Author: jamescalumcampbell

There is a character in Orwell’s 1984, Syme, who is arrested by the Thought Police and who disappears.  His disappearance is complete – he does not merely cease to exist, but his entire history is erased; he has never existed.

It was, ironically, in 1984 that I briefly, and literally, ran into somebody who was to become a non-person.  I was running in the Glasgow marathon and, around the 10k mark, I recall we ran up Queen Margaret Drive in Glasgow’s west end, ironically again, (with hindsight), past the BBC.  For a few minutes I passed the time of day with a robust-looking middle-aged man of middle height.  He wore a running vest and running shoes of gaudy colours and shorts so lurid as to be incandescent.  I remember he seemed to be surrounded by a protective entourage.  I have no doubt he was running for a good cause, perhaps for many.  He was affable and chatty.  I think we mostly discussed the weather.

Jimmy Saville.

Now of course, like Syme, Saville is a non-person.  He never existed.  Imagine all the archived footage of Top of the Pops and Jim’ll Fix It that can never be shown.  This is what happens when you blot your copybook.  You get written out.  When people started making allegations against Kevin Spacey he was airbrushed out of a film he’d just made and his role was handed to Christopher Plummer.  Spacey as director of the Old Vic had a huge profile in the UK but he has vanished completely.

So I quite see why Sir Cliff Richard got so exercised about the way the BBC covered the story of the allegations made against him.  They used a helicopter to film a police swoop on his Berkshire home, while he was abroad.  As it turned out, he had no case to answer.  Had it gone the other way, he would have been finished, not merely in the sense that he could never have performed again, but in that his entire life’s work would have been “disappeared”.

When the court found in favour of Sir Cliff, the BBC indicated they were considering an appeal.  The case revolved round issues of the freedom of the press to report issues of public interest versus the right of the individual to privacy.  We are familiar with these issues because of the efforts of tabloid newspapers to infiltrate the lives of celebrities through phone-hacking.  The actor Hugh Grant is a prominent, and very eloquent spokesman for Hacked Off.  The use of covert means by the tabloid press to investigate the death of the teenager Milly Dowler became a focal point for a cause célѐbre, leading to the Leveson Inquiry and an attempt to regulate the activities of the press, which thus far has made little headway.

With respect to Sir Cliff, the opinion of the court was that the televised coverage had been over the top, and that the BBC had been seduced by the lure of the scoop rather than by any high minded devotion toward the public good.  The BBC has decided not to appeal.  I suspect this is a pragmatic and calculated decision, not just in the sense that the corporation might lose the appeal, but in that public sympathy will be on the side of an exonerated Sir Cliff.  I think it less likely that the BBC would back down quite simply because they are persuaded that they got it wrong.

The allegation of historic crimes of sexual abuse levelled against the late Sir Edward Heath raised parallel issues.  I recall hearing a very remarkable interview on the BBC with Sir Richard Henriques, a retired high court judge who was particularly perturbed that the police should dub complainants as “victims” before a case was proven.  The police counterargument was that the conferring of victimhood status, and indeed the publicity afforded to police investigations of prominent individuals prior to any charges being brought, would encourage other “victims” to come forward.  But might a modus operandi that amounts to collusion between police and press not also encourage fantasists to come forward?  The counterargument, that fantasy is extremely unusual and that people making allegations of historic abuse really ought to be believed, is surely in itself fantastic.   We may see this position as a swing of the pendulum from one extreme to another.  After all, we may ask of Saville, how on earth did he get away with it?  He seemed to have been immune to criticism, a man with powerful allies, protected by his own celebrity.  Understandably, the police now wish to be seen to be willing and able to investigate anybody, without fear or favour.  Yet Sir Richard Henriques’ point seems to me to be well made.  If a defendant remains innocent until proven guilty, then it follows that the testimony of the complainant must be held in doubt until it is proved to be true, itself beyond reasonable doubt.

We live in an incredibly pharisaic age, an age of virtue signalling and finger-pointing.  Anybody who writes about political issues, and contemporary society, has the sensation of walking on egg shells each time he addresses issues of race, gender, sex and sexuality.  You sometimes see a writer being hauled over the coals for expressing a view which just happens to be anathema to the zeitgeist.  Then he has that look about him of a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car that is about to run him down.

Was the biblical King David a monster?  I suppose he was.  He lusted after Bathsheba, when he caught sight of her bathing.  (Who among us hasn’t done that?)  So he had sex with her, and she got pregnant.  He organised for her husband, Uriah the Hittite (who was under military command and supposed to be celibate) to go home to her, so to cover up what he’d done, but Uriah stuck to his creed.  So David sent him into battle, and to the most dangerous sector of the front line, essentially in order to murder him.  In all this, he succeeded.  Then Nathan the prophet came along and told David an allegory about a powerful person who took terrible advantage of a poor person.  “You are that man.”

Yet still we sing the Psalms of David.

(A sobering thought: nobody under the age of about 50 will have any idea what I’m talking about.)

G.K. Chesterton was once asked what he thought was the biggest problem in the world today, and he replied. “Me.”  I think I know what he meant.  I feel like saying, “No G.K., not you, it’s me.”  Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

 

On the hottest day of this remarkably hot summer, I chanced to be in Peebles, and stepped out of the seething cauldron of Peebles High Street into the cool tranquillity of the John Buchan Museum.  Well worth a visit.  Compared with Abbotsford, the grandiose pile of Buchan’s great literary hero Sir Walter Scott, this is a modest collection of memorabilia that would easily fit into a crofter’s cottage, yet I found the exhibits endlessly fascinating, particularly those pertaining to Buchan’s work in Intelligence during the First World War.

I’ve been an avid fan of Buchan ever since one memorable Friday afternoon in Primary VII, when Mrs Miller opened at page 1 of The Thirty-Nine Steps and started to read to us:

I returned from the City about three o’clock on that May afternoon pretty well disgusted with life.  I had been three months in the Old Country, and was fed up with it…

The British weather makes Richard Hannay liverish, and he has more or less decided to go back to the Cape.  But he gives the Old Country one more day.  And what happens?  Well, Scudder turns up at his door, and he’s off on the first of five adventures.  I gobbled them all up.  They are marvellous.

Intrigued by the pattern of Buchan’s life, while in the John Buchan Museum I bought John Buchan, A Biography, by Janet Adam Smith (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1965).  It is a splendid book which offers comprehensive coverage of the writer’s life and works, and paints a picture of a man of warmth and integrity.  You can’t help but be overawed by the scope and breadth of his endeavours.  Buchan’s CV is remarkable.  Born in Perth in 1875, a son of the manse, he attended Glasgow University, and subsequently Brasenose College in Oxford.  He read classics, or “Greats”.  He started to write and to publish while he was an undergraduate, and it appeared that the literary life beckoned him, yet he seemed to make a decision early on that writing, albeit that he might be prolific, would not be his main preoccupation. After Oxford he went out to South Africa as an administrator, one of “Milner’s men”, or “the kindergarten” as they were called because they were all so young.  When he came home, he went into publishing.  Then the Great War came, and he ended up running the Ministry of Information.  Later, he was to be deputy director of Reuter’s, then MP for the Scottish Universities.  He married Susan Grosvenor and started a family.  And all the time, he wrote.  Essays, newspaper articles, novels, history, biography.

