Author: jamescalumcampbell

Irrespective of one’s personal position on the Europhile/Eurosceptic spectrum, it is hard not to admire Mrs May for her determination, stamina, resilience, and sheer grit in the face of a barrage of opposition from multiple sources.  She has actually succeeded in clinching a deal with the 27 EU states.  If it were to find favour in the Commons’ “meaningful vote”, you might conclude that she had thus firmly established and safeguarded her own Prime Ministerial legacy, and who knows how long she might continue on as PM?  But at the moment, the numbers at Westminster are not stacking up in her favour.  What happens if she loses the vote?  Nobody knows.

I always thought it was a little odd that Mrs May succeeded Mr Cameron after the referendum in 2016.  Mr Cameron resigned because he was a Remainer, and therefore not in a position to lead the UK through the Brexit negotiations.  He said this specifically, in his short resignation speech from the podium outside No. 10.  Mrs May had also been a Remainer, albeit low key, but for whatever reason, she did not feel this precluded her from chucking her hat into the ring.  At the time, there was no shortage of Brexiteer contenders – Mr Johnson, Mr Gove, Dr Fox – but who knows what was going on in the cabals of the backbench 1922 committee.  Maybe they realised early on that a referendum won on a margin of 52% to 48% of the vote was barely statistically significant, and that some sort of compromise – some people would call it a fudge – would be necessary in order to give expression to what has been called “the will of the people.”  If the referendum result came as a surprise, and if   the Government, and Parliament as a whole, were broadly on the Remain side, cynics might say that the Government set out to concoct a “Brino” or Brexit in name only.  Many on the far right of the Conservative Party might say that this in fact is what Mrs May has striven to achieve.

Aware of the uphill struggle she now faces, Mrs May took to the air waves on Friday to address the people directly in a radio phone-in session.  On Sunday morning she also wrote to us all.  This might also seem puzzling, since she has taken the decision-making out of the hands of the general public by declaring there will be no second referendum or “people’s vote.”  I suppose she might think that the electorate might put pressure on MPs at constituency level to “get on with it” and wrap the whole thing up.  It seems unlikely that many members of the public will have trawled their way through the 585 pages of the withdrawal agreement, so maybe she is just relying on sheer voter fatigue to create a climate in which the exhausted public say, “Enough already.”  But you take a risk going on talk-back radio, because somebody might bowl you a googly.  On Friday, somebody asked Mrs May if the deal she’d brokered was worse than remaining in the EU, and when she spluttered and blustered I thought, she wants to stay in.  Why should that be a surprise?  She was after all a Remainer.  It’s always good to be straight.  She might have said, “Yes I’d rather have stayed in.  But since we’re out, we’d better make the best of it.”

So what now?  Say the deal gets knocked back by Westminster.  Mrs May could resign.  I think that’s unlikely.  Remember determination, stamina, resilience, and sheer grit.  She might go back to the EU and try to renegotiate.  But Mr Juncker has as good as said, “This is the only show in town.  That’s the deal.  Take it or leave it.”  Some people think he’s bluffing.  He doesn’t look like a man who is bluffing.

She might try to extend Article 50.  But if there’s only going to be one deal on the table, what’s the point?

She might call another referendum, and broaden the options – In, Out, Shake it all about, Canada-plus, super-Norway…  But there would be no guarantee at all of getting an answer clearer than the one that already exists.

And she could call a general election.  This seems to me to be the least likely option of all.  The Conservative Party may be riven, but one thing it has always put ahead of all other considerations is self-preservation.  And Mr Corbyn might win the election.

So what’s left?  Only one thing: we crash out.

Cliff edge Brexit has always been regarded as the nightmare scenario, but not by everybody.  Some on the right would be happy with the cleanest of clean breaks.  Mrs May herself used to say “No deal is better than a bad deal” but I note she has stopped saying that.  After all, the prospect of the entire population signing on to the local food bank is beyond frightening.  So crashing out, heretofore, has not been an option, but the odds on it are shortening, because, if Parliament can’t make up its mind what to do, we will default to no-deal simply because we run out of time.

Who was it said politics is the art of the possible?  You stop an Irishman in the street to ask for directions, and he says, “If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.”  But we have no other choice but to solve the conundrum as it now presents itself.  It will be a terrible indictment of our Body Politic if it cannot come to an agreement within itself, and with Europe.  We may not much fancy Mrs May’s deal, but at least it’s on the table.  As Ken Clarke pointed out on Any Questions at the weekend, most people admire the PM’s tenacity.  Ken Clarke was reminded of a conversation he had with Malcolm Rifkind in which he referred to Mrs May as a “bloody difficult woman.”  A panel member characterised this as a sexist remark, but Mr Clarke defended himself by saying he knew plenty of bloody difficult men.  And besides, he said, it was meant as a compliment.  After all, both he and Mr Rifkind had worked for Mrs Thatcher!  I have a notion he was digging a hole for himself, but that he didn’t much mind.

Of more serious import was the accusation that Mrs May’s return from Brussels resembled Mr Chamberlain’s return from Munich in 1938, waving his piece of paper.  I thought that was a crass remark.  But then, it is seldom constructive in contemporary political discourse to invoke, even obliquely, the spectre of the Fuhrer.  Still, the reference did remind me of Winston’s critique of the Conservative Government in the 30s, and I wonder if it could be applied now to Parliament as a whole, verbatim:

So they the Government go on in strange paradox, decided to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent…  

In the cramped shoebox that is my bijou cottage – I call it the Yellow Submarine – stowage becomes an art form.  I’m minded to upsize – an unusual ambition for one who has matriculated in the University of the Third Age.  But upsize to what, and to where?  Wait until 29/3/19.  Then, when the road system has become a gigantic lorry park, and the supermarket shelves are empty, all will become clear.

