Author: jamescalumcampbell

On June 24^th I found myself, serendipitously, on the battlefield at Bannockburn.  I’d forgotten it was the 703^rd anniversary of the battle.  I’m not inclined to celebrate battles but, finding myself in theatre, I paid my respects to King Robert mounted on his huge steed, and read the quotation on the plaque beside the high flagpole with its huge saltire, flapping in a westerly gale.

We fight not for glory, nor for wealth, nor honour but only and alone freedom which no good man surrenders but with his life.

In 1940, Winston Churchill, or George Orwell, could both have said just that, or something like it.  The previous day I had read Churchill & Orwell, The Fight for Freedom by the American Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas E. Ricks (Duckworth Overlook, 2017).  A thumping good read, I’d say.   It’s a clever idea – if an unlikely one – to interweave within a single volume the lives and thoughts of two men whose personalities and politics could hardly have been different.  Churchill was implacably opposed to socialism and during the 1945 general election campaign he opined that socialism could only be imposed upon British society by means of a Gestapo; Orwell wanted to create a specifically English form of socialism and to overturn the English ruling class of which Churchill was a member.  Churchill remarked that he had not become prime minister to oversee the dismantling of the British Empire; Orwell since his Burma days conceived of the Empire as a corrupt system of exploitation.   Churchill and Orwell never met, but it seems they had a respect for one another.  Churchill admired 1984; he thought it a remarkable book and read it twice.  The last article Orwell completed and published before he died was a review of Volume Two of Churchill’s Second World War memoirs, Their Finest Hour.  Orwell recognised Churchill’s qualities as a war time leader, particularly in 1940.  He also admired Churchill’s ability as a writer, and in a more general sense, his humanity.

So what common theme links these two disparate characters?  It is their defence of democracy and the liberty of the individual.  This, argues Thomas E. Ricks, is the reason why Orwell and Churchill remain so important to us today.  Democracy and liberty continue to be under attack.

It seems to me that they shared other common features.  Both were distant from their fathers.  Both were dispatched to English preparatory schools where they were miserable.  Churchill described his early educational experience in My Early Life, and Orwell in Such, Such Were the Joys.  Both went to public schools, Churchill to Harrow and Orwell to Eton (where he was briefly taught by Aldous Huxley).  Churchill was rebellious and educationally backward; Orwell was, and remained, an outsider.  Neither attended university; instead, both headed off in directions contrary to their ultimate destinations.  Churchill joined the army and Orwell the Imperial Police in Burma.  Both were men of enormous physical and moral courage.  Churchill put himself in danger so frequently that he really ought not to have survived.  Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War and sustained a gunshot to the neck from a Fascist sniper on 20^th May 1937.  He too ought not to have survived.  Orwell’s description of this episode is as vivid as Churchill’s description of his part in the British army’s last cavalry charge, at Omdurman on September 2^nd 1898.

Both were heavy smokers.  Eventually, both became, and remained, journalists and authors.  Stylistically, their writings have much in common.  Churchill is wordier and more flamboyant; Orwell is pared down and sparer.  But they both share a dislike of abstraction and redundant phraseology.  Churchill liked “short words and vulgar fractions”.  He berated his subordinates for loquacity and asked for reports to be confined to a single side of paper.  Orwell expressed similar sentiments in his essay Politics and the English Language.  While both could relish beautiful language and vivid imagery, you could never imagine either of them choosing to attend a creative writing course on a literary retreat.  Always their language subserves another purpose.  This is because both were, at heart, politicos.  Churchill might write about painting as a pastime, and Orwell Some Thoughts on the Common Toad, but their writing was never for writing’s sake.  Churchill was never a novelist.  His one attempt, Savrola, rather embarrassed him.  And although Orwell wrote novels I don’t believe he was truly a novelist in the sense that Dickens, another writer with a political conscience, was a novelist.  I think Orwell was primarily an essayist who happened to write two longer pieces which made him world famous.  Animal Farm uses the allegory form and 1984 the novel form but it’s the political message that really matters, just as Churchill’s writings during his wilderness years of the 1930s are dominated by his warnings about the rise of Nazism.

