Author: jamescalumcampbell

I watched King Charles the Third on Wednesday night.

It did not take me long to realise

That Royals speak exclusively in iambs.

Decasyllabic lines conveyed the drift

And burden of this ninety minute play.

It was a very Shakespeherian Rag;

You could not fail to spot Will’s influence

(By Will I mean the Bard and not the Prince).

You might have thought the clowns would speak in prose –

Provincial patois, slangy, a la mode

Or some such less exalted register

But nay; this wuznae punters doon the pub

But kings and queens and those and such as those –

Prince and Princesses, Crown Imperial.

Besides, to tell the truth there were no clowns

Though “circus” might describe this Windsor court

Depicted by the traffic of the stage.

Princess Diana took a cameo role

Like Hamlet’s father on the battlements

At Elsinore, or maybe Banquo’s ghost

Up Cawdor way, by Birnam, Dunsinane.

Indeed the Scottish Play was ever present –

(Eleven syllables are quite the thing

So long as endings are made feminine)

Vaulting ambition the imperial theme

And Evil’s metaphysic thrall.  I thought

The playwright took a frightful liberty

In casting Catherine as a harridan.

Lady Macbeth was never cold as this.

This futuristic melodrama was

Beyond dystopian; I cannot think

It bore much semblance to the actual Firm

Conspiring to get Charles to abdicate.

The King was shown to dither, vacillate;

With little succour from the Cambridges.

No need to ponder who the trousers wore –

The heir was firmly under Catherine’s thumb;

The spare as vacuous as his dithering dad

If dad he was – the playwright went so far

As cuckold him; what right to cast this up

Before a man with no right to reply?

Now here’s the nub: this is a travesty.

I might be Royalist or Republican –

It matters not one whit; this is abuse.

An alexandrine line to end this flood:

You can’t make monsters out of living flesh and blood.

On May 1^st in a rare show of creative scheduling I put both my eyes and my car in for a simultaneous service and MOT, creative, because with the tropicamide drops I wasn’t going to be able to drive for four hours anyway.  The garage and the optician share certain common features.  Both are kindly.  They offer a “health check” and they run “diagnostics”.  If there are problems, they both commiserate.  I remember once when an old car of mine was nearing the end of its life, I was even ushered into a room specifically designed for the breaking of bad news, a Quiet Room with the atmosphere of a chapel.  My memory is trying to tell me there was a Gideon’s Bible on the table, but that is preposterous.  It was probably Ovlov, the Volvo glossy.

I started using reading glasses in my late forties.  The secretary of Auckland Emergency Department saw me squinting at a document at arm’s length and without comment she lifted the phone and booked me into Optometry in the Med School across the road.  Otherwise I might have been in denial for the next eighteen months.  Now if I am a sedulous keeper of appointments it is because I keep sitting on my glasses.

The eye appointment started and finished with a check of ocular pressures.  They repeat the test because of the tropicamide drops, in case the pupillary dilation precipitates acute glaucoma. So, a total of six puffs of air into each eye.  I never get used to it and never cease to flinch.  Still, not as bad as the dental hygienist going between the upper first incisors with a pickaxe.  That really does bring a tear to the eye.

Then, still on the glaucoma theme, chronic this time, it’s visual fields.  How many lights?  Three!  Or maybe four!  Two and a half?  -ish.  Lights?  What lights?

Then it’s the automated modified Snellen charts and another chance to uhm and agh.  O, or maybe C… D, or maybe O…  It’s as well I didn’t become an optometrist; I wouldn’t have had the patience.  “For pity’s sake make up your mind!”  But I was treated with the utmost courtesy.  Ophthalmoscopy next, and a repeat picture of the optic fundi.  In Days of Thunder, Nicole Kidman in her capacity as consultant neurologist remarks to Tom Cruise in his capacity as racing driver, post shunt, that the retina is a beautiful thing.  Fundoscopy as a procedure is somewhat up-close and personal.  GPs undertaking it are supposed, irrespective of the genders of doctor and patient, to offer a chaperon.  Impractical and unworkable?  You decide.  Incidentally, Kidman and Cruise became an item, not just in real life, but in the film.  The ethical issue of professional boundaries wasn’t raised.  Is it okay if the doc’s a woman and the patient a man?

I sneaked a peak at my fundi on the computer screen.  No change from previous.  And indeed, no change of prescription.  My eyes have “plateaued”.  I was self-congratulatory, after the fashion of the man in the Bible who is smug about all the grain stored in his barns.  In my family, “barns, barns” has become a kind of shorthand depicting the folly of reliance on the best laid schemes of mice and men.  Thou fool…  Twenty minutes later, my dilated pupils blinded by the glare, I nearly walked under a bus.