In the meantime, to keep my lobby open and passable, I must ruthlessly dispose of junk.  And not only junk.  Things of value, sentimental or otherwise, must go.  There is, literally, no room for sentiment.  But there is an upside to all this.  I’ve become quite good at decluttering, simply because I have no choice.  People talk about “retail therapy”, but of course it’s addiction to retail therapy that lands us in this jam.  You buy your way into a corner and then you can’t get out, a prisoner of your own possessions.  Every therapeutic regimen has its unwanted effects, and the main side effects of retail therapy are guilt, and over-satiety.  Even as you make the purchase, and pass your debit card over the contactless console like a magic wand, the still small nagging voice of conscience interrogates you: you may want this commodity, but do you need it?

On the other hand, letting stuff go is largely a guiltless procedure.  Maybe it really is true that it is better to give than to receive.  This week I had another book cull, loaded up the car, and went to the local charity shop.  I started with a taster, and offered half a dozen hardback books of good quality.  They were gratefully accepted.

“Do you gift aid?”

“No.”  I affected the demeanour of a mysterious tax exile.

“Not a problem.”  (I’m on a solo and forlorn anti-gift-aid mission.  The tax system is far too complicated.  If HMRC didn’t sanction gift aid then presumably she could recoup all that tax and be in a position with the increased revenue to tax us less.  Then we in turn would be in a position to increase our donations to charity if we so wished.  Then everybody would know who was paying what to whom.)

“I’ve got another 200 books in the car.  Do you want them?”  I felt it was only fair to warn them they were about to be inundated.  But they seemed to be delighted, so I started to lug them in, in rubbish sacks.  I don’t think there was a single dud among them.  They fell broadly into three categories: (a) books I’d read and probably wouldn’t read again (example – Madame Bovary);  (b) books I’d always meant to read but would probably never get round to reading (example Lanark);  (c) books I’d partially read/skim-read/plundered in one way or another (example Finnegans Wake).  I suppose if I’d had a library at home large enough I wouldn’t have parted with any of them.  But in that case, I might have been the laird of a vast estate, occupying a huge pile and flaunting, in addition to the library, a music room, gymnasium, swimming pool, cinema, and private chapel (God knows I’d be in need of the latter).  Anyway I was glad to get them off my hands and if somebody out there buys one of these books at a snip, reads it, and profits by it, then I am delighted.

Next up, I dismembered my bulky photograph albums.  I can’t justify the shelf space.  I separated the cardboard from the plastic and put the remnants into the green and blue bins respectively.  That left a vast pile of old photos.  If I didn’t recognise the people, or the scene within the photograph, I binned it.  It’s always a poignant experience, going through old photos.  You have this recollection of the richness of an epoch in your life that you were barely conscious of at the time.  I tipped all the surviving loose photos into a filing cabinet.  My “filing cabinet of memory” is not metaphorical but real.

Next up: textiles.  I counted fifty ties.  I only ever wear four – two medical college ties, the clan tartan, and a black tie for funerals.  (The black tie is not entirely black; a subtle texture is apparent, like Hawking radiation.)  Also I’ve kept my father’s RAF tie.  As someone once in the RAF volunteer reserve I might even be entitled to wear it, but I never have.

Next up, tired old suits…

You get the sense I’m on a roll.  I said that, unlike retail therapy, declutter therapy is without side effects, but I’m not sure that’s entirely true.  My penchant for relinquishment can get out of hand.  I think I’m wedded to the Shakespearian notion of periodically being cast away, and washed up naked on an unknown beach, to start again, to fend.  The perusal of all these ancient photographs reminded me of the episodic nature of my life, and the way I strived to attain some position, only to give it away and start afresh.  I don’t think the idea of constructing a life, adopting a strategy, and planning the next move, has ever crossed my mind.  Eighteen months after I got the senior lectureship at Auckland University Medical School, I quit, and vanished, and buried myself in a tiny hamlet in North Skye.  A colleague told me I was utterly mad.  I guess he was right.  I remarked to somebody that I suspected I might have a self-destructive nature, and she replied, “You’ve only just noticed?”

There’s that guy in the gospels, a virtuous young man who kept all the commandments, who asked Our Lord what else he needed to do to gain the life more abundant.  Well, he was nearly there.  All he needed to do was sell all his possessions and give the proceeds to the poor.  That came as a bit of a blow, and he departed, exceeding sorrowful.  Sometimes I think that if I’d got the call, I would have said, “Cool!  I’m up for that!”  But, precisely because of my dangerously mendicant tendencies, Our Lord would never have commissioned me.  He would probably have looked at my twelve year old self and asked, “How much does Mr Winning pay you for your paper round?”

“£1.00 a week, with a £1.00 bonus in the week of your nativity.”

“Bank it every week for a year.  When you attain £53, come back and see me, and I’ll tell you what to do.”

But that would have been too much of an ask for somebody who never really grasped Gerard Manley Hopkins’ notion that “sheer plod makes plough down sillion shine”, and I, too, would have departed, exceeding sorrowful.

Actually I held on to Finnegans Wake.  You never know.

The symbol of the poppy has been the subject of much heated conversation over the weekend.  The first question on Radio 4’s Any Questions was, “Has the time come for a more inclusive symbol to mark Remembrance Day?”  The programme was coming from a village in Devon, in the middle of a storm and a power cut, hence was conducted by candle light, and only went on air thanks to a local farmer’s tractor and generator.  This scenario evoked a Dunkirk spirit and a Blitzy atmosphere the more so as apparently the generator failed three minutes after the end of the programme.  They got through by the skin of their teeth.

One of the panellists, Aaron Bastani, had apparently put out a piece on U-tube characterising the poppy as “racist”, a symbol of “white triumphalism”.   Another panellist accused him of having said, “F*** Invictus”.  I did notice that Jonathon Dimbleby effectively abandoned the neutrality of the chair and joined the panel in confronting Mr Bastani, which I venture to say he ought not to do.  The other panel members are perfectly capable of articulating the opposing point of view.  The audience member who posed the question pointed out that the debate had gone off in a different direction and never really addressed the issue.  That is so often what happens when things get heated.