Perhaps what binds Churchill and Orwell most closely is their shared love of England, or their individual conceptions of England.  When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour on December 7^th 1941, Churchill was overwhelmed with relief because he knew that the USA would enter the war and that, therefore, England would survive.  The closing paragraph of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is deeply nostalgic of a sleepy old England that I daresay some Englishmen would not have recognised.  In The Lion and the Unicorn Orwell admits he might be treading on toes when he conflates England with Great Britain, but he proceeds to do so.  Well, everybody has their blind spot.  On February 14^th 1947 he wrote a piece for the left wing periodical Tribune about Scottish Nationalism.  An extract from it appears in Seeing Things as They Are, Selected Journalism and Other Writings, (Harvill Secker 2014).  Orwell’s hopes for the dissolution of Empire stopped somewhere north of Carlisle.  Yet I like to think that his criticism of the proscription of the Gaelic language in Scottish schools suggests he was embarking on a journey.

Then there are the differences.  Churchill was always a lover of luxury who said his tastes were simple – nothing but the best.  Even when he was at the front during the First World War he had Clemmie send him supplies of delicatessen and enormous quantities of booze.  He was prone to bouts of melancholia – his “black dog” – but on the whole his outlook always remains optimistic; he has a conception of “broad sunlit uplands”.  Can the same be said of Orwell?  Orwell’s world is often grim.  It smells bad.  Orwell seems to have had a heightened sense of smell and his olfactory world is deeply unpleasant.  In this, he follows in a long tradition of scatological English satire going back to Jonathan Swift.  1984 is utterly dark, a dystopian nightmare without remission.  Orwell when he left the Imperial Police deliberately descended into a world of abject poverty in London and Paris, and later in the north of England.  His career choices, if such they can be called, must surely have contributed to his poor health and premature death at the age of 46.  A croft house in Jura in winter could hardly have been the ideal sanatorium for a man with advanced pulmonary tuberculosis.  He was treated in Hairmyres Hospital in Lanarkshire and subsequently in London.  It was a tragedy that he turned out to be allergic to streptomycin and that treatment had to be stopped.

But what really binds Churchill and Orwell together is their attitude to a man neither of them met, Adolf Hitler.  Churchill nearly met Hitler in a Munich hotel in 1932.  The meeting was arranged but it is said that Churchill’s criticism of Hitler’s anti-Semitic views caused Hitler to cancel the meeting.  Orwell was never likely to meet Hitler, although it was highly likely he, like Churchill, was on a list of people to be executed in the event of a successful Nazi invasion of Britain.  In his review of Mein Kampf, Orwell confessed he felt no personal animosity to Hitler, and indeed saw something attractive about him, but he added that if he had ever met him he would have tried to kill him.  Both Churchill and Orwell recognised what Chamberlain and Lord Halifax never recognised, that Hitler was not a man you could negotiate with; he had to be resisted.

The one battle I feel happy about celebrating is the Battle of Britain.  Battle of Britain day is September 15^th.  Nowadays it is rather overshadowed by the commemoration of 9/11.  15/9/40 was the day Goering sent his entire Luftwaffe across to southern England.  Churchill watched the aerial battle unfold from the HQ of No. 11 Fighter Group at Uxbridge under the command of the New Zealander Keith Park.  At one point the entire resource of Fighter Command was engaged and there were no reserves.  It was a close run thing.  This was the day Churchill borrowed Shakespeare’s notion of “the few” from Henry V’s Agincourt speech and used it in his own “Never in the field of human conflict…”  Then he took a four hour siesta.

It is sobering to consider what might have happened in 1940 if the British Government had not listened to Churchill, but rather to the substantial body of opinion from the English upper class, and had sued for peace.  Judging from the way Hitler dealt with the rest of mainland Europe, he would have installed a Vichy-style puppet government in Whitehall, taken over command of the British fleet, and hence the whole of the British Empire.  Joseph Kennedy, the US Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, would have been vindicated in reporting back to FDR that England was defeated.  Perhaps the US would have become even more isolationist.  What would the world have looked like now?

Probably something like 1984.

 

 

 

 

 

Jumped on a tram on Princes Street the other day heading west to Ingliston Park & Ride next to Edinburgh Airport where I’d left my car.  It beats sitting gridlocked in the chaotic late afternoon Edinburgh traffic.  £1.60 single, unless you go one further stop to the airport terminal in which case the fare is exorbitant.  Why are prices so hiked in airports?  One of the great mysteries of life is that everything in Duty Free is much more expensive than everything everywhere else.  Creating the tram lines turned out to be expensive as well.  Bit of a disgrace – like the cost of the construction of the Scottish Parliament.  But at least they both got built.  I confess I’m not a fan of the Parliament building.  It could easily turn into a slum.  I recall Edinburgh’s Old Royal High School, a neoclassical building next to Calton Hill that has been unoccupied for years was mooted as a site for the Scottish Parliament.  One rumour has it that the then Labour government voted against that because the building was too iconic.  Personally I would have gone for Donaldson’s School for the Deaf, a magnificent Grade A listed edifice (Playfair, 1851) in its own substantial grounds in the west end, that’s currently being turned into residential flats.  Meanwhile it has been suggested that the Royal High School now become the new site for St Mary’s Music School.  That would be good.

