be the same; I will never know.  But I like to think that I would have abdicated and gone to medical school.

 

 

 

 

 

Whichever way you look at it, BBC Radio 4’s More or Less just isn’t sexy.  The truth is, is Stats has an image problem.  Statisticians are entirely devoid of attitude.  What Stats needs is a Superhero.

Remark overheard in a bar.

 

Walter Digit, head of the Statistics Section of the long-established firm of Avro-Avalon Aeronautics, gazed across the expanse of the grand mahogany board room table at the man he imminently intended to murder.

“Ten minutes!” announced the chair grandiloquently.  “Guillotine at nine.  Then we vote.”

Guillotine.

Digit reminded himself that there are Three Laws of Company Board Room Polemics, as inviolate as the laws of Kepler or Newton.  First Law: To win, you must be present at the battle.  First, turn up.  Be amid the heat and dust of the arena.  It was no good being lofty.  If you chose to be above the battle, you would lose it.

Digit was not a violent man.  Indeed, in his 65 years he had never once perpetrated an act of aggression.  It occurred to him that if, as recently as twenty four hours previously, somebody had told him that this was what he had now resolved to do, he would have been utterly astonished.  But that was before the first extraordinary general meeting of the Board had convened, before he had encountered the Big Noise from Seattle WA, before he had realised the route which Avro-Avalon Aeronautics, if the vote went the way Digit suspected it would, would be bound to take.  There was, admittedly, a faint possibility that the vote might go the other way, Digit’s way.  But having weighed the possibilities and crunched the numbers – number-crunching was after all Digit’s long suit – he thought it vanishingly unlikely.  Such a result would be anomalous; in statistical parlance it would be an inexplicable random variable, an outlier, a quirk to be taken out of the equation.

The Board Room was a thickly carpeted, plush, windowless inner sanctum on the third floor of a six storey art deco office block on the edge of the old apron of the Croydon Aerodrome that was the headquarters of AAA.  Digit regretted that this room in which he had spent so much of his professional life should lack a view.  The Executive Board was surrounded by portraits of past presidents of the company.  On the east wall, behind the position of the current President and Chair, was the company logo, an intertwining of five Greek letter alphas to form a coat of arms resembling an Ampersand, thus a representation of the company’s full name, Avro-Avalon Aeronautics & Avionics.  The room’s only panorama was afforded by the west wall, facing the Chair.  Here, in Mercator projection, was a representation of the world, shimmering like a migrainous aura.  On closer inspection, the map was a composite, in real time, of the radar signals of all the aircraft in the world currently aloft.  Thus the first world, the United States and Europe in particular, was well delineated; but the third world, sub-Saharan Africa in particular, was a black pool and a void.

Digit glanced again at the twelve men and two women that comprised the executive (the glass ceiling was yet to be cracked at AAA).  For the hundredth time he ran a thought experiment and conducted a straw poll as to how each individual would vote.  It really all came down to swords and ploughshares.  The peacemakers would go for Project Beta and the warmongers would go for Project Alpha, simple as that.  You might have expected the two women would vote for peace but no!  They were the most alpha male of the lot.  Any woman capable of fighting her way on to this board must have an inner core of steel.  Professor Frances Paton had MOD affiliations and Dr Vanessa Rothermere, after all, was Project Alpha’s lead.  Who else?  Digit himself would go for Beta, and so would MacFadyen.  Beta was Hector MacFadyen’s baby.  That made it two all.  Then there was Gordon Pritchard – chief engineer.  He didn’t like MacFadyen.  Thought he was a maverick, definitely a threat.  Too clever by half.  He would go with Alpha.  Peutherer, R & D, probably knew the most about both projects’ finer details and should have an even hand.  But Peutherer liked micro-tech – so probably Alpha.  Same with Blair, company lawyer.  Thanks to his training, Blair could easily deploy arguments on either side.  You might have supposed fear of litigation would lead him to support peaceful Beta over aggressive Alpha, but Alpha might get subsumed within an MOD contract, and suits against MOD were seldom successful.   5 – 2 for Alpha; not looking good.  Now the big beasts: Prendergast the CEO and Ismay the MD.  Flabbergast and Dismay, they said on the shop floor.  They were both aviators and they tended to prefer flying machines that were flown by people, over drones, so both Beta.  5 – 4.  The younger set?  Harder for Digit to judge.  Margessun the physicist would go for Beta, and Eugene Delaware the chemist, because of the nature of its payload, would go for Alpha.  As well, Delaware had the hots for Rothermere.   6 – 5 to Alpha.  Then Grey. Strategic Development.  A gentleman.  6 – 6.  It was coming down to the wire.  Hargreaves, the money man?  Hargreaves would definitely have been Beta but that was the problem; Hargreaves was absent.  His chair was occupied by the Big Noise, and even before the Big Noise had made any sort of noise at all, Digit knew he would be Alpha.  7 – 6.

That meant Alpha couldn’t lose.  But there might yet be a tie.  There might be a tie because Digit thought there was a switherer –Alan Mabie, something nebulous in management.  He would swither because he would really have no criterion of value beyond whatever madcap managerial trend happened to be flavour of the month.  Mabie was the one marginal constituency.  Digit grasped this fact when he heard Mabie remark, “Pity we can’t run with both Alpha and Beta.  That way it would be win-win, going forward.”  The rest of the time he sat with his mouth open, gawping like a cod stranded on the beach.  The Board might sit up all night and argue the case until they were blue in the face, and Digit suspected nobody but Alan Mabie would budge.  Mabie was the floating vote.  Could he somehow work on him and pull it up to 7 apiece?  What then?  In that case Sir Howard Whittingehame, the Chair, deep, silent, and patrician, would cast the deciding vote.  Digit was devoted to Sir Howard who had been his boss for 40 years, but he knew that Sir Howard was mesmerised, had fallen under the spell of the Big Noise.  He would succumb to the lure of the charismatic man from Seattle and, if it came down to the wire, exercise his franchise in favour of that particular constituency.  And that would be that.

The name of the Big Noise was Warren Paul Mitchelson.  Economist with a Huge Gong round his neck – the reason why Sir Howard was mesmerised.  He was a Nobel Laureate.  Digit had met him just prior to the first board meeting on the previous day.  Mitchelson had hijacked Sir Howard’s introductions.  “Walter Digit, our highly valued head of the Statistics Section…”  Digit’s hand was enveloped in a bone-crusher.  Mitchelson talked at Sir Howard over Digit’s head.  “You still using personnel to number crunch?  We use robots…  Hiya.  Warren P. Michelson.  My friends call me Warp.”

“How do you do, Mr Mitchelson.  My stenographer, Miss Normal.”

“Stenographer?  Geez!”

Anita Normal smiled demurely and nodded, but did not proffer her hand.

Mitchelson ignored Miss Normal, and casually ran an appraising eye over Digit, who was not surprised that the American should effect a double-take.  Somewhat under middle height, thick set, gnarled, stocky and robust, Digit had long been aware that he bore an uncanny resemblance to a legend of Hollywood’s golden age, Edward G. Robinson.  “Say!  You look like that guy in the movies.  Whazziz?”

“I simply couldn’t imagine.”

“Getaway!”  He snapped his fingers impatiently.  “Double Indemnity.  Straight down the line, Keyes!”

Mr Mitchelson himself could have been a Hollywood film star, occupying the lead.  He was six foot four inches tall.  He had taken care of himself.  He was past fifty but he retained the build of a football player and with his chiselled bronze features and a full head of black hair he was a very handsome man.  An expensive three piece suit of US cut and sheen became him, but he would have looked equally good in casual western livery, strolling across the dirt street of the set of High Noon, a revolver with an extra-long barrel in its holster strapped low outside his right thigh.  It occurred to Digit that Mitchelson would be an advocate for the Second Amendment.  From my cold, dead hands!

