Author: jamescalumcampbell

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.

When the bell went I took a chance and ran up the alley on the south side of the school which was strictly out-of-bounds but I wasn’t seen and I missed the mobs on Clarence Drive and picked up a 59 bus on Hyndland Road and went to Arlington Baths.  They occupied a magnificent but decrepit Byzantine folly, with domes and minarets at the foot of a run-down street in Woodside.  In the Turkish baths, ancient bank managers with huge bellies and diminutive genitalia padded around the finely tiled mosaics.  Arlington was really a remnant of Empire, originally a bathing club for gentlemen and the sons of gentlemen.  I remember an ancient poster advertising the club (it could as easily have been an advert for Woodbine, or Bovril) featuring muscular moustachioed Victorian gentlemen zooming over the surface of the pool on rings and trapeze.  I was not the son of a gentleman; my father was a policeman and my mother a nurse, but we were upwardly mobile.  I threw my school bag on to the great pile of bags that littered the foot of the stairway up to the billiard rooms, grabbed my trunks from their hook in the office, jotted my membership number, 301J, in the book, changed, and went on the trapeze.  There were two trapezes in series, just as in a circus.  The pool was the safety net.  The manoeuvre of transferring between trapezes was known as “the fly”.  I had not yet mastered the fly, but I was getting close.

I played tig with some kids from Hillhead and the High School, and ran and dived and swam myself to exhaustion eventually getting thrown out because I jumped from the deep end trapeze stand to the third ring and swung like Tarzan the length of the pool which was verboten.  Mr Cox blew his whistle and kicked me out.  My eyes were stinging with chlorine and my palms callused with the repeated gripping of the rings and trapeze.  All the lights had haloes round them.

After baths I met my father in the reading room.  He was talking with his friend Mr Train.  Mr Train was a haberdasher and women’s couturier who was very tall with fair hair and a trimmed moustache.  He looked like Douglas Fairbanks Jnr.  He was immaculately dressed in sports jacket, cavalry twills with a razor-sharp crease, and faultlessly polished brown shoes.  He used to say to my father, “James, invest in your clothes.”  He always wanted my mother to model for him but she never did.

My father had been in the RAF and Mr Train had been a POW in Stalag Luft III.  He didn’t have a good word for Tuck, Bushell, Bader and the rest who kept irritating the Germans, who would take it out on everybody by exacting reprisals mostly of a petty nature which would increase the general level of discomfort.  He greeted me with a twinkle in his eye.  “Hello young man!  Can you do the fly yet?”

“No.”

“I was watching you.  You’re nearly there!”

We gave Mr Train a lift along Great Western Road to Kelvindale.  It had been drizzling and on the broad curve of Clevedon Road the rear end of the car drifted.  My father drove into the skid and the car righted itself.

“Well held, James!”

Next day I sat in the playground at morning break with my pal Big Jobs.  He had torn out the middle four pages of his F2 jotter and was writing laboriously.  I glanced over his shoulder.

Discipline is the fundamental basis of any well-organized society.   

Discipline is the fundamental basis of any well-organized society.

Discipline is the fundamental basis of any well-organized society.

Discipline is the basis of any well-organized society.

Discipline…

I asked sympathetically, “How many?”

“Hundred.  96 to go.”

“Blimey.  Who was it?”

“Gobstopper.”

The vice-captain. He was the only prefect sufficiently feared and hated to merit a nickname.  He was squat and prematurely bald and sadistic and aggressive and frankly looked ridiculous in his school tie and half-colours.  He looked like a real estate agent.  Shortly afterwards he became one.  He would hand out lines as soon as look at you.  At least he wasn’t allowed to beat us.  That had gone out shortly before the abolition of hanging.  Some people thought society was going to the dogs.  We were all getting soft.  I asked Big Jobs what he had been caught at.

“Having a ciggy in the bogs.”

Well now that’s ridiculous.  Everybody knew Big Jobs smoked.  Big Jobs had been smoking since he was about 5.  He smoked on Clarence Drive to and from school and none of the teachers bothered.  He was like one of these Hispanic boys in the Remove at Public School – you read about them in The Hotspur – who was allowed to smoke Cuban cigars for cultural reasons.  Big Jobs really ought to have had the same dispensation.  I volunteered, “Gimme some paper and I’ll do a page for you.”

“He’ll recognise the handwriting.”

“No he won’t.  I’m a good forger.  Let’s see…”  I copied Big Jobs’ backward slanting scrawl and handed it over for his perusal.

“Not bad.  Okay, thanks.”

And as I wrote, I wondered if it were true.  Was discipline really the fundamental basis?  I didn’t care for the idea.  If it were fundamental, then discipline existed for its own sake.  But surely we chose discipline, we chose to be self-disciplined, in order to achieve a higher aim.  If the sole purpose of our society was the perpetuity of discipline, then were we not merely the rank and file of a vast goose-stepping army strutting around some parade ground just for strutting’s sake?  Who would benefit from such an arrangement?