Anyway, back on the Princes Street tram, there was this guy in a sharp suit standing at the back of the rear carriage conducting a voluble conversation with himself.  Only a few years ago you might have concluded that he had mental health issues, but in fact he was merely taking a phone call on a hands-free system.  He was making expansive bilateral hand and arm gestures which was odd as his interlocutor could not see them, but I suppose he was just absorbed in the conversation.  He had the appearance of somebody making a public address, which, indeed was exactly what he was doing.  He might have been cabin crew on a jet issuing safety instructions.  “The emergency exits are located as shown; be aware the nearest exit might be behind you…”  He must have got on the tram at the York Place terminus or St Andrew’s Square and as we travelled through the west end it became evident this was not going to be a short conversation.  He was clearly in the corporate world.  He seemed to be a senior figure in some kind of international conglomerate.  At first I was mildly irritated that he felt the need to share his business with an entire tram-load of people.  But then I developed a sickly fascination for the whole performance, and I rather hoped that when I alighted at Ingliston – my trip would take about 35 minutes – he would still be talking.  I suppose it was rude of me to eavesdrop, but then I hardly had any choice.  And besides, it began to sound to me like a prose poem in the form of a dramatic monologue, or rather dialogue with one part inaudible.  Francis Poulenc made an opera out of such a scenario – La Voix Humaine, with libretto by Jean Cocteau – in which a woman of a certain age has a long and very painful telephone conversation with an ex-lover.  I heard Dame Felicity Lott give a wonderfully agonised performance.  The conductor was Stephan Deneve.  Maestro Deneve told a charming anecdote about a performance in an opera house.  When the conductor came up from the pit on stage to take his bow, a lady in the audience asked her friend, “Who is that?”  Her friend replied, “That must be the gentleman on the other end of the telephone line.”

Would you conduct a protracted piece of business, mezzo-forte, in a public place?  I wouldn’t.  But then I’m used to sitting in the dining room of West Highland hotels in which everybody speaks to one another in whispers.  You sometimes come across test scenarios in textbooks of medical ethics which pose a problem as follows: you are a junior hospital doctor on an Edinburgh tram on your way home from hospital after a weekend on call.  Your irate consultant phones you because the computers have crashed and he can’t access your record relating to a critically ill patient you’ve just clerked in.  Would you be so kind as to give him a quick verbal summary?  What do you do? A Hang up B Blurt C Give the facts but disguise the names D Say you’ll phone back from home E get off the tram?

The solution is to conduct the conversation using corporate managerial-speak.  Then nobody will have the slightest notion what you are talking about.  This is why I have little compunction about reproducing the monologue of the man in the sharp suit.  Despite the length of the conversation, I could not figure out what goods or service his conglomerate purveyed.  I have an idea it wasn’t something concrete like food, drink, or clothing; but rather something nebulous like – I don’t know… Futures.

…got to be in Stuttgart tomorrow morning…

Yah; yah-yah… yah

Maggie?  Well you know the trouble with Maggie

With Maggie it’s you know, load, fire, aim…

Haymarket, please have tickets and smart cards ready

The thing is the solution’s got to be bottom-up not top-down

Yah

The thing is it should never have crossed my desk in the first place

It’s the sort of thing that should have been cut off at the pass…

Yah yah but I never said that; I never said lower echelon

All I’m saying is she’s skiing off piste   

Murrayfield

So when you chair the eleven o’clock

Put it in Any Other Competent Business

So everyone’s desperate for coffee and it gets kicked

Into the long grass or at least

On to the next meeting when we can

Do a proper workshop.