“You can’t have much longer to go, Keyes.  You got an exit strategy?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The golden handshake and the high goodbye?”

“I am due to retire at the end of this year.”

“I guess that’s why they’re letting you wither on the vine.   Stats is History, Keyes.”

Digit was only too well aware of the precarious position Statistics held within the company.  Once, during the great glory days of expansion of the aviation industry last century, the section could, and did, field a cricket team which always did rather well in in-house competition.  But these days were long gone and the section now comprised Digit himself, Miss Normal, and Mr Woo, an odd-job man with learning difficulties retained by Sir Howard who was a little ostentatious about the company’s role in the community.  At that precise moment Mr Woo loped in disco-ordinate fashion into the room, came to Digit’s heel and handed him a mauve folder much as a playful dog might retrieve a stick for his master.

“Thank you, Mr Woo.”

Mr Woo giggled and went off abruptly in search of something else.  Mitchelson watched his departure.  “That guy got issues?”

Sir Howard remarked, “He is challenged.”

“I’ll say.”

“Mr Woo is Mr Digit’s assistant.  He has Gerstmann’s Syndrome.”  Digit was aware that Miss Normal had flushed.  She couldn’t see why Mr Woo’s medical file should not be as confidential as anybody else’s.

“Whazzat?”

Sir Howard enumerated, as if reading from a text book, “Agraphia, acalculia, finger agnosia, and left-right confusion.  The lesion is in the angular gyrus of the dominant parietal lobe.”

Mitchelson produced a low and cunning chortle like an eructation.  “Let’s see.  Can’t read, can’t count – even with his fingers, doesn’t know where he’s going.  That’s Stats for you Keyes!”

“My name is Digit” – this said in the soft tones of regionless old-fashioned Received Pronunciation.  “Delta India Golf India Tango.”

“Sure it is, Keyes.”

Digit turned to Sir Howard.  “Where is Mr Hargreaves?”  Hargreaves was AAA’s chief financier.

“Seattle.  Sabbatical.  A six month placement.”

“I take it Dr MacAndrew will be acting up?”

Mitchelson interjected.  “Get with the programme Keyes.  I mean, Hello?  From now on, I’m Hargreaves. Kapische?”

Ignoring Mitchelson, Digit continued to address his boss.  “Does Mr Mitchelson have voting rights?”  Sir Howard nodded.  Digit’s heart felt like a stone.  Kapische.

 

Digit told himself that his plan to murder Warren P. Mitchelson had nothing to do with personal animosity.  He said to his stenographer, “Why is it, Miss Normal, that Americans will insist on sporting a middle initial?  Dwight D. Eisenhower, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Warren P. Mitchelson.  I’ve heard it said that Roosevelt’s initial didn’t actually stand for anything.  It’s all very Ivy League.  Phi Beta Kappa.  Or Delta in Roosevelt’s case.  You tote it, like a Glock stuck down your waistband.  Why, Edward G. Robinson, come to think of it.”

“Delano.”

“What?”

“Roosevelt’s middle name.  Delano.”

“Really?  Miss Normal.  You are a fund.”

No, it wasn’t personal.  The reason why Mitchelson had to be removed was Digit’s conviction that Mitchelson, with Hargreaves’ vote, would indubitably go for Project Alpha.  Both Alpha and Beta were R & D projects of considerable scope and ambition.  AAA could not take them both on and run with them simultaneously.  A choice had to be made.  This was why a series of extraordinary general meetings had been called.  Data already had been produced and disseminated. Now the Board would hear a short presentation from each camp, and come to a ruling.

“Toss a coin, Mr Digit, if you please.”  It amused Sir Howard that his chief statistician should perform this ritual.  “Order of ceremonies: heads – Alpha first, tails – Beta first.”  Digit spun the half-crown he retained specifically for this purpose, deftly caught it in his right palm and turned it over on to the back of his left hand.  Tails.  Hector MacFadyen was first up.  He was a freckled, red-headed young Scot.  Digit liked him.  Knew his people.  He was from Ayrshire, of lowly origins, a “lad o’ pairts” who like so many poor Scots before him had seen a way up, and a way out, through the professions, medicine, teaching, engineering.  Digit would never have thought of telling Hector but, privately, he suspected Hector was an engineering genius.  Highly imaginative, Mercurial, Mozartian.  But difficult.  He lacked people skills.  He didn’t know how to get people on board.  He was always a step ahead of his colleagues, who didn’t understand him.  Probably he was on the spectrum.  And today, he was very nervous.  Result – a botched presentation.  Inevitably, the IT acted up.  Digit decided to help him out.

“That’s a really interesting presentation Hector.  Do you mind if I just reiterate the salient features and perhaps you could let me know if I’ve followed your line?”

MacFadyen, who knew very well Digit was bailing him out, turned spaniel’s eyes of deep gratitude in Digit’s direction, and smiled his twitchy smile.

“Of course, ideas of unencumbered personal transport and of human flight have been dreamt of since time immemorial.  Your device-”

“The vacutainer.”

“…the vacutainer, takes the notion of the Hydrogen or Helium balloon to its ultimate conclusion.  What could be lighter than Hydrogen?”

“A vacuum.”

“Just so.  Now we all know nature abhors a vacuum.  Any structure containing a vacuum must be robust, therefore will likely be weighty and bulky.  You suggest you have solved this issue by using a particular material-”

“C60 Graphite.

“…designed into a specific shape-”

“The buckminsterfullerene.”

Mitchelson threw his gold pen on to his blotter, stretched, and yawned.  “Let me get this straight.  You want me to take a big golf ball, strap it on my back, and jump off a tall building.”

“That’s it.”

“How’s it powered?  Gas?  Nuclear?”

“Neither.”

“This some kinda green shit?”

“Wings.”

There was a protracted silence.  Mitchelson broke it.  “Wings.”

“Paddles if you like.”

“What d’you do with them?”

“Flap.”

“You flap?”

“Flap.”

Another strange noise emanated from Mitchelson’s mouth.  At first Digit thought he was clearing his throat, but then he realised he was laughing.

“Mister.  Anybody tell ya?  You’re a nut job.”  Mitchelson turned in his chair.  “What do you think, Keyes?”

“They all laughed at Christopher Columbus.”

Second Law of Company Board Room Polemics: It is a mistake to be seduced into debate with an adversary whose mind cannot be changed.  Under normal circumstances, Digit would have stuck to his brief and rendered a dispassionate account of the robustness of a business model, how the numbers stacked up.  But he had already recognised that Mitchelson would pay no attention, and that what Mitchelson thought was what was going to matter.

Digit had to admit that the second presentation, Project Alpha, was very much more professional.  It was given by a woman.  Vanessa Rothermere, UCL, mid-thirties, polished, cool, urbane, eloquent, and sexy.  She worked in nanotechnology.  She presented an engine of war.  It was an antipersonnel device in the shape of a drone that was tiny, silent, and could deliver a lethal injection.

Intrigued, Mitchelson asked, “What sort of injection?”

“There could be a suite of choices, depending on each specific situation.  Designer drugs of one sort or another, VX, Ricin, batrachotoxin, tetrodotoxin, botulinum toxin…” Dr Rothermere sounded medieval.  The rope, the rack, the garrotte, the strappado…

Mitchelson said, “Now you’re talkin’.”

Without waiting for an invitation Digit interjected, “Avro-Avalon has neither a history nor a tradition in arms manufacture.”

“That’s not entirely true Walter.  During the war…”

“That was a question of national survival.  The nation is not now at war, at least so far as I’m aware.”

“We have always made modest contributions when it comes to MOD procurement.”

Digit was later to say to Miss Normal, “Procurement!  There’s a word.  Does it not have a lewd connotation?  Is it not something gentlemen indulge in at kerbsides?  And is such trafficking not therefore a form of prostitution?”

“Proxénitisme,” volunteered Miss Normal.

“Miss Normal, you always come up with le mot that is juste.”