On Saturday evening I attended the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall and a concert given by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in conjunction with Poppyscotland, commemorating the centenary of the 1918 armistice and the end of the First World War.  Driving home, I caught The Moral Maze, again on Radio 4.  Once again, the poppy came under scrutiny in a debate concerning whether we should continue to commemorate the Great War, or whether we should let it go.  The first witness was the historian James Heartfield, author of The Blood Stained Poppy, who thought that Remembrance Day was a military victory parade attended by a degree of hokum.  Melanie Phillips, who writes for The Times, expressed outrage at his point of view, and indeed sounded pretty angry.  James Heartfield remained remarkably calm, and thanked Ms Phillips for expressing herself so eloquently.

Clearly, our collective memory of the First World War continues to rouse strong passions.  Any Questions and The Moral Maze reminded me of the response of the establishment to another BBC creation, The Monocled Mutineer.  This was a dramatization by Alan Bleasdale of the 1978 book of the same name by William Allison and John Fairley, broadcast in four episodes in 1986.  The first instalment went out on August 31^st and was watched by an audience of over ten million.  It centred round an historic event, the Étaples Mutiny.  Apparently all official records of the Étaples Board of Enquiry pertaining to this event have been destroyed, which makes it difficult to know whether or not the historic events of the television drama were inaccurate or, as we would say now, “fake news”.  But I recall a lot of people at the time got very hot under the collar.  The apologists on behalf of The Monocled Mutineer made the case that certain liberties taken with historical fact were justified as poetic licence, and the depiction of the cruelty and folly of the war was broadly accurate.  What I will never forget about The Monocled Mutineer was the re-enactment of the execution of a soldier, shot at dawn, for cowardice.  It was utterly horrific.

One hundred years past, we still haven’t recovered from the First World War.  On Sunday evening, the BBC broadcast on Radio 3 a live performance from Cardiff of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, while on Radio 4 they conducted a retrospective of the series Tommies, which has already run for more than four years.  Meanwhile in Westminster Abbey, a service of remembrance took place, attended by members of the Royal Family, who were also present at a similar event on Saturday evening at the Royal Albert Hall, and again, of course, at the cenotaph on Sunday morning.  Across the channel, M. Macron and Frau Merkel had met, symbolically, in the replica of the railway carriage at Compiѐgne, and subsequently, with Mr Trump, Mr Putin, et al, in Paris. For myself, I was present for the two minutes silence at Dunblane Cathedral.  Meanwhile, all over the beaches of the British Isles, images of figures from the war were etched into the sand, transiently, to be obliterated by the incoming tide.  And still, this morning, the papers are full of the War.  We debate whether we should remember, or forget, but I doubt if we really have a choice.  Perhaps we suffer from a collective Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Of all the images broadcast by the BBC over the weekend, the most striking one to me was that of Wilfred Owen, etched into the sand at Folkestone.  It seems to me that the people getting upset with one another on BBC debating programmes would do well to take a two minute silence, and go back to the poets.  Over the past hundred years, the war poets have become rather sanitised, elegiac figures.  It is easy to forget just how subversive their work was.  If you doubt it, read Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est.

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

One thing the panellists on The Moral Maze seemed in broad agreement about was that there would never be another First World War.  I thought this was an extraordinarily complacent point of view.  A century ago, didn’t they think the same of the war to end all wars, when they signed the armistice at Compiѐgne?  Perhaps even then, Corporal Hitler was making plans to reconvene at the same location.  It took him only 22 years to get there.

Another famous peroration worth reading alongside Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est is Churchill’s most famous speech of all, culminating in the rallying call, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds…”  This is another poem – if you will – that has become sanitised, its true meaning lost.  We think of it as a stirring and inspirational offer of Hope, but in fact it is an instruction to an entire population to indulge in Total War to the last man, and woman.  When – rather than if – the enemy landed, it would be met sequentially at every location – beaches, landing grounds, fields, streets, hills…  “We shall never surrender.”  Randolph’s wife Pamela asked Churchill how he could expect her to do this when she was unarmed.  “You can always use a carving knife.”  Churchill said, “I do not intend to be taken alive.”  And, “If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood…”  The imagery is exactly that of Owen’s Dulce Et Decorum Est.

Owen wrote a preface to a putative anthology of his poetry, that he never saw.  It says everything that needs to be said, and renders all these BBC panel shows rather redundant.

This book is not about heroes.  English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.

Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.

My subject is War, and the pity of War.

The Poetry is in the pity.                                                                                                                                                                                                               

I read two books last week, one short, one long.

The short one was No.  More.  Plastic.  What you can do to make a difference, by Martin Dorey, Founder of the @twominutesolution (Ebery Press 2018).   According to Mr Dorey, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is estimated to cover more than 60 times the UK’s land mass.  Soon, there are going to be more pieces of plastic in the ocean, than fish.  While recycling has a place, and indeed is essential, we actually need to stop producing this superabundance of plastic.  What can we all do on a personal level?

You might answer, on a personal level, nothing.  The problem is so vast; what does it matter what I do?  But then, you might as well say that of any human problem.  The sum total of human achievement, or human folly, is nothing more than an integral of all the infinitesimal activities of us all as individuals.

So I attempted a plastic-free week.  I have two very good farm shops close to where I live so I didn’t really need to visit a supermarket.  I can buy vegetables unwrapped, or in brown paper bags.  The butcher counter uses very light transparent bags – as does the local fish van – of whose constituents I am uncertain.  I’ll have to check it out.  I can get soup in tins or in cardboard cartons.  The bread is unwrapped.  I get bottled milk, and butter in greaseproof paper rather than a plastic tub.  Gewürztraminer still comes in bottles.  God bless New Zealand.

