Author: jamescalumcampbell

The centenary of the founding of the Royal Air Force on April 1^st has brought much to my mind.  I was in the RAF Volunteer reserve when I was in the University Air Squadron in Glasgow as a teenager.  That my father had been a pilot in the RAF was no doubt influential in my going down that route.  My father had very humble origins in the seaside town of Saltcoats in Ayrshire. (I see that Ayrshire continues to supply the RAF.  The current top man, Air Chief Marshal Sir Stephen Hillier KCB CBE DFC ADC MA RAF, Chief of the Air Staff, went to Kilmarnock Academy.  Kilmarnock Academy’s list of alumni is rather formidable and includes two Nobel Laureates.)

My dad was in the work force from age 8.  He was smart, dux of Kyleshill Primary, and went on to Ardrossan Academy, but he wasn’t comfortable with the posh boys and he left when he was 14 and went to work down the coast in ICI Ardeer.  He got a break when he was chosen to go to the Duke of York’s camp down south (I still have his signed photo of the young man who became George VI) and he got a taste of the wider world.  He joined the City of Glasgow Police, and then war broke out.

The Clydebank Blitz occurred in 1941 and my father volunteered for the RAF.  I know the devastation of Clydebank made a great impression on him and now I have no doubt it contributed towards his decision to volunteer.  He went to London thence by troopship to Canada to train as a pilot.  On board, he attended Sunday worship, when the congregation sang “For those in peril on the seas” with great fervour.

On the other side of the Pond they boarded a train and travelled west for days to places with exotic names like Medicine Hat.  He was subjected to the rigours of RAF training of which I have some personal knowledge.  He didn’t take to the bullying culture.  He actually said to his instructor, “Don’t talk to me like that.  You won’t get the best out of me.”  I greatly honour my father for that because I know what it would have meant for a young man from Ayrshire to say that to a person of authority.  Things got better for him after that and he won his wings and flew with Coastal Command out of Prince Edward Island, tracking the submarine traffic out in the North Atlantic.  I have pictures of him in Canada, lying on the beach surrounded by beautiful women with big hair.

Then he crossed the Atlantic.  Dorval – Gander Newfoundland – Greenland (Bluey West One) – Reykjavik – Prestwick (I have all his log books).  When he got into Prestwick he said to the Commanding Officer, “My mother lives 10 miles up the road and I haven’t seen her for three years; may I visit her?”  The CO said no.  But he went anyway, bearing exotic gifts that rationing had rendered unobtainable.  So I suppose technically he was a deserter.  But he never got into trouble.  In Saltcoats his youngest brother (I spoke to him on the phone on Saturday) answered the door and didn’t recognise the man in uniform and got a hell of a fright.

Then he was posted to the south of England for a time and thence to West Africa where he seemed to spend a lot of his time flying VIPs around.  I remember the year my father died I happened to be going on holiday to Madeira.  He said to me, “I know it well.”  I said, “I didn’t know you’d been there.”  “I haven’t, but I’ve flown over it a lot.”  He flew out of exotic locations like Casablanca.  On VE day he was in Accra. His chums said, “Give us a show, James!” and he duly did a few swoops over the aerodrome.  His last flight before he came home was from Ikeja to Accra, on September 9^th, 1945.

I wouldn’t pretend for a moment that my experience in the RAF VR was remotely as taxing as my father’s experience, but I do believe I got something of its flavour.  You get a sense of it in the film The Battle of Britain.  One of my University Air Squadron instructors flew a Spitfire in the making of that film.  If you’ve seen it, do you remember the rather feckless pilot who tries to land with his undercarriage up and is warned off by a groundsman flying a flare?  The pilots witnessing this at dispersal pass derisory remarks under their breath but lapse into silence when the pilot walks by them.  Then his intimidating Squadron Leader (played by Robert Shaw) takes him up on a training sortie and basically frightens the life out of him.  (But in the long run he doesn’t manage to save his life.)  That scene reminds me that standard procedure in the Air Squadron was that if you “cocked up” you could expect to receive a “bollocking”.  I suppose the rationale was that aeroplanes can be very unforgiving.  Take-offs, as they say, are optional, but landings are compulsory.  So the stakes are high; in the war, considerably higher.

My father never bought that argument and neither did I.  You learn by your mistakes.  Teaching by intimidation in any discipline – it’s the same in Medicine – is useless.  In order to master any art or craft, you must be relaxed.  When I took up flying again in New Zealand I couldn’t get over the fact that my instructor was full of good humour and completely laid back.  He said, “You can fly!”  He didn’t berate; he encouraged.  Over the years I flew the length and breadth of New Zealand and when my father visited it was a privilege to have him sit beside me, to take off and say to him, “You have control.”  He flew 1700 hours during the war so I shouldn’t have been surprised to find myself saying, “You can fly!”  He said, “It’s like riding a bike.”

Actually I’m not sure that it is.  If you don’t fly, you lose “currency”.  And that, too, is true of any art or craft.  Even riding a bike isn’t like riding a bike.

 

 

I find myself this week reiterating a favourite remark of my father’s which he frequently passed on perusing the morning newspaper:

We are not well led.

There is something very puzzling to me about the events that took place in Salisbury on March 4^th, and the rapid response of Her Majesty’s Government.  Bear in mind that the environs of a park bench in the centre of the town are a crime scene, at which the attempted murder of two individuals has taken place.  We should expect due process.  First, the scene needs to be sealed, to allow the police to gather and collate evidence.  It may be that the trail of evidence leads the police to a suspect, or suspects, in the crime.  If the evidence is believed sufficient that there is a case to be answered, it is laid before the Crown Prosecution, and the suspect, or suspects, are charged and placed under arrest.  There is however, at this point, a presumption of innocence until proven otherwise.  The case is tried in a court of law.  It is vital that any evidence gathered be presented and made available to the defence, otherwise, as we have seen recently in various cases of alleged rape, the case will collapse.

Due process takes time.  The Law is generally in no hurry.  It might be said that justice delayed is justice denied, to which the lawyers might reasonably reply, “Do you want it done now, or do you want it done right?”

I think that was essentially the point Mr Corbyn was making last week when he was severely criticised for being unpatriotic.  His critics even used the “A” word.  He was appeasing Mr Putin.  The Foreign Secretary went out of his way to liken Russia’s imminent hosting of the World Cup with Nazi Germany’s hosting of the Olympic Games in 1936, an attempt by a corrupt regime to gain legitimacy and prestige on the world stage.  Considering the terrible price Russia paid standing up to the Nazis, this was certainly a provocative remark.  I think it was Baroness Shami Chakrabarti who said that invoking the spectre of the Fuhrer seldom enhances any current political debate.  There have been calls to boycott the World Cup.  Following the arrest of 90 English football fans in Amsterdam on Thursday for alleged loutish behaviour, I can’t help wondering whether Mr Putin might be perfectly happy not to host that particular fan base.  Football has a problem over which the FA and FIFA are in denial.  Frankly I’m glad Scotland’s not going to Russia.  Even so, I’m not a fan of sporting boycotts.  I suppose the English-speaking world might have boycotted the Berlin Olympics, but wasn’t Jesse Owens’ performance on track and field a better response to any claims of racial superiority?  And we would not have witnessed one of the most perfect races ever run, that of Jack Lovelock in the 1500 metres.  Harold Abrahams, who was Jewish, provided the commentary on that race for the BBC.