But he was to avow that politics was his abiding passion.  Nevertheless he lacked the partisanship he might have needed, steadfastly to pursue the career of a professional politician.  He was always “above the battle”.  He wanted to enter public life but he was bored with party squabbling.  He was never given a cabinet appointment.  In 1935 he was created 1st Baron Tweedsmuir and he became Governor-General of Canada.  All the time, he was plagued with ill health.  He gave his character John Scantlebury Blenkiron a duodenal ulcer and this is likely to be what he himself suffered from.   He was never really free of it.  That is perplexing, because had he been alive today he might well have been cured by a week’s course of antibiotics.

In Canada, despite his poor health, he travelled widely, visiting the ordinary inhabitants of the remote regions of the north.  His last novel, Sick Heart River, describes the last adventure of the lawyer Sir Edward Leithen, the recurring character who first appeared in The Power House, and who most resembled Buchan himself.  He too travels to the Canadian outback despite being terminally ill.  Buchan suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and died in Montreal on February 11th, 1940.  His autobiography, Memory Hold-the-Door (published in the US as Pilgrim’s Way and a favourite of JFK) was published in 1940.

 

Buchan remains steadfastly in print.  Doubtless he would have wished to be remembered for his biographies of Scott and Cromwell and Montrose, but it is really Richard Hannay who made Buchan world famous, just as James Bond made Ian Fleming world famous forty years later.  Yet for Buchan himself, the Hannay books appear only to have been a diversion.  He called them “shockers” – his word for thrillers.  He had read widely in the genre, and he made up his mind that he could make a far better fist of it.  So that’s what he did, while pursuing several careers outwith the cloistered world of letters.  A remarkable feature of Buchan’s life is the ease with which he appeared to move between social strata.  He seemed equally at ease with the King, and Stanley Baldwin, as with Ramsay MacDonald and indeed with the Red Clydesiders whom he depicted in Mr Standfast in the character of Andrew Amos.  He also forged a close relationship with President Roosevelt whom he saw as the only world figure big enough to avert the impending catastrophe in Europe in the late 1930s.  He worked with Roosevelt, preparing a memorandum for the President, in an attempt to bring about a conference of world leaders.  But Mr Chamberlain dismissed the idea without even bothering to tell his cabinet about it.  Instead he went off to Berchtesgaden, confident that he could manage the Fuhrer perfectly well himself.

Of course, the Hannay books are dated; they are of their time.  In Peebles, I picked up an ancient edition of Mr Standfast, opened it at random, and read Richard Hannay’s appalling utterance:

And to my joy, one night there was a great buck n***** who had a lot to say about “Africa for the Africans.”  I had a few words with him in Sesutu afterwards, and rather spoiled his visit. 

(The asterisks are mine.)

Curious to know how modern editions of Buchan deal with unacceptable language, I popped into Waterstones and consulted the Richard Hannay Omnibus published by Wordsworth Classics in 2010.  The “great buck n*****” is replaced by “big black man”.  In other words, the books have been censored.  A poor editorial decision?  I can hardly reprimand Wordsworth Classics when, after all, I’ve just censored myself with all these asterisks.

I venture to say that Buchan is not Hannay.  Hannay is a creation.  He is a man of action, a Big Bruiser underestimated by his adversaries, because they fail to notice the rich seam of imagination and creativity in his consciousness.  That much he shares with his creator.  Hitchcock, who made The Thirty-Nine Steps famous through film, recognised the originality of the atmosphere of Hannay’s world, the world, indeed, of “atmosphere”, the Double Bluff, the thinness of the veneer of civilisation.  “Capering women and monkey-faced men”, and “A general loosening of screws”.  Men in ulsters emerge from shooting brakes in country estates, and you sense a world of conspiracy, a civilisation far more fragile than it appears, and a world teetering on the brink.

“Horlicks?”

“Could I possibly have it with a correctif?”

MacKenzie asked, “What’s that?”

“Fortification.  If it’s brandy I call it a d’Artagnan, if it’s single malt, a Snape.”

“Why Snape?”

“Think Aldeburgh.  The Maltings at Snape.”

“You’re off you head.”  But she found some Oban and added a measure.  I took a sip.

“Perhaps a tad more.”

She frowned.  “Are you getting fond of the glug-glug?”

“Not inordinately.”

“How many units are you taking?”

“Say fourteen.”

“A week?”

“Good heavens no, dear sister.  A day.”

“You’re joking.”

“It’s not as much as it sounds.  Couple of G & Ts at the cocktail hour.  Substantial gentleman’s measures.  Say 3 units each.  Wine with dinner.  Not the whole bottle.  Say two thirds.  Call that another six.  Then a large single malt for a nightcap.  That’s another two.  Yep, comes to fourteen.”

Her eyes opened in horror.  ”But that’s appalling!  That’s a hundred units a week!”

“If you add in a Snape and a d’Artagnan, just to round up, yes I suppose it is.”

She shook her head.  “Slippery slope, Alastair.”

And she was right.  I may have been exaggerating.  But it was only too easy to deceive oneself into thinking one had it under control.  The grog was like any other instrument of the devil.  It would quietly insinuate its way into your life and then, without appearing to dominate, it would push every other aspect of life into subservience.  Work, play, hobbies, interests, pursuits, people, Grand Passions, Great Causes, Faith, Hope, and ultimately Love, all would take a back seat to the deoch.  The whole timetable of your life would be scheduled round the next drink.  The cocktail hour would arrive earlier in the day.  It’s always five o’clock in the evening somewhere in the world.  The prospect of an evening of sobriety would fill one with gloom, anxiety, even foreboding.

Of course you wouldn’t be able to keep it secret.  Twenty years down the track, while MacKenzie and spouse, Mr and Mrs Perfect, were being philanthropically profligate at Carnegie Hall, the final Mrs Cameron-Strange would come to realise I was a lost cause, and get out.  The kids, who had spent two decades tortured by the dread and embarrassment at how they might find me in social situations, trying to cut me off at the pass on my way to the bar, trying to keep their friends out of my bleary-eyed way, would similarly desert me.

Then there would be the health issues.  The stigmata of the drinker – liver palms, spider naevi, jaundice.  The early morning awakening in low mood, the crushing sense of self-pity, the hangovers, the black outs, the memory impairment, the shakes.  Maybe even the DTs.  It could get a whole lot worse.  Liver failure.  Hepatic encephalopathy.  A whole host of cancers.  The screaming ab-dabs.

Well before then, my work would have begun to suffer.  Maybe my colleagues, out of a misplaced sense of kindliness and loyalty, would have propped me up and protected me, as well as my patients, with an elaborate roster of checks and double-checks.  Finally it would all become too much and they would have to let me go.  There would be a blunder.  A Bad Mistake.  Then an unfortunate encounter with the constabulary one night in the car.  The GMC would have to be informed.  With due regard for my record of service they would do their damnedest not to strike me off.  But I’d have the humiliation of attending a detoxification and education programme.  I’d be earmarked as an addict.  An impaired professional.  My work would have to be supervised.  I might be credentialed only to perform a certain number of tasks. Nurses would give me sidelong glances.  There goes old ACS.  They say he was quite a good doctor in his day.  Not bad looking either, believe it or not.  To the medical students I would be invisible.  What a nightmare.

No.  MacKenzie was right.  Don’t go down that route.