So the inner man is sorted.  What else?  Clothes.  To be honest, I have enough clobber to see me out, but if I start to look particularly shabby with my frayed collars I’ll buy a shirt hanging on a (wooden) coat hanger and avoid the shirt in the box with all that plastic packaging.  Moreover I’ll make sure its 100% cotton.  Apparently non-biodegradable fibres work their way from the washing machine into the ocean.

Soap.  I found some packaged in cardboard.  Deodorant.  I actually found some in a glass bottle – my find of the week.  Shaving.  These sophisticated five-bladed devices are full of plastic.  I resurrected my electric razor but it’s not that effective and all week I’ve been walking around with a permanent 5 o’clock shadow, looking a little down on my luck.  I remember from the dim and distant past having a metal safety razor into which you inserted metal blades.  I seem to recall giving myself multiple lacerations with this device and wandering around for the first after-shave hour with pieces of loo paper stuck to my face.

Loo paper!  Not a problem.  I can get rolls wrapped in paper.

So it goes on.  Nobody said it would be easy.  But in fact it’s been quite fun.  We don’t need all that packaging.  I might start proselytising, and become a right pain in the neck.  At the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday I got a filter coffee, served in a cardboard beaker, and I tried to turn down the plastic lid.  But no.  Apparently it was a health and safety issue.  I sympathised.  I didn’t say to the barista, “It’s health and safety gone mad!”  I just said, “You put the lid on and I’ll burn my fingers taking it off.”  She laughed.

Then I got the gift of some Christmas Cards (already) from a well-respected charitable organization, accompanied by a plastic pen.  I’m thinking of writing to them (with the pen) to suggest they stop sending out the pens.  The November issue of the British Journal of General Practice arrived, wrapped in transparent cellophane.  I might write to the BJGP and suggest they change to paper envelopes.

But before I turn completely into a smug, self-satisfied virtue-signaller, I must mention the other book of the week, the long one.  It was Churchill, Walking with Destiny by the historian Andrew Roberts (Allen Lane, 2018).  It comes in at 1105 pages, but I romped through it, partly because it’s very readable, but also because I’ve read so much Churchilliana over the years that the subject matter is not unfamiliar to me.  Yet I’m not sure if I know anything at all about Churchill as an environmentalist.  His greatest insight lay in his recognition in the 1930s of the true nature of Nazism, an insight that made him very unpopular and an outcast in his own party; he was very nearly deselected.  He had another great insight after the war when he made his Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri; this also made him initially very unpopular.  On both occasions, he was vindicated.  But would he have recognised the threat inherent in a plastic drinking straw?

In his autobiographical My Early Life, he gives this rallying call: “Come on now all you young men, all over the world…  ‘The earth is yours and the fullness thereof’… You cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her…  She has lived and thrived only by repeated subjugations.”

Well, that’s just tosh.

While driving round the Kilcreggan Peninsula on Saturday afternoon I caught The Road on BBC Radio 4.  This was an adaptation for radio of a drama for television by Nigel Kneale (pen name Nigel Neale).  It was first broadcast in September 1963, but there is no recording extant.  Prior to The Road, the BBC had shown the six part serial for which Kneale is perhaps best known, Quatarmass and the Pit.  I was 7 years old when the Beeb put on Quatarmass.  I was simultaneously enthralled, and frightened out of my wits.  A couple of years ago I tracked down Quatarmass somewhere on the net, and watched it again.  It hadn’t lost any of its power.  I was still frightened out of my wits.  Of course the technical production would now be regarded as clumsy, even amateur.  But, as in the theatre, you voluntarily suspend your disbelief, when you know you are witnessing the creation of a powerful imagination.

I was gripped by The Road.  It seemed to share some common features with Quatarmass.  The Road is set in an English village in the early eighteenth century.  The peasantry know the local woodland is haunted, and the village squire, of enquiring nature and scientific bent, decides to investigate.  He is visited by an urbane, rational and sceptical gentleman (I take it from London) and his man Jethro who I gathered (it’s hard to tell on the radio) is black.  They interview a local wench who describes terrifying “manifestations” in the woodland.  She has witnessed a road, a mass of people in flight, the trundle of chariots, and a massacre.  There is a superstition among the people that echoes may still be heard, of a conflict between the invading Romans, and Queen Boadicea.  Yet there was never a road in this woodland.  The visiting toff puts it all down to the hysterical ravings of an impressionable young girl, but the squire is not so sure.  Following a protracted conversation in which the visitor extols the virtues of scientific progress and its potential to solve human problems,    they go to investigate, and enter the woodland.

In case you want to catch it on the i-player, I insert a spoiler alert here.  If you don’t wish to know the score…

We discover quite suddenly – it is the pivotal moment of the drama – that our preoccupation with the past should have been directed towards the future.  They witness a nuclear attack.  As in Quatarmass, the culmination of The Road is apocalyptic.

I think I must be of a nervous disposition.  I had a disturbed night.  I am still the same 7 year old child, watching Quatarmass from behind the sofa.  The distinctive quality of Nigel Kneale’s work is its memorability.  If it refuses to leave us, it is because it seems to tap into our deepest, primeval fears.  There is a sense that the supernatural elements are metaphorical representations of those aspects of human nature that we do not understand, and are beyond our control.  Perhaps his main theme is that civilisation is a veneer, and we are on the brink of complete anarchy.  Something comes along, something happens, and with all our scientific rationality we are still incapable of avoiding Armageddon.  That chilling notion seems to me to be particularly relevant to the world in its current state.

It is hardly surprising that Kneale adapted Wuthering Heights, and 1984, for television.  1984 was so disturbing that questions were asked in the House about its suitability for the general populace.  In The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968), Kneale describes a near-future dystopia in which the populace are fed a diet of reality TV pornography.  In The Live TV Show, a family are cast away on an isolated island and observed 24/7, struggling to survive.  He saw it all coming.