According to to-day’s Telegraph, President Trump is poised to expel more than twenty Russian diplomats from the United States.  This show of solidarity may encourage Mrs May, but the Telegraph also reports that Trump’s appointment of “uncompromising” Mr Bolton and “tub-thumping” Mr Pompeo, described as being “stuck in a neo-conservative time warp”, stokes fears of a UK-US split.  A neo-conservative time warp was brought into sharp relief at the weekend with the mass rallies in the US (and elsewhere) of young people demonstrating against the US gun laws, or lack of them.  I was pondering the US’ slavish devotion to the Second Amendment on Sunday morning, appropriately enough, seated in the rear pew of Dunblane Cathedral.  The NRA’s latest suggestion to counter the wave of mass shootings in US schools and colleges is to arm the teachers.  When you think of the great strain our teachers are already under, that must be one of the most fantastically stupid suggestions ever to be put forward, even in the USA.  Put a teacher into a disadvantaged school in a disadvantaged area full of disadvantage children and he will struggle to maintain discipline.  Now overburden him with reams of bureaucracy, useless initiatives, “strategic plans” with endless tick boxes and impossible goals.  Stress him to the max.  And now, give him a gun.

We are not well led.

Did you see the terrific spat between the two ladies reviewing the papers on the Andrew Marr Show on Sunday morning?  One was making the point that Cambridge Analytica might have influenced the Brexit referendum result and the other was saying there was no evidence to this effect.  You might suppose that a debate involves listening to an argument and then, unless the argument persuades you, replying with a counterargument.  No no no.  What you do is talk over the argument so that the argument cannot be heard.  I switched off and instead tuned into Paddy O’Connell’s Broadcasting House on Radio 4.  Mr O’Connell is unfailingly polite.  The BBC had received complaints that Welsh schoolchildren had been interviewed about their views on Brexit (they all turned out to be Remainers) and the substance of the complaint was that their views were “childish” and not challenged.  In response, Broadcasting House “aimed low” and interviewed toddlers about Brexit.  Hilarious.

Next week I think I’ll tune back into Broadcasting House.

Seat 31A in Premium Economy Class, Singapore Airlines’ Airbus A380 – I can recommend it.  Enter the aircraft, turn right and it’s the first window seat on the port side.  There’s plenty of leg room, and the position behind a bulwark even affords a little extra.  I booked the seat both ways on my New Zealand trip.  Premium Economy is a nice compromise between the purgatory of riding down the back, and the exorbitant opulence of the suites, accessed by turning left as you enter from the air bridge.  It’s not just the expense of the suites that puts me off.  I’d feel a bit of a prat, like being borne along in a sedan chair, or driving a red Ferrari.  Incidentally, have you noticed the resemblance between a diagram of the seating on an aircraft, and the stowage arrangements for human cargo on a slave vessel?  Such are the rigours of latter-day travel.  I used to travel business class when I was on business and wanted to turn up fresh usually for a college meeting.  I’ve been bumped up to First Class a surprising number of times, thanks to rendering medical treatment to passengers taken ill.  When I left New Zealand after 13 years I came back to the UK First Class because I wanted to offload the millions of air points I’d accrued.

Back to 31A – I chose a window seat because I never tire of the view from aloft, and I specifically wanted to savour the experience of landfall on NZ’s North Island’s west coast.  As it turned out, I gave my seat up so that an elderly American couple separated by the aisle could sit together.  Sometimes you do something simply because you are importuned.  I was rewarded by the company of a charming young woman from Kashmir, en route to Christchurch to study for a Masters in something like “Big Data”.

On the way home a month later I resumed my seat without even checking the number.  A woman across the aisle did what I’d done on the way out and swapped seats to allow a young couple with their baby to sit together.  She sat down on 31B and whispered to me, “I think I’ve done us both a favour.”  Oddly enough, crying babies do not disturb me, even although I’m very noise sensitive.  I think the reason is that when I did Obstetrics, and Paediatrics, and Neonatology, as a junior doctor, my worst nightmare was to be faced with a non-breathing, floppy, grey, flat neonate, and the most joyous sound in the world is the lusty cry of a pink baby.  I once took an Aerolineas Argentinas flight back to Auckland from Buenos Aires seated beside a screaming infant who was inconsolable for virtually the whole trip.  His mother was profoundly apologetic but I reassured her it was fine.  All I needed to do was put on my headphones and listen to another tango from the fiddle and the squeezebox.  The only thing that seriously discomfited me on that trip was the realisation as we crossed the International Date Line that I’d miscalculated my dates and that on arrival in Auckland at 7 am I would need to head straight for the hospital and go to work.

Talking of noise intolerance, I went with a friend to see The Post in Auckland at The Lido on Dominion Road – Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, rather good, a “speaking truth to power” movie which no doubt resonates in the current US political climate.  My companion sat on my left but after about twenty minutes she moved to my right in order to distance herself from the incessant blethering of a couple on her left.  I gave it another ten minutes and then leaned across and said, politely but firmly, “Excuse me, would you mind not speaking during the movie?  Thank you very much.”  Unlike a gentleman who recently made a similar remonstration in an English pub, I did not in consequence suffer life-changing injuries from a machete.  My friend said, “James, I’ve seen a new side to you.”  Well, I don’t know about that.

But to return to seat 31A, while looking down upon the endless vista of Australia’s hot red centre, I was rewarded with a remarkable view of Uluru, and the Olgas.  What an extraordinary apparition in the middle of nowhere is Ayers Rock, and no wonder the aboriginal people regard it as a holy place.  I scaled the rock several times (and once ran up in 44 degrees – mad dingoes and Scotsmen…) in the days when it was not considered sacrilegious so to do.  The view of the Olgas from atop is rewarding.  In some ways the Olgas, and the Valley of the Winds, are even more atmospheric than Uluru.  Standing at the base of the Olgas and looking upwards it isn’t hard to imagine one is standing on Mars looking up at Olympus Mons.  I’ve twice driven to Uluru by car from Alice Springs, a 450 kilometre road through the outback.  I found myself driving at 100 mph – no speed limit in the Northern Territory, at least then – and thanks to the unchanging vista having little sense of speed.  The second time I made the journey my fan belt broke about 30 kilometres from the settlement at Uluru and the engine began to overheat.  I pulled over and let the engine cool down, then started up and drove a few kilometres, pulled over, restarted, drove a bit, pulled over… and thus limped to my destination.  I got nervous as dusk fell as I was not insured to drive at night because of the danger of hitting an animal.  During this entire incident I never saw another car nor another human soul. If it had happened 100 kilometres to the north-east I might have been in a spot of bother.  On the return trip – problem fixed – and about 30 kilometres outside Alice, we encountered a vehicle full of aboriginal people that had left the road and overturned.  Nobody was injured.  I gave a bushman in a grass skirt a ride into Alice to get help.  My companion, a young lady from New York, was a bit nervous about that.  The bushman reminded me so much of people I’d worked with in the highlands of PNG.  In Alice, the white man walks along the asphalt roads but the aboriginal man walks along the bed of the Todd River, dry.  In New Zealand, I believe the Maori and the Pakeha knock along pretty well together and this is entirely due to the effort that went into, and continues to go into, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi.  But in Australia, the white man is on tarmac and the black fella is down on the riverbed.

