Author: jamescalumcampbell

I’ve received a communication from the Electoral Reform Services, containing a letter from the British Medical Association Scotland, a 12 page document entitled “Frequently Asked Questions”, and a ballot paper with the question, “Do you wish to see the proposed new Scottish GMS contract implemented?”  I settled down to read the answers to the frequently asked questions, but I got distracted by pages 11 and 12 which were identical in both bearing a single, deeply mysterious sentence.

This page is intentionally blank.

I’ve come across this sentence before so it is not unfamiliar to me.  I first came across it in RAF standing orders when I was in the University Air Squadron, and I’ve subsequently seen it in Civil Aviation Authority publications.  The aviation world seems a natural home for such a sentence.  The RAF would call it “bumf”.  The question is begged: why?  Why is this page intentionally blank?  I found myself giving this question inordinate attention.

But of course the statement is false; the page is not blank.  The page would only have been blank if the sentence were not there.  I can’t think that a truly blank page would have caused consternation in any quarter.  Blank pages are quite common at the end of a book; are they not called end-papers?  To check this, I’ve just taken a book at random off my shelves.  It is Nobel Laureate Alice Munro’s New Selected Stories (Chatto and Windus 2011), a beautiful volume.  The last story, Free Radicals from Too Much Happiness (2009) ends on page 434 and is followed by 10 blank pages, 8 in white and 2 in orange.  Neither Ms Munro nor Chatto and Windus felt compelled to offer an explanation.

So Chatto and Windus are quite relaxed about blank pages, but for some reason the RAF, the CAA, the BMA and the ERS are not.  It must have something to do with officialdom.  They might have written, “For your convenience, here are two blank pages for your own notes”.  But maybe that’s the whole point.  They are worried about sabotage; some rogue doctor and/or aviator might decide to invent and insert his own standing orders, so the idea is to endorse the pages in the way a reproduction of a bank cheque might be marked “Specimen only”.  They might have written, “Do not write on this page” but that introduces an absurd element.  It reminds me of a picture somebody sent into the Herald Diary column, of a sign bearing the legend, “Do not throw stones at this notice.” Might it have been better to state, in the interests of accuracy, “The obverse of this page is intentionally blank”, and then, intentionally, left it blank?  That still leaves us with the conundrum, what did the writer or editor intend by blankness?

The fact that there are two sides to the page raises the spectre of the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell.  In his three volume autobiography (George Allen and Unwin, 1967) – a compelling read – Russell describes how he wrote on a piece of paper, “The statement on the other side of this paper is false”.  Then he turned the paper over and wrote, “The statement on the other side of this paper is true”.  Then he sat in silence and stared at the piece of paper for eighteen months.  This is the sort of aberrant behaviour fathers write to their sons about when they see them entering a cul-de-sac in pursuit of some forlorn chimera.  “I beseech you, my son, do not waste your substance on wraiths of gossamer.  Play music as a hobby by all means.  But come into the family business and manufacture ball bearings.”  Russell started out thinking his quirky true/false paradox was just a light-hearted parlour trick, but he never solved the conundrum and he came to believe that the entire edifice of human knowledge was built on sand.

Perhaps in a similar vein of scepticism, I started by thinking that the intentionally blank page was just a trivial manifestation of bureaucratic farce, but its persistence goads me; I keep thinking the blank page has a deeper cultural significance for us.  I’ve been struggling all week to think what it might be.

Then I read of the passing of Christine Keeler and, improbably, the jigsaw began to fall into place.  In 1963, an iconic photograph of Ms Keeler appeared in the newspapers.  She was sitting back-to-front astride a very 60-ish vinyl chair, a very beautiful brunette pouting at the camera.  The only thing she was wearing was the chair.  Just in case you don’t remember, Christine Keeler achieved fame, I will not say notoriety, in 1963 when the then Minister of War, John Profumo, had to resign from the government when it was discovered that his assertion that there was “no impropriety” about his relationship with Ms Keeler was an attempt to provide verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.  If I render this in a Gilbertian way, it is only to accentuate the element of farce.  It was said that Mr Profumo had to resign because he “lied to the House”, but I think everybody knew his sin was not that he had lied, but that he had been found out.  He had to go because his real sin was that he had made the upper classes look ridiculous.  I think that even then, child as I was, I realised this when I saw an interview on the BBC between Robert McKenzie and Quintin Hogg, Lord Hailsham.  McKenzie asked the then potential prime minister if (because Ms Keeler was also thought to be involved with the Russian attaché Yevgeny Ivanov) he thought that Profumo’s affair constituted a threat to British security.  Well!  Lord Hailsham went ballistic.  “OF COURSE IT IS – DON’T BE SILLY!”  Shortly after the whole debacle, the government fell and a successor to Harold MacmIllan had to be found.  The two front runners were Lord Hailsham, who was prepared to give up his peerage, and Rab Butler.  I remember seeing Hailsham at a hustings, being confronted at close quarters by a protester bearing a placard.  I don’t know what the placard said but I just remember footage of Lord Hailsham smashing it to bits with either a walking stick or an umbrella.  Whether that did his electoral chances any good I couldn’t say.  Of course the next Prime Minister was Sir Alec Douglas-Home, a Scottish aristocrat of such high caste that one had the sense he was quite indifferent to the premiership and only acceded to it out of a sense of civic duty.  Lord Hailsham was a colourful character, and Rab Butler had the reputation for being politically astute.  But both were polarising personalities and in the end the Conservative Party opted for an invisible figure for whom it might have been written, “This page is intentionally blank.”

The Profumo scandal ran for weeks.  It ran in tandem with BBC’s greatest satirical show, That Was The Week That Was.  TW3’s legacy was this truth, that a governing class can endure anything through two world wars, but one thing it cannot endure, is ridicule.

I know it’s irrational, but any time I see an official publication bearing the statement “This page is intentionally blank”, I conjure a sense of smoke and mirrors, of official subterfuge, obfuscation, and sleight of hand.  Redact, redact, redact.

Every morning I take (sic) The Herald.  Notice I don’t “get” my newspaper, I take it.  By the bye, I don’t take cream and sugar, I “have” cream and sugar (actually I don’t) and I don’t have a good breakfast, I “make” a good breakfast even if I don’t make it myself.  Then I sit with my coffee and read the Letters Page.  What with Brexit and Indyref 2, politics in Scotland at the moment is somewhat polarised, and in an effort to be impartial, The Herald tends to print letters from Camp A en masse on Monday, and then from Camp B on Tuesday.  Then Camp A ripostes on Wednesday, and so on.  People get exercised, and the tone can become sour, at which point, like Monsieur Manette in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, coping with his post-traumatic stress disorder by returning to his cobbler’s last, I turn to the Puzzles Page.  The puzzles are either literary or numerical.  I usually do the literary ones and if I stray into the numerical I know my PTSD is particularly bad.  It’s a form of addiction really.