How would you get yourself out of such a hole?  How, in fact, do you cure yourself of an addiction?  Not alone, that’s for sure.  But with help.  Probably best to join AA.  No mawkish sentimentality there.  They would tell it to you straight.  You wouldn’t be able to pull the wool over their eyes.  “I’m more habituated than addicted, not so much an alcoholic as a dipsomaniac.”

Aye, right.

For God’s sake Alastair, get a grip.

But I can’t leave you, gentle reader, in this black mood.  I went for a stroll that took me through the playing fields of Callander Primary School, in Perthshire, and came across the following notice:

GOLDEN PLAYGROUND RULES:

Be gentle, and play well with others.

Be kind and helpful.

Be honest, and do not cover up the truth.

Listen to people and do not interrupt them.

Care for your playground and environment.

Respect others’ feelings and do not hurt them.

Play nicely and do not spoil others’ games.

 

My companion remarked that it would be a good idea to take this notice and position it at the entrance to the chamber of the House of Commons.  But it occurred to me that perhaps such a notice already exists.  It might read thus:

 

Be strong, and don’t let anybody take advantage of you.

Be firm, and obdurate.

Be enigmatic, and obfuscate.

Talk over people as a means of smothering their point of view.

Merely pay lip service to conservation.  It’s the economy, stupid.

Exploit the weakness of the opposition.

Play to win.

 

I’m getting sour again!  The best thing to do when you are fretful is climb a hill.  A friend of mine set out to climb his last Corbett (mountain between 2500 and 3000 feet), and invited family and friends to join him for the occasion.  The summit was Leum Ulleim (906 metres), in Rannoch Moor.  It is a remote region, inaccessible by road, but fortunately the train stops at nearby Corrour Station, itself at 400 metres elevation.  The last time I climbed with my friend, we were in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, and the summit was over 12,000 feet, so this was a gentle afternoon stroll.

I picked up the Glasgow train at Crianlarich.  Here, the rolling stock was split asunder, the front half going off to Oban, the rear to Mallaig.  The one hour trip north to Corrour was a delight.  Mostly the passengers were holiday makers, tourists, backpackers, climbers, and their dogs.  The dogs were seasoned travellers and settled down quietly for the journey.  A snack trolley came round and I had a coffee and admired the scenery, still lush green despite this long hot summer.  Upper Tyndrum, Bridge of Orchy, Rannoch, and finally Corrour.  Here we disembarked.  The station has a fine restaurant, and the signal box has been converted into a B & B.

It was marvellous to be in a landscape entirely devoid of motor vehicles.  The weather was kind.  The morning cloud had lifted and all the surrounding tops, including Ben Nevis, were visible.  The boggy ground had largely dried out, there was a gentle breeze and, blessedly, no midges.  Leum Ulleim, only five kilometres to the south west, beckoned, and a couple of dozen of us, plus four dogs, set off.  One of the dogs, a beautiful Golden Retriever, happened to be my namesake which caused some confusion as we would both respond when called.  He worked it out quicker than I did.

I was struck by the enormous age range of the party – the youngest one year old, the oldest 86, with all decades in between represented.  We ascended in gentle fashion, and there was much chat and ribaldry.  The views were spectacular, the great Nevis range to the north west, Loch Ossian north east, and to the south, some of the great peaks of Perthshire including Schiehallion and Ben Lawers.

At the top, a photoshoot.  A happy day.  My friend has already climbed all the Munros (Scottish mountains over 3,000 feet), and all the Donalds (hills below the Boundary Fault Line over 2,000 feet), and now all the Corbetts, and he is half-way through the Grahams (hills between 2000 and 2500 feet).  If spared, we will reconvene for his last Graham.  Some addictions are more wholesome than others.

 

 

 

 

 

Chambers: doub’le-think the faculty of simultaneously harbouring two conflicting beliefs – coined by George Orwell in his Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).

Doublethink is not the same as cognitive dissonance.  Cognitive dissonance describes psychological conflict resulting from incongruous beliefs and attitudes held simultaneously.  But there is no psychological conflict in the faculty of doublethink.  Practitioners of doublethink genuinely believe both of the contradictory opinions they may express.  I venture to say Mr Blair’s apologia pro the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as expressed in his memoir A Journey (Random House, 2010) is an example of cognitive dissonance.  You sense his pain.  But here is an example of doublethink:

Brexit means Brexit.

You might suppose that a better example of doublethink, and a more obvious pairing of conflicting beliefs, would be “Brexit means Remain.”  But there is a subtlety here which becomes evident when you put the three word mantra into context.  (Incidentally, I believe I can make this argument quite independently of any position I may hold as either Brexiteer or Remainer.  Maybe that is my own lapse into doublethink.)  In 2016, Mr Cameron campaigned for Remain, and when he lost the argument, he resigned the premiership, pointing out that he could hardly be the person best placed to lead the forthcoming negotiations with the EU.  His resignation was universally accepted as right and proper.  Was it not bizarre, therefore, that he should be succeeded as PM by Mrs May, herself a Remainer?  If you sincerely iterate, and reiterate, “Brexit means Brexit” and then sincerely negotiate to remain within the club in all but name, you are practising the virtuoso high-wire act of doublethink.

You can only maintain the doublethink state of mind if you have the capacity to close your mind to reality, because, like it or not, the truth is out there.  A corollary to “Brexit means Brexit” is that there will be a border between the United Kingdom and the European Union.  This includes a land border, between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.  You can make it as virtual and as “seamless” as you like, but it will still be there.  There are two potential solutions to this problem.  One is that the UK changes her mind and stays within the EU.  The other is that the island of Ireland unites, and the United Kingdom breaks up.  Any other solution is going to be a compromise, a fudge, very complicated, and very difficult to enact.  Grappling with a problem which is insoluble is very stressful – it causes cognitive dissonance – unless you have mastered the art of doublethink.  Then you are not stressed, because reality doesn’t touch you.

Like Brexit means Brexit, there are three pithy political mantras in Nineteen Eighty-Four, the slogans of the Party that are doublethink archetypes:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

To refresh my memory, I went back to Orwell’s dystopian nightmare and reread The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein, the forbidden volume Winston Smith reads just before he is arrested by the Thought Police.  It is chilling, because Orwell predicted with uncanny prescience so many aspects of the world in which we now live.

Orwell’s world is divided into three superstates: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia.  In Oceania, America has absorbed Britain and the British Empire. In Eurasia, Russia has absorbed Europe.  In Eastasia, China has absorbed Southeast Asia.  These three superpowers are in a state of perpetual war with one another, although the alliances and antagonisms can change.

The internal structures of the three superpowers are essentially identical, though unconnected.  Society is stratified into the High, the Middle, and the Low.  In Oceania, the High, that is, the elite, is the Inner Party; the Middle is the Outer Party; the Low is made up of the proles.  The object of the High is to perpetuate its own existence; the object of the Middle is to attain the position of the High; the Low’s sole objective (hardly recognised as an objective) is to subsist.  This stratification is not the same as the ancient English class system, because it is not based on patronage and inheritance.  In fact, Orwell describes the new aristocracy as comprising bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians.

The society is rigidly controlled.  It is impossible to escape surveillance.  Aberrant thought is as criminal as aberrant behaviour, perhaps more so.  In fact, the state is dedicated to rendering aberrant thought impossible, by the creation of the official language Newspeak, a language devoid of nuance, richness, or abstraction.