There is a rock face, a ridge about 600 feet high, above Alice Springs and I once scaled it of an early evening and sat down to admire the view.  I became aware that I had been joined by a kangaroo.  It had never even crossed my mind to consider whether venturing out into the bush at dusk was foolhardy.  At any rate the kangaroo was perfectly sociable.  We didn’t box.

Back in 31A, it was poignant to farewell the beautiful and deserted beaches on Australia’s north shore and to head out across the ocean to south East Asia.   It was about here that I once treated a man in Business Class on the same Auckland – Singapore trip, who had lapsed into unconsciousness.  I remember I was watching Tom Cruise and Demi Moore in A Few Good Men – good movie – when the call came – “Is there a doctor on board?”  Opportunistic medicine is incredibly rewarding.  You are privileged to enter somebody’s life in a unique way. The clue to this patient’s condition lay in his hand luggage.  He carried a generous supply of insulin.  I rummaged in the Qantas medical bag – rather well supplied – and was able to measure this gentleman’s blood sugar.  When I pricked his finger he said, “Whas mah nah?”  He had a serum glucose of 1 mm/L – low.  I decided he had enough of an airway to tolerate oral fluids and ordered an orange juice.  The cabin crew was gone for a very long time and returned with a cocktail, exquisitely prepared, with a twist of orange skewered on the edge of the cocktail glass.

The gentleman recovered rapidly.  Meantime the Captain asked me, “Should we land in Darwin?”  Well, I’ve never been to Darwin.  It was tempting.  But I assured him we could go on to Singapore.  No wonder I got bumped up!  I ordered the patient some dinner.  He said, “Have I been making an ass of myself?”  I spent the rest of the flight – this all happened pre 9/11 – on the flight deck.  There is no more beautiful view than that from the flight deck, at dusk, coming in to land at Changi.

This time round at Changi I had a few hours to kill but fortunately found a very comfortable lounge, as I had also done at Auckland, and whiled away the time.  Still, it’s daunting to reboard and be faced with the announcement, “The flight time is 13 hours and 45 minutes.”  I ignored offers of food and drink and fitfully went to sleep.  Later, I think over India, I watched the movie Three Billboards outside Ebbing Missouri.  Very blue collar.  Very coarse.  Yet very good.  I remember Woody Harrelson’s letter to his stupid subordinate, and the extraordinary and rather touching conversation between the tough protagonist lady and her midget “date”.

Somewhere between the Aral Sea and the Caspian the aircraft seems to go into suspended animation.  Then as we made the interminable journey across the Russian Federation I thought of the latest diplomatic spat that has sprung up, over an incident in Salisbury, between Britain and Russia.  We passed to the south of Moscow and then crossed to Poland and thence to Germany and France, these lands upon which have taken place the greatest conflicts ever known to mankind.  As day began to break we flew parallel with the beaches of Dunkirk.

Landing at dawn, I had five hours to kill in Heathrow’s Terminal 5.  I have to say the Lounge was a disappointment.  It didn’t even have a loo and charged £20 for a shower.  I ask you.  I’m back in the land of carping and bickering and already I’m carping and bickering.  I got a Financial Times and got up to speed with all the parochial preoccupations, then did the crossword.  Eventually I got on a BA flight to Glasgow.

I always watch the safety videos.  Sooner or later, I’m bound to get on to a flight where something goes wrong.  The current BA safety video is quite attention-grabbing because it features various high profile British actors and there is an element of spoof.  It’s typically British, full of irony.  I imagine the Chinese will find it completely incomprehensible.  Gordon Ramsay told me that if I had to leave the aircraft in a hurry I must leave everything, “And I mean, everything!”  I had a coffee (bizarre cup requiring a tutorial on how to imbibe) and a delicious M & S sandwich, all paid for by the beep of a credit card – money is so passé.  After the tranquillity of the A380 it was a bumpy ride and we landed in Glasgow in a cross wind.  Tricky things to finesse, these crosswinds.  Yet it was safe, for which much thanks.  Now I have to grapple with Glasgow humour, and it is then that I know I am home.

What will this journey be like in another decade?  Perhaps on the fourth runway at Heathrow the captain will say, “Our flight time to Auckland today is 25 minutes.  Our cabin crew will be serving lunch.  Transient loss of consciousness in the ionosphere is perfectly normal… We apologise for a fifteen second delay…”  I think I’d rather take the flying boat with Imperial Airways, flying at 6,000 feet and dropping into the ancient capitals of the world to dine and sleep.

Now I close my eyes, and easily conjure an image of Ninety Mile Beach.  So beautiful.  When I was there, I wanted to walk down Sauchiehall Street in the sleet.  Now I am here, I want to slosh down Te Paki stream in the heat.  Such is the perversity of human nature.

 

 

One day last week I attended the 8 am medical handover in the Emergency Department of Middlemore Hospital, South Auckland, where I worked from 1986 until 1997.  I was privileged to be the department’s Clinical Head from 1994 until 3 years later when I moved on to the University of Auckland, and Auckland Hospital.  I’m flying back to the UK on Tuesday but before I leave I’m going back into the MMH ED 8 am handover.  I’m very proud of what the department has achieved.

The story of the birth of the specialty of emergency medicine in Australasia is extraordinary.  When I first came here in 1986 Middlemore’s “Accident & Emergency” (sic) was indistinguishable from any large urban “A & E” in the UK.  The medical staffing largely comprised junior doctors, mostly two years out of Medical School, with very little supervision.  Doctors sought advice on patient management from in-patient specialties, and from experienced nurses.  Adverse events and poor outcomes were commonplace.  Most Australasian “A & Es” had a medical director who for one reason or another had drifted into the role from another specialty.  In the mid-1980s a group of such directors who were well aware of the parlous state of the front door of the hospital got together to see if improvements could be made.  Their centre of gravity initially was across the Tasman in Melbourne Victoria, but allegiances were soon made with colleagues in the other Australian centres, and in New Zealand.  They formed a society, but they realised early on that if they were going to make any real difference they would have to aim high.  They formed the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine in 1984.