There was never really any doubt in Digit’s mind that the death-midge was going to win hands down over the backpack full of sweet FA.  He needed time to think.  “Could I propose a cooling off period?  We should mull over our deliberations.”

“Time is a luxury we just don’t have.  Blink, and the other guy takes the biscuit.”

“I think, Warp,” said Sir Howard with due respect to his ancient and trusted colleague, “We can allow a day for reflection.  I think we’ll follow Mr Digit’s lead, stop and think, and reconvene here in 24 hours.”

Mitchelson sighed and pointed out, “One of your prime ministers said that a week’s a long time in politics.  Well I tell you something, in war, twenty four hours is an age.  Lose twenty four hours, and you hand the other guy the day.”

Nevertheless, Sir Howard adjourned the meeting.

 

Digit never married.  He had been an only child, and he was without issue.  He lived with his aged mother and had become, since she had gradually lost herself in the labyrinthine forest of dementia, her principal carer.  The ravages of Herr Alzheimer.  Senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles, a glorious fankle which our neurophysiologists have yet to unwind.  Digit never considered his role as carer as anything other than a privilege.  Thankfully his mother had retained her sunny personality, and he was never conscious that he was on duty or under obligation, far less that he laboured under any sense of burden.  He was a creature of routine.  He rose at 5, bathed, made a good breakfast, and solved the Financial Times crossword usually under ten minutes.  He lived in Westerham, a short bus journey from AAA’s Croydon HQ.  He reached his desk by 8 am and thus undertook a solid hour of work in solitude which he regarded as the most productive part of his day.  His office had changed little since he had first occupied it four decades ago.  It resembled that of a news editor or a private investigator.  The walls were lined, floor to ceiling, with ancient tomes, perhaps of jurisprudence, in calf-bound vellum.  The desk was littered with the office accoutrements of a bygone age.  Digit would hang his jacket over the back of an austere dark wooden office armchair on castors, and sit in his bulky tweed trousers, braces and shirtsleeves.  He affected a dark green eye shade as protection against the glare of an angle-poise lamp, and he chewed on the stub of a cheap cigar.  The smoke-free policy of the company somehow had given Digit’s office an exemption.

Digit never used email and there was very little evidence that the digital age had touched him.  Anita Normal occupied an anteroom on the other side of a battered door whose top half was of opaque glass bearing the AAA logo.  The phones were of heavy dark green Bakelite with liquorice-black wiring.  Miss Normal used a heavy office Barlock typewriter, not a word-processor.  Digit felt that its incessant clatter aided his creativity.  She would tap away while he would muse at his desk, then jump up and walk through the half-glass communicating door.  “Take a letter Miss Normal.”  Despite the fact that she was half his age she had somehow acquired the requisite shorthand (Pitman’s) and typing skills.  She would insert two pages of foolscap, carbon paper between them, into the Barlock, and take dictation.  When she had reached the bottom line Digit might reach over, pull the pages out with a flick of the wrist, and peruse her work.  “The full stop – third paragraph second sentence.  I prefer a semi-colon.”  She would dutifully retype the entire page, change the punctuation, automatically shorten the double space to a single space thereafter, and continue, recommencing in lower case.  It would never have occurred to her to object.  Twelve years ago, at her commencement, she had merely found the set-up eccentric and amusing.  But she had come to dote on her boss.  If Digit had realised it, he would have been astonished, discomfited, and embarrassed.  But he never had an inkling.  Nor had he ever been consciously aware that her feelings were reciprocated.

His day was made up of study, contemplation, and meetings.  He finished at 5.  He might reasonably have finished at 4 but the concept of “flexitime” was quite alien to him and in any case he was devoted to his work and to the company.  Regular as clockwork, he would take the bus back to Westerham.

“Good evening, mother.”

“Oh!  Good evening, sir.  Do I know you?”

He would take over again from his mother’s day-time carers, and fix supper.  He didn’t smoke at home as the smell nauseated Mrs Digit.  He hardly drank at all, aside from a small glass of Bristol Cream at New Year.  In the evening he would converse with mother, and they would ask about one another’s day.  Mrs Digit’s short-term memory was severely affected, but Digit answered her repetitive questions fully and with great patience.  She would generally ask Digit where his father was.  Mr Digit senior had died a decade before, and this news caused Mrs Digit distress.  The ironic tragedy of Alzheimer’s disease is that bad tidings need to be renewed every day, and therefore there is no attenuation of grief.  To spare her such anguish, Digit only once told his mother a lie.  He told her that his father was working late and that he would be home presently.  He soon realised that the lie would need to be repeated as often as the truth, so he abandoned this subterfuge because denial of the truth was very foreign to his nature.  His entire professional life was based on a search for truth and an enquiry as to its nature.

Sometimes he and his mother would play Scrabble.  Despite her dementia, Mrs Digit was rather adept at Scrabble, and she would sometimes astonish Digit with the placement of an obscure seven or eight letter word which would earn her a bonus of 50 points.  Marzipan and Fraught and, taking advantage of the presence on the board of Li (the Chinese mile), Imbroglio.  Around 9 they would take Horlicks and he would assist his mother to bed. He himself would retire at 9.30.

What of the prospect of retirement?  Retirement held no dread for him.  He would read.  He would walk.  He had the church.  It is certain that Walter Digit led a quiet life, and you might suppose he lacked vice.  Yet he had a flaw.  A fatal flaw, the Greek “hamartia”, something that he recognised as a Nemesis, something he knew he could not keep under control, and therefore something he knew he must abjure altogether.

Digit was a gambler.  He was not secretive about it.  He called himself a “recovering gambler”.  He hadn’t made a wager for forty years, for the same time that he had been working for AAA.  Before that, when he was 25, he would have been declared bankrupt but for the fact that his parents bailed him out, offering to pay off his debts so long as he attended an addiction clinic for gamblers.  This he duly did, and since then he had assiduously avoided regions of temptation, the dogs and the turf and the trots, the casino, fruit machines, the betting shop, even the stock market.  Of course nobody living in a capitalist world can avoid the stock market.  Digit’s investments were through the bank and were generally low risk. ‘Cautious growth funds’. His only stocks were in AAA and these represented a profound belief in AAA’s activities rather than any form of speculation.  Digit knew that AAA had saved him.  He had studied mathematics and then statistics and had been attracted to actuarial work, the study of probability, and the assessment of risk.  He subsumed his fascination with the odds into his devotion to his profession.

Yet he never thought of himself as cured, always in recovery.  So he sedulously avoided any office sweepstake, a flutter on the National, even a lottery ticket in aid of a good cause.  He always knew that he would never be free of the Mad Impulse, the sudden overwhelming desire to risk absolutely everything on a game of pitch and toss.

At the reconvening of the Board, it became evident that Warren P. Mitchelson had decided to play Digit at his own game, by producing data.

“I ran my own analysis.  Yeah.”  He passed reams of A4 around like a croupier dealing from the shoe.  “You can get this stuff off the net.  Google it.  Easy-peasy.  Wikipedia and so on.”

Digit said, “Off the peg statistics?”

“Bespoke I’d say.  D’you know ‘R’?  It’s very good.  The language of big data.  Sorry Keyes.  No hard feelings, but you’re redundant.  Anyway-” He glanced at his laptop.

“Let’s look at the units.  Vacutainers versus stealth drones.  Compare and contrast. Let’s cut to the meat and potatoes.”  Mitchelson performed some rapid arpeggios on his laptop keyboard with the facility of a concert pianist.  The Mercator projection of the world’s aviation activity was replaced by a graph projected on to the bare wall beyond the foot of the table.  There were no glitches.  The IT was on Mitchelson’s side.

“Instant economics.  Apologies.”

The graph represented a bell shaped curve.  “This is a projection model for the movement of units, aka sales.  “On the Y axis –” the red dot of the laser pointer ran up and down the line – “number of units.  On the X axis –” laser pointer again – “we have the Mitchelson Index.”