This morning’s letters are all about Brexit.  A new word has crept into the Brexit lexicon: Brexodus.  It describes the net fall in the UK immigration figures.  The odd thing about Brexodus is its pejorative connotation.  For years the government has been promising to get the immigration figures down to “the tens of thousands”, and for years the opposition has been lambasting it for failing to do so.  Control of immigration is one of the principal Brexit aspirations.  But now that the trend is swinging in that direction there seems to be general dismay rather than euphoria.  How can this be?  The answer lies in the word “control”.  The government wants to control who comes in and who leaves.  They want to cherry pick.  But the Eastern European cherry pickers have made their own minds up and are voting with their feet.  They will reap a harvest elsewhere.

As the negotiations in Brussels proceed, or stall, I predict we will need a whole thesaurus of neologisms.  We could use the Puzzles Page to generate them.  (You know you’re in a bad way when you start to make puzzles up.)  How many Br-words can you coin?  Less than 5 – brexcruciating; 5- 10 – brexiguous; 10 – 15 – brexcellent; more than 15 – brexcessive.

So…

Brexpletive deleted – minutes of the negotiation, redacted.

Brexocet – rebranding of Scud missile.

Brexcalibur – rebranding of Trident.

Brexcrement – exported nuclear waste.

Brex-Cathedra – intervention of Archbishop of Canterbury.

Brexaggeration – £350m weekly to NHS.

Brexorcist – anyone who can get us out of the mess we are in.

Brexterminate – latest Dalek trope or meme

Brexeunt – fall of the government.

You know you’re in a bad way when you start to make puzzles up.  I’ve recently found myself wondering how Sudoku puzzles are generated.  Sudoku is apparently a shortened version of the Japanese suji wa dokushin ni kagiru which means “the digits are limited to one occurrence”.  Even so there are, according to Professor Ian Stewart, 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 ways of filling out the typical 9 x 9 Sudoku grid.  I consulted his book Professor Stewart’s Incredible Numbers (Profile Books 2015) hoping to get some hints on how to solve the puzzles, and was somewhat discouraged, though not surprised by his statement, “the methods are too complicated to describe here, and can best be summarised as systematic trial and error.”  That fits in with my experience.  There are usually two Sudokus in the paper, one easy and one difficult.  I find that the easy one can usually be solved by an unbroken series of logical steps; you enter a number into a square confident that no other number will fit.  This added piece of information allows you to enter the next number with the same certainty, and so proceed until the grid is full.  The only potential snag is to make a mistake through carelessness.  You discover it further down the track and then the whole thing becomes difficult to unwind because you can’t identify when and where you made your mistake.  You mutter to yourself in a breathless Japanese whisper, “Shimata!”  Shimata, according to Ian Fleming in his magnificent You Only Live Twice means “I have made a mistake” or, as Mr Bond translates it more pithily, “Freddie Uncle Charlie Katie!”  Ah so desu ka!

The “hard” Sudoku does not seem to offer an unbroken line of reasoning and indeed you seem to need to fall back on Prof Stewart’s trial and error.  Best use pencil and rubber.  But what’s the point?  If the puzzle has a unique solution, there must be a rational way of reaching it.  Well, that’s an axiom.  I sat down with pencil and paper and tried to figure out the anatomy of Sudoku from first principles.

I know what you’re thinking.  Don’t go there.  It’s Mulholland Drive.

Just in case you don’t know the rules:  the Sudoku grid is a grand square of 81 squares, 9 x 9, rather like a chess board with an extra row and an extra column.  The grand square is subdivided into 9 subsets each of 3 x 3 squares.  The digits one to nine occur once, and only once (suji wa dokushin ni kagiru!) in every row, column, and subset, and our task is to fill the boxes with the right digits, the compiler having inserted for our benefit a handful of numbers to get us started.  This immediately begs the question: how does the compiler generate the puzzle, and know the puzzle has a unique solution?

It occurred to me to simplify the problem by reducing the size of the grid.  Instead of having a side of length 9, (3 squared), reduce it to 4 (2 squared) and use only the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4.  This is now a grand square of 16 squares divided into four subsets each of 4 squares (2 x 2).  I know I’m straying into dangerous territory here.  My readership will have dwindled down to one mathematician (I know who you are) who will see I am making a Terrible Mistake.  What the hell.

Let us now consider the number of ways a 2 x 2 subset can be filled in.  This becomes an algebraic problem in “permutations and combinations” analogous to the following: four people go to the theatre.  They have seats in the back stalls – row X 1 and 2 and, immediately behind, row Y 1 and 2.  How many different ways can the theatre-goers arrange themselves?

Well, X1 can be filled in 4 different ways, and once it is filled, X2 can be filled in 3 different ways, and once it is filled, Y1 can be filled in 2 different ways, and once it is filled, Y2 can only be filled one way.  So there are 24 possible arrangements, that is, factorial 4 or 4!

Put this into the context of the 4 x 4 Sudoku square.  It has four subset quadrants and we now know that there are 4! – or 24 – ways of filling in a given quadrant, say the bottom left.  Once the minisquare is filled, move to the one on its right.  Now there are only two ways of inserting numbers in each row (or column) of the minisquare, so there are a total of 4 ways of filling in the second minisquare.

Now move to the minisquare on the top left of the puzzle.  The situation is exactly the same as with the previous minisquare.  There are four possible solutions.  Move finally to the last minisquare.  Each square, therefore the minisquare as a whole, has a unique solution.

Hence the number of possible solutions for a 4 x 4 sudoku puzzle is 24 x 4 x 4 x 1 or 384.

Clearly we now need to consider the actual 9 x 9 Sudoku puzzle or, better still, create a formula for any n x n puzzle using n digits.  The fact that Prof Stewart tells us the answer for the 9 x 9 grid is 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960, is daunting.

Think I’ll try Kakuro.

Now that Gavin Williamson has relinquished the post of government Chief Whip to become UK Defence Secretary, I wonder if he will take with him Cronus, his pet tarantula.  Cronus used to occupy a place on the Chief Whip’s desk, and, at least according to the Guardian, Mr Williamson told the Times, “You have to look at all different ways to persuade people to vote with the government, and it’s great to have Cronus as part of the team.”

I’m trying to imagine what effect the tarantula would have had on me if I had been a Conservative MP summoned to the Chief Whip’s office.  Having a tarantula on your desk is the sort of thing a Bond villain might easily have gone in for.  “Ah! Mr Bond…” – stroking one of the eight legs – “An unexpected pleasure…”  It’s that sense of the steel fist inside the velvet glove.

Bullying in the UK is extremely refined.  People often talk about eradicating bullying, in our schools and universities, in the work place, in the armed forces and, most recently, in Parliament.  Yet, it seems to me, bullying is such an integral part of the UK social fabric from top to bottom, that its eradication could only be achieved by an attitudinal change so drastic that I doubt our political masters could take it in.