The birth of the college was not easy.  In particular, the struggle to gain specialist recognition was protracted, and the acknowledgement from the ancient Royal Colleges that emergency medicine was a specialty in its own right was hard won.

The founding fathers of the college were tough, and astute.  The first college president was a Scotsman, the second from Melbourne.  Both had a surgical background, both were charismatic, and both were completely devoted to the idea that expertise in emergency medicine should reside with emergency medicine specialists.  The college needed to set up a specialist training programme, an academic base, and a research programme.  It became evident that a lot of medical students and junior doctors were interested in training in this new specialty, and it says a lot for them that they were prepared to invest in a career whose future was not assured.

I could write at length about the political struggles involved in acquiring increased resources for emergency medicine, and the gradual evolution and expansion of the discipline.  But perhaps some statistics relating to Middlemore Emergency Department will suffice:

160 beds with oxygen and suction

Six resuscitation rooms

A 22 bed 24 hour short stay unit

105,000 patients per annum (including 23% paediatrics)

24 consultants

18 registrars

14 junior doctors

6 further senior doctors or college fellows

6.5 clinical nurse specialists

12 charge nurses

120 staff nurses.

Nothing like this, so far as I am aware, exists in the UK.  Middlemore Hospital is “front-loaded”.  The emergency department is the hub of the hospital’s acute care.  Compared with the model of care of 1986, when I first arrived here, this is an entirely different way of working.

Of course it would be wrong to suggest that everything is rosy in New Zealand emergency medicine.  Just like any hospital in the UK, the hospital is bursting at the seams.  There is a huge pressure on the system, the public has an apparently limitless appetite for the service on offer, there is access block, hospital discharge delays, and a crisis in social care.  In many ways, New Zealand emergency medicine is a victim of its own success.  The more you can do, the more people ask of you.  The safer your department is, the greater will be the pressure on you to hold on to patents who have nowhere to go.  Sometimes Middlemore ED can resemble an intensive care unit.

Still, sitting listening quietly at the back of the handover, I was tremendously impressed by the work the doctors and nurses were doing, the comprehensive work-up, the appropriate investigations and interventions, the succinctness of the presentations.

Every generation has its challenges.  We were trying to establish a specialty and demonstrate its credentials, while simultaneously seeing large numbers of patients and managing risk.  The challenge now it seems to me is to study the work-load and try to work out precisely what emergency medicine’s role is and how the specialty can deliver, without its practitioners burning out within a decade.  You need to identify the challenges of the day and then devote yourself to rising to them and taking the specialty to a new level.  That is actually what is inspirational about practising emergency medicine.

But I think it’s a young person’s game.  And you can only play it for so long.  Then you must find a way to diversify.  In terms of the current structures of the medical hierarchy, I was the first Clinical Head of MMH ED.  My dear friend and successor still works there but relinquished the directorship to another ex-colleague who in turn has handed the role on so that she can act as the Chief Medical Director of Middlemore Hospital.  A generation ago, that an emergency physician (a “casualty doc” they might have said) should fulfil this role would have been unthinkable.

So, four Clinical Heads.  We’re all going to be there tomorrow.  I’m hoping to get a selfie.

 

 

 

I said to my hostess in Auckland, “I’m going to vanish into the far north for a few days and write a story for the BBC short story competition.”  She nodded understandingly.  “You need to aloof yourself.”

“Aloof myself!  Aloof qua verb!  Can I use that?”  She said yes.  I don’t think she meant I was behaving like Mr Darcy, before he was humbled by Miss Elizabeth Bennet; merely that writing is, after all, a solitary pursuit.  So off I went.

Mind, it comes at a cost.  I spent a night in a town whose main street might have been a Hollywood set for a Western.  Once I’d written a thousand words I took myself off to the movies.  They were showing The Shape of Water.  Strange, but good.  In the USA of the Cold War a bizarre creature, half fish, half man, is captured in the Amazon and brought to a government installation for nefarious scientific investigation, and general abuse by a sadistic gaoler armed with a baton that delivers electric shocks.  The creature – “the asset” – is befriended by one of the institution’s cleaning ladies who happens to be mute.  Well, it’s not the first time a gal has fallen for a guy in a wet suit.  When she realises that her fish-man is due for the autopsy table she resolves to break him out.  While he is on the run (can a fish run?), he slips into a movie theatre and, sitting in the stalls entirely alone, tries to make sense of the film on the screen.

The really strange thing was, I was the only person in the movie theatre.  I sat alone in the deserted stalls looking at a fish-man sitting alone in the deserted stalls…  Like being in a hall of mirrors really.  It was at this point that I resolved that I should no longer be aloof.  Back in Auckland on Sunday morning I went to St Luke’s Remuera.  As part of Lent, the minister preached on the extraordinary episode, which appears in all four gospels, of Jesus getting mad, making a whip, overturning the stalls of the racketeers in the temple, driving them all out with their hens and chickens, and generally wrecking the joint.  He must have known that wasn’t going to go down well.  Maybe he wanted to make quite sure he was going to fulfil his destiny.

The Auckland to which I have returned feels to me a little bit like the temple in Jerusalem.  I suppose it is inevitable; it has just become a little more like the rest of the western world.  It has become expensive.  The house prices are absurd.  Dining out can be a costly business if you are not careful.  Do I really want to pay $36 for a piece of snapper?  What is happening is that the gap between rich and poor is widening, and the wider the gap is, the less inclined people from both ends of the spectrum are inclined to smile, and the more miserable everybody becomes.  This disparity, just as in the UK, is reflected by the immense strain put upon the Health Service, of which I mean to write more next week.  I venture to say that the Health Service in New Zealand, however, is far more robust than the NHS.

But I still think New Zealand is a friendly, open, welcoming, and amazing place.  I think if I were to make a scene in the Auckland Sky Tower after the fashion of Our Lord I might be arrested but I wouldn’t be summarily bumped off.  The long-suffering police would probably decide I had a mental health issue and take me to hospital where my ex-colleagues would aver they always knew I’d lost the plot, and section me.  Instead, I’ve returned to the glorious far north where New Zealand still offers the sense of being a nation at the frontier.  Here, the Maori are not much impressed by glitz and consumerism and big price tags.  They recognise them as false gods.  They would take the side of the fish-man against his upwardly mobile oppressor who fulfils an ambition and buys a brand new Cadillac.

Meanwhile the annual BBC short story prize is up for grabs.  Excuse me while I aloof myself.