Digit enquired, “What is the Mitchelson Index?”

“As I say it’s rather technical.  It’s an index of risk.  Or, more accurately, it is the square root of the reciprocal of what is known as the risk attraction-aversion amalgam.”

“Gobbledegook,” said Digit.

“Don’t spit the hickory, Keyes.”  The laser pointer began to dance around the slide projection.

“Mitchelson for Plan B…”  He clicked the mouse.  “…and Mr Mitchelson for Plan A.”  The bell curve moved upwards and to the right.  “Let’s do it again… Plan B… Plan A… and then A and B superimposed.   Two populations.  I calculated the pooled standard error.  As a business venture, going forward, the drones win hands down.  No contest.”

Digit glanced down at the handout and gave the paper a cursory glance.  It was a mix of ready-to-go statistics and on-line advertising.  Statistics how to… practically cheating statistics handbook… how to calculate pooled standard error… Fast Money Transfers… How to retire in Thailand…

It is a mistake to be seduced into debate with an adversary whose mind cannot be changed.

In for a penny.  Digit laid the paper down.  “It’s flawed.  You can’t apply the pooled SE when the variances are different.  You need to apply the Satterthwaite Approximation.  It’s elementary.  It’s a subtle distinction, but critical.”

“Well you know what they say. There’s lies, damn’d lies, and statistics.”

“A remark attributed to Mr Twain that is, I believe, widely misconstrued.  You think it describes a downward continuum of misinformation, but in fact it conveys a contrast.  You have on the one hand, humbug, then bullshit, but, on the other hand and by way of contrast, the truth.”

It was very remarkable that Digit, who abjured vulgar language, should use the word ‘bullshit’.  That he should do so betrayed a deep inner passion.

“Bullshit!  You said it.  You can make numbers mean anything you like.”

“On the contrary, data, if properly collected, construed, interpreted, and presented, in terms of hard evidence, are really all we have.  They allow us to get as close to the truth as is humanly possible.  The truth is not an inner construct of the imagination.  The truth is out there, waiting to be discovered, and revealed.  That is why it is so important to speak the truth to power.”

“Nah.  See Keyes, that’s why you’re obsolete.  I guess that’s why I’m here.  To speak power to truth if you like!  Yes I like that.  Just as the victors are the ones who write history, so it is that the powerful define truth.  And that’s why Avro-Avalon Aeronautics must back adversarial drone technology.  The next time some tin-pot despot from some shit-hole banana republic sends his suicide bombers in our direction – sshhhht!”  Mitchelson slapped the side of his neck.  “His successor will think twice believe me.”

It was at that point that Digit realised Mitchelson had to go.

Back home, Mrs Digit was sitting over the Scrabble board in quiet contemplation of yesterday evening’s undisturbed game.  She wore an expression of great sweetness, but she was grey and inert.  Digit gently took his mother’s hand and laid his fingertips across her wrist.  She was still warm, but he verified there was no pulse.  The carer would have departed an hour ago, so Mrs Digit’s passing was extremely recent.  Digit felt a strangely intense emotion of sad serenity.  He glanced down at the Scrabble board, idly curious as to what her last play had been.

LOOFAH

Digit picked up the telephone and called the family doctor.

 

“Take a letter, Miss Normal.”  He waited until his secretary had arranged the paper and the carbon copy in the typewriter’s roller.

“To Sir Howard Whittingehame, Chairman, Avro-Avalon Aeronautics….

“Dear Sir Howard…”  Digit paced about behind Miss Normal’s straight back.

“With respect to the recent deliberations of the company’s executive board…”

Of course, he had always known that Miss Normal was pretty.  It only occurred to him now that she was a remarkably beautiful woman.

“…a board whose make-up has been subtly yet significantly altered by…

“…by the replacement of Mr Hargreaves by our visitor from overseas…

“…with respect… where was I?”

She read back.  “Our visitor from overseas…”

“Ah yes.  Where is Mr Woo?”

“Hastings.”

“What on earth is Mr Woo doing in Hastings?”

“He has been relocated.”

“Relocated?  Why wasn’t I told?  Which section?”

“Not by the company.  His sheltered House in Croydon has closed.  Council cuts.  I believe a place has been found for him in Hastings.”

“But Mr Woo will not know anybody in Hastings.  He will be confused.  Does Sir Howard know?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“He must be told.”

“Yes, sir.”

There was a pause.  Digit looked down at the nape of Miss Normal’s neck.  Miss Normal sat patiently before the Barlock, awaiting further dictation.

“As you know Miss Normal, I am due shortly to retire.”

“Yes, Mr Digit.”

“In the event that I am not replaced, in the event that the section folds…”

“Sir?”

“Forgive me.  None of my business.  Shouldn’t pry.  Anita, have you any plans, for example, to marry, settle down?”

Miss Normal sat stock-still.  She was unable to interpret the sense of pent-up turmoil within her bosom.  In the course of their twelve year professional relationship, Digit had never until now addressed her by her Christian name.

 

Before the final meeting, and the vote, it was absolutely essential that Digit pave the way for Warren P. Mitchelson’s timely assassination.  For this, he needed to recruit Hector MacFadyen.  He entertained no hopes of being able to deceive MacFadyen as to his intent, yet he was determined that MacFadyen not be an accessory to the crime; all he needed was some information, and some technical know-how.  MacFadyen would have both because MacFadyen had a handle on AAA’s every project.  He phoned Hector at about 9 pm, after Dr Campbell had visited and issued his mother’s death certificate, and after he had made preliminary arrangements with the undertaker.  MacFadyen lived in a bachelor apartment in Biggin Hill, twenty minutes away.  Digit drove over, declined refreshment, and explained succinctly what he needed.

“You’re going to do the bastard in, then?”

“If that were the case, then you would doubtless be interviewed by the police.  Speaking hypothetically, in such a case you would be able to tell them that I made some enquiries into Project Alpha, enquiries perfectly commensurate with my role as Chief of the Statistical Section.  Your suspicions were not aroused for one moment.”

“Sure you don’t need my help?  Hypothetically, I mean.”

“I don’t make hypotheses.”

 

“Five minutes!” announced Sir Howard Whittingehame.  “Five minutes!”  Digit rose from his chair.

“Where are you going, Mr Digit?”

Mr Digit replied gravely, “I am going to the lavatory.”

“Ha!  Too much information Keyes.”

In fact Digit had no need to answer a call of nature.  He was merely following the Marginal Constituency, Mabie, the ditherer, into the men’s room.  It was his final chance to change the course of the meeting through the ballot box rather than the bullet.  They stood together before the pissoir in companionable silence, and then before the wash basins.

“What was that Proxy business about? Saturday… Saturnine…”

“Satterthwaite.”

“Yes.  What is that?”

“It is a way of comparing apples and pears without distorting the truth.”

It occurred to Digit that Mabie was like Pontius Pilate, washing his hands.  “The truth?”

“Yes.”

Mabie dried his hands under the roaring vortex of the Dyson air blades.  He had a fixed expression, a musing pout of puzzlement.  Maybe he just couldn’t hear above the racket.

“The truth.”

“Only the truth will make you free.”

“The truth?  What is that?”

Mabie was going to vote for Alpha.

 

Third Law of Company Board Room Polemics:  The most critical decision is made during the last five minutes of the meeting.

Digit had long understood that the board room decisions that really mattered took place during “Any Other Competent Business”.  Nothing is decided, until everything is decided.  This was when you had to be at your most alert.  Why is it that politicians are the last people to apprehend this?  Airline pilots and physicians know to quit when they are tired.  Not politicians.  They slog it out during an all-night session and then make the critical decision in a state of exhaustion.  But now Digit was sure, with 95% confidence he might have said, of the outcome, and it was time to activate Project Charlie.