Yah.  Three sixty feedback plus…

Yah yah yah   

Balgreen… Saughton… Bankhead… the man in the suit paused momentarily to glance across at the Aston Martin showroom… Edinburgh Park Station… change here for main line services… Edinburgh Park Central…  It crossed my mind to alight.  I like Edinburgh Park, a business park that never existed when I was a medical student in this city.  From the tram it looks exactly like an artist’s futuristic impression of an idyllic space with glass buildings fronted by lawns, tree-lined paths and water features, inhabited by strolling Lowry stick figures.  I thought to take a walk past the sculptures of literary luminaries, Edwin Morgan, Norman MacCaig, and my kinsman Sorley Maclean.  Kinsman!  That’s a bit of a stretcher.  My mum’s cousin is Sorley’s brother’s widow.  Sorley was very deep.  He had the persona of a magus.  He and Norman MacCaig were once attending a recitation and Sorley was asked to read one of his poems.  Sorley composed himself, looked upwards, pursed his lips, and cleared his throat in a sonorous way with a series of coughs and groans.  He lapsed into a premonitory silence.  MacCaig gave him a gentle nudge, and said, “Sorley, I think they mean for you to recite aloud.”  I will pause by Sorley’s bust and read a few lines from Creagan Beaga

…south-east of Sgurr nan Gillean

Blaven, and the stainless moon…

But no.  I’m stuck with my prose poem.

…squidgy Brexit.  Could be floppy Brexit

Could be priapic Brexit who knows

Gyle Centre please have tickets…

But we must get the mood music right

More Gordon Ramsay than Gordon Lightfoot

More Oasis than Blur yah

Edinburgh Gateway… Gogarburn

Next stop Ingliston Park & Ride thank God

Passengers not bound for Edinburgh airport must alight here…

The elegant white carriages swished to a halt and I passed out on to the platform, conscious of a vague sense of diminuendo.

But then you see that’s Maggie all over all over again.  It’s her lunar cycle don’t quote me on that…

Yuh.  Yuh…

Yuh

 

 

I’m currently writing a tract On Snobbery.  4,000 words on the slate; I think I’m about halfway.  But it keeps burgeoning; it’s such a vast topic.  Snobbery is everywhere!  I can hardly remember what set me off.  I think it might have been a consciousness of the vast difference in the experience of living in New Zealand and living in the UK.  That’s not to say snobbery doesn’t exist in New Zealand.  But the snobs are fewer in number and for that reason more easily identifiable.  They have an obsolete aura of empire and colonialism about them that make them easier to parody.  Crucially, they are really not part of the mainstream.  The really big difference between NZ and UK is that, while in NZ you can prosper as an individual, in the UK, if you want to get on, you had better be part of a group.  As an Aberdeen gastroenterologist friend of mine puts it, “We hunt in packs.”

My Snobbery tract spends much time and effort trying to identify what exactly snobbery is, so for the purpose of this commentary I will assume that you have a sense that a snob is somebody who is excessively preoccupied with notions of rank or class.  It’s like that famous sketch by the Two Ronnies and John Cleese which took advantage of Ronnie Corbett’s diminutive stature and John Cleese’s height; Ronnie Barker was in the middle.  “I look up to him because… and I look down on him because…”  And Ronnie Corbett would say, “I know my place.”  It’s a quintessentially British sketch; it would hardly make sense anywhere else.

For myself, I’m Ronnie Corbett.  I’m a peasant.  I daren’t say that with any sense of pride or I will be accused of “inverted snobbery”.  Yet I think it’s true.  I think of myself as a churl and a serf.  My grandfather was a dynamiter in Ardeer Factory, working with Irishmen whose method of assessing the concentration of nitroglycerine was to taste it.  They suffered terrible headaches.  My father’s first job, when he left school at 14, entailed going round bomb sites identifying body parts when the manufacturing process went wrong.  It’s health and safety gone mad I tell you.  In the evening he would trawl the Ayrshire beaches collecting “duff”, a mix of sand and coal dust which, with some difficulty, you could burn.  My grandfather on my mother’s side was a publican.  But he was a Gael.  In the Gaidhealtachd, everybody is an aristocrat.

My father was clever.  He was dux of his primary school.  He went on to Ardrossan Academy but he left when he was 14.  I had always understood it was because the family (he was second eldest of seven children) needed him to be a bread winner, but now I don’t believe this was so.  He wanted to leave.  He didn’t feel comfortable in the company of the sons of gentlemen.  But he always retained a great respect for higher education and it was never in doubt that I in my turn would go to university and that I would practise some sort of profession.

Yet I am my father’s son.  I didn’t have much notion of class until I became a medical student in Edinburgh and I discovered most of my classmates had attended private schools.  On the ward consultants would ask me, “What does your father do?”  I was too naïve to realise I was being interviewed for a job.  Over the years I came to realise that people of rank would generally misinterpret my station; they thought I was posher than I really was.  Whether the process of disillusionment was bitter to them I cannot say.