 

 

Each time I come to New Zealand I make a pilgrimage to the top of North Island, to Cape Reinga, the place from whence the Maori spirits depart.  When I first came here, the last 20 kilometres of road after Waitiki Landing were unsealed, and the roller-coaster dirt track heavily rutted; you completed the journey leaving a cloud of dust in your wake.  Now the tour buses whisk the Japanese tourists up the super highway and deposit them in the overflow carpark by the toilet facilities a short walk from the lighthouse which looks out over the sun-kissed surf, where the waters of the Tasman and the Pacific meet.  I come here, but more important to me is the journey to Te Paki stream and Ninety Mile Beach.  You hang a left at Te Paki Station about four kilometres north of Waitiki Landing, and take the dirt track across pleasant pasture land down to the enormous sand dunes.

When I first discovered this place more than 30 years ago, it was deserted.  Nowadays it has become a tourist trap because of the craze of sand-boarding down the dunes.  I can’t begrudge the local economy this bonanza, nor that the tour buses should head down the stream to drive up to the Cape via the beach.  I can still kick off my shoes and slosh down the stream to the ocean.  Once past the dunes, by and large, I have the place to myself.  Like climbing a mountain, this is a pilgrimage of transfiguration.  Your cares, whatever they may be, fall away, and you see the world through fresh eyes.  Then, just as you would have to come back down a mountain, you must duly make your way back up Te Paki stream and head inland.

This time, as I walked towards the ocean, unaccountably, I found myself thinking about happiness.  L’s daughter L said, “I’m so happy”, and, an ocean and a continent away, L’s exact contemporary M, daughter of G and J, said, “I’m so happy.”  G being an expat Scot cautioned her, “Don’t say that!”  It’s a fey, Celtic superstition – don’t tempt fate.  Dick Hannay’s young wife Mary felt as much in The Three Hostages when she looked at their most pleasant haven, Fosse Manor in Oxfordshire, and shivered.  Aidos.

But should we be fearful of happiness?  The Pursuit of Happiness is writ into the US Constitution, as an inalienable right, along with Life and Liberty.  Not only that, but that it should be so is held to be a truth self-evident.  When I was at school my mother would often say to me, “I don’t care what you do, so long as you are happy.”  I didn’t pay the slightest attention.  I now realise that she meant this with all her heart and soul.  She was completely indifferent to academic achievement, status, wealth, power, “getting ahead”.

Yet she was a lone voice.  I can’t think the school was much interested in my personal happiness.  It was more concerned that I turn up on time, homework done, pay attention, and conform.  I suppose the school peddled a sort of esprit de corps.  I went to a state school in the west end of Glasgow.  I realise now its structure was modelled on that of an English public school, albeit with a tartan gloss, whose raison d’etre, the nurture of Empire, had become obsolete.  There was a House system.  There were four houses – Bruce, Wallace, Scott, and Burns.  I was in Burns House.  I was glad to be on the side of the pen rather than the sword.  There were prizes for academic and for sporting achievement.  You were applauded for being First – at History or English or Maths or the 100 metres or the high jump.  Captain of the First Fifteen.  Well done.  There were no prizes for being happy.

It’s easy to state that it is more important to be happy than to be wealthy, and yet the attack on happiness can seem quite convincing.  Some profound philosophers have spoken out against the pursuit of happiness and considered that happiness is a by-product of something else.  You devote yourself to some kind of higher calling and perhaps along the way you will discover that you are happy.  You will be surprised by happiness much as C. S. Lewis was Surprised by Joy.  But if you make happiness your goal, it will just evaporate.  Somebody once compared happiness to a body of water held by a riddle being pulled through the sea.  So long as the riddle is submerged and moving it holds the water; but stop, and bring the riddle to the surface, and you find that it is empty.

I have a notion that this is nothing more than a piece of propaganda, manufactured by people who would wish you to take on board the values of their “House System”, whatever they might be.  As the last line of the Desiderata states, “Strive to be happy.”  This raises the question of what happiness is.  Perhaps it is easier to say what it is not.  It is not pleasure, nor gratification, nor ecstasy, though it may contain all of these at one time or another.  It isn’t even the absence of pain or anxiety.  Rather it seems to me to be a sense that the decisions we take in our lives, our “pursuits”, our “striving”, contain within them a sense that what we are about is fundamentally right for ourselves, that what we choose to do is not an act of violence against our own nature, but rather a profoundly natural fulfilment of that which we are called upon to do.  Whatsoever things are right, and just, and true, and of good report…  If you are deeply involved in your own calling, then you may by some mysterious grace know the deep peace of happiness.

At Ninety Mile Beach, I resolved to continue to read and write.  At the other end of this vast shoreline, at Waipapakauri and at Lake Gnatu, this stayed with me, the devotion to Letters.  It’s what I do.

Go placidly amid the noise and haste.

 

In what my dear Northland friend reliably informs me is the trendiest Kiwi youth-speak, what’s the haps?

My latest hap is that, in an effort to escape the winter and the cracked fragment of shellac that is Brexit, with its 78-rpm needle stuck fast, I have “popped down” to New Zealand, courtesy of Singapore Airlines.  I was going to record what a marvellous thing the internet is, to allow me to arrange an itinerary, at short notice and on a whim, and to make it all come to pass at a click of a mouse.  But that was before I started grappling to post this blog from my upside-down position.  The gremlins have caught up with me.  I need a helpful youth to ask me what’s the haps and sort out my cyber woes.

But mustn’t grumble.  Glasgow – Heathrow – Singapore – Auckland went on schedule and without a glitch.  There was a flurry of snow on the edge of Glasgow but I never seriously thought we would be grounded.  I certainly didn’t have the difficulties encountered by Hercule Poirot in the in-flight movie, “Murder on the Orient Express”, where not only was somebody done in, but the train was derailed by an avalanche.  I don’t suppose I would have gone to the cinema to see an Agatha Christie melodrama, but I rather enjoyed it.  Stellar cast, beautifully shot.  There is a very powerful conversation between Kenneth Branagh and Johnny Depp.  Then I read Yanis Varoufakis’ “Talking to My Daughter About the Economy”, the only time I’ve ever managed to finish a “dismal science” text, and before I knew it I stepped through Customs where an officer obligingly cleaned my muddy running shoes, and out into the blazing sunshine.  The huge New Zealand flag above Ihumatao obligingly came out of freeze frame and flapped in the breeze.  And I am back in this extraordinary land.  Girls in downtown Auckland were offering free hugs, girls in Devonport free apples, and the taxi driver gave me a tip.

I slipped into the Kiwi idiom.  The girl on Coast Radio said, “We’re so Friday – loose as a goose.”  I bought The Daily Hap, aka the New Zealand Herald.  I was amused, perhaps bemused, that there was absolutely no British news at all.  I really have escaped Brexit.  All politics is local.  There was a lot about Cyclone Gita which has devastated Samoa and Tonga and is on its way here, but we never heard about that in the UK.