He took the laptop out of his brief case, placed it on the mahogany surface, opened the lid, and switched it on.

“Good heavens Walter!  In the 40 years I’ve known you, I’ve never once seen you engage with the satanic looms of Apple and Microsoft!”  There was an eruption of astonished laughter round the table.  Most people thought Digit was a Luddite, computer-illiterate.  That was their great mistake.  In fact Digit had spent a considerable portion of his career undertaking work which, while distasteful to him, he was rather adept at – programming.  Two of his great scientific heroes were Alan Turing and James Clerk Maxwell.  He understood their work at a deep level.  Sir Howard opened his mouth to make another quip, but he was silenced by his own further sense of astonishment at the facility with which Digit utilised a machine he was wont to refer to as a “hellish contraption”.

Digit exercised a few mystic passes, shut the machine down, closed the lid, and put it back in his briefcase.

“What was that about?”

“Exit strategy.”

“Sorry?”

“Just checking the bus timetable.  Some of us do have a home to go to.”  (Was that true?)

“Don’t sweat the small stuff Keyes.   My driver will give you a ride.”

The culmination to the meeting turned out to be somewhat anticlimactic.  Mitchelson passed away in much the same manner as Mrs Digit on the previous evening.  Death entered the room, and departed therefrom so silently, that Digit was the only person to see Mitchelson absently reach a hand up to his neck and brush away a mosquito.  Digit rose unhurriedly, picked up his briefcase, and made for the door.

“Walter!  The vote!”

“Don’t want to miss the bus.”

“Like I said, Keyes, don’t spit the hickory.”

“Walter, you must vote.”

But Digit had suddenly decided, now he was a felon, there was a moral imperative he not vote.

“I abstain.”

“Don’t spit the hic-  hic – hic – hic!”  Abruptly, Mitchelson stopped talking and stared straight ahead.

Digit took the back stairs, not the lift.  On the top floor, yes, here was the equipage, fully prepared and lying in wait.  The vacutainer was the size of a bulky rucksack – and once deployed, it would expand considerably – yet amazingly light.    Digit strapped it on.  Helmet and goggles.  Now he looked like a cross between a bumblebee and a free fall parachutist.  He stepped out on to the flat roof.  Clear skies, a crescent moon, and the great panoply of the Milky Way.   Last safety checks.  He ran Hector’s briefing again over in his mind.  Final, vital actions.  The emergency door at the top of the service stairs scraped open and MacFadyen, breathing heavily, was at his side.

Digit asked blandly, “How did the vote go?”

“A tie.  Six apiece.  You shouldn’t have abstained.”

“Six all?  Somebody else must have abstained also.”

“Mitchelson.  As you very well know.  There’s pandemonium down there.  Cardiac arrest they think.  They’ve started CPR.  They can’t find the defib.”  The sound of the siren floated up to them from somewhere in the southeast.  In a moment they would be able to track, quite clearly, the course of the twinkling blue lights.

“How do you suppose Sir Howard will cast his deciding vote?”

“He will vote for you, Hector.”

“How do you know?”

“I worked it out.  It’s a great project.  Good luck with it.  Every success.”  Digit stepped towards the edge of the roof.

“Walter.  I’m not sure this contraption’s going to work.”

“I have every faith.  It will work.”

“How do you know?”

“Probability.”

Digit stepped off the roof.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Saturday I listened to BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions with a stopwatch.  It’s a rather fine stopwatch which I picked up in an antiques shop, a Swiss-made Chronosport, 7 jewels, with an expansive 30 second dial allowing for great accuracy.  I wanted to see if there was any substance in my suspicion that the Any Questions chairman, Jonathan Dimbleby, hogs the conversation.  So I simply timed his contribution – rather an anal, but an easy thing to do because the Chronosport has a stop-start facility, and all I had to do was click a button with a thumb every time Mr Dimbleby started and stopped; thus the process hardly interfered with my attention to the debate, which was almost entirely devoted to Brexit.

He spoke for 12 minutes and 32 seconds.  The programme lasts 45 minutes.  Let us assume for the sake of argument that the audience contribution – the questions asked and the audience applause – only took 28 seconds (they clearly took longer); then this leaves 32 minutes for the four invited guests on the panel.  They have 8 minutes each in which to make their points.  The chairman speaks for more than half as long again.  The chairman is supposed to be a facilitator who keeps his opinion to himself.  I venture to say, Any Questions has a problem.

Could long-windedness be a Dimbleby trait?  I don’t think so.  David Dimbleby who has broadcast his last TV Question Time after 25 years had a knack of interjecting succinctly and cogently, when he sensed a politician was attempting to pull the wool over our eyes.  Of course the Dimblebys’ father, Richard, was the doyen of the broadcaster commentating on great state occasions, and on television he evinced an instinctive sense that less was more.

I’m very interested in the art of the interview.  Every clinical medical practitioner is, first and foremost, an interviewer.  I say “first and foremost” quite deliberately, because far and away the most important component of the medical consultation is the taking of a medical history.  I spent my career in the field of undifferentiated medicine.  The general practitioner asks an open-ended question: how can I help you today?  The emergency physician might choose to be more succinct; the most powerful question in emergency medicine is quite simply this: What happened?

Having asked such a question, it is imperative that the interviewer then shut up.  All you need to do is sit back and listen.  As a matter of fact, if a doctor just sits back and listens, really listens, nine times out of ten he will be handed the diagnosis on a plate.  Fancy that.  He sits with his patient at the front door of the hospital.  Behind him there are haematology, biochemistry and microbiology laboratories, X-rays, and CTs and MRIs and ultrasound, catheter labs and gamma cameras and you name it.  Sometimes they can all be quite useful but not half so useful as an experienced clinician who just sits and listens.

You might suppose that the art of listening is somewhat passive.  Quite the contrary.  If the doctor is silent, it is because he has entered into a trance.  He has asked, “What happened?” and then he has unstintingly entered the patient’s realm of experience.  He steps into the patient’s shoes.  For a moment, he becomes the patient.  It is through this profound act of empathy that the doctor comes to understand the patient’s predicament.

One of the most memorable medical educational experiences I can remember was a seminar on interviewing techniques given by an Edinburgh consultant psychiatrist.  He played us extracts of interviews mostly from the BBC, and asked us to critique the technique of the interviewer.  The interviewers were all very different, some flamboyant, others self-effacing, some loquacious, others virtually monosyllabic; no one style was “right”, but what became clear was that what characterised the successful interviewer was the ability to listen.  Conversely, the bad interview was characterised by lack of close attention, premature interruption, miscomprehension, and failure to pick up on the unexpected.  The interviewer that sticks in my mind from that seminar was a man who I don’t suppose a younger generation will even have heard of: John Freeman.  He would interview TV personalities of his time such as Tony Hancock, Gilbert Harding, Adam Faith.  During the interview, he himself was virtually invisible.  Actually, if memory serves me right, that was literally true.  He remained off camera, only occasionally giving the interviewee a prompt, so that the interview almost became a monologue, during which the interviewee, often an intensely private individual, would be as surprised as everybody else to find himself baring his soul.

Who has that skill now?  Since the departure (at least from Radio 4) of Eddie Mair, precious few.  The current model of the political interview is that the interviewer is determined to extract a particular piece of information from the interviewee, and the interviewee is determined to stick to a script (probably under the direction of a spin doctor) and get a specific message across.  No wonder these conversations are so arid.  But you only need to think of the last cocktail party you attended and recall the bit of chat that really took off.  Last week at such an event in Aberdeen somebody told me an extraordinary saga.  I just did my John Freeman impersonation and disappeared into the furniture.

But our public discourse is dominated by confrontation.  Television seems to thrive on it, social media even more so.  PMQs, The Apprentice, Eastenders, Bodyguard… everything is fraught.  Political discourse has itself become the script of a soap opera.  You can’t tell the difference between Today in Parliament and The Thick of It.  When Mrs May confronted Mr Juncker last week maybe she modelled herself on Malcolm Tucker.