After spending fifteen years in the rough-and-tumble of the Antipodes I was somewhat disconcerted on my return to the UK to find that I was afforded a deference on account of my physicianly status.  People of low rank would take trouble to dress up and look their best for the benefit of the doctor.  Not so the aristocrats; they would come in from their boats and their gardens dressed in rags and covered in mud.  I suppose they thought it was “democratic”.  Actually the fact was, they just didn’t give a damn.

Mr Trump is going to withdraw the United States from the Paris Accord on climate change.  He thinks climate change is a hoax.  It might even have been cooked up by the Chinese to damage the US economy.  He wants to fire up the US coal industry again as part of a strategy to get manufacturing industry in the mid-west rust belt to recover.

There is a stark contrast between Mr Trump’s point of view and that of Al Gore, who lost the presidential election by a hanging chad to George W Bush in 2000.  Mr Gore always had an interest in environmental issues and he went on to devote himself to persuading his country and the world that global warming was real and that we needed to do something about it.  He toured the US to give a series of lectures which are captured in the film An Inconvenient Truth.  Watching Al Gore present An Inconvenient Truth and watching President Trump announce his decision re Paris from the White House Rose Garden, it is clear that both men are consummate performers, each with their own inimitable style.  Mr Gore is rather academic, able to talk to what are known in academic circles as “busy slides”, addressing the meaning of graphs and statistics.  Mr Trump is more interested in the broad sweep of things rather than the nice details; he can hold his audience by a magnetism that is not to be underestimated.

But the question must arise, who is right?  Does global warming exist, and is the activity of mankind responsible for it?  In other words, what is the truth?

To outward appearances it would certainly seem as if Mr Gore has approached these questions with more scientific detachment than Mr Trump.  He has certainly outlined to us, in some detail, the salient scientific facts as he sees them.  By contrast, so far as I’m aware, Mr Trump has asserted that global warming is a hoax, without cogent scientific argument and back-up.  It is certainly a fact that the prevailing wisdom of the scientific community supports Mr Gore’s thesis.  If Mr Trump is privy to scientific arguments counter to the prevailing wisdom, I am not aware that he has laid them out and defended them.

I can’t help wondering what the world would have looked like if Mr Gore had won the US presidential election in 2000.  Some people think he actually did win.  These hanging chads again.  But it would seem that the US electorate vote for the man they would like to share a beer with in a bar.  Mr Kerry ran against Dubya in 2004.  Mr Kerry was a little like Mr Gore in being rather academic.  Good heavens, he speaks French!  Dubya got back in.  Perhaps we witnessed a similar phenomenon with Trump and Clinton: Hilary the Washington patrician and insider, Trump the self-professed man of the people.

The biggest event to occur in the west during this period of history has been 9/11.  Dubya looked utterly perplexed but then he was handed a gift on a plate.  A highly articulate lawyer crossed the Pond and without any need for encouragement became the voice, like Cyrano de Bergerac, for a man who could hardly string two words together.  You can see clips of Dubya behind his podium looking across at Mr Blair behind his podium with a pursed-lipped expression somewhere between bewilderment and gratitude.  It’s said Mr Blair was Dubya’s poodle but if anything it was the other way around.  Blair was miles ahead of the game.  “The kaleidoscope has been shaken…”   Then in 2003 Mr Blair persuaded the British Parliament that Saddam Hussein was such an imminent threat to the UK with his weapons of mass destruction that it was necessary to invade Iraq and remove him.  He won the Parliamentary debate by 412 to 149 votes.  Very few people in positions of influence opposed him.  Charles Kennedy did.  So did Robin Cook, whose resignation speech on March 17^th 2003 was extremely eloquent.  Both men died prematurely.  I also recall Ken Clarke stating in the House, somewhat presciently, that if we embarked on the Iraq war, we would see terrorism in the streets of London.

It seems to me that three of the people I have mentioned, Mr Blair, Mr Bush, and now Mr Trump, shared a common feature.  They had a scant regard for the truth.  They were prepared to interpret the world according to their own lights and to proceed on a course of action without much attention to external reality.  Hans Blix was telling Blair and Bush that there was no evidence of the existence in Iraq of WMD.  Virtually the entire scientific community is telling President Trump that global warming is real, and is caused by us.