The drive from the airport to Auckland’s North Shore is not as slow as it used to be, now that a new highway by Mount Roskill takes you to a new tunnel and on to Highway 1 and the North West Motorway.  Next up, get over the jet lag.  The best thing is to plunge into a punishing social schedule.  I walked the six volcanoes of the North Shore – “the local group” – Onepoto, Styak’s Swamp, Lake Pupuke and – “the local subgroup” – Mount Victoria, Mount Cambria, and North Head.  I saw “Romeo & Juliet” in the open air at the Pump House by Lake Pupuke on Friday.  Romeo even came and sat and conversed with me while trying to avoid his carousing mates roistering abroad in the streets of Verona.  On Saturday I heard the magnificent New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in Auckland’s beautiful Town Hall.  On Sunday I renewed my acquaintance with the good people of St Luke’s Remuera, and then I drove up to Whangarei.  Ah – to walk the Hatea Loop round the Whangarei River in high summer.  This is really the gateway to the far north.  Tomorrow I’m off to Waitangi, to renew auld acquaintance.

But the news follows you, much as plastic waste migrates to the shores of Antarctica.  The Herald is full of the latest US High School Massacre.  Another tragedy.  I don’t think the US Congress will ever solve this problem.  If there is an answer, it will come from the grass roots, from the common man, and woman, who will take to the streets, as they did in the Civil Rights movement of the sixties.  Surely the people will say, “Enough already.”

A family member had reason to visit his local GP surgery one day last week, and on approaching the reception desk he was faced with the following notice:

We run ten minute appointments.  Please present a single problem.  If you have more than one problem, you need to make a further appointment.

Nothing could be more emblematic, than that pitiful notice, of the crisis in which General Practice currently finds itself in this country.  That sign needs to be removed immediately.  It’s an appalling sign.  Life just isn’t like that.  The human predicament cannot be reduced to a grocery list.  By and large, people don’t go to the doctor with one problem; they go with a syndrome.  A syndrome is a concourse, concurrence, or combination of symptoms.  Reiter’s Syndrome, for example, comprises nonspecific urethritis, arthritis, conjunctivitis and uveitis.  Does the GP really need four consultations before he twigs, in a slow-witted way, that his patient’s complaints might all be joined up?  But of course that is precisely what happens when you practise medicine like a shopkeeper fetching nostrums piecemeal from the shelves.  The really worrying thing about that reception desk notice is its signal that the doctors who put it up don’t know anything about pathophysiology, don’t know that most syndromes don’t have a name because every patient’s constellation of symptoms is unique.  If you must put up a sign, let it read:

There is plenty of time.  Make sure you say everything you need to say. 

Now that’s all very well (you might say in defence of the GPs), and in an ideal world the latter notice might hold good.  But the fact is we are in crisis and there’s no sense in denying it and certainly no sense in concealing the truth from the patients.  How can a GP give his patients all the time in the world if he needs to see 40 of them in a day?  And that’s not counting the home visits.  That’s before the GP attends to the mail, looks at the results, orders more tests, makes more referrals, negotiates more absurd bureaucratic hurdles, undertakes further medical education, and ticks 1001 more boxes.  The GP is constrained, and therefore the patient must be constrained also.

40 patients a day?  Goodness, even with 10 minute appointments, that’s two three and a half hour surgeries allowing for a ten minute coffee break, say, 9.00 am to 12.30 pm, lunch, then 1.30 pm to 5 pm.  That fills a 9 – 5 day but then there are all the other commitments just mentioned, which could even keep the conscientious doctor at work till past midnight.  Maybe the doctor will be on call overnight and have a disturbed night, then start the whole thing again at 9 am the next day.  It’s not sustainable.

Could we offload some of the consultations on to other health professionals, such as nurse practitioners and pharmacists?  That’s being piloted at the moment, but a lot of GPs are sceptical; some even think the other professionals end up creating more work for them.  What about telephone consultations, advice hot lines, email, and social media?  More pilots – and certainly such platforms are widely used, and heavily subscribed, but there is evidence again that they don’t put a dent in the GP work load, but rather increase it.  It’s as if the public has an insatiable desire for multifarious forms of the health care product.

Let’s take a step back, stop looking for a moment for a quick fix, and consider what the best model for primary health care delivery might be.

I assert that the gold standard not just for General Practice but for Medical Practice across the board, is the medical consultation.  The patient consults a professional who has been specifically trained to practise the art and science of medicine – a doctor.  It is certainly true that if there is no doctor available in an emergency, the intervention of another health care professional might be invaluable and even life-saving.  When Louisa Musgrove suffers a head injury jumping off the Cobb at Lyme in Jane Austen’s Persuasion, she is attended by the apothecary.  Currently the medical profession’s ruling bodies, and the Government, are quite keen on reviving this arrangement.  Still it seems self-evident that the person best suited to consult at such a time is a person who has been specifically trained to the task.

If the patient-doctor interaction is the gold standard, then, it is also best that it be face-to-face.  A telephone, or Skype, might be useful in the Australian outback when the doctor is 1,000 miles away, but the advantages of the consultation being real rather than virtual, not least because a physical examination can take place, are self-evident.

The medical consultation is a holy and sacred thing.  It takes place in a setting of absolute trust, behind closed doors where confidentiality is assured.  The vulnerable patient must feel he is in a place of absolute safety.  Nothing must be allowed to intrude, no third party, no politician or manager, no obtrusive IT system with its own alternative agenda.

The power of the medical consultation is not widely understood.  The public is not generally aware of the four-pillar structure of the consultation in its widest sense – History, Examination, Investigation, and Diagnosis.  To these I would a fifth and a sixth – Formulation, and Management.  The public is not aware, for example, that far and away the most powerful diagnostic predictor in the consultation is the History.  Patients habitually phone their practice to ask the receptionist if their results are “normal”.  But the question has no meaning, because the results cannot be interpreted outside the context of the History.  Nine times out of ten, perhaps even more frequently, an experienced GP will have a good idea of “what’s going on” with a patient, on the basis of History alone.  This is why nothing must be allowed to interfere with the telling of the History, and why it is such a travesty that a practice should attempt to put a cap on what a patient wishes to say.

The medical consultation is sacrosanct, but I believe it is under threat, both from within and outwith the profession.  All of the pilots, remote consultations or consultations by allied professionals, are suboptimal.  We should not allow the medical consultation to become diluted.  The consultation is an “all-or-nothing” phenomenon.  Patients: never seek half a consultation.  Doctors: never offer half a consultation.  Rather than advising patients to opt for second best, we must strive to have patients understand that the consultation requires complete commitment from them as much as from doctors.  When doctors and patients meet in the consulting room they are, effectively, entering a contract.  I call it the Consultation Contract.  By adhering to it, doctors and patients ensure they get the most out of the consultation.  The contract’s twelve points follow.  Notice these directives apply as much to the doctor as to the patient.  This truly is a contract.