The Politburo watching the show, I suppose.  That was a very uncomfortable notion.  Suppose the only thing that society asked of us was that we strut in a specific way.  We strut in the playground so as not to arouse Gobstopper’s wrath. We strut, albeit with more subtle gait, in the classroom for our teachers, subsequently in the work place for our employers.  But if there is nothing behind the strut, then this is a masque of death.  And what happens if you find yourself out of step?  Well, Gobstopper hands down 100 lines.  He might well have dictated, “Harshness is the fundamental basis of any well-organized society.”

Harshness is the fundamental basis of any well-organized society…

Big Jobs glanced across.  “Steady mate, you’re writing the wrong thing.”

“Sorry.”

I’m sure Big Jobs would have settled for two of the belt.  I know I would have.  Short and sharp.  A double dose of the tawse; two swipes of the Lochgelly.  Over and done with.  Lines were soul-destroying.  You did them, all the while thinking, “This is a complete and utter waste of time.”  That was the point, the poignancy of the punishment.  It was like painting coal.  It struck me that I hadn’t had the belt for a while.  I got a reprieve in MacTavish’s one day.  I’d been fooling around, and MacTavish said in an undertone, “If you don’t settle down, I’ll warm your fingers.”  I mistook his tone.  I should have recognised the menace of understatement.

“Okay, that’s it.  Step out.”  The desk drawer was wrenched open and slammed shut.  He swished the fork-tongued instrument of discipline through the air like a golfer warming up with a driver at the tee.

“Cross them.”

I did as I was told.

He raised his right arm.  The tawse disappeared momentarily behind his shoulder.  I tensed in readiness.

Suddenly MacTavish went pale.

“Good God, boy, what have you done to your hands?”

“Mm?”  I glanced at them.  The palms were covered in blisters and calluses from the repeated frictional trauma of the rings and trapeze at Arlington.

MacTavish relaxed his stance and put the belt back in his drawer.

“Sit down and hold your tongue.”

It never occurred to us that our teachers’ right to chastise us might be withdrawn.  But even then there was a debate raging amongst the directors in 129 Bath Street.  All these kids from deprived backgrounds suffering abuse at home – did they really need another clip round the ear?  “Never did us any harm!” said the pro-tawse lobby, with their irrepressible facial tics, intermittently losing control of their bladder.

We were changing for gym one day, and a bit noisy, and Paddy Elder came round from the PE staff room and said, “I’ll say this once.  Shut up.”

There was a lull, but the hubbub started up again.  Somebody pushed my friend Donald against the dressing room door and it slammed into the wall with a crash.  Paddy marched back in and summarily gave Donald six of the best.

There was dead silence.

Then my friend Brian MacFarlane met my gaze and shook his head and whispered, “That’s not right.”

 

 

 

A couple of months ago, minded to attend a BBC Proms performance of the Britten War Requiem on September 6^th, I went on line and bought a ticket.  Or thought I did.

This was the last time Peter Oundjian conducted the Royal Scottish National Orchestra as their Musical Director.  He closed the RSNO 2017-18 season on June 2^nd in Glasgow with a performance of Mahler 9.  On that occasion, the (also outgoing) orchestra’s chief executive encouraged the audience to make the trip to London.  If you have trouble getting a ticket, he said, let me know.

I Googled “BBC Proms” and rather carelessly visited the first listed website.  To make my trip worthwhile, I also purchased a ticket for the all-Berlioz Prom of September 5^th, featuring the viola player Antoine Tamestit, and the stupendous mezzo Joyce DiDonato.  I organized to stay two nights with the Royal College of General Practice, and one night with the Royal Society of Medicine.  I bought an airline ticket and a rail connection from Stansted.

I was slightly puzzled that my Berlioz ticket was going to be sent to be my Royal Mail, while my Britten ticket was electronic.  I printed out the Britten ticket.  It was not the seat I had booked.  The printout was for a cheaper seat in another part of the hall, and it bore somebody else’s name.  I got on the chat line naively assuming that this could be sorted out.  Apparently my only options were to use the ticket, or attempt to sell it on.  I got into a somewhat protracted chat-room conversation which ended up in a loop going nowhere.

I phoned the Royal Albert Hall Box Office.  They asked me what website I visited.  I told them.  They said, “Oh God, that lot.”  This was not encouraging.  I also remembered the RSNO Chief Executive’s kind offer, and contacted his office.  They were very sympathetic, but didn’t have any tickets.  I resolved to start again, and contacted the Royal Albert Hall Box Office to buy a ticket.  During the transaction, my Kensington Gore interlocutor suddenly said, “It’s a practice fire alarm.  Got to go.”  It was at this point that I decided I wasn’t meant to travel to London.