We live in a “post-truth” age.  If something confronts us that is not to our taste, we call it “fake news”.  Scientists are belittled.  Not so long ago Michael Gove advised us not to pay too much attention to experts.  The idea that there might be a “truth” out there that is independent of our own imagination and will is seriously doubted.  The world is largely as we choose to see it.  This is the origin of political “spin”.  You disguise the truth by applying a heavy veneer of humbug.  You are like a defence attorney presenting a case you don’t personally believe to be true.  You could as easily argue the other side’s case by, as Mr Blair would say, “deploying other arguments”.  The Princeton University philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt dissects this indifference to external truth in his two wonderful treatises On Bullshit and On Truth.  His great insight on bullshit is that the perpetrator of it doesn’t actually care whether what he is saying is true or not; and on truth, that once you cease to believe in the reality of a truth “out there”, you cease to have any clear notion of where you as an individual begin and end.  In other words, you go a bit crazy.

After the Manchester suicide bombing some people said Jeremy Corbyn had “blamed Britain” for the atrocity simply because he had asserted that the Iraq war had fuelled Islamist extremism.

Duh.

In the middle of May the NHS computer systems throughout the UK came under cyber-attack and as a result, the NHS was temporarily crippled.  I wrote a letter to The Herald, which they were kind enough to publish, suggesting that it is unwise to become too reliant on computer systems.  The computers crash and you can’t function because you haven’t been trained to think from first principles.   Now British Airways have suffered a “catastrophic” IT systems failure resulting in the cancellation of BA flights into and out of Heathrow and Gatwick.  Serendipitously, I had likened a doctor under cyber-attack to a pilot who can’t navigate using compass turns and mental dead-reckoning.  It all reminded me of a piece I wrote in 2006 for Hoolet, the Journal of The Royal College of General Practitioners, Scotland, which I dug out and reread.  It seemed relevant to me.  As I hold the copyright, I reproduce it now.  I haven’t changed a word.

ZEITGEIST

Imagine you have been commissioned to design the front cover for the next edition of Hoolet.  The theme: zeitgeist – the spirit of the age.  The editor asks for an image that will represent for the readership the atmosphere of le nouveau siècle.  What would you choose?  Perhaps, the twin towers aflame?  An iceberg calving off the Greenland coast?  A uranium enrichment plant in Iran?  George Galloway dressed up as a vampire on Big Brother?

I choose a word picture, something I happened to hear on the radio, vivid enough for me to conjure the scene with extraordinary clarity.  It was a description, one year on, by a British tourist who happened to be in a Thai electronics shop on Boxing Day 2004 when the tsunami struck.  One moment he was browsing the shelves, the next he was swimming for his life, to escape from the shop before it was completely engulfed.  There he was – and this is my image – surrounded by floating desk top computers, mobile phones, PCs, iPods, digital cameras, and play stations, thinking, “This stuff is useless rubbish.”

He escaped with nothing but his life.  He needed rest, warmth, shelter, food and drink, and human companionship.  The local people, who had next to nothing, shared with him that which they had.  I have no idea what happened to him after that.  Perhaps he returned to Britain and resumed his job as a sales rep for Hewlett Packard.  But I’d hazard a guess that the experience must have changed his world view, and his sense of the relative value of things.  I do believe his experience has changed mine.

I am not a Luddite.  I remember as a GP trainee in Edinburgh in 1984 going on a distant house call from our practice to Gogarburn.  I made the round trip and got back, only to be given another Gogarburn house call.  I said to my trainer, “Do you think the practice should get one of these portable phones?”  I’d seen one.  It looked like a large brick, the sort of thing John Wayne might have used on Juno, Gold, or Omaha.  My trainer was dubious.  They were expensive, toys for the rich and famous, and Edinburgh was full of black holes where you lost the signal.  So we put the idea on the back burner; I paused for a coffee and signed a few repeat prescriptions that had been hand-written by the reception staff.

How times have changed.  I don’t think very many people in 1984 anticipated the sheer scale of the information technology revolution, its power, and the rapidity of its onset.  And it would be crazy, it would indeed be Luddite, to wish it away.  Apart from anything else, it is just so much easier now than it was in 1984 to book a flight, to withdraw money from the bank, to get an urgent message to New Zealand.  As one of the doctors in our practice said the other day, “We’re going paper-light; there’s no point in arguing about it; it’s coming; all that matters is that we do it right.”