The Consultation Contract

1. Remember: the medical consultation is “all or nothing”.
2. Dress for the occasion.
3. Turn up on time.
4. Shake hands.
5. State your business in simple terms.
6. If you have a hidden agenda, reveal it.
7. Tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
8. Listen.
9. Articulate your fears.
10. If you have a question, ask it.
11. If you don’t understand something, say so.
12. Table any other competent business.

You can’t do all that in ten minutes.  But GPs who schedule 15 minute appointments and conduct high quality consultations will, by and large, run to time.  Still it’s not easy.  The power of concentration the doctor requires is such that for a short while, every consultation, the doctor steps into the patient’s shoes.  The doctor becomes the patient.  This is really why doctors cannot sustain seeing 40 patient daily long term.  100 patients a week for a full time GP is quite sufficient.  GPs who manage modest list sizes, say a flock of 1,000 souls, will not earn megabucks but they just might have a chance at happiness.

President Trump used the words “America” or “American” 79 times, and the words “United States” five times, during his first State of the Union address on January 30^th.  I sat down to watch it, but there was a lot of hanging around, periodically interrupted by the announcement of the arrival of various VIPs such as the Diplomatic Corps and the Supreme Court.  Then the gentleman from Nebraska, and the gentlewoman from Illinois, et al, went off to provide a Presidential escort while Congress continued to glad-hand and network, and the Speaker of the House and the Vice-President chatted as they stood by their chairs.  It was all designed to create an air of excitement and expectancy for an annual event of national importance.  It was the New World equivalent of Black Rod summoning the Commons to the Lords for the Queen’s Speech.  At length came the grand announcement.

“The President of the United States!”

To sustained applause, President Trump with entourage slowly progressed down the grand hall shaking hands, clapping backs, and pointing laconically at those supporters out of his reach, before reaching his position at the podium immediately below Mr Pence and Mr Ryan.  More hand-shakes.  Finally it was Mr Ryan’s high and signal honour to introduce the President, and the speech got under way.

I only gave it ten minutes.  Not that the President gave anything less than a sterling – perhaps I should say a silver dollar – performance.  It was the audience choreography that got on my nerves.  Literally after every sentence, the Republicans rose to their feet and gave the President a standing ovation, while the Democrats sat on their hands, dour, stone-faced, and immobile.  In the West we used to smile condescendingly at footage of the Soviet Union Politburo endlessly applauding their chairman, and we still scoff at the North Korean generals similarly adulating Mr Kim.  But is this much different?  Well, different in one respect.  At least Congress had a binary choice.  But even some Democrats occasionally felt compelled to join in.  It must be hard to cavil at “God bless America.”

I switched off, but I didn’t give up.  I printed the speech out and read it, just as I’d previously done with Mr Trump’s acceptance of the Republican nomination, and his inauguration speech.  That’s how I know he said “America(n)” 79 times; I counted.  To the extent that this was an intensely patriotic speech, it could hardly be said to be controversial, and in matters of policy, in that it reflected much of what was said at the Inaugural, it was predictable.  Much of the speech was given over to acknowledging the work of unsung American heroes invited to be present for the occasion.  This was intended to offer bipartisan appeal and therefore to contribute to the idea of the House and the Senate putting aside differences and working for the common (American) good.  As well, as much of the speech was retrospective as it was prospective.  The President trumpeted (sic) the achievements, mostly economic, of 2017.  Apparently America is booming.  Real or fake news?  There’s a lovely quote in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury in which the President says “My exaggerations are exaggerated.”

So, when you get down to the nitty-gritty, that is, policies for the year ahead, you could summarise them on the back of a postcard:

Give Cabinet Secretaries power to remove under-performing Federal employees.

Reduce pharmaceutical prices and allow terminally ill patients to undergo experimental treatments.

Fix trade deals and enforce trade rules.

Generate $1.5 trillion to invest in infrastructure.

Introduce a “four pillar” immigration plan.

Intensify the war on drugs.

Modernise and rebuild the nuclear arsenal.

Extinguish ISIS and keep Guantánamo open.

Give foreign assistance only to America’s friends.

Restore “clarity” about adversaries – Iran, North Korea etc.

 

So, no surprises there.  But why be so interested, from this side of the Pond, in the State of the Union?  It is because, remember, we have a “Special Relationship”. We are “shoulder to shoulder”, “joined at the hip”.  You could hardly be more Siamese than that.  Whither thou goest, I will go…

It occurs to me that Mr Trump has developed a presidential expression, one intended to convey iron will and determination, characterised by clenched teeth and a pugnacious jowl.  I venture to say he has modelled this look on Winston Churchill, whose bust has returned to the oval office.  Churchill himself enjoyed the honour of addressing a combined sitting of Congress, at this same venue, during the war.  He made a quip that had always struck me as being rather heavy-handed; I couldn’t understand why Congress found it so amusing.  He pointed out that, had his father been American and his mother British, rather than the other way around, “I might have got here on my own.”  It was only 76 years later, while listening to Trump, that I finally got this joke.  I’d just assumed Churchill imagined he would have entered US politics and come to Capitol Hill.  But he was implying much more; he was suggesting that he would have been the President.

Had the technology been available, I doubt if Churchill would have tweeted.  His speeches were drafted and redrafted through blood, toil, tears, and sweat.  President Trump gives the impression of being a President-on-the-hoof, making it up as he goes along.  No doubt what he says is sincere when he says it.  “We’re going to have a great relationship, great relationship, we’ll make billions, believe me.”  But it’s a mistake to underestimate him.  In his unique way, he is Presidential.

Yet it seems to me that, on the world’s stage, he has not been tested.  What his Presidency stands for is yet to be characterised.  We may be apprehensive about his plans to step up military actions (“Our warriors in Afghanistan also have new rules of engagement”), apprehensive about his adversarial attitudes and, and most of all about the nuclear arsenal.  But what will define the Trump Presidency remains unknown.  All we can say with certainty is that something will happen.

Somebody once asked Harold Macmillan what defined a premiership, and his reply – perhaps apocryphal, perhaps fake news – was said to be, “Events, dear boy, events.”

I don’t so much inhabit a house, as a book repository.  My visitor cast a glance around the place, and said, “Gosh, have you read them all?”

“Every word.”  She laughed.

From time to time, things get out of hand and there are books strewn across every surface.  Then I have to buy another bookcase.  It happened last week.  I got a modest four-tier flat-pack from B & Q.  I used to struggle to put these things up, get into a lather, lose my temper, and inflict damage on the structure.  I despised these parsimonious instruction leaflets comprising a series of diagrams devoid of explanatory text.  You would have thought a bookcase, of all things, would have predicated a literary explanation of its own construction.  The thing is, these components, these slabs of wood manufactured by robots with precisely located indentations for the screws provided, have “chirality”, or handedness.  They need to be orientated correctly, otherwise you end up with a bookcase half of which is upside down and the other half back to front.  If you are flat-pack naïve, you can sense the instructions sneering at your gauche trials and errors.   You are not collegiate; you need to bloody yourself before being admitted to fellowship of the flat-pack “mistery”.  But I’m definitely getting better and indeed this time I constructed the edifice expeditiously and without hassle.  Then I chose a nook within my bijou cottage – there wasn’t much choice – stacked the shelves with all the orphan books, turned the whole thing through ninety degrees so that the titles might beguile my visitor, marvelled at the relative tidiness of the place, gave myself a pat on the back, and phoned a relative.