Well, are we not more than halfway there?  We live in the age of the strong man.  We in the UK are detaching ourselves from Europe and wooing Mr Trump – Oceania.  Mr Putin seeks to extend his influence in Eastern Europe – Eurasia.  China is emerging as a global superpower – Eastasia.  Populist leaders encourage xenophobia and paranoia.  Orwell called this “The Hate”.  Hate is alive and well.  You only need to look at the level of discourse, and the baseness of expression, on “social media”.  What is Twitter, if not Newspeak?  The digital age has made surveillance universal.  Big Data is an engine for human manipulation utilised by The High, that is, by Oligarchs.

On Monday July 16^th, Mr Trump met Mr Putin in Helsinki.  He was asked whether he thought Russia had interfered in the 2016 US Presidential election.  Mr Trump said, “(President Putin) said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”   The US Intelligence Services, and indeed US politicians on both sides of Congress, were very upset that the POTUS should prefer Mr Putin’s word over theirs.  So on Tuesday July 17^th Mr Trump said he had misspoke.  “The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be.’”  Perhaps Mr Trump picked up a penchant for the double negative from the Isle of Lewis and his mother.  The double negative is the idiom of the Gael, who goes to the theatre, fumbles in his pocket, and mutters in Gaelic, “I will not believe I have not forgotten the tickets.”  Or should that be, “I will not believe I have not remembered the tickets?”  Whatever.

Would be, wouldn’t be…  What’s the difference?  This apparent exercise in Helsinki damage limitation seemed to leave the POTUS completely unfazed.  That is because he does not suffer from cognitive dissonance.

Dr Alastair Cameron-Strange, the troubled doc, really needs to get a grip.  He’s too much of a navel-gazer.  Frankly, he needs to get out more.  I mean, look at the following piece of nonsense.  I’ve persuaded him to dump it from Episode 3 in his troubled life…

Even though I’d been down that route, I didn’t really “get” nuptials.  I thought of it as a con.  It was society’s way of putting bromide in your tea; it was a sanctioning of carnality that rendered you devoid of passion.  The older members of the congregation who had seen it all before enjoyed it hugely.  The bewildered couple were surrounded by avuncular guffaws.  They were dressed up in ridiculous clobber; they looked ridiculous.

I was pretty sure I wouldn’t repeat that long walk down the aisle.  It was bad enough being a guest.  To be honest, I prefer funerals.  At least they’re quick.  It was always such a pain in the neck to get an invite.  It was a whole day out of your life, spent in a churchy atmosphere, washed, brushed, and in your churchy clothes.  There was a terrible sense of unease about the whole transaction.  You entered the church and were directed to right or left.  Two opposing factions covertly eyed one another with deep suspicion across the aisle, both aware that this enforced amalgamation was entirely capricious.  You endured the first of a series of interminable waits.  The organist would exhaust his repertoire and have to start through it again.  For some reason the bride, though she and her mother had been planning this event for eighteen months, and therefore could hardly be said to be unprepared, was late.  The groom and his best man, unaccountably dressed identically to resemble a pair of nineteenth century dandies, stood with their backs to us shifting their weight from foot to foot.  A pregnant pause, then the slow troop of the bride’s father and the cream blancmange.  Mendelssohn or Wagner, the minister beaming with the forced grin of a politician inducted to kiss babies.

Hymn.  Preamble.  Prayer.  Vows.  A terrible tension gripped the entire gathering.  I could feel my heart thump.  I would think of Jane Eyre.  Would anybody speak now, or would they forever hold their peace?  I felt like shouting out myself.  This is grotesque!  Would they muff their lines?  The groom tremulous but loud, the bride barely audible, the minister deeply sympathetic, like a surgeon trying to inflict as little trauma as possible.  Exchange of rings.  The discomfiture of the congregation now at its zenith.  Or perhaps nadir.  The best man would fumble in an empty pocket.  The bride would be too shaky and the groom too detumescent to get the thing on.  The ring would vanish under the front pew with a faint tinkle.  The blancmange would run back up the aisle in hysterics.

Done!  Spliced!  The relief would be palpable.  Off to the vestry.  Another interminable wait while a contralto warbled.  Then a lightening of the atmosphere.  Vidor’s Toccata.  Bride and groom emerge.  The bride’s veil is back, and she is grinning.  Do newly married couples still throw coppers at waifs and urchins out in the gutter as they depart in a limousine?  Perhaps I’ll join them, and risk losing my fingers under the wheels of a Bentley for some petty cash.  How bizarre that would be, like the sight of grown men taking to the swings and roundabouts in a kids’ playground, or jumping around on the bouncy castle.

There are more hiatuses to endure, shivering outside the church waiting for transport.  At the reception the adults make a bee-line for the bar.  In Orwell’s A Hanging, they all had whisky after the event.  This has a similar feel.  Now the longest wait of all.  The photographer has taken over, and whisked the bridal party away to the park behind the hotel.  The groom poses, chasing his bride round trees.  It’s absolutely excruciating.  Now the guests are getting tipsy, hungry, and disgruntled.  At least the wedding breakfast affords a chance of a good square meal.  But the worst is yet to come.  Speeches.   The Best Man, who yesterday was a perfectly normal bank teller at RBS, has metamorphosed into an unconvincing urban Lothario bent on apprising the bride and her people of the true nature of the monstrous husband she has so recently acquired.  The company has reached another pitch of nervousness, laughing ahead of time at the clunking punchlines.  I squirm at each lewd double-entendre.  I can’t take any more.  Dear God, beam me up.

And yet wasn’t the alternative equally bleak?  I would see all my friends and loved ones make that commitment that I conceitedly professed to despise.  I would gradually and dim-wittedly begin to sense that I was being left behind.  There comes a point in your life when solitude becomes deeply unattractive.  Solitude turned into loneliness.  You thought you were doing just fine, avoiding the trap of turning into a hen-pecked Walter Mitty figure, but in fact you were only becoming Thurber’s other side of the coin, the sad man who is always a wanderer.  Yes you avoided Thurber’s hellish matrimonial corrida, but this is how you will end up.  A sad, lonely old man sitting around getting crocked in hotel lobbies, drinking brandy, with a little water on the side, asking the concierge if there are any messages.  He glances in your pigeon hole.

“No, nothing to-night, sir.”

The final straw would come when dear Caitlin got married to somebody from Cambridge named Caedmon Ambrose-Pedoe.  At the reception, I would find myself seated with a whole lot of matrons of ample girth, and bald-headed bank managers.  “I don’t understand!” I would say.  “Why am I not seated down there at that rowdy table with all the other young bucks?”  I would concoct an elaborate confabulation for my garrulous barber just to avoid the embarrassment of declaring myself a reclusive old git.  It would start off, to all intents and purposes, innocently enough.  “How’re you doing, doc?  Wife and kids okay?”  The comb and scissors flashing in front of my eyes.

“Never better.”

“Keeping you out of mischief?”

“Somebody’s got to.”

“Ah!  Don’t you just love ’em?”

The trouble is, he would remember.  Before I knew it, I would have invented an entire fantasy world, populated by Fiona, and Cameron and Sophie, and Watson the dog, going off in our Chelsea tractor to our croft in Ardnamurchan.  There would be no way out.  I’d have to sue for divorce, lose custody of the kids, and look suitably dejected every time I had a haircut.  If I really took the role seriously, employing the Method, I might begin to look down on my luck.  Imperceptibly slipping down the social scale.  Ill-shaven, shabby, stained trousers, and mild body odour.  Once I’d left the shop the barber would gossip about me with the other clients.  “Used to be a smart guy.  But something happened.  It just shows you, it can happen to anybody.  Poor bastard.”