What is a whip if he (usually he) is not a bully?  The expression whip dates back to the mid eighteenth century and apparently comes from hunting.  (I gleaned this information from the House of Commons Library Standard Note SN/PC02829, 2008.)  The “whipper-in” was a huntsman whose task was to stop the hounds from straying from the pack, literally by whipping them into line.  That the office of whip might be associated with fox hunting may indeed suggest a sense of anachronism.  Yet whipping was never so refined and developed as it is now.

The main function of the government’s Chief Whip is to ensure that the government’s business gets through Parliament.  Some of this task is organizational and relates to the timetabling of parliamentary affairs, but at its heart lies the task of managing MP attendance at votes, and persuading any reluctant MPs to vote with the government.  To this end, the Whip’s Office circulates a weekly document actually known as “the Whip”, which details the coming week’s business and the government’s expectations as to how members will vote.  If the business is important, it is underlined; if very important, it is underlined twice; if crucial, three times – hence the expression “three-line whip”.

It is said, particularly in televised dramas of parliamentary life, that the Whip’s Office gathers dirt on backbenchers which gives the office leverage in influencing how they vote.  It has also been said that the whip is influential in assigning positions in government or on select committees.  Now you may well think so; I couldn’t possibly comment.

Of course the Chief Whip has a Shadow Chief Whip, fulfilling similar tasks for Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.  The orderly dispensation of parliamentary business requires that the Chief Whip and his shadow to some extent co-operate.  This co-operation constitutes “the usual channels”.  Much of this work can be undertaken by the Civil Service, and in this the Private Secretary to the Government Chief Whip has an important role.  The Chief Whip has a Deputy Chief Whip and a team of junior whips.  They each in turn have their shadows.  Deputies and juniors are assigned regional or departmental areas of interest.  One of the government whips, the Vice-Chamberlain of the Household, is held hostage in Buckingham Palace during the Queen’s Speech at the State Opening of Parliament, as surety against Her Majesty’s safe return to the palace.  The House of Lords, (“the other place”) also has whips, although the influence they exert tends to be a little less zealous.

I find it fascinating that MPs’ questionable peccadilloes are – allegedly – recorded in a “little black book”, but that if an MP really fouls up, the whip is not lashed; on the contrary, it is withdrawn.  The offending MP is no longer subject to discipline because he has been expelled from the party.  He is like a concentration camp inmate who starts to smoke his own cigarettes rather than bartering them for scraps of food.  Or like a hypothermic mountaineer who stops shivering violently and starts to hallucinate he is in a sunlit meadow, meandering towards the sound of children’s laughter.  He stops suffering, because he is finished.

What do you think of all this whipping stuff?  Is it the sum total of priceless tradition that has evolved over centuries in the Mother of Parliaments, there for a purpose and to be cherished and venerated?  Or is it a load of tosh?

I’m rather fond of tradition (albeit viewed from a distance of 400 miles).  I think the Palace of Westminster is a very beautiful building.  Precisely because it is falling to bits, I think it should be evacuated and restored ASAP.  I rather like the tradition of referring to “My honourable friend the member for Biggleswick” rather than Joe Bloggs, and the insistence that to call Mr Bloggs a liar – even if he be guilty of terminological inexactitude – is unparliamentary.   I don’t mind the MPs parading through lobbies rather than pressing an electronic gadget in order to vote; at least they get to stretch their legs.  I quite like Mr Speaker to announce, “The ayes to the right… the nays to the left… the ayes have it!  Unlock!”  If I were a sitting member I might even be tempted to take a snort of snuff apparently provided at the entrance to the Chamber, in a wooden box with a silver lid, made from the old chamber door the Luftwaffe managed to blow to bits in 1941.

But I think they should dump the whips.  Get over it, I say.  I realise this is an extremely radical point of view to take.  If you dump the idea of a whip, you really dump the idea of a political party, because you are removing the party’s disciplinary machinery and saying to the members, “Vote according to your conscience.”

Now I hear you say, that’s an impossibly jejune and naïve idea.  It is the most natural thing in the world for people of like mind and with a common end in view to organize.  You can’t achieve anything unless you can get a body of men and women to act as one.  That is perfectly true, but is not the purpose of a parliamentary debate to explore an issue such that men and women of good will can indeed take a vote, establish the majority, and then act as one?  The trouble with the whip is that parliamentary debate is reduced to number crunching.  You count the number of votes the government and the opposition can rely on, and you push forward the debate when you already know what the outcome is going to be.  People may be compelled by the three-line whip to vote for something they don’t believe in.  They might even be called upon to go on camera and defend the indefensible on the BBC and before the nations.  Big hitters traditionally take on this role, particularly if the interview is going to be rocky, because big hitters are big bruisers.  They are well versed at maintaining a straight face and giving expression to some specimen of cognitive dissonance or, more colloquially, talking b*******.  They justify the outcome of the debate, but the outcome of the debate was already established through techniques of backstairs jobbery.  The debate becomes a show-debate.  If your debate is a show-debate, it is meaningless.  All you really have left is flummery in the surround of ornate architecture, ancient modes of polite address, the tinkling cymbal of the division bell, and snuff.

In the magnificent setting of Glasgow’s Park Circus, astride his steed, looking out across Kelvin Grove towards the tower of Glasgow University, sits Field Marshall Earl Roberts of Kandahar, Pretoria, and Waterford VC, KG, KP, GCB, OM, GCSI, GCIE, born India on the 30th September, 1832, died France on the 14^th November 1914, while visiting British troops.  Beneath the statue on its east side are listed the Field Marshall’s campaigns – the Indian Mutiny, Umbeyla, Abyssinia, Lushei, Afghanistan, Burmah, South Africa.  And there is a quotation from a speech he gave in Glasgow on the 6^th May, 1913: “I seem to see the gleam in the near distance of the weapons and accoutrements of this Army of the future, this Citizen Army, the warder of these islands, and the pledge of the peace and of the continued greatness of this Empire.”

That quotation reminds me of a short story by Kipling, The Army of a Dream.  It’s one of these rather eccentric, Kiplingesque extended flights of fancy perhaps describing Roberts’ Citizen Army on manoeuvres, on a yomp or, as Kipling calls it, a “heef” – beef on the hoof.  It’s good natured and jolly.  But it is a dream.  And its abrupt end is shocking.  It’s a tricky business, foretelling the future.  Within a single generation following Earl Roberts’ Glasgow speech, Britain was exhausted and bankrupt, and the British Empire was to all intents and purposes no more.