Back at the garage, the news was similarly good.  No need to withdraw to the Chamber of Bad Tidings.  I even, apparently, passed the emissions test.  Three years ago, and for the first time, encouraged by her green credentials, HMG, and free Road Tax, I bought a diesel car.  How far-sighted was that!

Barns, barns.

Popped into Scone Palace, the crowning place of Scottish kings, in deepest Perthshire.  National Trust?  I enquired hopefully of the kindly lady at the kiosk.  No.  I stumped up the £11.50.  As I walked across the magnificent park, an air raid tocsin made me nearly jump out of skin.  It was only a peacock, strutting ostentatiously around the entrance.

Scone Palace gets a mention in Shakespeare’s Scottish play, though I’m not sure if that’s a recommendation.  The site has been important historically for about fifteen hundred years.  This was the northern limit of the Roman Empire. The Romans never defeated the Picts, but Kenneth MacAlpin, King of Scots, did so, it is said by an act of treachery, in 843.  He murdered the Pictish nobles at a banquet.  (This is what puts me off the study of history – all the gore.)    It is said he set the king-making seat, the Stone of Scone, aka the Stone of Destiny, on Moot Hill next to where the palace now stands.  Macbeth ruled here in the eleventh century.  John Balliol was crowned at Scone in 1292.  In 1296 he rebelled against his patron, Edward 1, and during the English invasion the Stone of Scone was removed to Westminster.  Robert the Bruce was crowned at Scone in 1306.  The Scottish medieval parliaments met at Scone until the mid-fifteenth century.  James IV was crowned at Scone in 1488.  Then the court shifted to Edinburgh and Holyrood Palace.  In the early seventeenth century Scone passed to the aristocratic family whose descendants still hold it.  Charles II was the last king to be crowned at Scone, in 1651.

A replica of the Stone of Scone stands on Moot Hill, but the real thing is somewhere else.  In 1950 a group of students snatched the stone from Westminster and brought it back to Scotland.  (Incidentally, it’s important that the perpetrators of that act were students.  That made it a student prank.  If they had been motor mechanics or, worse still, unemployed, they would have ended up in prison.)  Then the stone was returned to London, then it came back, and I gather it’s in Edinburgh, or is it inside the palace at Scone under the crowning chair beside the Scottish crown?  Nobody quite knows.

I confess I don’t much mind.  It is only, after all, a stone.  I have never really understood the quest for the Holy Grail.  Why are people prepared to pay large sums at auction for such items as the dress Marilyn Monroe wore while singing Happy Birthday to JFK, or Elvis’s Fender bass guitar, or one of Winston’s cigars?  I can understand somebody coveting the Macdonald Stradivarius viola.  But that is not simply because it is the most valuable musical instrument in the world; it is because it produces a beautiful sound.  But when an item’s intrinsic value is due entirely to its provenance, that has me stumped.

Yet is that entirely true?  Suppose I found myself in possession of the autograph of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, or Ian Fleming’s You Only Live Twice, or Lennon-McCartney’s No Reply, would I say to myself, we have copies, this is worthless – and put it through the shredder?  I think not.  I would preserve it.  But I like to think I wouldn’t hoard it.  Give it to a museum.  What is the point of acquisition?  This is what I find myself thinking when I wander through a place like Scone Palace.  Why, as a private citizen, would you want to surround yourself with all this opulence?  All the art, the plate, the furniture.  I’m trying to imagine myself dining before one of these huge tables with all the glassware, withdrawing to a room the size of a tennis court, and finally retiring to a four poster in a huge scarlet bedroom.  I wouldn’t get a wink of sleep.  I’d feel such a prat.

Unaccountably, I’ve developed a yen to climb the Inaccessible Pinnacle, the spur of rock atop Sgurr Dearg on the Cuillin ridge that for many aspiring Munro-baggers has proved to be a Nemesis.  I realise this is for me an absurdly late mid-life crisis akin to turning up at the class reunion in a Porsche with the new 25 year old girlfriend.  I’ve been picking the brains of In Pin graduates.  I’ve noticed that none of them have expressed a wish to do it again.  They’ve ticked the box.  (Maybe it’s the same with the putative 25 year old girlfriend.  I’m reminded of these Old Testament stories of powerful men like David who lusted after attractive young women like Bathsheba.  He wished “to have lain with her.”  Presumably this is the Authorised Version of “he wished to get laid.”  But why is it in the past tense?  He didn’t really want to relish the experience at all.  He merely wished to brag about it afterwards.)