Oh fetch me my violin.  Cut out the schmaltz.  Pull yourself together.

 

 

 

 

In the realm of international diplomacy, we have grown used to the scenario of two world leaders emerging from behind closed doors to take up positions behind parallel lecterns, to issue a joint statement to the press corps, and then to take questions.  First, Mrs May pauses for a photo-call at the door of No 10 with a prime minister, whose name we can’t quite remember, of an African state whose position on the map we can’t quite delineate.  They disappear to discuss a mutually beneficial trade deal, and then do the parallel lectern bit in No 10’s media-briefing room.  The press aren’t particularly interested in the trade deal but they are intensely interested in the fractured state of the Cabinet and the latest looming possibility of the resignation of another Big Beast.  So they head off into this morass leaving the poor man from central Africa looking bemusedly peripheral to the occasion.  It’s the height of bad manners.

It doesn’t happen with the President of the United States.  Quite the opposite.  All the domestic squabbles merely become part of the terrain the leader of the free world must negotiate.  Mr Trump might well be happy to share his views on Britain’s leaving the EU, just as Mr Obama was happy to share his views on Britain remaining within it.  I seem to recall that, in terms of a US-UK trade deal, a Britain outside the EU would have to “join the back of the line”.  Nowadays, it is a Britain which, in all but name, stays within the EU, which must do the same.  It is not long before somebody from the BBC asks the President if “The Special Relationship” still exists.  It’s when “Special Relationship” comes up that I wish the press would ignore the POTUS for a bit and bombard Mrs May with questions about Grammar Schools or some other internal matter of which the POTUS will not have heard, and in which he will have no interest.

It’s always the UK that brings up the Special Relationship, never the US.  The UK is like an anxious lover, seeking reassurance, sensing a relationship on the rocks.  “You still love me, darling, don’t you?”  Avoiding eye contact, the US replies, “My dear, you know I do.”

Churchill, whose memory Mr Trump reveres, devoted a lot of blood, toil, tears, and sweat to forging the Special Relationship.  But then it was a question of survival.  It was like getting blood from a stone.  Churchill leased British military bases to the US, initially in the Caribbean, and in return the US lent Britain fifty obsolete destroyers to augment the North Atlantic convoys.  This Lend-Lease arrangement expanded into more general aid throughout the war, that was partly reciprocated (“Reverse Lend-Lease”) but by 1945, Britain’s war debt to the US was so enormous that it was only paid off in 2006.  Franklin might have been sympathetic to Winston’s plight, but he had a deep distrust of the British Empire, and he had promised the American people that he would keep them out of the war.  It was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour that brought them in.  Roosevelt’s chief concern, just as with Trump, was always “America first.”  Churchill knew all about this realpolitik.  But he had a genius for creating an idea and then stirring the hearts of men and women to make it a reality.  He could create a mythology and convince everybody else to see the world as he described it.  No doubt Churchill believed in the exalted destiny of the Special Relationship he strove to create.  He was, after all, more American than Mr Trump.  One thirty-second Iroquois.   (Or maybe that, too, is mythology, or fake news.)

At any rate, ever since, the UK has paid court to the US.  Mr Blair was very quick to invoke the Special Relationship after 9/11.  Remember, “The kaleidoscope has been shaken.”  In fact he was so quick to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with George W Bush that Dubya looked even more bemused than usual.  Look at the mess that landed us all in.  Then when Mr Trump got elected, like a flash Mrs May was across the other side of the Pond, hand in hand, helping the POTUS to negotiate a declination.  And last week at Chequers, the POTUS was asked again about the Special Relationship.  He called it “the highest level of special”.  Perhaps the world press sat there and solemnly recorded for posterity, “highest level of special”.

Personally, I have a Special Relationship with the US.  I have a burgeoning extended family of American cousins.  We keep in touch.  We visit one another.  There doesn’t seem to be any requirement, from either side, for fawning obsequiousness.  I greatly admired the stance David Lange, the New Zealand prime minister, took in the 1980s when he refused to let nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed US submarines enter NZ territorial waters.  The US didn’t like it, but they accepted it.  That nuclear-free position became, and remains, an integral part of New Zealand’s character and identity.  By contrast, 25 miles from where I am right now, sits the biggest nuclear arsenal – 200 warheads – in Europe.  I’m right under the nuclear “umbrella” (or GAMP – Generalised Assured Mutual Pulverisation).  It’s called an Independent Nuclear Deterrent but it’s not really independent.  It’s arguably an extension of the Roosevelt – Churchill Lend-Lease agreement, all these years ago.

Shortly after Mr Trump trashed Mrs May’s proposed Brexit deal, they did the parallel lectern thing outside Chequers and Mrs May stoically put a brave face on it.  I wonder if she has seen the film Love Actually?  You may recall the scene in which the PM (Hugh Grant) tears a strip of the POTUS (Billy Bob Thornton) for his overbearing and bullying style of diplomacy.  The POTUS eyes the PM with caution, and a new respect.  Mrs May might have borrowed the script.  She missed a trick there.  She might even have started to forge a Special Relationship.

 

Maizie said airily, “You might be interested to know that I had dinner with Mr Bond last night.”

It was quite feasible.  Maizie was married to some guy high up in BBC Scotland.  She was very glamorous.  She could quite easily have been a Bond girl.  We felt that she belonged to a life infinitely wider and richer than anything we knew.  She had hinterland.  It’s a great trick to carry off, if you can, as a teacher – simultaneously to be a born pedagogue, at home in the classroom, and to exude the powerful sense that you belong to the wider world.  We knew she was a sophisticate because she came to school in a taxi.  Sometimes we got our ink exercise jotter back with a cigarette burn on the margin.  She had absolutely no discipline problems and if we never crossed her nor even felt the wish to cross her, it was through a dread of sexual humiliation.  She certainly never had recourse to corporal punishment which I think she would have regarded with distaste.  She handed out lines which we loathed even more than the strap; it was such a bore and a waste of time to write out fifty times, “I must not forget my pencil.”  She and our French teacher Pinocchio were great pals.  Pinocchio may have had a big nose, but she was sexy as hell.  Part of her allure was the fact that she was French. We were fooling around in her class one day, and she silenced us, reduced us to nothing.  “You boys, you thing you are men, bu’ you are jus’ li’lle boys.”

Anyway…

We all piped up, “What was he like?”

“Sean Connery?”  She turned down the corners of her mouth.  “Bald and taciturn.”

I checked it out.  He wasn’t bald, but he was certainly taciturn.  He was perfect.  They say that Earl Stanley Gardner watched the auditions for Perry Mason, had seen Raymond Burr, and said, “That’s him.  That’s Mason.”  This was the same.  That’s him.  Bond.  James Bond.

I wasn’t confident about the Scottish accent.  “Quuck Honey!  Doon ahent this roke!”  (I exaggerate.)  I knew Bond’s father, Andrew, was from Glencoe, and James went to school in Edinburgh.  But Fettes isnae in Fountainbridge.  James is only Scottish in the sense that Alec Douglas-Home’s Scottish.  Frankly, I was amazed that the powers-that-be didn’t dub Sean out with the voice of James Mason.  I think that if Dr No had been financed by Pinewood rather than Hollywood they probably would have.  Perhaps the Americans found the Scottish accent Celtic and romantic and strong and free, not, as we ourselves did, disenfranchised and low caste and downtrodden and cringing.  God bless America!  They were ahead of their time.