My dear colleagues in the RCGP and the RSM were very good.  I got a full refund bar a £5 administrative fee.  I did try and get my air fare refunded, but in fairness to the budget airline, they did say up front that refunds in event of cancellation would not be possible.  So the entire exercise cost me £127.02.  I didn’t make any further attempt to contact the ticketing people.  I didn’t want anything more to do with them.  I resolved to put the whole thing down to experience and not worry about it.  I received several e-fanfares, announcing the imminent arrival of my (snail mail) ticket for the Berlioz.  Not that it mattered any more, but it never arrived.  Today I got a questionnaire from the budget airline asking me how I enjoyed my trip.  Endless compulsory fields on a scale of one to ten.  I found a box for free text and wrote, “I never made this journey”, and pressed “submit”.  Of course it was inadmissible.  So I pressed “delete”.

The great cellist Yo-Yo Ma was on the Andrew Marr show this morning, returning after the summer break.  What an engaging and kindly smile he has.  He played the Prelude from Bach’s first cello suite.  Yo-Yo Ma has played to a host of American presidents in the White House.  Mr Marr asked him if it was stressful to perform to the great and the good.  He replied that he was stressed when his performance failed to make a connection.  He was convinced of the power of music as a source of good for humanity.  He used to think that, in terms of human transactions, music should have a seat at the table.  Now he thinks that music is the table.  Music is trust.

So I will carry on listening.  I’ve been working very hard trying to finish a book.  I’m a dull dog and I’m very grateful to a passing New Zealander who dragged me out of myself and asked to be entertained.  I took her to two organ recitals, on in Dundee’s Caird Hall, and one in the Glasgow Art Galleries.  I really know how to show a girl a good time.

Last year I wrote a novel entitled Speedbird.  Speedbird is Part 3 in the troubled life of Dr Alastair Cameron-Strange.  I sent the draft to my publisher, who pointed out some structural problems that needed to be addressed.  This was indeed the case, but at the time I wasn’t really in the mood to address them.  (I hope I wasn’t becoming a Diva, a Prima Donna, but you never know.)  Anyway we agreed to put the book down, like a vintage wine, and let it do whatever vintage wines do while occupying the cellar.  Of course the simile is not really a propos.  Vintage wines might mature, or they might degrade, with time.  Written words, on the other hand, will do nothing at all, no matter how much time you give them.  The words in storage remain exactly the same.  The only thing that will change with time is the author.  He may resurrect the incarcerated tome and find it is exactly as it was when abandoned.  If it appears changed, it is only because it is being viewed with fresh eyes.

So I forgot about Speedbird.  Then my gentle publisher emailed me and asked after the well-being of Alastair Cameron-Strange.  It was the nudge I needed.  I brought the tome up out of the cellar, blew away the dust, and perused it once more.  I perceived a change.  Whether the change resides in the book or in the author hardly seems to matter.  I was able once more to take up the threads and weave the tapestry.  I became engaged, then distracted, then preoccupied, and now – mildly I trust – obsessed.  I confess I rather like Speedbird.  It is taking shape. Weird shape, but shape.  Its forging has come at a cost.  ACS’ world is growing darker.  Nothing I can do about it.

A pretentious conceit, I hear you say.  You are the author; you can do with your creation whatever you like.  And that is perfectly true.  And yet the more I proceed with this tale, the more I am constrained by a sense of what plot machinations will “work” – or not work, as the case may be.  I can only proceed where I am led.  So I sit daily in front of my word processor and grope my way forward into the dark.

Structurally, the tome is in much better shape than it was.  It is in three acts – a format universally favoured by the film industry though I have to say that that consideration mattered to me not one whit.  Each act occurs in a separate location, and takes place over eight chapters.  24 chapters then.  And then a coda, revisiting each location once, over a further 3 chapters.  So, 27 chapters, “bookended” (as they say) by a correspondence, two letters, to open and to close.  There it is.

Today was my birthday.  I gave myself a day off.  After all, Sunday is a day of rest.  I attended Dunblane Cathedral, then was shouted lunch in Callander, then had a delightful walk in the environs of Kings Park Stirling, then had a private recital from a virtuoso pianist, all the while bombarded by a barrage of congratulatory texts that made me feel like a teenager.  Tomorrow, I entertain an old friend from New Zealand.

But come Tuesday (if spared), it’s back to the coal face.  I have a sense of being within shouting distance (within co-wee, as we say in New Zealand) of the conclusion.

Onward and upward.

Over the last fortnight I’ve attended six concerts in the Usher Hall as part of the Edinburgh Festival.