“You callin’ me ******* nebulous, Jim?”

Monday afternoon:  I’ve just listened to Mrs May’s statement to the House (given against a background of braying and carping so incessant that Mr Speaker had to interrupt twice to restore order) announcing that she has decided to defer tomorrow’s “meaningful vote”.

In my own professional life in medicine, while reflection could often be helpful in solving a problem, I don’t recall procrastination as ever being a useful diagnostic or therapeutic tool.  Actually, in emergency medicine, it just isn’t an option.  Procrastination comes from the Latin cras, tomorrow.  Manana.  Manana is too late.  Time, specifically “the golden hour”, is the defining entity of emergency medicine.  You see a patient, you take a careful history, you conduct an equally careful physical examination, maybe you order a couple of highly specific tests designed to answer a specific question and not merely to kick the problem into the long grass; then, sooner rather than later, because maybe the situation is deteriorating and in any case loads of patients with equally difficult problems are pouring through the front door, you have to make a decision, and run with it.  You have to make a diagnosis, construct a “formulation” as to how the diagnosis uniquely affects the patient, and then you have to devise and implement a plan of management.

Maybe you make the wrong decision and achieve an outcome somewhere between less than ideal and absolutely catastrophic.  Then you are up in front of the General Medical Council which takes a week to mull over an episode you were constrained to conclude within fifteen minutes.  I’ve heard it said that with respect to a UK – EU divorce deal, two years was always going to be cutting it tight, but you will readily appreciate how odd this sounds to an emergency physician.  The government has a track record for imposing its will on various professional groups and getting off-side with them.  Mrs May who is now PM got off-side with the police when she was Home Secretary, Mr Gove who is now Environment Secretary got off-side with the teachers when he was Education Secretary, Mr Hunt who is now Foreign Secretary got off-side with the doctors when he was Health Secretary.  Then they all elided seamlessly into their next job.  But I wonder if Parliament and the body politic, the Westminster Bubble and the whole political system, realises the extent to which it is currently being weighed in the balance by the electorate, and found wanting.  Parliament might make a decision which is wrong, and harmful, in the eyes of half the people, or she might make another decision equally wrong, and harmful, to the other half; but if she fails to make a decision at all, then the entire electorate will be entitled to ask whether they are worth the candle.

Being disillusioned with the political class is not good.  Mr Trump got elected because the great American people were disillusioned with the Washington élite.  In Paris, les gilets jaunes assembled aux barricades because they say M. Macron is a toff who doesn’t know the first thing about how real people live, and struggle.  The UK has a ruling class that is predominantly public school and Oxbridge educated.  People will look at what is going on in Parliament just now and conclude that maybe PPE at Oxford ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.  After all, if the ruling class can’t even get together to make the wrong decision, and thus end up making no decision, I think we have to consider whether they are worthy of our respect.  You expect your surgeon to be a trained surgeon, you expect your airline pilot to be a trained pilot, but what sort of training should a politician have?  Maybe it would be better if we elected mature adults who had proved themselves in various other walks of life, who were of independent mind, who weren’t frightened of losing the next election, who felt they had something to contribute, and who volunteered to stand for one term only.  I can’t imagine they would make any bigger hash of it than that which we are currently witnessing.

Westminster needs to be put into special measures.

J’ai essayé d’expliquer ces choses qui dorment, sans doute, au fond de notre instinct et qu’il est bien difficile de reveiller complѐtement. 

Maeterlinck.

 

This will happen twenty years from now.

My name is David Walkerburn.  I’m an Edinburgh lawyer, a partner in the firm of Cardwell Walkerburn, Writers to the Signet, 48 Heriot Row, Of This City.  I was in the New Club, Princes Street, with my friend the distinguished emergency physician, Professor Sir Alastair Cameron-Strange.  We sat in companionable silence, reading the newspapers.

“Listen to this.”  I read aloud from The Scotsman.

“Scots Aristocrat Arrested at Uluru.  Macabre Discovery in Hot Red Centre.  You listening, Alastair?”

“Mm?”

“Police in Australia’s Northern Territory are being tight-lipped about the gruesome find, in a wild camping site in the Valley of the Winds, between Ayers Rock and the Olgas, of the dead bodies of a man and a woman, as well as of a new-born baby, alive, but in a state of severe dehydration.  A man found wandering in the vicinity, in a state of delirium, has been arrested.  He and the baby have been transferred to hospital in Alice Springs.”

“Mm.”

“Funny how the Australian outback casts up these macabre tales.  British tourists found wandering amid the spinifex in a state of confusion.  Then a dead body, or two, turn up.  Often a dingo is involved.  Intriguing.”

“Mm.”

“Professor, you don’t sound intrigued.”  I read on.  “An unconfirmed report identifies the deceased woman as the Countess of Acharacle, and the arrested man as the Earl.”

The colour drained from the face of my physician friend.  For a man who has spent the bulk of his professional life dealing with humanity in extremis, he looked shaken.  He reached forward and snatched the newspaper from my hand.

“Acharacle you say.”

He scanned the brief article.  There was a photograph of a young couple, the Earl and Countess on their Moidart estate, in happier times.  Alastair handed the paper back.  He looked abstracted.  “Excuse me.”  He rose rather unsteadily and took himself off to the lavatory.  He was gone for a considerable length of time.  When he returned I could see he had regained control of himself.  I saw him stop the waiter and order a drink.  He signalled to me across the room and I pointed to my glass and nodded.  He came back and sat down.  I said, in a lawyerly way, “Am I to suppose that the Acharacles are known to you?  Patients perhaps?”

“If they were, I wouldn’t tell you.”

“What a tragedy.  She was only twenty.”

“Nineteen.”

The drinks came.  He hesitated, then: “Perhaps I could tell you about something that happened twenty years ago.”

Alastair doesn’t talk to me about his work very often.  I laid The Scotsman aside, sat back, and took a sip of Islay single malt.  “Continuez.”

And this is what he said.

*

Throughout my hospital career I have occasionally taken time out and dabbled in General Practice, just to remind myself what real life looks like.  I particularly value the experience of the home visit.  In hospital, we don’t have the opportunity to enter people’s lives in this unique way.  Perhaps the home visit is the nearest a physician can get to understanding the dynamic of a patient’s life.  What is it that you seek?  What makes you tick?  We doctors flatter ourselves that we understand our patients, but you know, in our brief consultations we only ever get a snapshot, like a single frame in a roll of 35mm film.  The rest is mystery.

The strangest house call I ever undertook as a GP took place north of Loch Sunart, in a narrow strip of land halfway between Loch Shiel and the Ardnamurchan Peninsula.  I undertook a weekend locum for the harassed local practitioner, approaching the end of his career, his own shelf-life, and burn-out.  I’d driven up from Edinburgh on the Friday afternoon.  It was the sort of November day we call dreich.  There is an even more expressive word in Gaelic: gruamach.  Thick low cloud enshrouded Rannoch Moor, and when I entered the long defile through Glencoe the atmosphere of oppression was suffocating.  A heavy sense of deep foreboding stayed with me as I crossed the Great Glen by the Corran ferry, and I knew it would not leave me until I had escaped from the blighted north-west on the following Monday morning.  The Gàidhealtachd was one vast desolate moor of clearance and desertion, and I moved through it conscious of inescapable history, of vague whispers, subliminal allusions to the conscription of a language and the systematic persecution of a people, and a culture.  I negotiated the single track road through woodland between Strontian and Salen in a mood of complete dejection.

I met Dr McGregor, striding out of his surgery in a state of evident agitation, and in a tremendous hurry.  He only paused to thrust a Gladstone bag into my hands.  “You’re wanted at the House.”

“House?”

“Acharacle.  Himself.”

“I was hoping you could orientate me.  Perhaps a little background?”