Anyway in the course of my researches I’ve been invited by a friend of mine on a rather more modest stroll up Leum Uilleim.  He has done all the Munros and with this top he will have completed all the Corbetts, and he wishes to share this experience with some friends.  I asked, will there be champagne?  You will know that Munros are over 3000 feet and Corbetts over 2500 feet.  (It’s more complicated than that but would take too long to explain.  K2 may be challenging, but it’s not a Munro.)  At 2974 feet, Leum Uilleim is really a Munro manqué.  It had a brief cameo role in the film Trainspotting.  It’s location on Rannoch Moor would be somewhat remote but for access by train at Corrour Halt.  Re this proposed expedition, it occurs to me the last time I climbed a hill with this friend it was Mount Hagen which is the second highest mountain in Papua New Guinea.  At the time he was the PNG all-comers 10,000 metres champion.  Consequently by the time we got back down I was a wreck.  I remember we ran into an Engan who tried to charge us for going through his part of the jungle.  He said in Pidgin, “Dispela bush belong me!”  He clearly hadn’t heard of the right to roam.  He looked at me, not unsympathetically, and said, “Em e no good long walkabout.”

Over lunch in the Lion & Unicorn I said to another conqueror of all the Munros, “Let’s do the In Pin.”  He said he would have to be blindfolded, tied on to a stretcher, and heavily drugged.  This does not bode well.  I don’t have much of a head for heights.  Aeroplanes are fine.  I find the presence of wings a great consolation.  On the other hand I had sweaty palms in the gondola that took me up the mountain above Funchal in Madeira.  I went on line and watched on video a couple of ascents up the In Pin.  I can see the climb itself is only moderately difficult.  When I was twelve years old I was a monkey and would have scrambled up and down without giving it a second thought.  Not now.  Sweaty palms again.  It’s the 3235 foot drop on either side of you that’s the difficulty.  Perhaps I’d freeze half way up and have to be yanked off by a helicopter.  How embarrassing.

*

In Perth Concert Hall I heard the young New Zealand violinist Benjamin Baker give a solo lunchtime recital.  He played the Bach D minor Partita, and the Bartok Sonata, both for unaccompanied violin, on a Tononi violin of 1709.  By coincidence, in The Seven Trials of Cameron-Strange, the troubled doctor’s twin sister gave a performance on her Stradivarius viola, in the Auckland Town Hall, of the Bach D minor partita.  Life emulates art.  Benjamin Baker was superb.  I don’t normally do the Green Room bit but it’s always nice to talk to a New Zealander.  I said, “You’ve lost your Kiwi accent.”

“I know.  It’s awful.  I sound like a Brit.  Almost as bad as a Scotsman sounding English.”

“Oh, not that bad!”

Just banter.

He was spotted by Nigel Kennedy and enrolled in the Yehudi Menuhin school aged 8, the last pupil to enrol before Lord Menuhin died.  He played before the great man.  These two unaccompanied works, the Bach and the Bartok were very close to Menuhin’s heart (he commissioned the Bartok), and I thought I could hear in Mr Baker’s playing an occasional trace of that unique, distinctive voice.  He played the Bach from memory but he used electronic music for the Bartok, turning the pages by means of a foot pad.  The world is being taken over by robots.  Perhaps the union acting for les tourneuses des pages will hack the system in a gesture of protest.  The French really know how to organise a demo.

I was further reminded after the concert of the encroachment of mechanisation into all our lives when visiting Sainsbury’s.  What do les beepeuses have to say about self-check-out?  I have an idea for self-check-out which I hope to put before Dragons’ Den.  It is to turn one of the self-check-out consoles into a Dalek.  The kids who are being beguiled by all the confectionary and electronic games at toddler eye level would just love it.  The swivelling Dalek antenna would be the scanner.  Falling foul of the system would be a terrifying experience.

UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA!!  REMOVE ITEM IMMEDIATELY!!!

I don’t think my pitch in Dragons’ Den would go down too well.  One of these hawks – one of the women, or that great Scottish bruiser – would give me a flinty stare.  “Let me get this straight.  You want to buy your groceries off a Dalek?”  Eyes raised to the ceiling.  “I’m out.”  Actually I had a mishap at the self-check-out.  I asked one of Lord Sainsbury’s representatives to take a security tag off a bottle of gin, while I was packing my bag.  Then I proceeded to forget all about it and on lifting up my bag swept the gin across the floor.  Broken glass everywhere, a gin-clear puddle, and the subtle tang of juniper berries.  I abjectly apologised, assumed ownership of culpability, and thanked them profusely for cleaning up after me.  I decided to think of the episode as divine intervention: you’ve had enough gin!  On my way out, a blonde woman of personable attribute said, “They’ll give you another one.”  I said, “Oh no.  Entirely my fault.”  But sure enough, I was called back, and given a replacement.  I accepted the gift with grateful thanks.  The blonde lady said, “What-I-tell-you?”