On August 14^th, the National Youth Orchestra of Canada played Estacio’s Moontides (UK premiere), Copland’s Appalachian Spring, and Vaughan Williams’ Pastoral Symphony.  Wonderful.  What a relief that experiencing a contemporary work should not be like a dental extraction.  The Estacio was harmonic and evocative, in a North American idiom not unlike that of the Copland.  And if RVW 3 is redolent of pastoral England, perhaps it is an England as remembered by an ambulance driver in the Royal Medical Corps, in Flanders.  Hearing RVW in concert is a profoundly spiritual experience, made even more haunting by the effect of the offstage bugle and wordless mezzo-soprano.  Then the NYOC stunned everybody not by playing two encores, but by singing them.  And what an excellent SATB choir they turned out to be.  They sang a cappella – the only sound other than the human voice was the combined percussive thunder of a more than a hundred feet stamping on the stage and more than a hundred right hands slapping the ribcage, in a stirring Québécois anthem.  They thoroughly deserved the unreserved whoops of the man on my right, who happened admittedly to be from Toronto, and on the orchestra’s teaching staff.

On August 16^th, the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra under Vasily Petrenko played Strauss’ Don Juan, then to be joined by soprano Lise Davidsen to sing Strauss’s Vier Lieder Opus 27, and Wiegenlied, Op 41 No 1.  Ms Davidsen was a statuesque figure of some presence, whose huge voice had no difficulty in filling the Usher Hall even above the orchestral tutti, with great beauty and no strain.  She never sang louder than lovely.  She sang two encores – I know not what – the first a gypsy song and the second a ballad not unlike Shenandoah.  Prior to each encore she and Maestro Petrenko had a brief tête-à-tête, and on the second occasion the conductor asked the audience in mime if they wished to hear more.  There was an amusing piece of faux-Diva dumb crambo when Ms Davidsen raised an ironic eyebrow.

Then the orchestra played Prokofiev 6.  There is a sustained and very haunting melody for oboe which occurs in its first movement, and then recurs towards the end of the symphony.  It is very affecting.  As with so much Soviet music, all is not as it appears.  There is a tragic irony in that Prokofiev should have died in 1953, on the very same day as Stalin.

The following day, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra played Stravinsky’s Funeral Song, Opus 5, Elgar’s Cello Concerto, and Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé.  This was not quite as billed, because (I understand), the CBSO’s charismatic conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla is with child. So Ludovic Morlot stood in, and the cellist was the young BBC musician of the year (2016) Sheku Kanneh-Mason.  The Stravinsky is a recently rediscovered early work and you can hear anticipations therein of the great ballet scores, especially the Firebird.  In the Elgar, Sheku Kanneh-Mason was magnificent.  What a musical gift he has.  His was an intimate rendition, not at all reminiscent of the great Jacqueline du Pré, but entirely his own.  It was a privilege to hear him play.  The Edinburgh Festival Chorus joined the CBSO for the Ravel.  Their wordless contribution was powerful and sonorous.

On August 20^th the Colburn Orchestra (a music college in LA) played Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Nyx, the Barber Violin Concerto (soloist Simone Porter) and the Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances.  Another wonderful orchestra.  They were conducted by Stéphane Denѐve.  Denѐve conducted the RSNO between 2005 and 2012 and he got a very warm welcome back from the audience.  He was delighted to be back in the Usher Hall.  “Good evening… bon soir!  Ah!”

Then on August 23^rd came the final of the Eurovision Young Musicians 2018 (as opposed to the Eurovision Song Contest – though anchor-man Petroc Trelawny was amused to point out that the latter had in fact been held in the Usher in 1972, the winner on that occasion being Luxembourg.  This concert was televised here and across Europe so there was quite an air of excitement in the hall.  There were six finalists, a cellist, two violinists, a bassist, saxophonist, and a pianist, each given a twelve minute slot.  All were amazing.  In terms of virtuosity and solidity of technique, perhaps the pianist and one of the violinists had an edge, but I was most taken by the bass player, a young man from the Czech Republic who came out wearing a kilt (he got a tremendous ovation) and proceeded to play his own composition.  It sounded to me a little like Dvořák.  I thought he had something.  He spoke to people.  The pianist, a Russian with a phenomenal technique, won.

And on August 24th the Baltimore Symphony under Marin Alsop played the Stravinsky Firebird Suite (1919), the Gershwin Concerto in F (soloist Jean-Yves Thibaudet), and Schumann 2.  What a Rolls Royce Orchestra.    

About an hour before the concert’s start, I happened to be just outside the door of the Sheraton Hotel across the road from the Usher, waiting for the rain to go off, and who should also be waiting next to me, but Marin Alsop.  I said to her, “You’ve got a concert to conduct.  At least I know I won’t be late.”  She was very charming.  Since she had been on the judging panel for Eurovision on the previous night, I couldn’t help but opine that the bassist should have won.  Everyone’s a critic.  But at the end of the day, I remarked, music is not a competition.  Fancy telling one of the great conductors of the world what music is, or is not.  I really ought to get a grip.