It’s ironic that I should have picked up The Road on the car radio in Kilcreggan.  I went round the peninsula, clockwise.  It was a very beautiful autumn day, and this is a singularly beautiful part of the world, blighted by the endless barbed wire surrounding Faslane and, the spookiest place in the United Kingdom, Coulport.  After Coulport the road turns abruptly south-east, then north-east back towards Garelochhead.  A not very welcoming road sign announces, “You are entering MOD territory.”  You find yourself on a fast road, very well maintained.  In fact, you find yourself on The Road.  This is where the convoys without a name, in the inimical dark green livery, commence the journey to Aldermaston.

Last week, Mr Trump pulled out of the Gorbachev-Reagan 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.  But nobody seemed to pay much attention.  There has been another mass-shooting in the USA, when Jewish people were specifically targeted in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania.  Mr Trump’s solution is to arm the synagogues.  It could have come straight out of a television drama by Nigel Kneale.

Word of the week: Backstop.

Chambers: backstop a screen, wall, etc. acting as a barrier in various sports or games, e.g. shooting, baseball etc.: (the position of) a player, e.g. in baseball who stops the ball: something providing additional support, protection, etc.

The last time – no, the second last time – I visited Ireland it was to climb her highest mountain – Carrauntoohil (1038 metres), in the heart of Macgillycuddy’s Reeks.  In the absence of a bridge that will one day I’m sure cross between the Mull of Kintyre, and Antrim, I drove to Cairnryan and took the ferry to Belfast, then drove south west to Kerry.  Just south of Newry the A1 became the N1 and the speed limits were given in kilometres rather than miles per hour, but other than that, I wasn’t conscious that I had crossed a border.

Kerry is very beautiful.  The summit of Carrauntoohil is dominated by a huge cross; standing under it and looking south west, the view to the Irish coast is stunning.  I stayed in Killarney, and the following morning drove east to pick up the ferry from Rosslare to Fishguard.  I could as easily have been taking the ferry from Stornoway to Ullapool.

I wonder what that trip is going to be like after March 29^th next year.

With regard to the land border between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, the EU and the UK signed up to the backstop agreement in December 2017.  The agreement was that, regardless of the detail of the Brexit deal, the border would remain frictionless, and the Good Friday agreement would be protected.  You can see right away (at least, people living on the border saw right away) that this poses a difficulty.  The main motive force for Brexit was that we “take back control of our borders.”  This presumably includes our only land border with the European Union.  The EU’s proposed backstop was that Northern Ireland stay in the Customs Union, large parts of the single market, and the EU VAT system.  This effectively transplants the border into the Irish Sea.  Such an arrangement however crosses the one red line of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, that there will be no border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.  Is it not profoundly ironic that Mrs May called a general election in 2017 in order to increase her majority and bolster her negotiating position in Europe, only to lose her overall majority in Parliament and to become reliant on the support of the ten returned DUP Westminster MPs?  If Mrs May loses the support of the DUP, her already precarious grip on power may be critically damaged.  Mrs May’s response has been to propose that the whole of the UK remain aligned with the Customs Union for a limited time after 2020.  She is effectively kicking backstop into the long grass (excuse the mixed metaphor – I’ll come back to that) and postponing making a decision.  This does not satisfy the Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar: the backstop cannot have a time limit.  It occurs to me that here is a conundrum that, like squaring the circle or finding the roots of an irrational number, is insoluble.   Unless the UK stay in the EU, or Northern Ireland unite with the Republic, any other solution will be the softest of soft Brexits, a fudge.

One proposed solution involves “maximum facilitation” (Max-fac).  This involves the use of digital technology in order to render the border so virtual as to be invisible.  This idea seems to me to be quite sinister.  You replace the barbed wire and the goon boxes and all the paraphernalia of border checkpoints, with the apparatus of surveillance.  So next time I climb Carrauntoohil I will be watched all the way.  CCTV will observe me driving my car (driver identified and registration number clocked) on to the ferry at Cairnryan, disembarking at Belfast, crossing the border at Newry…  Then picked up again at Rosslare and monitored as I re-enter the UK in Wales.

Max-fac is a kind of reciprocal Emperor’s New Clothes.  The Emperor was a nudist streaker who told everybody he was wearing a fancy suit; his subjects were so keen to please him that they developed hysteria and believed they all saw the suit.  With Max-fac, the Irish border will be real, but the people need to be convinced that it does not exist.  When the EU asks the UK to come up with a solution to the problem of the Irish border, I wonder if they know they are asking the impossible.  This is why nobody really understands the meaning of “backstop”.  It is a metaphor that refuses to function because it refers to the solution to a problem that cannot exist.  Rather than backstop, a better term would have been the Scots’ bourach.  Look it up.

The reason why the Brexit referendum in 2016 went the way it did was that all the passion was on the leave side.  Or at least, those remainers who were passionate didn’t seem to get air time.  Perhaps Jo Cox was passionate.  Mr Cameron (remember him?) used to ask people to “stop banging on” about Europe.  Mr Corbyn gave the EU “7 out of 10.”  How can you possibly promote a cause by awarding it 7 out of 10?  I remember plenty of people saying that membership of the EU “on the whole” made sound economic sense, that if we wanted a say in European affairs we had better grit our teeth and stay in.  I don’t remember anybody championing the EU’s four freedoms, the freedom of movement of goods, people, services, and capital.  I can’t recall anybody stating (aside from the migrants risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean) that to be a European, and to have these freedoms, was a wonderful thing.