Splendid.  Yet I can’t say I mind when the system crashes.  I say to the receptionist, “The computer’s down.  Thank God.  We’ll do it the old-fashioned way.” And suddenly we all talk to one another a bit more.  A computer outage affords us all a glimpse of our humanity.  There is a little frisson of excitement – you feel the same thing during an electricity power cut.  I’ve always loved power cuts.  The darkness creeps in from outside and you huddle together round the tallow lamps, sharing a kind of underground, blitzy camaraderie.

“That’s all very well,” I hear you say, “but that’s just an indulgence and a conceit.  If you were a doctor in Baghdad and you only had power for two hours every 24, you would be monumentally cheesed off!” And would I also feel the same way if the computers didn’t get up and running again?  I’m not so sure.

The miraculous thing about the medical consultation is that it can be carried out under the glow of a tallow lamp.  It is a beautiful thing.  All you need are the skills – to take an accurate and detailed history, and to carry out a physical examination with little more than your hands, ears and eyes.  Then you need the wit and experience to interpret what you have found and to consider whether you should intervene, and if so, how.  You say to yourself, “What does this person who consults me seek?  What does he need?”

Nothing should be allowed to interfere with the sanctity of the medical consultation.  If the computers go down and as a consequence we find we are unable to do our business, then I think we are in trouble.  I had the misfortune to spend ten hours in Heathrow Airport last December when the departures board suddenly and peremptorily cancelled my connection to Glasgow.  There was no explanation.  I dutifully joined a lengthy queue at the BA information desk and waited my turn.  Still no announcements.  A young man just ahead of me in the line began, politely, yet insistently, to complain to the BA staff that in the age of the superabundance of information, we weren’t getting any.  When I reached the head of the queue I learned that my flight had been cancelled, not because of a mechanical problem, but because of a computer failure; and that the outage did not affect Air Traffic Control, but the ticketing system.  “But I’ve got a ticket!” I waved my boarding pass in the air.  No matter.  I had to rescue my baggage from the carousel, join another queue, and check in to a later flight.  When I got to the head of the queue, I was told I was too early to check my baggage in.

I got home after midnight, and was moved to write a “Disgruntled of Tunbridge Wells” – type letter to The Scotsman disabusing the Roman Catholic Church of its new-found belief that Limbo did not exist; after all I had spent an eternity there.  I could give its precise location: Gate Lounge 5, Terminal 1, Heathrow Airport.

Not long after this – and perhaps this is a tiny example of the way our humanity can be bolstered by an outage – a young man came to see in in the surgery.  After the consultation, he asked me if I had written a letter to The Scotsman.  His father had sent him the cutting with the covering note, “Sounds like this doctor was in the same queue as you.”  It was a Buchanesque experience; Buchan might have written, “My eyes dislimned .”  I suddenly recognised the articulate, vociferous young man who had been ahead of me in the queue.

For most of us I believe it remains the case that when the computers go down our business doesn’t grind to a halt.  Quite the contrary, we feel freed up to get on with our work.  This should at least give us pause, not to unplug the terminals, but to consider how we use the technology and whether our use of it really does improve patient care.  I can’t decide whether the people who negotiated our contract for us were childishly naïve or cynically Machiavellian in throwing a sop to a government bureaucracy obsessed with the achievement of targets through ticking boxes on a computer screen.  I think we all know that many of the measurable parameters deemed to indicate that we perform well are risible in the extreme.  Bring me the most intractable hypertensive patient in the practice and I will get his blood pressure under 135/85 – no bother at all.  He may not be able to stand up, he may be exhausted, nauseous, impotent, and depressed, but he will be normotensive.  Tick the box.  This is what happens when the IT system becomes the business.  It’s a very dangerous ménage-a-trois, a doctor, a patient, and a computer screen.  It is so easy for the doctor to misplace his loyalty within the triangle.

For myself, considering the way things have gone, I find it difficult to separate in my mind IT and childishness.  There are 700 channels on the TV and nothing to watch.  I get 700 emails a month and about 7 of them are worth reading; the rest are either spam, or “fire and forget” blanket directives sent out by the trust to a vast readership.  Travelling by public transport has become a torment not so much because of the grime, squalor, and imminent threat of physical violence, but because of the cacophony of zings and tinkles issuing from the ear-pieces of one’s fellow-travellers, and the mindboggling banality of their one-sided telephone conversations.  Mobile phones have become a sex aid for adolescents with repetitive strain injury of the thumb.  Well, good luck to them.  C U L8R!  St Paul had a word to say about IT:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

Now I think of the patient before me as the man in the Phuket electronics shop, fighting for his life, not waving but drowning.  What does he need?  Certainly not all this cyber-flotsam, impeding his efforts to escape, to be free, to live.