Churchill had a go at foretelling the future in his collection Thoughts and Adventures published in 1932.  Some of what he said was remarkably prescient.  In Shall we all commit suicide? (written in 1925) he predicted that a bomb “no bigger than an orange” would contain the force of a kiloton of cordite that could obliterate a town.  In Fifty Years Hence he predicted, inter alia, the mobile phone, Skype, and (still unattained) cold fusion.  (I think you can tell he had been picking the brains of his scientific advisor Prof Lindemann.)  He admired Lord Tennyson’s effort at prophecy in Locksley Hall.  The poet laureate, in foreseeing modern aviation, both civil and military:

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,

Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew

From the nation’s airy navies grappling in the central blue;

But Churchill’s glance into the future is essentially dystopian.  He bemoans the fact that scientific progress has outstripped our capacity for living in harmony.  And in 1940 he famously foretold the possibility of a new Dark Age rendered more sinister and perhaps more protracted by “the lights of perverted science”.

If one were to write a Fifty Years Hence now, what might it contain?  Robots? Radio 4’s PM programme recently talked up robots every day for a week.  Eddie Mair encouraged the artificial intelligence boffins with humour and a light touch, but I got the sense he wasn’t really engaged.  I’m on Prof Stephen Hawking’s side.  We should watch these robots in case they take over the world. Have you read Robert Harris’ The Fear Index?  Maybe there’s something to be said for being Luddite.  I’m with Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman.  His hackney carriage drew up outside No 10 and his aide asked him if he was thinking of acquiring one of these new horseless vehicles powered by the internal combustion engine.  He said no.  Why ever not?  He went round to the front of his conveyance and allowed the horses to nuzzle in.  “This is why.”  Bartok was walking along Fifth Avenue New York when he stopped and sniffed the air.  Horses!  He crossed the road and found the stable and communed with the beasts.  Ah, Bartok Bela!

Isn’t it funny – I can remember when I was a child thinking how wonderful it would be if you could have a device that could record television programmes in the same way that radio programmes could be taped; I supposed such a device would be called a videotape.  Then if I missed an episode of Doctor Who I would be able to catch it later.  Pie in the sky.  Nobody then predicted that you could make your own movie on a device the size of a pack of cards, watch it instantly, and send it instantly to somebody on the other wide of the world.  It is amazing, but I confess deep down I’m indifferent.  What do you do when you see the world progress along a path you do not wish to take?  You write your own Fifty Years Hence.  Like, the kingdom of heaven is like…

Like a museum.  The world will become a vast museum.  Everything will be managed.  The check-list manifesto of the museum’s employees will be indistinguishable from the bucket-lists of the visitors, therefore it will be impossible to know whether you are a tourist or you work in the tourist industry.  Enga Province will be the Kew Gardens of Papua New Guinea.

Because you inhabit a museum, everything you experience will be at a remove.  Music will be in inverted commas.  You can relive “The Battle of Agincourt”.  Sex will be “sex”.  The museum will have an Executive Board in the old United Nations building in New York, itself a museum.  The Non-Executive Board will be in Beijing’s Forbidden City.  The identity of the museum’s curator will be unknown.

Yet still there will be rumours of an area outwith the museum, a Steppe in Central Asia, wild and anarchic, where men and women are expert on horseback and species still devour one another.  You may try to find this region, but you can never be sure that the peasants with grinning faces, beckoning you on, are not museum stooges, their log cabin still within the perimeter, waiting to send you to a Gulag in “Siberia”.  The worst thing that can happen to you is not that you will be cast into outer darkness, but that you cease to be a museum employee, or a visitor, and become an exhibit.

I’m travelling with the Bakhtiari, a nomad in Persia.  We’ve reached the water’s edge of the Bazuft River.  The migrating flocks are about to plunge into the swollen melt water and make the crossing.  My people need to follow the herd to survive.  I bid them farewell.  I’m not making the crossing.  Not this year.

To The Lion & Unicorn on Saturday night with my ex-colleagues, to celebrate L’s 50^th.  (She looks about 17.)  One of the practice receptionists, S, has the gift of laughter.  I don’t mean a smile or a smirk or a chuckle, but uncontrollable mirth that brings tears to the eyes.  For this reason I relayed to her an anecdote I’d heard two nights previously in the same L & U (home from home) from my friend J who is a great tennis fan.  She went to the Murray-Federer exhibition match at the Hydro in Glasgow.  “Hey Roger,” called someone from the crowd, “are you going to wear a kilt?”  A young lady came on court, took off her kilt and gave it to Federer who obligingly put it on before playing on.  “Hey Roger,” cried another young lady in the crowd, “Show us your Toblerone!”

Only in Glasgow.  Sir Billy Connelly used to do a running gag about Toblerone; something about eating a bar and getting an Alp stuck up your nostril.

Hughie, one of the park dog walkers, has been to Amsterdam for the weekend.  He took the obligatory tour of the red light district, where young ladies in various stages of undress advertise themselves in shop windows.  He said – and you have to say this in a characteristic urban central belt nasal whine – “I felt no desire.”

S was moved to remind me of a consultation she once had with me.  Actually that is not quite right. She told me of the consultation, for I have no recollection of it, m’lud.  She’d phoned me mid-surgery to ask if she could see me.  I said add your name to the list and come in at the end.  She showed me a mole on her neck.  Apparently I examined it and said, “Don’t worry about it, it’s benign.”  She said, “I’m so relieved.  I thought I might have to take my clothes off.”  I said, “Well, you can take your clothes off if you like, but it’s still benign.”  She said, “Oh, I only take my clothes off for Dr P!”

Dr P is the model of rectitude.

Talking of stripping off, I went into my local gym to find they’d swapped round the ladies and gents changing rooms, I guess so that a guy could carry out some repairs in the ladies.  I duly went in, changed, crammed my stuff into a locker, and went to the gym.  Nothing too strenuous: I ran 5k on the treadmill and then went for a sauna and a spa and a swim.  That blew a few cobwebs away!  Then back to the changing room.  Stripped off, had a shower… I was padding from the shower back round to the lockers, stark naked, and walked smack into a young woman.  To tell you the truth I can’t quite remember her own state of dress.  I said, rather redundantly, “I’ve come into the wrong dressing room, haven’t I?”

“Hmm.”

I put my togs back on and retreated.  “Apologies ladies!”

There was no reply.

The person next to me in Dunblane Cathedral for the Service of Remembrance on Sunday was completely tone deaf, and very loud.  I noticed it as soon as we started to sing Paraphrase 18, Behold! The mountain of the Lord to the tune Glasgow.  It has seven verses, which allows time for the flags and military regalia to process the length of the cathedral.  My neighbour might have been Horatio Hornblower.  It wasn’t so much singing as sprechgesang.  I didn’t mind.  There is a convention in church that extraneous noise should be tolerated.  If babes in arms heckle Church of Scotland ministers they tend just to soldier on.  I have to say I am less tolerant of noisy audiences in the concert hall.  At the Usher Hall Edinburgh on Friday night, despite a plea from the CEO that everybody turn their mobile off, a phone rang during a particularly contemplative passage of the Rachmaninoff third piano concerto.  The concerto was played by a young South Korean pianist, Yekwon Sunwoo, who won the 2017 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth Texas.  In this, said to be technically the most difficult concerto in the whole piano repertoire, Mr Sunwoo was both virtuosic and expressive.  It was a tour de force.  He played an encore which I could not place.  Chopin?  Rachmaninoff?  It dissolved into a deep and intense silence, punctuated by the clatter of somebody’s elbow crutch falling and ricocheting off the floor.