When I was a kid I hated getting up in the morning.  The adjustment to vertical life was agony.  And I could never figure out why.  In part I knew it was because I was knackered all the time because I went to bed too late, but I knew that was not the whole story.  What was it?  I didn’t hate school, although I was as susceptible to its amalgam of boredom and danger as everybody else.  I was never bullied, unless the strident ranting of some of our teachers constituted a kind of institutionalised bullying.  But I don’t think so: we were all yelled at with parity.  And surely the essence of being bullied lies in being singled out.  The essence of being bullied is not that you are in agony, but that you are alone.  Graham Greene describes one of his characters as being “not one of the torturable classes”, and if it was a conceit that I held myself to be invulnerable, it was one that gave me confidence.  I had sufficient popularity because I never courted it.

Not so the new boy, Stobo.  He threw a tennis ball without warning at me in the playground and I did well to stop it but I couldn’t hold it.

“Butterfingers!”

He was extremely well turned out.  The white shirt was freshly laundered and there was even a crease in his grey flannel shorts.  He lived up in Kelvindale, in the street next door to my father’s friends Mr and Mrs Train.  His father dropped him off at school in a Wolseley.  None of it made any sense.  He should have been at the High School, or the Academy.  And he was a Christian.  I had heard him “bear witness” in the playground.  He carried a neat pocket-size New Testament.  He asked me, “Are you saved?”

“That remains to be seen,” I replied, enigmatically.  “You?”

“Natch!”

Even at the time, his slang was anachronistic.  He belonged to the interwar era of muscular Christianity.  On the playing fields he would play hard, but never dirty, with an oval and not a round ball.  A wing three quarter rather than an outside right.  I looked at him pityingly and thought, “You are a martyr.  Get out now before the wolves pick up your scent.  Get your father in his Wolseley to drop you off at Kelvinside Academy where you can survive with your own.”

I had anticipated a siege, a war of attrition, or the slow wearing down of a lamed fugitive by a remorseless pack.  I was not prepared for the suddenness, the viciousness, and the unutterable brutality of Stobo’s destruction.

He fell within the ambit of Taxi’s demesne, passed within the visual field of the Bad Thing, the school psychopath.  Taxi’s nostrils flared.  He sensed Stobo’s Otherness, and he was outraged.  He tore him to pieces.

Stobo lay weeping and bleeding in the shadow of the playground sheds for half an hour.  It wasn’t that my friends didn’t want to help him.  They were waiting for leadership.  I realised with a sinking heart that they were waiting for me.  The lot was going to fall on me.  Had already fallen on me.

I helped him up in his torn shirt and his bloodstained trousers and together we limped into the cloakrooms.  Word must have passed through to the girls’ playground because Joyce Cochran came through and helped to clean him up with a wet handkerchief.  Joyce was like Mother Theresa.  She had taught me to tie my tie and my shoelaces when I was five.  She had not humiliated me when I had poor sphincter control.  I don’t think Stobo told on his assailant and we would certainly never have clyped, but word must have reached the teachers because the Wolseley drew up at the school gate, there were raised voices in the Headmaster’s office, and the shrivelled, pathetic bedraggled creature was driven off.  We never saw him again.

I ran into Taxi at the school gate.  It was inevitable.  I gave him a long hard stare, all the time thinking, why are you doing this?  He’s not your problem.

“You lookin’ at me, Jim?”

I just carried on staring.

Taxi took out his chib, a door hinge.

“Ah um gonnae rearrange yoor f****** face.”

“Oh no you’re not.”  It wasn’t courage.  It wasn’t even bravado.  I was just playing a part in a masque.  I was with my pals Adam and Wally.  Taxi was alone.  He had no friends, only a couple of weasel minions and they weren’t there.  Adam said uneasily, “Let’s go.”  Taxi made a couple of threatening passes at my face with the door hinge.  I had a talent for brinkmanship and I knew they were only for show.  He was certainly a very frightening boy.  But there was a sense of caution there as well.  My father had told me that all bullies were cowards.  I wasn’t sure if that were so but I had the sense that they would always pick the easiest fights, like a big cat on the Serengeti selecting out the weakling, the runt, amid the panic-stricken herd.  All you had to do was hold your nerve.  We backed away from one another, slowly, saving face.

How can you develop an attitude towards your existence when you are not armed with criteria of value?  How can you know to be out of kilter, malcontent, if you don’t know anything better?  What is the origin of vision, of hope?  You get up in the morning feeling like death; you eat a bowl of cornflakes in warm milk that smells of wet dog fur; you put on your duffel coat and walk through the drizzle, day after day, to a building that resembles a penitentiary.  You have the prospect of doing this for thirteen years, a sentence handed down to you at a time in life when it might as well be an eternity.  There is no perceptible end to it.  Whence the resource that will confront your imagination with another existence?

Between the covers of a book.

Money was in the news a lot last week.  On Wednesday a bottle of whisky was sold at auction in Edinburgh for £848,000.  The Macallan Valerio Adami, 1926.  What on earth would you do with an £848,000 bottle of whisky?  Drink it?  Let’s see… what would be the cost of a dram?  I seem to recall that a “nip” is a fifth of a gill.  Can you remember what a gill is?  Hang on while I look it up…

Chambers – gill jil, n. a small measure, having various values; in recent times = ¼ pint. – gill’-house (obs.) a dram shop.  (O.Fr. gelle.)

How much booze in a bottle of whisky?  700 mls, I think.  How many nips in a bottle?  We need to know how many pints are in a litre.  Hang on while I Google it…

It says that 1 litre = 1.75975399 imperial pints.  So 700 mls contains 1.2318277 pints.  (You can tell I’m using a calculator.)  One fifth of a gill is a twentieth of a pint.  So a bottle of whisky holds 24.636554 nips.  Round this up to 25.  After all, a nip is such a parsimonious measure that I feel sure the barman would err on the side of profit.  This means that a nip of whisky will cost you £33,920.

I go through this rather laborious calculation to exemplify to you just how utterly bananas is the world of the super-rich.