*

To Perth Airport to fly the EV-97 teamEurostar two seater light aircraft.  After a gap, it was good to be back in the aviation world.  Weather permitting (it’s looking a bit dodgy at the moment) I’m going back up on Monday.  Flying a plane is like climbing a mountain.  You rise above all your petty cares and preoccupations.  You live in the present.  You get away from the rat race.  For an hour you are free of the surly bonds.  Quite apart from anything else, everybody is very polite, and everybody observes the rules and conventions of Air Law.  You don’t have Audi drivers snarling up behind you to within a distance of six inches just because you are observing the speed limit.  Dear Jane, Audi driver, you are the exception.  Believe me.

*

To Waitrose.

“Oh hello!”

I said, “Hi, how are you?” – not having a clue who she was.  She gave me a hint.

“Gin!”

Perhaps I’ll make a habit of wandering down supermarket aisles smashing bottles of gin in the hope of running into her again.

It’s Day 86 of the president’s first term, and two nuclear powers would appear to be on the edge of war.  The extraordinary thing about it is that nobody seems much bothered.  There’s no panic buying in the Seoul supermarkets, no nose to tail traffic jams as the 10 million inhabitants try to head out.  One can only imagine they are so used to the intermittent heightening of tensions, the rhetoric and the brinkmanship, that they have become rather blasé.  Certainly the pundits in the British Sunday broadsheets, while recognising a crisis might develop, still think the threats and counter-threats are mostly hot air.  And yet, if we are to take the statements of the leaders of the two powers in question at face value, things are looking bleak.  It is evident that the president wants to curtail North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.  He would rather China do this work on his behalf but has stated that if China does not, he will “take care of it.”  A pre-emptive strike to disable the North Korean nuclear programme has been mooted.  The fact that North Korea’s ballistic missile test failed today, might persuade the US that this is the time to strike, while the opposition appears powerless to reply.  The opposition could effectively be neutralised.  But North Korea has stated that any such strike would inevitably result in retaliation.  This would presumably start the second Korean War.

There is every reason to suppose that the president is not bluffing.  In the course of the last week he has ordered the firing of fifty nine cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase in response to President Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons on his own people, and he has deployed an 11 ton “Moab” (Massive Ordnance Air Blast) against an ISIS underground installation in Afghanistan.  Meanwhile a US Navy “Armada” is heading for the Korean Peninsula.  (Armada could be an ironic choice of word considering that in the sixteenth century part of the Spanish Armada foundered off Lewis; might the president have Spanish ancestry?)

Why doesn’t the president want North Korea to have deliverable nuclear weapons?  After all, if they are good enough for the US, and the UK, Russia, China, France, India, Pakistan, and Israel, why not North Korea?  The British Government is always extolling the virtues of an independent nuclear deterrent.  This is why Trident is due for an upgrade.  Trident submarines can travel anywhere, anytime, and therefore obliterate any target across the entire planet.  This system is allegedly keeping the peace.  There are thousands of nuclear bombs in existence and only about 200 sovereign states.  Why not get the United Nations to divvy them up and arm everybody to the teeth?  I imagine the answer to this would be that, while there might be a debate to be had between proponents of unilateral and multilateral nuclear disarmament, most countries wish to strive for a world free of nuclear weapons.  That is a long term aim, but in the meantime the world is a dangerous place.  There are, if you will, some bad dudes out there.

I dare say that in this context the president regards the US as the goodies and North Koreans, particularly if they continue on their current trajectory, as the baddies.  The West tends to regard, and depict, North Korea as a repressed and secretive nation run by a bunch of utter nutters.  Certainly the intensity of the enthusiasm of their TV newscasters, and the synchronised and prolonged applause of serried ranks of military in uniform may not be to our taste.  On the other hand the Pyongyang subway stations look rather grand, the vehicles freshly painted and spotlessly clean, and the people – well, much like any other people across the world.  I imagine that the North Korean government, aware of the approaching Armada and aware that a pre-emptive strike is being mooted, might well be feeling very nervous.

I for one am feeling very nervous and I’m 6,000 miles away.  I can’t remember when the world situation last felt this jittery.  It might have been 1961.  We seem to be heading with astonishing rapidity towards a cliff edge.  Brinkmanship is all about Game Theory.  What’s the other guy gonna do?  The trouble is that in making such predictions, in playing out these war games, you have to believe that the players in the game are playing by certain rules and making decisions along rational lines.  You imagine the players have a game plan, a strategy, and they are each methodically developing their position as chess players do.   But this is not like a conventional game of chess.  This is more like speed chess.  You set the chess clocks to two and a half minutes to midnight and then you move so fast you haven’t time to think.  Anything might happen.  You make it up as you go along and you shoot from the hip.  Before you know it the board is laid waste, both sides obliterate one another, and if there is any victory to be won it is a Pyrrhic one.  It’s like Ozymandias.  “Nothing beside remains.” 

Got home the other night to this message on my answer phone:

This is to inform you that HMRC is filing a law suit against you.  Press one to speak to a police officer.