“The books are stacked.”  It might have been a cryptic message from the BBC to Pierre in Cherbourg in early June 1944.  “Les livres sont empilés.”

“Aye.  For now.”

And there’s the rub.  I am a bibliophile.  I cannot walk past a bookshop, just as some people can’t resist a tobacconist’s, or a pub.  I like to think my addiction is less self-destructive but that may be a delusion.  There’s no reason to suppose the latest flat-pack will curb my acquisitive tendencies.  Why not get a Kindle, I hear you ask, and buy on-line?  Well, I have a Kindle.  I bought it so that I could have the experience of downloading the electronic edition of my own first published book, Click, Double-Click.  I did so, recognised my own composition on the tablet, switched it off, and never switched it on again.  I relished more the experience of taking my own book, in its material form, from the shelf at Waterstone’s, and buying it.  The book sellers often engage me in conversation about my choices, and as a I approached the desk I didn’t know if I was going to remain incognito or own up to the authorship.  But on this occasion we concluded the transaction sans parley.  To me, printed paper is infinitely preferable to the electronic screen because reading is a tactile experience, and a book should be a thing of beauty, to be caressed.  Was not the lure that brought us as children into the world of books their physical attraction?  When I see old copies of children’s adventure books in second-hand bookshops, with their colourful dust jackets, I can still conjure that sense of wonder at the possibilities of exploring new worlds, through books.  I hold such a book in my hands now, Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, OUP 1958, well preserved with an immaculate dust jacket in dark greens showing Tom in pyjamas and Hattie in pinafore under a Victorian pile in the midnight garden.

Books have an aroma.  I can remember as a child on wet summer’s days rummaging in the cupboard under the stairs of boarding houses, amongst the chess and draughts sets, the Scrabble and Monopoly, to discover well-thumbed books about Biggles and Jennings and the Famous Five, and Nevil Shute books describing a world that has ceased to exist, all having that musty-musky, deeply comforting papery scent.  At the other end of the spectrum is the heady fragrance of glossy, sheeny magazine paper.  When I open a brand new magazine the first thing I do is smell it.  It’s unseemly, really.  My addiction is not merely cerebral, but visual, tactile, and olfactory.

Apart from bookcases, I have another strategy for attempting to keep my book habit under control, and that is to move books on.  Last week I offloaded a pile of paperbacks in a local charity shop.  Mostly they were “intelligent thrillers” by Robert Harris.  Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, The Ghost, The Fear Index, An Officer and a Spy, Conclave and Munich.  All went.  I kept Imperium because I haven’t finished it yet.  Not that I have anything against Robert Harris.  Quite the contrary; his books are page-turners and he is a master of pace.  The plots are very clever, the twist on the last page can be – at least to me – completely unexpected, and the research and level of historical accuracy afford the books an authenticity.  An Officer and a Spy, which concerns nineteenth century France and the notorious Dreyfus case, is perhaps his most substantial work.  It won Harris the Walter Scott prize for historical fiction.  The Ghost is a professional ghost-writer who writes the autobiography of an ex-British Prime Minister who sounds awfully like Tony Blair.  It is full of subtlety, not least the realisation on the last page – if it isn’t too much of a spoiler – that you have been reading a communiqué from a ghost.  And The Fear Index is a truly nightmarish vision of what might happen if IT systems are allowed to take over.

Yet I gave them away because I knew I would never read them again.  I’ve done the same with the books of Ian McEwan, another writer I greatly admire.  I’ve kept Nutshell, a hardback first edition signed by the author, so that McEwan is represented on my shelves.  I dare say the fault is mine and I read these books too quickly.  I look forward to the next publications from both Harris and McEwan.

Yet, when I cast an eye around my shelves, I realise there are books here that I will keep for ever.  What is it about these books?  They must have a quality that makes me want to revisit them, over and over.  Reference books, of course.  Dictionaries in English, Latin, French, German, and Gaelic – Chambers (20^th and 21^st century editions), Bloomsbury, Shorter Oxford, Churchill’s Medical Dictionary and, definitively – bit of an oddity – the complete Oxford English Dictionary in a single volume with accompanying magnifying glass.  I’ve also got a complete Encyclopaedia Britannica which is now about 25 years old.  I suppose it would be more sensible to download Encyc Brit and the OED or access them in the cloud or whatever, but I like to turn the pages, and I frequently do.

Then there are volumes of a certain sentimental value – gifts and heirlooms, school prizes and so on.  Roget’s Thesaurus, Aldous Huxley novels published by Chatto & Windus in their beautiful russet covers, Joyce’s Ulysses, Dostoevsky’s The Possessed in the Constance Garnett translation, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and Patrick White’s Voss.  Richard Feynman’s Lectures on Physics in the elegant three volume commemorative issue.  Classics like Shakespeare and Dickens and Jane Austen.  RLS complete.  Buchan on Scott and Scott on Napoleon.  The Richard Hannay yarns.  Special interests: first editions of Ian Fleming and Graeme Greene.  Bernard Levin’s Enthusiasms, and The Pendulum Years.  Churchilliana.  C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures which I mischievously shelve contiguous with F. R. Leavis’ Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow.  Music – Arnold Bax’s Farewell, My Youth, and Lewis Foreman’s biography and study of Bax.  Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.  Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough.  Scarne on Cards.  G. Wilson Knight The Wheel of Fire.  Vansittart in Office by Ian Colvin.  South Col, signed by the author, Wilfred Noyes.  Lorimer’s New Testament in Scots.  Wilfred Owen’s Letters.  The Stories of Katherine Mansfield, Definitive Edition.  James McNeish – The Man from Nowhere, and Lovelock.     Medical texts: Gray’s Anatomy, 40^th edition; Mattox, Feliciano and Moore – Trauma; the New Zealand First Aid Manual which I had the honour to edit.  I reread Ganong’s Medical Physiology the way people used to paint the Forth Rail Bridge; the tenth edition of Brain’s Diseases of the Nervous System which the pharmaceutical company Boehringer-Ingelheim gave me when I provided some case studies for a meeting they sponsored.  Books that have altered my world view, like Kafka’s The Trial.  Books that have fallen out of the sky like Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. This is just a snapshot.  More music and musicians, shed-loads of sheet music for piano and viola.  Poetry, history, biography…

You see my problem.