Then a painting, “Girl with Balloon” by Banksy, went up for sale at auction and was sold at a price of £1.04 million.  Immediately after the gavel went down the painting self-destructed through a shredder.  The auctioneers said, “We’ve been Banksied.”  Just how much they, and the purchaser, were in on the stunt I don’t know, but I was intrigued to hear that one opinion noised abroad is that the shredded remains might turn out to be more valuable than the original.  As I said, how utterly bananas is the world of the super-rich?  It occurs to me that there’s a nice contrast between Banksy’s Girl with Balloon and Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art.  One is constructed to be reduced deliberately to fragments.  The other is accidentally destroyed, to be lovingly restored (word on the street has it) fragment by fragment.  Not everybody is happy with that decision.  Shouldn’t we spend all that money on Glasgow’s deprived East End?  I wonder what Charles Rennie Mackintosh would have said?  I hazard a guess: raze the burned-out shell to the ground; then hold a competition for the design of a new building, and I’ll go in for it.

I listened, on Saturday evening, to a programme on Radio 4, largely centred round ex-Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s handling of the 2008 financial crash.    Well, the programme was full of drama. “We were running out of time.”  “The banks were running on empty.”  I was rather hoping to find out why all of a sudden, and out of the blue, the banks ran out of money.  I can’t say I’m any the wiser.  The crash seemed to be entirely a consequence of human folly.  It wasn’t as if some natural catastrophe had resulted in a widespread famine that left us all destitute and starving.

Then on Sunday, from my Zacchaeus vantage point at the back of Dunblane Cathedral, I heard a sermon preached on forgiveness, with a text drawn from the New Testament lesson – Matthew 18: 23 – 35, a parable concerning a servant who owes his master a vast amount of money.  He begs for time to repay it all, and his master takes pity on him and wipes the debt; whereupon the servant goes to a man who owes him a paltry sum, and casts him into prison.  Needless to say, when the master hears about it, he gets angry and gives his man short shrift.  This provides a context for the Lord’s Prayer’s “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive out debtors.”  I happened to be sharing a pew with a bank manager who whispered to me, “I wonder if forgiveness should be extended to the bankers.”  His own view was that nothing had been learned from the financial crash, and it might well all happen again.  Forgiveness is all well and good. What about atonement?

During his decade as Chancellor, Gordon Brown, a son of the manse, frequently talked up financial prudence.  Funnily enough, Our Lord didn’t seem that fussed.  In a rather erotically charged episode in John chapter 12, Martha’s sister Mary poured a generous supply of costly spikenard over his feet and wiped it in with her hair.  Didn’t Judas have a point when he said the nard should have been sold and the money given to the poor?  The author adds that this wasn’t what Judas had in mind at all – he wanted to hive off the cash into his own purse.  Just how the author figured that out I’m not quite sure.

On Sunday, the Cathedral held a fire drill.  I gave them top marks.  It took place at the close of the service, so that we were able to evacuate the building, and not return.  The session clerk explained exactly what would happen.  We would sing the closing hymn (Love divine, all loves excelling, to the tune Blaenwern), the minister would give the benediction, the choir would sing the amen, and the organist would lead the congregation in a repetition of the first verse of Love divine, during which the alarm would sound.  The elders would open all the cathedral doors, and we were instructed to evacuate expeditiously by the nearest exit.  It went like clockwork.  Inevitably I heard somebody say, “It’s health and safety gone mad!”  I have a notion that that very expression might have been used while the Titanic was being built and somebody suggested there should be sufficient life boats to accommodate all passengers and crew.  “It’s health and safety gone mad!  This ship is unsinkable.  Moving on to the arrangement of the deck chairs…”

My dentist, a master craftsman, is adept at conducting a one-sided conversation.

“How’s the book going?”

“Mwuh.”

“It’s number three, isn’t it?”

“Zhja.”

“Nearly done?”

“Yumf.”

“How do you know when you are finished?”

“’Ischwhen’z’ajz goodajzitgetchz.”

I broke a tooth on Tuesday evening.  Upper right four.  I scared even myself by grinning in the mirror.  I thought, “I’ve got a book to complete.  I haven’t got time to fall to bits!”  I popped into my dentist the following afternoon and grimaced at the receptionist.  She booked me in for Thursday morning.  How good is that?  I’d anticipated that I might have to be gloomed for a lengthy reconstruction involving scaffolding and an enormous bill, but no!  I could be managed conservatively, there and then!  It probably won’t require any novocaine (remember that extraordinary scene in Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri), but let me know if you are in discomfort.  It was a painless procedure, expeditious, and entirely successful.  I am full of admiration and gratitude.  And it was ludicrously inexpensive.  Something like £13.45.  I’d have thought that wouldn’t even cover the costs of materials.  An amusing (and slightly terrifying) episode took place back at reception.  The receptionist keyed the amount into the credit card reader, handed it over, and I rather too speedily keyed in my pin number.  The machine added the four digit number to the amount, and all of a sudden I had paid out a sum that would allow my dentist to retire.  Fortunately the transaction was cancelled.  I think.

But to return to matters of High Art, maybe I should have asked my dentist how he knows when he is finished.  I think he, like Mozart, could reasonably reply, “When I have achieved perfection.”  We mere mortals must settle for less.  I thought about his question afterwards and actually jotted down a list of possible answers.  Your task is done when:

1. You have created a beginning, a middle, and an end, and you’ve joined them all up.
2. You have trawled through the text and eradicated everything that makes you wince.
3. You can’t think of a way of making it any better.
4. Frankly, you’ve had enough.
5. You realise that more is less.
6. If you keep going it’s going to affect your mental health.
7. You need to file a tax return, then take a holiday.