Dined in Bologna, Bridge of Allan, with Tim Peake’s grandmother-in-law, another great tennis fan and a very remarkable woman who shares S’s capacity for uncontrollable laughter.  She told me she got a phone call from the International Space Station, the only time I can ever remember her say she was rendered speechless.

I heard on the BBC news last week that the emergency department of a hospital in Nottingham saw over 700 patients in one day.  Now, in peacetime, and unless plague is sweeping across the land, that ought not to happen.  What can it mean?  The collapse of General Practice?

Right now, in British General Practice, professional morale is at rock bottom.  GP training positions can’t be filled.  GP partnerships are advertised and nobody applies.  GP surgeries are either being placed into special measures or closed altogether.  Medical School lecturers are hostile to general practice and put the students off.  Junior doctors are heading for Australasia in droves.  When you consider that most young people who enter medical school do so with a high sense of vocation and a genuine wish to serve the community and make the world a better place, this is bizarre.  What task could be more rewarding than that of entering people’s lives in a unique way, using one’s knowledge and expertise to help and to be of use?

In my opinion, British General Practice has lost its way.  It did so circa 2004-5, when a contract was negotiated whereby the responsibility for out-of-hours patient care was handed over from practices to trusts or health boards.  That was a fatal error.  The opportunity to stop being on call, to shut the surgery door at 6 pm and not look back, looked like a priceless gift but in fact it turned out to be a poisoned chalice.  We should have known.  After all, with power comes responsibility.  If you abrogate the responsibility, you lose the power.  Thereafter, it hardly mattered how well a GP was paid or how much free time he was given.  He would be at somebody else’s beck and call, powerless, and miserable.

The new contract came into being at a time when information technology was taking off and paper records were being scanned into electronic systems.  Sophisticated and expensive software packages were adopted by NHS Direct in England and Wales and NHS 24 in Scotland.  There were frequent system crashes.

The new contract was target-driven and GPs were remunerated according to their attainment of set targets as delineated by the Quality Outcomes Framework (QOF).  GPs, doctors generally, have been training to hit targets since long before they ever entered medical school, and it should have come as no surprise that most GPs would fulfil the requirements of the QOF and gain maximum points nearly 100% of the time.  The QOF therefore evolved and became more complex, more IT-driven, and more time consuming.  Computer systems were programmed to drive the QOF, so that GPs would be prompted by a series of alerts on the computer screen to ensure the QOF was adhered to.

The new contract also brought in a system of annual GP appraisal, whereby an appraiser, usually a GP colleague from a neighbouring practice, would spend a couple of hours with the appraisee reviewing his educational activities and monitoring his continuing professional development.  Appraisal was developed shortly after the trial and conviction of a single-handed GP in the north of England who was found guilty of murdering fifteen of his patients, and who it was thought over his lifetime might well have murdered in excess of 300 people, making him the most prolific serial killer in the UK’s history.  By a strange non-sequitur, this was depicted by the media as the event that kick-started appraisal.  Read any newspaper article of the time about GP appraisal, and you could be sure the name Harold Shipman would appear in it.  The purpose of appraisal therefore was to stop GPs from murdering their patients.  Actually GPs knew perfectly well, and said often enough, that “appraisal won’t stop another Shipman.”  I suspect Dr Shipman’s appraisal paperwork would have been quite up to the mark.  As it turned out, appraisal wasn’t even that good at detecting GPs who were incompetent.

Meanwhile the ever exuberant, nay promiscuous QOF sired progeny such as “QIP” and “Whole Systems Working” by which GP practices were required to undertake ever more arcane and time-consuming pieces of paperwork (or electronic work).  It was around this time that I myself decided to get out.  I remember I attended a GP locality meeting at which GPs were being asked to undertake a particularly pointless piece of work.  I stood up and made a short speech, subsequently referred to by my colleagues as “the speech”, rubbishing the whole enterprise.  For a flavour of the occasion, I refer you to Chapter 17 of my novel Click, Double-Click.  ACS’ rant was, essentially, my rant.

The QOF has been abolished, at least in Scotland.  It is being replaced by another contract, to be “rolled out” (as they say) in 2018.  Will it be better?  I was about to write “I’m not holding my breath” but actually that’s not good enough.  GPs need to take back control of the nature of the profession.  The motto of the Royal College of General Practice is “Cum Scientia, Caritas.”  It seems to me that science has been replaced by pseudo-science and care or compassion is in danger of being lost altogether.  We need to come up with a plan.

Let’s draw up a model of care for a population of, say, 7000 people.  I’m going to envisage it as being located in a Health Centre in a small town serving the population of the town itself, and a surrounding rural community, but it could as easily, with some modification, be an inner-city practice.

The practice needs seven GPs.  If a GP has a “flock” of around 1000, he will seldom see more than 100 patients per week.  That’s 20 patients a day, 25 if the GP wishes to devote one day a week to research, education, administration, or a special interest.  Offer fifteen minute appointments.  Patients will be able to be seen on the day they phone for the appointment.  Believe me.  I’ve done it.

The practice does its own out-of-hours work.  This means being “on call” between 6 pm and 8 am once a week.  Depending on the work load, consideration could be given to sharing “on call” with neighbouring practices so that the frequency is lessened.  Schedule your night on call to be on the eve of your “off the floor” non-clinical day.

Next, the Health Centre has an in-patient unit.  This is not as innovative as it sounds.  Think of the traditional “cottage hospital”.  There is much talk at the moment of “hospital in the home” particularly with regard to care of the elderly.  But “hospital in the home” is very expensive.  “Hospital in the GP surgery” is viable and still constitutes care in the community.  Many elderly patients need to be admitted to hospital not because they need sophisticated tests or therapies, but simply because they need nursing care.  This is the sort of patient who should be admitted to the GP unit.

GPs running such a unit would be required to cultivate and maintain skills that are chiefly learned in hospital emergency departments and in-patient units.  They would have access to near-patient testing such as routine biochemical and haematological testing to allow for monitoring of intravenous therapy.  There is no reason why there shouldn’t be on site plain radiography.  Other lab facilities could be developed depending on the extent to which GPs were comfortable managing more serious conditions.  The unit would be run by GPs and practice nurses.  Allied health professionals such as physio, and OT would have input.  The on-call doctor would be on site.  Evening and overnight consultations would also be on site.  Home visits might take place but the default position would be to consult on site.  Transport, and a driver, would be available for both doctor and patient.

That strikes me as an attractive proposition for both patient and doctor.  It’s real.  It’s caring.  It can’t be belittled.  It’s pure medicine.