I went to see Charade with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn.  I thought it was fantastic.  So chic.  So sophisticated and Parisian.  It seemed to me inevitable that these two, Grant and Hepburn, would play opposite one another.  They struck me as the actor and actress who, above all others, had invented themselves.  Even the accent of each of them was entirely individual.  Nobody else talked like that – unless, like Tony Curtis in Some Like it Hot, it was homage by mimicry, the sincerest form of flattery.  Grant’s metamorphosis from obscure waif, with a crazed institutionalised mother in Bristol, seemed inspirational.  Archie Leach.  How did he do it?  He joined the circus!  Could you detect that provenance behind the immaculate charm, the tanned, dimpled, handsome face, the self-deprecation and the self-mockery?  No you could not.  There was an impenetrable mystery there.  Hitchcock recognised it, recognised its potential for menace.  Everybody wanted to be Grant.  Including Grant.

If anything, Hepburn was even more mysterious.  A Belgian refugee thrown up out of the chaos of the war.  An urchin.  Une gamine.  So English and so foreign.

Grant plays – well, that’s just it – who does he play?  Is it Peter Joshua or Alexander Dyle or Adam Canfield or Brian Cruikshank?  Is he an investigator on the trail of a group of thugs or is he himself a thug?  He could be either.  We really don’t know.  Neither does Reggie Lampert.  She doesn’t know whom to trust.

Paris is the backdrop.  “Dry-cleaning-wise, things are all fouled up!”  The quest and the mystery.  “It’s here Reggie – right before our eyes.”  The lovers on the Seine, the beautiful melody, the percussive thriller theme and the stringent and menacing string music.

“Reggie I beg you!  That man is Carson Dyle!  Trust me one more time.”

The passionate yell.  “Why should I?”

“I can’t think of a reason in the world.”

So she does.

The chase in the metro reminded me of Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, and the anonymous silhouette who pushed his assailant on to the live rail in the Aldwych underground.  Hideous because domestic.

The Count screened Citizen Kane one night at Film Club.  It was weird, daunting, and oppressive.  It started at the end, with a long shot trying to break through layer upon layer of wrought iron and latticed stone work that had held Charles Foster Kane prisoner in his own Xanadu.  The stately pleasure dome had turned into a mausoleum.  Kane had died.  The snow-filled bauble fell from his dead fingers and the final utterance came with the last expiration.

“Rosebud!”

Then, a brief resume of the life of the newspaper magnate, the projector lights died and you realised you had been watching Pathé News.  The potted life we have just looked back on is opaque.  Maybe, reasoned the world-weary journos in the smoke-filled room, maybe “rosebud” is the key to the meaning of Kane’s life.  At any rate it’s a hook, a handle, an angle.

I thought, that’s it!  Rosebud!  What does it mean?  More specifically, what does it mean for me?  What is my rosebud?  I sat through the film and tried to decipher its ever darkening images.  The rich man who loses everything that is of any real worth.

For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

There is a scene towards the end of Citizen Kane, a terrible scene, when Orson Welles goes into a blind rage and destroys a room.  I thought, that’s me.  That’ll be me, 40 years on, if I don’t find my rosebud.

The journalists on a quest never did find what they were looking for, and perhaps we the viewers didn’t either, though if you hung around to the bitter end and you saw all the accumulated junk of Xanadu being hurled into the incinerator you would have caught sight of Rosebud, the name of the boy Kane’s sledge, melting in the furnace.  I knew the secret of life had to be something quite simple, something quite devoid of sophistication, something available to a simple mind, something a child can have, something an adult might irrevocably lose.

I haven’t written to The Herald for a while.  Earlier this year I resolved only to write in if I considered I had something constructive to say.  It is so much easier to demolish, than to create.  It is easier to rubbish somebody else’s proposal, than to come up with a better proposal yourself.  Last time I wrote in, my letter concerned the organisation of the NHS, and my proposal was that the Society of Acute Medicine, and the Royal College of Emergency Medicine amalgamate.  I always peruse the letters column on the day following publication, for any riposte, and indeed on this occasion there was one.  Somebody suggested that the duly amalgamated institution be dubbed The Society and College Royal for Emergency and Acute Medicine (SCREAM).

Well I had to laugh.  I didn’t take it personally.  I don’t think my idea was really being mocked.  But nor was it being taken seriously.  It’s often the way with any innovation.  It takes some time before people take notice, so you have to persevere.  Before the “Scream” letter, I’d written in in support of the idea that a bridge be built between Scotland and Northern Ireland, and I was interested to read in The Sunday Herald that Arlene Foster, leader of the DUP, had reiterated this proposal while attending an Orange Walk in Cowdenbeath.  She says she would like to be able to drive to Scotland.  (It’s as well she said drive, rather than take the train, because I am given to understand that while the rail gauge here is four feet eight and a half inches, in Ireland it is five feet.)   I was also interested in the reaction to the bridge proposal from some Scottish politicians, who suggested that Arlene Foster should forget it and concentrate on getting Stormont back up and running.  There were mutterings about Brexit shambles, and the DUP’s record on equality issues.  There was also apprehension and dismay expressed by some of the good people of Cowdenbeath with respect to the Orange Walk, fearful of the underlying tensions of the great sectarian divide, necessitating the drafting of 100 additional police officers to ensure public order.

I think it’s a matter of regret that politicians chose to sidestep the bridge proposal solely in order to delineate and reiterate the established political fault lines, which are already well known.  Do not merely demolish.  Create something.  After all, Mrs Foster was trying, literally, to build bridges.  I wish our politicians had put all the old prejudices to one side and considered whether the bridge is a good idea.  Could we do it?

Two routes have been suggested, one running east to west from Port Patrick straight across the Irish Sea, the other running north-east to south-west from the Mull of Kintyre to Antrim.  At 11 miles, the latter is the shorter route.  Moreover the former would have to cross a deep trench in the Irish Sea, into which munitions have been dumped.

When this all came up in The Herald letters’ column, a professor of engineering wrote in to say that, while building a bridge to Northern Ireland was technically possible, it would be, from an engineering point of view, extremely challenging, and very expensive.  (More expensive than HS2, or a third runway at Heathrow?)  The professor pointed out that not only would we have to pay for the bridge, we would also have to pay for the upgrade of a road system connecting with the main centres of Scotland’s central belt.

It’s worth pausing to consider Scotland’s road system.  I have before me the AA Great Britain and Ireland Bestselling Road Atlas, 2018.  I open it at pp 2-3, “map pages and route planner”.  A great network of motorways and trunk roads criss-crosses England.  On the east, the A1M extends to Newcastle and then stops.  On the west, the M6 extends to Carlisle and then stops.  The only dual carriageway into Scotland is the A74.  I am looking at Scotland on the route planner, and it is empty.