Then I got an email ostensibly from HMRC to inform me I was a due a considerable tax repayment, which I could claim by accessing a certain web site.  The email looked very convincing and cited a London address, in “Parliament Street”.

I didn’t press one and I didn’t access the web site.  I did let my accountant know.  He said I did well to ignore both messages as they were clearly scams.

Then promptly on April 6^th HMRC sent me forms SA100-6 and SA101 2017 with a notice I am required, by law, to file a tax return.  It’s that dismal time of year again.  Might this be a scam also?  I think not.  I’ve also received from them my latest tax code for the New Year.  This is a combination of letters and digits with an explanation as to how the code was arrived at, and an accompanying set of notes to help me crack the code.  Now in an amateurish way I’m rather fond of codebreaking.  Crosswords and the like.  But this particular conundrum has me stumped.

The explanation starts out promisingly enough with a tax free personal allowance to which is added Gift Aid.  I’m having second thoughts about Gift Aid.  I recently sent some money to the Disasters Emergency Committee but I didn’t gift aid it.  DEC promptly sent me a form with a polite request that I consider it.  It made me wonder, why have I gone off Gift Aid?  I don’t intend to claim any tax relief on my gift either for myself or anybody else.  I think the tax system is too complicated and needs to be grossly simplified.

Anyway the rest of the procedure for working out my tax code involves a series of deductions such as “adjustment to rate bands”, “higher rate tax adjustment”, “underpayment restriction” etc. etc. which not only reduces my personal allowance to zero but turns it into a considerable negative quantity.  What can it mean to have a tax free amount that is a negative number?  I presume it must mean that I must pay tax not only on all of my income, but on all of my income plus this not inconsiderable amount that is expressed as a negative.  I will not weary you with the arithmetical convolutions that arrived at this sum, but proceed to Note 9, “Tax-free amount”:

To create your tax code, we’ve removed the last digit of your tax-free amount and included a letter…  We tell your employer(s) or pension provider(s) your tax code but we do not tell them how we worked it out.

This Bletchley-like utterance is reminiscent of the rubrics you come across above the 12 x 12 crosswords in the Sunday broadsheets that take you (or at least, me) all week to solve.  I’m thinking of compiling one and sending it to The Telegraph:

Enigmatic Variations No 666: “Gimme a break.”

Solutions to clues are a combination of letters and digits.  Prior to entry to the grid, solvers must remove the last digit to each solution and include a letter.  Solutions should reach The Telegraph by Oct 31^st (Jan 31^st if filing on line).  Do not tell us how you worked it out.

Incidentally, HMRC didn’t, as far as I can see, remove the last digit at all; they removed the second last.  It’s a nice point.

It’s enough to make you chuck your hand in, take their word for it, fill in the form and keep your fingers crossed you haven’t inadvertently made a mistake.  This is why I get an accountant to do it and I pay insurance against being investigated.  The professional fee protection blurb says:

HMRC are coming.  Even innocent taxpayers are caught out… a visit from (HMRC) can deal a severe blow to anyone… Nothing to hide?  Unfortunately even innocent taxpayers get caught up in the process and are under threat of investigation… It is an unfortunate fact, but it is often impossible to second guess when a tax investigation will take place…

It’s positively Kafkaesque.

I know I sound like a barrack-room lawyer but I think the whole tax system should be simplified on to one side of a sheet of A4.  If you need more than one sheet of paper to explain it, it’s too complicated.  You have an income tax rate at x%.  You pay x% of your income per annum to HMRC.  How hard can it be?

Mrs May’s letter to President Tusk triggering Article 50 is a strange document.  President Tusk waved it in the air in a manner rather different from that of Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich.  “Here is the paper…”  President Tusk said, with evident consternation, “Six pages!”  What did he mean?  Was it too long or too short?  The important message was contained in two sentences buried within the text:

I hereby notify the European Council in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union of the United Kingdom’s intention to withdraw from the European Union.  In addition, in accordance with the same Article 50(2) as applied by Article 106a of the Treaty Establishing the European Atomic Energy Community, I hereby notify the European Council of the United Kingdom’s intention to withdraw from the European Atomic Energy Community.  

I think Mrs May might have done well to leave it at that.  The rest of the text was reminiscent of a “Dear John” letter designed to effect the break-up of a relationship while letting the other side down gently.  You know the sort of thing.  “We can still be friends…”  There was even a hint of “It’s not you, it’s me…” in Mrs May’s contrite “there can be no ‘cherry picking’” (it crossed my mind that might be because there will be no East European labour available for the crop next harvest).

But let us subject Mrs May’s 2200 words to close textual analysis (not that I counted: Eddie Mair, sitting in for Andrew Marr on Sunday morning, did.  Gibraltar’s not mentioned.)

Dear President Tusk,

On 23 June last year, the people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union.

True.

As I have said before, that decision was no rejection of the values we share as fellow Europeans.