 

 

 

Two highly contrasting visits to Perth Concert Hall last week; on Monday to hear Nicola Benedetti and Alexei Grynyuk play Brahms, and on Thursday to hear English Touring Opera present Tosca.

Not content with playing all three Brahms sonatas for violin and piano (for the first time in one concert), Ms Benedetti prefaced each sonata with extended introductions dealing with the events in Brahms’ life at the time of each composition, the works themselves, and her own response to them.  Following the music, both performers sat down on stage for a thirty minute question and answer session with a large audience whose members almost all stayed behind for the duration.  (There was an amusing interlude when Ms Benedetti told us that her mother was in the audience.  “Where are you, mum?”  Then, with laughter and mock indignation, “Has she gone? I’m offended!”)  It said a lot for a sizeable contingent of very young people, many of them aspiring violinists, that the audience remained in rapt attention throughout.

They are a very class act, Benedetti-Grynyuk.  I’ve heard them play Perth Concert Hall once before, and particularly recall a memorable Beethoven Kreutzer Sonata.  Mr Grynyuk is as wonderful a pianist as Ms Benedetti is a violinist.  Both seem able to conjure from their respective instruments sounds of extraordinary expressivity.  (Sorry!  I sound like a guest on Michael Barclay’s Private Passions.  Sublime, Michael.)

The question and answer session was interesting.  All sorts of queries, from people of all ages.  Ms Benedetti has a rare gift for communication with warmth, sincerity, and entire lack of pretence.  Mr Grynyuk was a man of fewer words but they were well chosen and he had an irrepressible dry wit.  I was particularly struck by Ms Benedetti’s response to a question from a young girl.  “What advice would you give to somebody trying to be a violinist?”

“Do you play the violin?”

“Yes.”

There followed a conversation part private part public.  I hope I get the gist of Ms Benedetti’s reply right.  You have to decide what music, and the violin, means to you.  If you decide to devote yourself to it, you have to do the work.  Listen to your teachers and to all advice, but not uncritically.  Everything you are told has to be absorbed and evaluated by your own inner core.

It crosses my mind that when Nicola Benedetti was 16 she won the BBC Young Musician of the Year, got a recording contract, and embarked on a career.  I recall a remark she once made, that she got a lot of career advice that wasn’t necessarily any good.  She could easily have become enslaved by somebody else’s idea of what she was about.  But she didn’t.  I detect in her an extraordinary inner core of belief and resolve.  I think it was this sense of Truth to Self that she was trying to convey to her young listener.

If the Benedetti-Grynyuk-Brahms combination was inspirational and life-affirming then Tosca was something quite different.  Torture; murder; execution; suicide.  Strong meat, indeed.  I did ask myself, what are you doing here?  I have a phobia of judicial execution.  Grand Opera; honestly it’s too too bloody.  Only the other day I saw Pelleas in Edinburgh (lust, jealousy, abuse, murder) and then Bluebeard’s Castle in Glasgow (poor Judith finds herself married to a serial killer).  A Diva’s lot is not a happy one.

But, let’s face it, Grand Opera for all that it is highly stylized to the point of absurdity, does seem to hold the mirror up to human nature.  Some people think our lives are like a soap opera but on the whole I tend to think of life, public life at any rate, as Grand Opera.  In Grand Opera you are privy to the unfolding of a series of tragic events the protagonists are powerless to resist.  At the end of Act 1 of Tosca, while the Te Deum is sung in the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle, Baron Scarpia, the chief of police, formulates his dreadful plan of destruction and possession.  Puccini’s music is overwhelming.  Scarpia is a complete monster.  He tortures the painter Cavaradossi, plans to execute him and have his evil way with his lover the beautiful singer Floria Tosca.  Yet when Tosca stabbed Scarpia to death on stage I actually felt rather sorry for him.  He was in the grip of some external force of evil and as much a victim as anybody else.  This is the thing about operatic characters; they are playthings of the gods.

Following the purgation of pity and terror, you leave the theatre and resume life in the real world, disconcerted to find youself observing life on “the world stage”, and what you are observing to all intents and purposes resembles Grand Opera.  There is a horrible feeling that the libretto has already been composed; the players are merely acting it out.  John Adams composed Nixon in China.  I bet you somebody writes an opera about President Trump.  I hope it’s like a piece of Gilbert & Sullivan.  Meanwhile I can’t get the close to Act 1 of Tosca out of my head.  The bells, the bells.

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.