The colours of the trees round the Milngavie Reservoir yesterday were bedazzling.  It’s a beautiful time of year.  I am determined to relish it and in particular to ignore my two least favourite festivals of the year, Halloween and Guy Fawkes.  When I was wee me and my pals, we would dress up on Oct 31 and go round the tenements of Glasgow G11 trawling for swag.  We knocked on the door of a second floor flat on Randolph Road.  A grumpy man said, “What do you want?”  I recognised him.  He was the newsagent at Broomhill Cross.

“Please can we have wur Halloween?”  (We’d never heard of “trick or treat”.)

“Can you sing a song?”

“Aye.”

“Well don’t bother.  Here’s threepence.”

I have turned into that man.  The clock jiggery-pokery on Sunday morning has put me into a mood.

So I intend to ignore all these foul fiends and flibbertigibbets.  I will spare a thought for Martin Luther on the eve of All Saints Day.  It will be 500 years to the day since he pinned his 95 theses to the door of All Saints Church, Wittenberg.  95!  That’s a lot of bullet points.  It rather reminds me of these inquiries that take place following the uncovering of poor standards in an NHS hospital that needs to be placed into “special measures”.  Some retired judge comes out with a fantastic number of recommendations like three hundred and fifty seven or so, and you get the sense that, whatever the problem was, he has missed the wood for the trees.

Hard on Halloween, the whizz-bangs start to go off. Why on earth would you celebrate a plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament?  Is it in truth a celebration of the fact that Mr Fawkes came to a sticky end, hence a celebration again of Luther’s 95 theses and the dawn of the Reformation?  It wouldn’t be so bad if the racket was confined to the evening of November 5th, but it starts early and goes on and on seemingly only to be silenced by Armistice Day.  Now I’m all for Remembrance Sunday.  I cherish two minutes of blessed silence.  But two minutes is quite enough.  The people on the BBC have already been wearing poppies for days and it’s still October.  Is this what is meant by “virtue signalling”?

Then, just when you think it’s all over, the shops start banging on about Christmas, and we’re off into the six weeks’ hysteria of the advent to Saturnalia.  Count me out.

But I mustn’t make my alternative universe sound so wintry.  It is, in fact, autumnal, and autumn is the most poignant season.  It is the season of Rachmaninoff’s last piano concerto, his fourth.  I heard Peter Donohoe play it in Perth on Thursday night, with the St Petersburg Symphony Orchestra.  The orchestra’s timbre seemed to me to be of a bygone era.  They might have been accompanying Rachmaninoff himself.  As an encore, Mr Donohoe played the Prelude in D, Opus 23 No 4.  There is a secret that those of us who are in the autumn of our lives should really impart to the young.  It is that, when you realise that every day is a bonus, everything becomes infinitely more precious, the colours brighter, literature more profound, music more deeply moving, the natural world more awe-inspiring, ideas more intriguing, women – am I allowed to say this in the current climate? – incomparably more beautiful.

There was an odd interchange between panellist Tim Stanley and expert witness Dr Kate Greasley on Radio 4’s The Moral Maze last week.  The subject, fifty years after the Abortion Act, was the ethics of termination of pregnancy.  Dr Greasley was discussing “personhood” and making the point that there is a difference between a self-conscious being and a single cell zygote.  “Ah!” interjected Tim Stanley.  “Now you’re being medical rather than moral!” Dr Greasley called this a “rhetorical non-sequitur”.  They had a rather tetchy exchange which Chairman Michael Buerk had to interrupt so that the witness could finish making her point.  It all reminded me of why I don’t usually last the distance in The Moral Maze but switch over to Radio 3.  When people start to get hot under the collar they tend to diffuse more heat than light.  The same could be said for public discourse generally.  Only this week two US ex-presidents have, exceptionally, gone out of their way to bemoan the toxic atmosphere of partisan tribalism that has contaminated American politics.  Over here, debates resemble the squabbling of the sharp-suited apprentices hauled into Lord Alan Sugar’s office prior to a sacking.  I’m not immune to it myself.  I put my hand up.  A few months ago when Michael Gove, in support of the upgrade of Trident, compared the SNP Westminster MPs (et al) to “a eunuch complaining about the cost of Viagra”, I spluttered into my cornflakes and wrote a rejoinder to the letters column of The Herald.  It would have been a perfectly good letter, and I think The Herald might have published it, but that I closed by expressing the hope that somebody would tell Mr Gove where he could stuff his Viagra.  Not good!  It was not the first time The Herald has saved me from myself.  Now I try to write them a letter only if I think I have something constructive to say.

But this time I stuck with The Moral Maze because the expert witnesses were so good.  It was particularly interesting that Dr Edward Condon and Dr Kate Greasley, though expressing opposing views, were both extremely articulate.  Dr Condon, a canon lawyer who writes for The Catholic Herald, cast the debate in terms of human rights, and was prepared to grant human rights to human life from the moment of conception.  Dr Greasley, lecturer in law at UCL, saw the rhetoric of “rights” as a marker for a poor standard of debate.  She saw “personhood” as being the factor that made life valuable.  “Personhood” came into being gradually.

I thought it was unfortunate that Dr Greasley’s use of the word “zygote” seemed to compel Tim Stanley to interrupt.  It seems to me that there is much to be gained by considering the issue of termination, at a cellular level.  A zygote is the product of the union of two gametes.  A gamete is a sexual reproductive cell, either an egg-cell or a sperm-cell.  The moment of fertilisation occurs when two gametes, egg and sperm, successfully combine.  If I understood Dr Condon correctly, then he was saying that the entity thus created, the zygote, has as many “human rights” as any human being at any stage of life, and that the zygote’s right to life superseded any other consideration, for example the consideration of the rights of a woman who had been the victim of rape and/or incest.  One of the attractions of this point of view is its consistency.  The zygote is sacrosanct; no ifs, no buts.

That stance begs the question, does a gamete have rights?  The difference between a gamete and any other human cell is that the gamete only contains 23 chromosomes or half of the human cell’s complement of 46 chromosomes.   The average human male ejaculate contains about 300,000,000 gametes, so the idea of granting human rights to each gamete is patently absurd.  Even a woman who remains reproductive for a long time, say, from aged 13 to 55, can potentially produce about 500 gametes, but she can hardly be expected to bear 500 children.

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that a zygote has rights, but a gamete has no rights.  (I’m beginning to understand why Dr Greasley thinks the rhetoric of “rights” lowers the standard of debate.)  It occurs to me that there might be a way of reconciling two opposing points of view by looking at this issue in a pragmatic way.  Since the 1967 act, there have been about 9,000,000 pregnancies terminated in the UK.  The current abortion rate is about 200,000 per annum.  Some people would argue that is 200,000 too many; most people would argue that it is at the very least unfortunate that these situations arise, and that it would be a good thing if unwanted pregnancies just didn’t happen.  There are two ways to avoid an unwanted pregnancy.  One is always to remember to take the pill, or better still, get an implant or long-acting reversible contraceptive (LARC).  The other (and for some reason champions of teenage contraception are loath to suggest this strategy) is to abstain from sex.  This month at the annual conference of the Royal College of General Practitioners in Liverpool, John Guillebaud, Emeritus Professor of Family Planning and Reproductive Health at UCL, encouraged all the GPs to prescribe the low dose combined (oestrogen-progestogen) pill daily without breaks (or no more than four four-day breaks a year, rather than the twelve seven-day breaks a year, a fifty year old convention that has no scientific evidence base).  It is so much easier to remember to do something if you are doing it every day.