Now, how does Mrs May know that?  A referendum is rather a blunt instrument, usually offering an electorate, as in this case, a binary choice.  Cabinet decision-making is liable to be more nuanced and may more reflect the rationale underpinning an executive action.  Mrs May would need to peer into the minds of millions of voters to know whether or not European values were being rejected.  On the face of it, the much cherished four freedoms – freedom of movement of goods, people, services, and capital – might be said to be EU values which the British electorate has rejected.

This letter sets out the approach of Her Majesty’s Government to the discussions we will have about the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union and about the deep and special partnership we hope to enjoy – as your closest friend and neighbour – with the European Union once we leave. 

That is like flirting with your spouse while suing for divorce.

We therefore believe it is necessary to agree the terms of our future partnership alongside those of our withdrawal from the European Union.

This is an important point for Mrs May because she actually makes it in her letter three further times, as follows:

The United Kingdom wants to agree with the European Union a deep and special partnership that takes in both economic and security cooperation.  To achieve this, we believe it is necessary to agree the terms of our future partnership alongside those of our withdrawal from the EU. 

Note that on this second occasion of stressing the necessity of conducting withdrawal and renegotiation discussions in parallel, Mrs May also conflates economic with security issues.

We want to be able to agree a deep and special partnership, taking in both economic and security cooperation.

This is a third iteration of the parallel negotiations theme, with a second iteration of the economic-security conflation.  Mrs May also points out that the failure to reach a deal, and the resulting default to the fall-back position of World Trade Organisation terms, would weaken the fight against international crime and terrorism.  But she does not explain why this should be so.

It is for these reasons that we want to be able to agree a deep and special partnership, taking in both economic and security cooperation.

Fourth economic, third security iteration.  Is Mrs May being so repetitive because she fears President Tusk will not pick up on these points?  She need not have worried.  President Tusk said immediately that parallel talks were not going to happen.  You can hardly blame him.  Imagine resigning from a golf club, cancelling your subscription, then insisting on setting the green fees for visitors.

The process in the United Kingdom

This is a paragraph about the business of converting the body of existing European law (the “acquis”) into UK law.  What will be tweaked, devolved, reserved, or dumped?  Why should President Tusk be remotely interested?  It’s a bit like the divorcee telling her ex, having settled the inventory, how she is going to dispone her cut of the CDs around her new living room.  Not only that, she wants to retain a close interest in the affairs of the ex, when all the ex wants to do, following a short period of mourning, is to start afresh with somebody else.

Proposed principles for our discussions

Mrs May expounds seven principles.

i We should engage with one another constructively and respectfully, in a spirit of sincere cooperation.

When I first read that I thought, well, she would say that, wouldn’t she?  Yet I can hardly say it is a truism.  Indeed it is worth saying.  I remember on the day after the referendum Nigel Farage addressed the European Parliament in a breath-taking display of schadenfreude (remember: “you laughed at me; well, you aren’t laughing now”).  It was clear that he did not consider the EU to be a benign institution.  Mrs May needed to tell the EU that she wishes it to prosper.  Having said that, however, five of the six remaining principles do seem be of the “taken-as-read” variety, to wit –

ii We should always put our citizens first

iii We should work towards securing a comprehensive agreement

iv We should work together to minimise disruption and give as much certainty as possible

vi We should begin technical talks on detailed policy areas as soon as possible, but we should prioritise the biggest challenges

And vii We should continue to work together to advance and protect our shared European values.

Six pages.  A thicket of platitudes?

Yet, buried away inside all of this, there is one further crucial principle.

v In particular, we must pay attention to the UK’s unique relationship with the Republic of Ireland and the importance of the peace process in Northern Ireland. 

It strikes me that it is this issue more than any other, the reality of a land border between the EU and the UK, which will result in a profound alteration in the constitutional arrangements within the British Isles.

 

 

 

In Dunblane Cathedral a couple of Sundays ago a prayer of intercession was given up on behalf of people who struggle at this time of year with the recollection of an event which in the magnitude of its evil seems completely incomprehensible.  On March 13^th 1996 a man entered Dunblane Primary School and shot dead a school teacher and sixteen members of her class.  Ten other pupils and three teachers were wounded.  The perpetrator committed suicide.  It so happened that week I read A Mother’s Reckoning by Sue Klebold (W H Allen, 2016).  Sue Klebold is the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the two perpetrators of the Columbine High School Massacre in Denver, Colorado, 20^th April 1999.  Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, two students at the school, shot twelve students and killed one teacher.  Twenty four other students were injured.  Klebold and Harris committed suicide.  Seventeen years after the event, Sue Klebold has written a book about Columbine which is an attempt to understand why her son did what he did.