Undoubtedly the greatest revisionists are composers.  You can easily understand why this is so.  A piece of music doesn’t really exist except when it is being performed.  Therefore every performance is a new edition.  So composers are inclined to listen again, and then have second thoughts.  Thus Beethoven struggled to write an overture to his opera and came up with Leonora No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, and then went off at a complete tangent and wrote the overture to Fidelio.  Stravinsky fiddled with his Firebird – 1910, 1919, 1945…  Bruckner took the advice of friends and colleagues and tweaked his symphonies; maybe he should have stuck to his guns.  Rachmaninoff was famous for cuts; as a concert pianist he would cut his own compositions live in concert, extempore, if he sensed his audience growing restless.  Schubert did something unusual. He left the eighth symphony unfinished.  But perhaps this was because he realised that the Unfinished Symphony was, in fact, finished.

What about painters?  When do they stop?  I know very little about fine art, but I can imagine that a pitfall for the artist would be the temptation to keep touching something up until it becomes cluttered with redundant daubs.  I guess that could be applied to any creative process.  Perhaps the sculptor faces a slightly different challenge.  He strives to reveal the sculpture which already exists within the stone.  If he keeps going after the point at which he should have stopped, he ceases to be an artist and becomes a vandal.  Less is less.

Which brings us to writers.  Technology has made revision, practically, very easy.  You get your tome up on the computer screen and fiddle about with word choice, and order, to your heart’s content.  This is called word processing.  It’s a feature of the digital world but in reality it is not new.  Churchill, for example, was a great word processor.  He would compose a speech and then endlessly fiddle with it, pacing up and down, barking at his secretaries, searching for euphony.  He famously berated one of his typists for typing in single, rather than in double space.  He needed the space to make revisions in pen and ink.

Mind you, revision by word processor can be overdone.  All you are doing is tinkering.  “He lunged at me with a bloodcurdling yell.”   (Not my dentist; he is the gentlest of souls.)  “He came at me with an enraged scream.”  “He screamed at me with a bloodcurdling lunge…”  You’re just shifting deckchairs.

Yet on the whole, writers are happy to let go.  They cast their bread upon the waters and don’t look back.  I give them (us?) credit for that.  Let it go.  “Stet”, as the proof readers say.  So how, and when, do you decide that your baby is viable, and robust and fit enough to survive on her own?  You read through the text; you might even enjoy the content.  Then you come upon a passage that grates.  You squirm.  You strive to iron out all the glitches.  When do you stop?  Face it, you could go on for ever, in the relentless hunt to identify and exterminate cliché.  Eventually, you reach a point where everything hangs together, there are no lacunae in the elucidation of plot, and it all more or less makes sense.

Enough, already.

I’ll just run a quick spell check.

We were walking along the towpath of a canal on the outskirts of Edinburgh on Saturday morning, when the autumn equinox slipped past unobtrusively in the opposite direction.  A party of about thirty.  We had foregathered on this glorious morning to build up an appetite for lunch, which was a celebration of a Very Important Birthday of a friend of mine from medical school days.  Would I say a few words between courses?  It crossed my mind to read the assembly my friend’s blurb (which, as it happens, I wrote 37 years ago) from our class yearbook.

I was so grateful to my friend, et ux, for dragging me out of my garret into the sunshine.  Speedbird has just topped 100,000 words.  Page 399.  That is seriously wordy.  I must avoid the lure of loquacity with the sole purpose of turning on to page 400.  I am at the stage of final revision.  I read the tome and see how far I can get before some ghastly, graunching, clunking cliché of a literary artifice brings me up short and I think, “Well, that never happened!”

Our rendezvous on Saturday was an hour away so I gave my journey 90 minutes (+ 5 to set up the sat nav).  Remember the Cahoots doctrine (Campbell Adds Hours On Over The Schedule) which instructs you to work out your journey time and then add half as much again.  Consequently I arrived half an hour early.  I had coffee in a nearby hostelry and sat and contemplated the timeline of Speedbird.  It is contemporaneous (contemporanean… contemporary?).  A key event occurs on 8/9/18.  So I was able to reconstruct the entire novel in real time and put a date to every single episode.  Part 3 in the life of the troubled doc runs from April 25 through to October 1st – which, from the prospect of the equinox, is presumptuous.  I used my diary to give each chapter a specific day.  So, for example, on September 6^th, my diary states “30 Euston Square… Climb Stac Pollaidh.”  Euston Square and Stac Pollaidh are about 650 miles apart, which implies a punishing schedule, but for the fact that Euston Square refers to me, and An Stac to ACS.  So Euston Square is real, and An Stac fantastical.  (Actually they are both fantastical: I refer you to my recent blog Caveat Emptor, but that’s another story.)  The distinction between that which is real and that which is imaginary is becoming blurred.  You can see that I am leading a Walter Mitty existence which is bordering on the delusional.

I might share some, but not all, of Speedbird’s precise dates with you, gentle reader.  I feel I ought to know more than I necessarily reveal.  In going through the book with a fine tooth comb I’m really copy-editing; Ms Hathaway cannot have blue eyes on page 385 when they were hazel on page 14.  It’s like a huge jigsaw puzzle.  As Mrs May and M. Barnier say, nothing is decided, until everything is decided (although we are beginning to suspect they will say, nothing is decided).

Anyway, after our stroll by the Union Canal, we repaired to a lovely old world hotel in Ratho and dined.  What a sweet occasion.  There were fine speeches, not least from the man himself, and one of considerable charm and wit from the older of his two wonderful daughters.  I got through mine more or less unscathed, but then all I had to do was read a text.

It was fun to look at the yearbook, and reminisce.  My friend was an academic high flier, and he chose to become a GP.  That sentence might have read: My friend was an academic high flier, but he chose to become a GP.  Medicine is going through a tough time at the moment, but it will survive and prosper so long as it chooses “and” over “but”.  The essence of my friend’s work, and his life, as his daughter pointed out, is kindliness.  He is a Fellow of the Royal College of General Practice.  The motto of the RCGP is “Cum Scientia, Caritas.”  His daughter, a classicist, will translate.