Prof Guillebaud is very concerned about carbon footprints, not just the amount of carbon, but the number of feet.  The human population of the world is currently increasing at the rate of about eighty million per annum.  This means that the world has to create the infrastructure, the amenities, and the goods and services of Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, and Aberdeen, once a week, in perpetuity.  Then shortly, add Carlisle.  Then…  It’s not sustainable.

I’ve had a very violinistic week.  Last Saturday in Glasgow Nicola Benedetti played the Elgar concerto; on Friday night in Milngavie Tasmin Little played unaccompanied works for “The Naked Violin”, and on Saturday, again in Glasgow, James Ehnes played the Beethoven.  Nicola was terrific, Tasmin wonderful, and James sublime beyond comprehension.  I wondered why somebody as distinguished as Tasmin Little should choose to play in an obscure church in Milngavie.  Maybe she heard Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour say that the nation’s happiest women live in East Dunbartonshire.   But then Ms Little’s community outreach programme has taken her into a maximum security prison so maybe it isn’t such a leap.

These three wonderful exponents made me think about facility.  (Chambers – facility ease in performance or action: fluency.)  In terms of violin technique, they all have it in spades.  The thing about facility is that, if you don’t have it, you admire those who do and you know that they have been blessed with a miraculous gift.  Yet it seems to me that so often, those who have it are quite indifferent; they fail to realise they possess anything.  Ms Benedetti puts it all down to hard work.  Her work ethic is well known.  Her Majesty has even expressed the wish, with great solicitude, that she not work too hard.  Ms Benedetti herself has said she needs to keep practising to stay on top, but she has been known to admit, grudgingly, that she might have a grain of talent.  The thing is that facility is not recognised by its possessors as a positive attribute; it is taken for granted as merely the absence of something negative such as clumsy ineptitude.

Aeons ago, at a crossroads outside Thebes, I had the opportunity to become a professional viola player.  I was a jobbing viola player, of the sort that is the butt of jokes, melding with the furniture somewhere in the background.  Oom pah pah oom pah pah.  I was “serviceable”.  “Serviceable” is an expression Sir Simon Rattle uses to describe the Barbican, prelude to his advocacy of a new concert hall for London.  I could practise all I liked but I would never be playing Mozart’s Symphonia Concertante up front with Benedetti or Little or Ehnes.  So, without regret, the life of the professional musician for me became the road not travelled.  Just as well.  Nowadays the standards among professional musicians are so high that they could all come up front and play a concerto.  I had neither the temperament nor the facility.

Sometimes I rail against my own maladroitness.  When I wrap a Christmas present the cellotape curls over on itself and becomes a useless fankle.  I type carelessly on this very keyboard and then blame Word for all the misprints.  I usually incur an occupational injury undertaking the meanest household chore.  DIY flat packs?  Don’t get me started.  There’s something deeply seductive about succumbing to rage.  I could be Charles Foster Kane, systematically tearing the contents of a room to bits.  It’s a frenzied protest against the sullen intractability of things.  Why won’t things do as they’re told?  I’ll teach things a thing or two.  Rage is destructive; most of all it is self-destructive.

I hope I have been more careful with people than with things.  As a doctor, after I’d put in my ten thousandth suture, I suppose I had gained a degree of – dare I say it – facility.  Maybe Ms Benedetti was right after all; it’s the ten thousand hours of practice that matter.  Yet it helps if you are not always going against the grain.  It is not merely having the facility that is the boon.  If you combine the talent with the desire, if you have the desire to develop the talent through hard work, that is the true blessing.

I was a one talent man.  I had a facility with words.  Reading this, you may wish to disagree.  I sound like Lady Catherine de Burgh in Pride and Prejudice, with regard to the pianoforte.  “I could have been a great proficient!”  Perhaps I’m like one of these people on Britain’s Got Talent with a tuneless whine of a voice who insists his destiny is the Big Time; Simon Cowell shakes his head (No!  No!!!) and tells him to get off.  In my final year at school I had a wonderful English teacher who gave me great encouragement but was exasperated by my insouciance.  He waved my essay in front of my face.  “This stuff – it’s nearly publishable!”  Ah.  Slain by the morganatic compliment.  “You don’t seem to care!”  I was indifferent to my own facility.  For a time I despised the arts.  I wanted to enter the Pythagorean School and be privy to the secrets of science as expressed in the runes of chemical and mathematical symbols.  I experienced the deep jealousy which I now believe was endemic within the late twentieth century artistic community.  In The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski asserts that the intellectual leadership of the world now rests with scientists.  C. P. Snow, a polymath who bestrode the twin boulevards of art and science as well as the Corridors of Power, would criticise his artistic friends because they didn’t know what the Second Law of Thermodynamics stated.  He said that men of science had “the future in their bones”.  The distinguished Cambridge literary critic F. R. Leavis couldn’t stand this.  He composed an anti-Snow polemic and tore him apart.  Snow could have expressed his central idea more cogently but there is no doubt that he struck a nerve.  He certainly struck a chord with me.  I read Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and decided to become a doctor.  Meanwhile I sat the exam for the Civil Service and went down to Whitehall to take part in table-top workshops with chaps from Haberdashers and Eton.  The mandarins asked me what I wanted to do and I said I was thinking of going to Med School.  Amazingly enough, they didn’t say, “So what the hell are you doing here?”  They were very kind.  I visited Guys and Barts and made enquiries.  I must have had a degree of chutzpah because it actually looked like a forlorn hope.  But I did indeed follow in the footsteps of Maugham’s character Philip Carey – in rather more ways than I would have wished.  At the time, when things were looking a bit unhopeful, I wrote a piece of verse.  Well, call it doggerel.  It’s dire; I sound like a poseur out of a tragedy by Sophocles and the first line is a self-conscious snatch from Aristotle.  Yet I reproduce it now, because at least it accurately reflects the mind set of somebody who felt himself to be lost.

Midnight, 8/3/75

 

I went to the poets, tragic, dithyrambic

And vouchsafed my service in lieu of the world;

Sat by a cloister and sang riddles, iambic

Pentameters meet for a banner unfurled.

 

They listened – mine was a face bent on smiling

Upon them, but theirs were all hoary and grey.

They clapped softly, found my tales faintly beguiling,

Wondered if really they weren’t quite au fait.

 

Impatient I glanced down the valley below us

Where rivers of blood burst their banks without slake.