“My haste forbids it.  Ask Morag.  Housekeeper.  Mine of information.”  As an afterthought, he literally threw some car keys at me.  “Take the Land Rover.  Heavy rains forecast.  Four wheel drive.  You’ll need it.”  I never saw McGregor again.

The House turned out to be a prehistoric keep, a Scots baronial folly, a massive crumbling pile frowning over Loch Shiel.  I accessed it by a treacherous mud track that penetrated an interminable forest.  By the time I reached my destination, darkness was falling.  Just short of the dark shadow of the ramparted castle, I noticed, on the grass verge, a small child in dungarees, perhaps eight years old, with a serious, philosophical face, leaning on a gate, calmly observing my progress.  Then I was nearly driven off the track by an agricultural vehicle careering down on me from the opposite direction.  I caught a glimpse of a wide-eyed driver staring maniacally straight ahead, hell bent on escape.  He was carrying livestock.  I could hear the forlorn bleating of lambs going to market.  I had the odd sense the child was mourning their departure.  I crossed a causeway over a moat and drew up under a wrought iron gate as massive as a portcullis.  I pressed a buzzer on the wall.

“Yes?”

“Dr Cameron-Strange.”

“Yes?”

How irritating.  I wasn’t expected.  I patiently explained I had come on behalf of Dr McGregor.  The gate opened inwards with an agonised wail.  I edged through.  There was a cobbled courtyard, and a mews.  A porter met me as I got out of the car.  “This way.”  He led me into a gloomy cloister, thence to a turret, and a narrow spiral staircase hewn out of the stone.  We emerged into a vaulted atrium dismally decorated in stags’ antlers, jaded, moth-eaten tapestries, and hideous art depicting gory hunting scenes.  There were threadbare rugs strewn around the floor.  Vacant suits of armour stood sentinel and stared impassively in my direction from each corner of the chamber.  There was an enormous grated fireplace in which logs were blazing, but failing to provide any heat.  Above the mantel, a hundred muskets in a circular array formed a giant Catherine-wheel.

Himself emerged from an armchair before the fire.  I recognised the disdain for personal grooming, the bucolic sloppiness of the aristocrat.  He sported a pair of stained, bright orange corduroy trousers, and a shapeless woolly jumper covered in holes.  I introduced myself.  The craggy, debauched grey face quivered.  He offered me a limp hand.  “Acharacle.”  Anybody who calls himself by the name of his lands must have a fine conceit.

“Where the devil’s McGregor?”

“Taking a short break.  I hope I can help.”

“Who sent for you?”  He addressed his retainer over my shoulder.  “Who phoned for the quack, Fergus?”

“I couldn’t say, sir.”

“Hm.”  Himself frowned, in a perplexed way.  I had already noticed that his facial expression was one of fixed puzzlement.  It crossed my mind that he was dementing.  “Probably my son.  Bed bound for months.  McGregor knows the case.  Fergus, would you be so kind…”

But it turned out that Acharacle-fils had recovered from whatever it was that had confined him to his chamber.  He wasn’t my patient either. Must be some misunderstanding.  I was loath to head all the way back to the surgery only to be recalled again.  Back in the dismal atrium, Acharacle was staring vacantly through a long, slender, tessellated, pointed window down to the garden below.  He muttered to himself.  “What the devil’s he doing?”  I glanced down.  I saw a youngish man, prematurely grey, balancing a small child on his shoulders.  It was the child I had just seen on the roadway.  The boy was craning to look through a first floor window.  It was a bizarre vignette.  I supposed a father was playing with his son.  But it didn’t look like play; it looked like abuse.  I asked who else was resident in this ghastly edifice, who else might conceivably be my patient.  Thus I assembled my dramatis personae.  I was helped by sight of the family photographs on the mantel under the Catherine-wheel of armaments.  I expected them to have absurd names like Torquil and Rufus, but in fact the names were perfectly commonplace.  Acharacle-fils was absent, invisible; I never even got a name.  His wife was Jennifer.  They had two sons, half-brothers I gathered, Gordon and Paul.  Gordon’s wife was Melissa, and he had a son from a previous marriage, Iain.  So.  Half a dozen.  But who was I supposed to be visiting?  This was fast turning into a sardonic parlour game.  Hunt the patient.  I glanced at the photos above the log fire, marrying up names to faces.  The images that stood out were of Paul, a handsome young man, and of Melissa, very young, and very beautiful.  I decided to conduct a ward round.

I started with Jennifer.  She occupied an apartment on the top floor.  I took the lift.  It was a parsimonious and suffocating oblong cubicle barely the size of a casket.  I have a horror of confined spaces.  I bit my lip while the elevator painstakingly clanked its way upwards then lurched to a halt.  I emerged into a lady’s drawing room and a lighter atmosphere.  Jenny was a querulous, redheaded lady of middle age who looked to me to be in the prime of a robust and healthy life.  She hadn’t sent for me.  “But, doctor, while you’re here…”  I walked right into that trap.  She turned out to be one of the worried well, and she had a list.  I patiently went through it with her, and ruled her out, while she in turn ruled out Acharacle’s great-grandson Iain, a dreamy child, happily occupying his own private world.  So it had to be one of the brothers, Paul and Gordon, or Gordon’s wife.  What was her name?  Melissa.

I learned a little about them.  Melissa was Australian, from Caloundra, Queensland.  She was a teenager, half Gordon’s age.  It was all terribly romantic, said Jenny.  Gordon had gone walkabout Down Under, and when he met Melissa she was a damsel in distress, a frightened young woman who had been traumatised by some deeply upsetting experience and abandoned, lost in the middle of nowhere.  To me it all sounded a bit like Picnic at Hanging Rock.  Gordon had rescued her from whatever plight she was in, and brought her home.  Jenny had worried that Acharacle, in his patriarchal role as a clan chieftain, might object to the liaison and its precipitate nature, but he turned out to be quite philosophical about it, even fatalistic.

Fancy a young woman from the Sunshine Coast landing up in this godforsaken hole!  Had she been seduced by the idea of coming to the Old Country and joining the aristocracy?  Could she have had any idea what she was letting herself in for?

I asked if Melissa was happy.

“Happy?”  Jenny looked at me quizzically.  I don’t think she understood the question.

What about Paul?  Full of life, early twenties, just graduated (St. Andrews, fine art), champing at the bit, dying to get out of here.  He had a friend in some far off place who’d got sick, and Paul wanted to go and see him, but Himself had persuaded him to stay on until Paul’s father got better.  That now being the case, Paul’s departure was imminent.

That left Gordon.  Hedge fund manager.  Late thirties.  Intense, highly strung, prone to loss of temper and fits of rage, and something of a control freak.  That must be it.  Surely Gordon had to be my patient.  I had seen him down in the garden, balancing Iain on his shoulders.  I decided to go and find him.  I excused myself and got back into that hellish lurching coffin.

All the time that I wandered about that House I was conscious of numerous housekeepers and servants passing silently along the corridors like spectral wraiths.  The third floor was deserted.  Reluctantly I got back into my lift.  It stopped at the second floor and the doors opened on to a marital spat.  Gordon had removed the coat of his executive pinstripe suit to reveal a garish pair of bright red braces.  He was pacing the floor, multi-tasking, simultaneously taking a call on his mobile while interrogating his child bride.   He briefly clamped the mobile between cheek and shoulder and deftly loosened his tie.

“Get back to me about the FTSE and the Dow…”

But I couldn’t stop staring at Melissa.  She was one of these girls who didn’t have to dress to impress.  She would have looked good in a sack.  Actually a sack was pretty much what she was wearing, a kind of shapeless kaftan in muslin.  I should have paid more attention to that, but I got distracted by these bewitching eyes.  If I were to tell you that Melissa was, and remains, the most beautiful woman I have ever set eyes on, you will tell me that I am prone to exaggeration.  Besides, any blond-haired, blue eyed teenager on the beach at Surfer’s Paradise is likely beautiful de rigueur.  They themselves, despite the armour of hauteur, are the only ones who don’t know it.  Youth is wasted on the young.  What was so special about Melissa?