It is difficult to move around Scotland.  The engineering professor’s remarks about the necessity to upgrade the routes to the central belt is well made.  Suppose we built the bridge from Antrim to the Mull of Kintyre.  Glasgow to Campbeltown is a mere 61 miles as the crow flies.  By road, because of the rugged contours of Scotland’s west coast, the trip is 138 miles.  To negotiate the sea lochs, you have to go all the way up to Inveraray via the Rest and Be Thankful which often closes due to landslips.  (Then the diversion is 76 miles.)  From Inveraray, you still have to negotiate the length of Kintyre.  I know these airts and pairts quite well because I love Argyll.  Beguiling Argyll.  On midsummer’s day, having negotiated the Rest and Be Thankful, I drove down the east side of Loch Fyne through St Catherines and Strachur and the Cowal Peninsula, to Tighnabruaich.  The Cowal Peninsula is known as “Argyll’s Secret Coast”.  It is well named, because it is completely deserted.  Imagine that.  It is ravishingly beautiful, and, on midsummer’s day, completely deserted.

Sometimes I go down the west coast of Loch Fyne and then head up the A816 towards Oban.  I stop at Dunadd Fort, and ascend the small hillock at whose top a slab of rock bears the imprint of a foot.  It is an atmospheric and holy place, ancient Dalriada, where the Scottish kings were crowned.  And it is completely deserted.

Let’s build the bridge, and open up the Celtic world.

When the Glasgow School of Art went up in flames last week I thought, “That’s odd!”  Actually I thought of the quotation on the contents page of Goldfinger, that says once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but the third time it’s enemy action.  In 2014 a major fire in the Art School destroyed the Mackintosh Library which was being meticulously reconstructed at considerable expense.  And now this.  Once the fires were extinguished I took a walk up Renfrew Street which is parallel to and immediately north of Sauchiehall Street.  The block was cordoned off and there was a considerable police presence, but I got close enough to ascertain that there is nothing left of the building but a shell.

It’s all reminiscent of the destruction by fire in 1962 of Glasgow’s concert hall, the St Andrews Hall.  After a boxing match, somebody threw away a cigarette without stubbing it out.  The St Andrews Hall was situated less than a mile to the west of the Art School, just beyond Charing Cross and behind the Mitchell Library.  Now all that remains of it is the very impressive façade on Granville Street.  The first orchestral concert I ever attended as a child was a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in St Andrews Hall, and I do have a reasonably clear recollection of the hall, which was much admired by musicians from all over the world.  I don’t think a reconstruction of St Andrews Hall was ever seriously considered.  Its destruction occurred more or less simultaneously with the ripping up of Glasgow’s tram lines, shortly followed by the ripping up of the UK’s rail system.  In 1960, Ernest Marples, the Transport Minister in Harold Macmillan’s government, had commissioned Prof Sir Colin Buchanan et al to study the effect of the motor car on UK cities. The Buchanan Report, Traffic in Towns, was duly published.  Prof Buchanan said with respect to the car, “We are nourishing at immense cost a monster of great potential destructiveness, and yet we love him dearly.”  So at least some “strategic planners” envisaged the traffic congestion and air pollution that lay ahead, yet the concept of global warming from the production of greenhouse gases would largely have been unknown to them.  I recall once championing the Buchanan Report in a schools’ debating event held in some anonymous municipal office in Glasgow city centre.  As with many such reports, it was much lauded, and then buried without trace.  For the next thirty years Glasgow’s city fathers concentrated on turning Glasgow into an asphalt jungle dominated by the motor car jammed solid on overpasses, underpasses, and huge freeways cutting a swathe through obliterated neighbourhoods.  The one surviving facade of the St Andrews Hall is now the back entrance to the Mitchell, itself sitting on the lip of a roaring Grand Canyon through which the M8 runs south to the Kingston Bridge.  With the recent devastations (there was another big fire in March), Sauchiehall Street is a ghost town; you can almost see the tumbleweed.  At least at its east end sits the fine Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, home of the RSNO.  It took Glasgow 28 years, following the demise of the St Andrews Hall, to build it.

There has been a lot of coverage about the Art School in the newspapers, and much correspondence expressing a mix of sorrow and anger.  Questions are being asked.  Why hadn’t a fire suppression system, a sprinkler system, been fitted?  What was the significance of a series of loud bangs some local residents reported shortly before the outbreak of the fire?  Why was the fire so ferocious (“like a volcano”, said the firefighters)?  Those who might be in the know are keeping tight-lipped.  Most people seem to favour another attempt at restoration, although some have ventured to suggest the money might be better spent on health and social care in Glasgow’s east end, and one journalist has levelled a scathing attack on the liberal élite of Glasgow’s west end for crying crocodile tears into their hazelnut lattés for their beloved “Mack” (I never heard the Art School being described as the “Mack”, before it went up in smoke).  But I don’t think the attack on the gentrified west end is justified; I think the dismay is real.

I’ve never been inside the Art School although I know plenty of people who studied there.  The Art Department was very strong in my school (in Glasgow’s west end).  I had a sense of that, although I personally had absolutely no talent for art whatsoever.  I didn’t envy the pupils who could design and paint and sculpt, but I did venerate them.  I thought of them as being a little removed from the academic mainstream.  They were very mature.  They seemed to know their destiny from an early age, that they were going to the Art School, so they did enough in other subjects to secure their entry, all the while devoting themselves entirely to their art.  They seemed to be given a great deal of latitude.  Their relationship with the staff of the Art Department was not so much teacher and pupil, as master and apprentice.  It is to the teachers’ credit that they didn’t simply ignore the rest of us, but did try to instil in us a sense of art appreciation, and curiosity.  Glasgow is an arty place.  The Art Galleries in Kelvingrove is a much loved, much visited venue.  I often pop in and revisit the work of the Glasgow Boys and the Scottish Colourists.  Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Hill House in Helensburgh (currently under refurbishment) has an extraordinary interior, well worth a visit, although I admit I would not have cared to live in it.  The Glasgow School of Art was Mackintosh’s masterpiece, and any time I walked past its entrance I had a sense of that, so all that exposure to art in my school days must have had an effect.

Isn’t it strange how an event of significance can occur in an area of your life you consider arid and devoid of interest?  I would have dumped art at the earliest opportunity.  Yet I knew the art teachers at school were all rather impressive figures.  They never had any discipline problems in the classroom because they were respected.  They carried with them an aura of worldliness, the sense that they enjoyed a rich life outwith the classroom.  At least two of them were eminent in the art world.  One of them we called Dirty Dick (because of his apparent predilection for the study of the nude).  He was tall, slim, sophisticated, and grey.  An éminence grise.  He occupied a magnificent studio with huge windows on the top floor of the school’s Old Building.  One day when I was about fourteen I got the summons to that grand studio.  Dirty Dick wanted to see me.  He had a small coterie of his serious art pupils with him.  It turned out they needed a subject.  I said, “Why me?”

“I need somebody who isn’t going to keel over.”

I was gratified.  I thought, fair enough!  So long as they don’t want me to take off my clothes.

And yet there was a sense of being stripped naked.  I stood bathed in white light.  The artists were merely shadows lurking behind easels.  I had thought it would be easy to stand motionless for forty minutes but I could feel my features crumbling under the scrutiny.

“You see this young man.”  Dirty Dick addressed his class in discursive tones.  “He is clearly on a mission.  He is on a journey.  He is all curiosity and eagerness.  Yet cautious, too.  Haunted.  Hunted perhaps.  Can you capture it?”

How did he know that about me?  It never occurred to me he might have been describing any adolescent boy.  It was like reading your horoscope and saying, oh yes, that’s definitely me.

“What do you intend to do when you leave this august institution?”  I noticed Dirty Dick was sketching me, too.

“Go to university.”  That was a given.  Taken as read.  My father, who left school when he was 14, had the highest respect for higher education.