I questioned my teachers on whence these streams flow as

They broadened and merged in a great crimson lake.

 

They told me the source of all suffering torment

And pointed out where its sour fruit reached the sea.

I looked long and hard without venturing comment

For deep haze had hid the horizon from me.

 

I left these old poets and went down the mountain,

Greeted the world by the riverside

Where men without faces, bedrenched in a fountain

Of blood, rescued souls from the incoming tide.

 

I rolled up my sleeves and stepped forward to aid them

But one put his hand on my shoulder and said

“You’re one of the poets and you have betrayed them.

“Retrace your steps to the summit’s head.

 

“I knew you at once” – he ignored my dejection –

“Perceived your apartness and knew you couldn’t stay.

“Step forward and look at your crimson reflection.

“Look!  Can’t you see you’re all hoary and grey?

 

“But don’t touch that redness, or sure it will kill you

“For you were not meant to raise life from this mirk.

“Go back to your soul-searching – harmless, I will you” –

Suppressing a snigger, a smile, wont to lurk.

 

I shrank back, betook myself up from this deepness,

Stumbling, a man heaving so many chains,

Came back to my mountain but, awed by its steepness,

Faced me about, and went out to the plains. 

 

Things got better after that.  I went to Edinburgh Medical School.  In a flash, forty years later, I’d hung up my stethoscope.  Although the business of fishing bodies out of a crimson lake had been all-encompassing, I never stopped scribbling.  I hope I never really buried my one talent.  I’m immensely fortunate that I got another bite at the cherry, and actually published something that was “nearly publishable”.

I think it was Doris Lessing who said that the problem for a writer is not how to write, but how to live.  My English teacher was kind to me about my ability to string two words together, but I knew myself that what I’d written was worthless, because I knew nothing about life.  I was like poor wheelchair-bound Chatterley in Lady C who wrote clever stuff for the London literati.  But, said Lawrence dismissively, it was nothing.  I had to go and do a bit of living.

I expect these musicians with phenomenal techniques feel the same.  It doesn’t matter how much facility you have, if you have nothing to say.  Mstislav Rostropovich took a cello masterclass and, having listened to a young cellist with such a technique, he conducted a thought experiment in which he had the cellist open an imaginary, expensively beautiful and gorgeous bag.  “Look!” – it was very cruel – “There’s nothing in it!”  I don’t think Slava should have said that.  He should have considered that he might have been wrong.

For myself, facility or not, I’m going to carry on wrestling the best of three falls with words.  It’s a life sentence.  I will take my inspiration from Lord Tennyson, me with my outworn buried tools.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Following the appalling events in Nevada, President Trump flew into Las Vegas to reassure the United States that violence was not what defined the nation, but that Americans loved one another.  Somebody asked him if it was time to review the Second Amendment and he replied, “Now is not the time.”  You might ask, if not now, then when?

So let us review the Second Amendment.

A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. 

That was written in 1787, and you can see that it is of its time.  That first clause – an ablative absolute if you will – is crucial.  The sense is that the people must be able to arm themselves so that, for the benefit of the State, they can come together and form a Home Guard that, note, is well regulated.   I don’t think Mr Paddock, when he chose to open rapid automatic fire on an assembly from the 32^nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort Hotel, was well regulated.

With all the media attention, I was curious that nobody seemed interested to ask how it could be that a man could smuggle 23 heavy duty guns into a hotel room, and not be noticed.  Presumably the arms were contained in nondescript cases.  They would have been heavy.  Did the bell-hop trundle a luggage carrier out to the carpark and load it up?  Probably not.  Too risky.  You could imagine the conversation.  “You sure aint travellin’ light, mister.  What you packing?”  He would have needed a cover story.  “It’s medical equipment.  I’m a rep.  I don’t like to leave the stuff in the trunk.”  But then the bell-hop might mention it to the concierge.  “Oh don’t feel you have to cart that stuff up to your room, sir.  We can store it for you securely down here.”  No.  He must have taken the equipment up himself.  Twenty three guns, some fitted with “bump-stocks” to turn them into machine guns, plus a tonne of ammunition, plus CCTV equipment (he set up his own surveillance system), plus his personal baggage (literally and metaphorically).  He must have made more than a dozen round trips.  32 storeys is a big climb so he probably didn’t use the back stairs.  He would have taken the elevator.  He would have spaced the trips out so that it wouldn’t be obvious he was a removal man.

Even unpacked, the cases would have taken up a lot of room.  What did the chamber maid make of them?  Perhaps he put the “Do not disturb” sign on the outside door knob.  The maid would be Hispanic.  No molestar!  But he was resident for four days.  She must have cleaned at least a couple of times.  Somebody might have checked the minibar daily.  You would have thought that he was taking a huge gamble.  All it would have needed to stop him would have been the discovery of even a single weapon, linked with the idea that there could be more, and therefore that a man with a deadly arsenal would shortly have the mass audience of an outdoor concert of country music within his line of fire.  How on earth did he get away with it?

He had another huge armoury at home.  A total of 42 weapons, all apparently purchased legally.  No doubt he collected them over the years.  Maybe he shopped around so that no single dealer became aware he was amassing such a lethal armamentarium.  Do the dealers talk to one another?  Is there a record of gun ownership that law enforcement agencies can access?  In any case, would anybody raise an eyebrow that somebody wanted to own all these guns?  Maybe in the US people collect guns the way people here might collect stamps.  But why would you want to own an automatic weapon that has been designed to mow down large numbers of an advancing enemy on the battlefield?  Is there any top limit to what the good citizens of Nevada would tolerate?  A howitzer?  Field cannon?  A small but dirty neutron bomb?

Supporters of the National Rifle Association sometimes say that the agency to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.  It’s the fallacy of redemptive violence.  You only need to look at the motion picture industry to see how the US is wedded to it.  The good guy rides into town, destroys the bad guys, and rides off into the horizon.  John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper.  He is low key and anonymous.  The Lone Ranger.  Talk softly and carry a big stick.  The final arbiter is the gun.  You would have thought a film poster of a guy, or a gal, pointing a gun, would by now have worn a little threadbare, but the image seems to keep up with the times.  Today’s shootist turns the gun left through ninety degrees and shoots palm down.  It’s chic.

This notion of the man in the street as hero is locked in to the idea that the common man will resist, not only alien invasion, but corruption from within.  A US Congress that threatens to become too authoritarian had better look out.  Rumour has it that Congress, even on the Republican side, is moved to reopen a discussion on gun control.  I’m not holding my breath.  It’s often said that the National Rifle Association is a very powerful lobby and it occurs to me that that somewhat clichéd iteration has a sinister undertone.  It is actually very difficult to debate with somebody who is armed to the teeth.  I have a notion that the US will only ditch – or even amend – the Second Amendment when there is a ground swell of public opinion of the sort that was seen in demonstrations in the 1960s against the Vietnam War, and for Civil Rights.