I probably wouldn’t have read her book but for two factors.  I was lucky enough to win the Impress Prize for New Writers in 2014 with my book Click, Double-Click.  In Click, Double-Click, the narrator of the story becomes convinced that somebody is going to “do a Columbine” on a specific University Campus.  For reasons intrinsic to the structure of the book, I needed to cite four previous, I might say notorious, examples of similar events.  I chose Dunblane, Hoddle Street, Aramoana, and Columbine.  Why did I choose these specifically?  I live fifteen minutes’ drive from Dunblane.  I spent the better part of fifteen years in Australasia – hence Hoddle Street (Melbourne) and Aramoana (South Island, New Zealand.)  And Columbine?  Well, Columbine is so notorious that it is a kind of archetype for these sorts of events.

The second factor compelling me to read Sue Klebold’s book was that recently I happened to hear Private Passions on Radio 3 with Michael Barclay.  (Curiously enough that shows up in Click, Double-Click as well.)  On this occasion the guest was Andrew Solomon.  Andrew Solomon has written a book about unusual children, be they gifted or challenged.  During the course of his research he met with Sue and Tom Klebold, Dylan’s parents, confident that he would discover the cause of Dylan’s catastrophically aberrant behaviour.  He was disconcerted to find that he liked the Klebolds.  He was left struggling to explain how an apparently normal teenager raised in a normal, and indeed loving, environment, could have perpetrated such an act.  Solomon wrote the preface to A Mother’s Reckoning.  That was a nudge to make me read it.

A Mother’s Reckoning was not an easy read.  Not that the book was in any sense dull, turgid, or obscure.  Quite the contrary.  It is extremely well written, lucid, highly intelligent, heartfelt, and at times compulsive.  It is just the pure pain of the narration that makes the read so difficult.  Any act of grieving involves going over the same material again and again and so it can hardly be surprising that the book contains a lot of repetition of angst and fear and horror.  Sue Klebold also knew that in her narration she was laying herself open to criticism.  Was this simply to be some kind of exercise in self-expiation?  No.  Instead, there is incessant self-condemnation.  She says, frequently, I should have seen this coming.

So Sue Klebold compels us to ask ourselves, the readers, would we, to avoid a tragedy, have done any better?  I fell to wondering if the home life she depicted in an idyllic setting just outside Denver held any clues.  I tried, specifically, to envisage Dylan’s life, his home life, his school life, his social life, as he would have envisaged it.

I got the strong sense of a personality who, faced with the “norms” of North American life, the need to aspire to the American dream, to do well in class and at sports, to be part of the community, to please his parents and his mentors and his peers, to “shape up”, just found it utterly impossible.  But why did he choose to make his final act an act of brutality?  That remains an enigma.

“Six Jobs Osborne” is the catalyst that has forced Parliament this week to examine the issue of MPs taking on work outwith their constituency and parliamentary duties.  I was curious enough to try to track down what the ex-Chancellor’s half dozen jobs might be.  They are allegedly as follows:

1. Member of Parliament
2. Editor, London Evening Standard
3. Consultant, Blackrock, a US hedge fund (one day a week)
4. Chairman, Northern Powerhouse Partnership
5. Fellow at McCain Institute (a US think tank)
6. Speaker, Washington’s Speaker’s Bureau.

Such a portfolio is not without precedent.  None other than Sir Winston Churchill had a career divided between politics and journalism.  He even started off as a newspaper war correspondent reporting on military campaigns in which he was taking part as an officer in the British Army.  Conflict of interest?  He caused outrage by being critical of the senior officers under whom he served.  Throughout his parliamentary career he continued to write for the newspapers.  He even, albeit briefly during the General Strike, put himself up as a newspaper editor.  He was an author and historian.  He was also a painter and a bricklayer.  Clemmie said Winston lived like a Pasha.  I think she meant he organised his life exactly the way he wanted it.  He famously took a siesta.  On September 15^th, 1940, he went to bed between 4 pm and 8 pm.  September 15^th is Battle of Britain day.  That was the day Field Marshall Goring sent over the entire Luftwaffe.  That was the day Len Deighton’s SS GB might have become a reality.  Churchill intoned “Never in the field of human conflict…” and then went to bed.

It just shows you; some people are walking, or think they are walking, with Destiny.  I cannot imagine what it must be like to have this degree of Inner Belief.  When I was a medical student I had the opportunity to take on a second job, playing my viola in 50% of the Scottish National Orchestra’s gigs.  It was feasible on paper; I could have timetabled it, for a year.  I said no.  I never had cause to regret that decision.  I realised that medicine was an all-or-nothing pursuit demanding nothing less than total commitment.  Of course it was possible – indeed essential – to have hobbies, of which playing music might well be one.  But my brief experience of playing in the SNO taught me that the life of a professional musician was also a life of commitment and devotion.