“And what will you read?”

“English I suppose.”

“You suppose?”

I shrugged.

“What do you want to be?”

I hated that question.  I’d already died of embarrassment owning up to my aspiration to write, and I vowed I’d never divulge that piece of information again.  Yet I hated the schoolboy trick of hiding behind sullen silence.  So I said, in a fit of boldness of the sort that would occasionally overtake me, “I haven’t a clue.  What would you recommend?”

It was like consulting the oracle at Thebes.  I wondered if I should elect Dirty Dick to be my mentor.  If he could give me an answer that would show me the way, then I would appoint him.

There was quietness for the space of five minutes.  Dirty Dick carried on sketching.  Then he punctuated the silence.

“I think you need to rebel.”

 

“You boy,” said the Vamp, sticking his pointer into Brian’s sternum, like a bayonet.  “What book are you reading just now?”

I knew Brian would tell the truth, and it would be his downfall.  I sent him a telepathic message.  Just make something up!  The White Company, Henry Esmond, anything!

“None, sir.”

“What?”

He was the deputy headmaster.  He took very few classes.  You would see him swooping around in his gown along the outside corridors above the playground (designed thus so we wouldn’t all succumb to tuberculosis), hamming it up, a camp Count Dracula.  Sometimes he would come on the blower at morning break.  “This is the deputy head-maahsta speaking” and we would start giggling in a terrified, hysterical way.  One day we congregated after lunch in Miss Watson’s maths class and found, to our amusement, that somebody during the lunch break had written a legend in Anglo-Saxon on her blackboard commencing, “Some girls need…”  None of us volunteered to rub it off with the duster for fear of being implicated.  Miss Watson arrived unexpectedly early, impassively pushed up the blackboard’s moveable surface until the legend was out of sight, and then went and got the Vamp.  They stood on the floor in front of us and had a protracted conversation in an undertone.  We sat in dead silence thinking, this is the end of the world as we know it.  Then the Vamp sloped off and Miss Watson went back to y = mx + c as if nothing had happened.

“And you boy.”  Now the bayonet was upon my own breast.  I could feel a surge of precocity sweeping over me.  It sometimes happened.  I would blurt, and later be doubled up with the embarrassment of reminiscence.

“I don’t so much read books, as plunder them.”

There was a pause.  The bayonet was withdrawn.  “Indeed?  And to what purpose, such an act of plunder?”

“Ideas.”

He looked at me, thoughtfully.  “Do you write?”

“Try to.”  Now I felt myself going red.  Sometimes I hated my own destiny.  Why couldn’t I have been a centre forward?  I should have done a Brian.  Kept mum.

“And upon which work are you currently wreaking your act of rapacity?”

“1984.”

The Vamp frowned.  Another thought had occurred to him.  “Are you a plagiary?”

“No, sir.”

“But is not this act of piracy you allude to, a plagiary act?”

I shrugged and said coldly, “You can’t write in a vacuum. Read Eliot.  Tradition and the Individual Talent.”  I thought, leave it at that for God’s sake.  I could feel the rest of the class growing restless.  I said to myself, next time, keep your mouth shut.

The Vamp was still gazing fixedly at me, wondering whether to reward me for chucking my hat in the ring, or castigate me for impertinence.

“Do you have a publisher?”

“No.”

“Mm.  Always remember the words of Dr Johnson.  ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.’”  He subjected me to the chilly vampire grin.

“Coconut or a cigar?”

It was true, though.  I did plunder.  I was a very indiscriminate reader.  I read the way an idiot savant reads the telephone directory.  Right at break of day, there I’d be, Yesterday in Parliament on the Home Service, reading the Kellogg’s Cornflake wrapper.  Or the blurb on the HP sauce bottle:

  Cette sauce de haute est un qualité mélange des fruits, épices, et vinaigre de malt…

When you are young your enthusiasms are completely anarchic.  They are almost entirely random.  You turned on the radio and happened to hear a piece of music; you idly picked up a volume as you passed a book shelf.  My mentors told me to read Charles Dickens and listen to Mozart.  I read Aldous Huxley and listened to Ralph Vaughan Williams.  And they didn’t know.  Consequently I was incomprehensible to them.  And to myself.  Why should an urban Scottish waif born into a landscape of dilapidated tenements, of bomb sites full of nothing but nettles and docks, parched, be slaked by an evocation of the gentle green leas of Down Ampney?  Why should I have been in the least bothered by the foppish fantasies of an oversized, oversexed Oxon galoot inhabiting such improbable hamlets as Bole, Tritton, Spavin Delawarr, Knipswich for Timpany, West Bowlby, Camlet-on-the-Water?  Yet I gobbled them up, the Collected Works, in the beautiful Chatto and Windus editions in their cellophane-wrapped russet covers.  But I hated myself for it.  I thought, I am effete.  I am turning myself into a refined and precious artistic buffoon of the sort John Buchan parodied in Mr Standfast with his depiction of the artistic community of Biggleswick.  I am Biggleswicked.  A galoot at moot.  I could turn out reams of pseudo-Huxley, the smart-arse post-prandial rantings of smug intellectuals with queer names, saturated in gin and Art, stuffed like a Strasbourg goose with indiscriminately acquired knowledge, the A-Z of Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The Count said to me, “This is good stuff!  It’s nearly publishable!”  (Ah – the curse of the writer manqué, slain by the morganatic compliment.)  “I don’t know where you get it from.”

Don’t you?

I shrugged.  A strange look, part rueful smile and part irritation came over his face.  “You don’t seem to care.  Why are you so sad?”

“It’s nothing.”  I remembered Clifford’s body of work in Lady C, smart, intellectual, up-and-coming, sought after, and on the brink of success.  Yet it was nothing.   I knew mine was the same.  It was nothing.  Definitely dead from the waist down.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.  I just thought it was a cynical throwaway remark.  Now I feel it conceals a profound truth.  You absolutely must get out of your garret and go and experience the heat and dust of the arena.

There are crossroads in your life.  You pause at them for a moment and take in the view, hardly aware that questions are being asked of you, that you are required to give an answer, to make a decision.  You are at a meeting of ways outside Thebes.  Mark this.  It is only in retrospect that you realise you might have taken an alternative path.

The Count was a wonderful man.  A born teacher.  Tall, urbane, cultured, and sophisticated.  He was steeped in Art.  Literature, opera, theatre, film.  He opened the partition at the back of room 17 and expanded his empire into the next classroom and turned his domain into the school library, there for us all.  He formed a Film Club.  We watched Citizen Kane.  He took us to The Close Theatre to see Ibsen and Strindberg.  He taught us Shakespeare and Shaw, Greene, Pinter.  He taught us literary theory.  He taught us fantastic concepts such as The Fallacy of Imitative Form, the Objective Correlative, F. R. Leavis’ notions of concreteness, the mind-boggling idea that the meaning of a work might be independent of the author’s intention.  He might have been my mentor.  I might have said to him, there and then, “Thank you for your kindness and encouragement.  But I need more.  I need your help.  The fact is, while it reads well enough and is at least, as they say, ‘prose-competent’, it’s empty.  Doris Lessing once said that the difficulty for the writer is not in writing, but in leading a life.  Teach me how to live.”

But I didn’t.  Instead I shrugged and shut him out, with all the callousness and brutality of youth, and said, “It’s nothing.”  I cut him dead, with a device of patient lacklustre.