Her hair.

“Buy at four fifty. Then if the price tops five fifty, sell.  Yah yah…

“Well where the hell did you drop it?”

“Blind man’s burn.”  Melissa’s voice was soft and low.  I could hardly detect an accent.

“Well you must go and find it.  Not you, Maggie.  I’m talking to Melissa.  Yah yah.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now, Melissa.”

“But it’s dark.”

“It’s a gold wedding ring, Melissa.  Twenty-four carat.  You have to find it.  Take Paul with you.  I don’t know what the hell you and Paul were thinking of.  You are children.  Sorry Maggie.  Where were we?”

I closed the elevator doors and continued my descent.  Gordon was very exercised about that twenty-four carat ring.  He reminded me of Othello, and his preoccupation with a handkerchief.  “The handkerchief!  ‘Zounds!  My mind misgives!” Gordon struck me as a jealous, and a very irascible man.  He was a corporate man.  He was the sort of man who had decided that he was surrounded by nobody but fools and idiots and as a result he was at the end of his tether.  Back in the lift, I must have pressed the wrong button because before I knew it I was descending into the crypt of the castle, and the bowels of the earth.  I travelled so far down that I experienced the sharp otalgia of barotrauma.  Down in the vaults, I came to a shuddering halt.  The door opened on to a narrow passageway carved out of the rock.  Ahead, there was the faintest glimmer of light.  I should have closed the doors and reascended immediately, but something compelled me to step forward toward that faint light.

It was surreal; maybe I just imagined it.  I found myself in a grotto, deep below the surface of the earth.  It must be some profound underground tributary feeding Loch Shiel.  Ahead, the water appeared still, dank, black, and fathomless.  I had discovered a subterranean ocean, from which emanated a stench of rotting decay.  I sensed that if I didn’t get out of this place immediately I would lose my wits.  I was conscious of an all-pervading, crushing sense of complete terror.  I stepped back from the hidden sea and its fetid miasma, turned, and literally ran back to the sanctuary of the lift, closed the doors, and got the hell out of there.

After that, things happened very quickly.  I made my way back to the atrium where I had first met Himself, to find that the marital spat, far from blowing over, had got completely out of hand.  They were positioned, as in a tableau, in front of the log fire, a tear-stained Melissa on her knees in an attitude of supplication.  Gordon stood over her.  He was incandescent with fury.

“Bitch!  Bitch!  Seeming, seeming, scheming, ungrateful, harridan!” 

It was when he started to drag her across the floor by her beautiful hair that I had to intervene.

“Stop that.”

He screamed at me.  “And who the hell might you be?”

“Never mind who I am.  I’m phoning the police.”

“How dare you!  Why don’t you stay out of other people’s business?  Leave this house immediately!”

I must admit I had the overwhelming desire to smack him on the jaw.  I think he must have sensed it because he stopped dragging his wife by her hair across the floor, and looked at me in surprise.  Maybe nobody had ever dared to cross him.  There was a pause and a brief interlude.  I remember I caught sight again of the photos on the mantel, and my gaze fell upon the image of the one person I’d not seen in the flesh – Paul.  Melissa followed my gaze and for a brief moment I captured her expression as her eyes settled on the same picture.  I might never have caught it.  It was my single frame in the roll of 35 mm film – that look of great and abiding tenderness.   Thus all was made clear to me.

Suddenly Melissa gave a strangled cry of pain.  She fell on to her left side, clutching her abdomen.  I saw the dark stain begin to spread across the muslin of her flowing dress.  Automatically, I knelt beside her and laid a hand on her tummy.  It was rock hard.  Gordon snapped impatiently, “What’s the matter?”

“She’s delivering.”

“What?”

“She’s having a baby.”

“What?”

I reached into my pocket and handed Gordon the car keys.  “It’s a Land Rover.  It’s parked in the courtyard.  There’s a large crash box in the boot.  You can’t miss it.  Get it.  Quick.”

But there was no time.  I didn’t so much manage a birth, as preside ineffectually over its inexorable progress.  I don’t know how much time elapsed as I concentrated on the technical aspects of the obstetrics, but I became aware that various servants had filed silently into the room and I was being handed clean towels.  Nobody expressed the slightest surprise at this extraordinary turn of events.  It was almost as if it were preordained.  I stared at the new arrival, the pale, flat grey sliver of life.  I estimated twenty four weeks.  The cusp of viability.  Then to my enormous relief the skin pinked up and the baby emitted a pitiful bleat.  Gordon, wide-eyed with horror, returned with the crash box, and I was able to cut the cord and deliver the placenta.

Then it all went downhill.  She just wouldn’t stop bleeding.  I called out, to nobody in particuIar, “Get an ambulance.  Blue light.”  I was vaguely aware of Gordon tapping out a number on his mobile with a shaking hand.  I forced myself to think pathophysiologically.  Why’s she bleeding?  Not retained placenta.  Not retained products.  Uterine atony?  A soft tissue laceration?  Uterine rupture?  A coagulopathy?

With a sinking heart I noted the pallid skin with its clammy frost.  The pulse at the wrist was thready.  The arm was limp and unresisting.  She had withdrawn into herself like an injured animal retreating into its lair.  I took her blood pressure.  80 systolic.  Shock.

I cursed the environment I was in.  The light was terrible.  We hadn’t even been able to get Melissa off the floor.  At least one of the servants had dried off the baby and fashioned a makeshift crib near the log fire.  I got two drips up and poured fluids in, normal saline and then colloid.  But she needed blood above all else.  Thank God I found a vial of oxytocin in the crash box.  I gave her ten units.  It didn’t make the slightest difference.  Then I gave her ergometrine, 250mg intravenously, then 250 mg intramuscularly.  How I wished I was back in Edinburgh with a six minute ambulance response time.  Here, the ambulance would take forever.  And the rains had started.  The cavalry might not reach us at all.  I set up an oxytocin infusion.  What else could I do?  Rub up the fundus.  Examine the genital tract – as best you can – for tears.  Anything else verged into surgical management and I had neither the tools, nor the environment in which to proceed.  Uterine artery, or internal iliac artery ligation?  Hysterectomy as a last resort?  Impossible.  All I could do was tamponade the bleeding as best I could, with a mass of sterile packs, and wait.  Slowly I became aware that the entire household staff had entered the room and had formed a semicircle around its periphery, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy.

Now she was deathly pale.  I had a very bad feeling about the way things were going.  As a doctor, I had never before, nor since, felt so wretched nor so helpless.   When Melissa spoke, her voice was almost inaudible, as if she were speaking from another world.

“Where is Paul?”

“He is at Blind Man’s Burn.”

“Why doesn’t he come?”

Gordon said, “I need to speak to my wife, alone.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I promise I won’t harm her anymore.  Please, see, you can leave the door open.”

But I wasn’t going to leave my patient.  As a concession I retreated a few steps.

“Melissa.  I need to know.  Did you love Paul?”

“Of course I love Paul.”

“I mean, did you love him… with a forbidden love?”

As one, the Greek chorus fell to its knees.

She whispered, “How can love be forbidden?”  I believe it was the last thing she said.

Now the eternal wait for the ambulance no longer mattered.  It didn’t even matter that the blue light approaching through the dense forest belonged not to an ambulance, but to a police car.  I gave the two startled police officers a brief handover, and suggested that one of them might wish to take a turn down to Blind Man’s Burn.  Acharacle made another brief appearance, pausing to look absently at the girl’s inert body, and then at his great granddaughter.  He never lost his mystified look of profound puzzlement.  It was nineteen years ago.  But for me the memory, the sharpness of the image, has never faded.

“Poor little mite.  It’s your turn now.”