So I confess I’m sceptical about Mr Osborne editing a London newspaper in the morning and then attending the House of Commons in the afternoon to cast a vote.  Might he not wish to take part in the morning’s debate?  Maybe Her Majesty Opposition will deploy an argument so persuasive as to make him change his mind on an issue of the day.  Or am I being hopelessly naïve?  It occurs to me that the six jobs annotated above are not really jobs at all, in the sense that most people hold down a (single) job.  If I said to a medical colleague, “I’m off to edit a newspaper” (or play my viola, or whatever), he might reasonably ask, “Who is going to look after the 32 patients booked in to see you?”  I have this notion that the more exalted we become in our various fields of endeavour, the less useful we are to humanity.  If the Minister of Health wakes up in the morning with a migraine he can reasonably throw a sickie.  The Grand Strategy can wait.  The GP migraineur on the contrary will take two paracetamol, drag himself out of bed and go to work because if he doesn’t, chaos will ensue.  All the transactions that really matter to mankind are one-on-one.  I venture to say this is what Jesus had in mind when he told his disciples that if they wanted to be first, they must put themselves last.

I’m intrigued by Mr Osborne’s one day a week with Blackrock (salary allegedly £650,000).  I don’t even know what a hedge fund is.  I looked it up in Bloomsbury:

Hedge fund n 1 US an investment company that is organised as a limited partnership and uses high-risk techniques in the hope of making large profits 2 a unit trust that invests in derivatives and other instruments that involve substantial risks and may yield extraordinary returns.

Well well.  It’s a funny old world.

Whenever I sit beside a stranger, on an aeroplane or in a theatre or concert hall, I make a point of engaging in conversation, if only for a moment.  At the Usher Hall in Edinburgh on Friday evening, the cloakrooms were closed.  Short staffed, they said at the bar.  We just had to take our cloaks into the auditorium.  The place was full because Nicola Benedetti was playing the Bruch Violin Concerto.  Ms Benedetti had played the Brahms in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall the previous evening and it had been packed also.  Anyway everybody in the Usher Hall just had to sit in their overcoat or stuff it under the chair.  It gave the occasion a fleeting sense of transience, an atmosphere not unlike, I imagine, these occasions in 1945 when scratch ensembles gave hurried renditions of the great German classics in bombed out halls lacking a roof and before huddled masses starved of culture as well as food.

I said to the lady on my left, who turned out to be a relative of Enid Blyton, “You’d think they’d be able to offer a peg, even a shoogly one.”  She said, “I’ll tell my son-in-law. He’s the hall manager.”

By contrast, at the Festival Theatre for the opera on Saturday evening, the cloakrooms were accommodating not only cloaks, but guide dogs.  I saw two of them settling in for the evening, a black lab and a golden retriever.  I thought of them as a couple out for the evening, the gentleman in black tie, the lady in a gorgeous golden coat.  They seemed to understand very well the social norms of attending the opera.  I imagined their conversation.

“What’s on tonight?”

“Pelleas et Melisande.  Debussy.”

“What’s that about?”

“The usual human preoccupations.  Abuse of women and children, lust, infatuation, jealousy, murder.”

“Are you going in?”

“I don’t think so.  It’s a long sit.”

My conversation with a stranger turned out to be with a lady from Aberdeen who as a child had known Mary Garden (1877 – 1967).  Mary Garden created the role of Melisande in the 1902 premiere at the Opera Comique in Paris.  She joined the Manhattan Opera House in New York in 1907 and also sang Melisande in the US premiere.  Some people said she was Debussy’s mistress but I believe Ms Garden was not one of them.  Her acquaintance and I fell to talking about Nicola Benedetti and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s lightning tour this week of Florida.  She hoped that if Nicola met President Trump she would give him a good piece of her mind.  I remarked I rather thought President Trump would like to meet Ms Benedetti.  She raised her eyes to the ceiling.

The RSNO are doing eight concerts in nine days in places like Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Sarasota.  They are playing two programmes presumably four times each.  Frankly it sounds like very hard work and not much fun.  They are playing, among other things, Beethoven 5 and Tchaikovsky 4.  That strikes me as odd programming.  Beethoven 5 is a wonderful piece of music, but why would you go all the way across the Atlantic to perform it four times?  If somebody said to you, “Fancy going to see La-La Land?” they would not be surprised if you shook your head and said, “I’ve seen it already.”  Similarly, “Fancy going to hear Beethoven 5?”  “I’ve heard it already.”  The flautist Sir James Galway says he made up his mind to leave the Berlin Phil during a power cut when they were playing Beethoven 5.  The orchestra played on, undaunted, in the pitch black.

I remarked to Enid Blyton’s relative in the Usher that the classical concert-going audience was grey haired and is now white haired.  Another decade, and perhaps the RSNO will be playing Beethoven 5 in a Peabody Auditorium, Daytona Beach, that is deserted.  Scary thought.