Author: jamescalumcampbell

Tuned into the BBC Proms on Saturday night with some trepidation.  The National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain embarked on a kind of space extravaganza.  Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra and Holst’s The Planets (complete with Pluto, downgraded or not, courtesy of composer Colin Matthews) were preceded by Iris ter Schiphorst’s Gravitational Waves.   The last time I went to a London Prom was on September 10^th 2008 to experience a similarly spaced-out programme; the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Martin Brabbins played Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Antartica and Holst’s The Planets.  I believe Herbert von Karajan hated The Planets, but was occasionally obliged to programme it with the Berliner Philharmoniker, which just goes to show, even the great and the good sometimes just have to do as they’re told.  I quite like The Planets, but I really wanted to hear the Vaughan Williams, because it is so seldom programmed. Some people say it’s hardly a symphony; it’s only film music, albeit of a classy kind.  But I thought it was beautiful, and the effect of the ethereal soprano, Elizabeth Watts, an apparition high up above the Royal Albert Hall, was extraordinary.

Sandwiched between the Vaughan Williams and the Holst was Iannis Xenakis’ Pleiades, a substantial four movement piece for a battery of percussion.  I like to think I’m open-minded and receptive to contemporary music.  If I took offence at the Xenakis, it was not because it was avant garde, but simply because it was painfully, literally painfully, loud.  I thought it was only rock music that damaged your tympanic membranes.  Not so.  I believe a rank-and-file string player has recently sued the symphony orchestra in which she plays, for hearing loss.  I like to think the complainant is a viola player.  Somebody in the brass will have cracked a joke about it.  Well, they all laughed when Christopher Columbus… etc.  The woodwind players in the RSNO protect their ears from the brass by erecting sound barriers (they look like transparent music stands) behind them.  Sometimes, during a tutti (if she is not playing herself) the cor anglais player puts her instrument down and covers her ears.  For myself, I gave myself until the end of the first movement of the Xenakis, and whispered to my neighbour, “Life’s too short.  I’m going to the bar.”  I wasn’t alone.  I heard boos and catcalls.  Those of us who walked out were later berated by a critic, but I’d like to assure him it was not a matter of music appreciation, but one of health and safety.  Who was it that said, “Never sing louder than lovely”?

I met a very affable steward on my way out and said, “I need a drink!”

“Was it all too much for you?”

“Just too mm-mm loud.”

“Come back for the Holst.”

But I’d had it.  I’d taken a mood.  I could see he thought I was a dour and grumpy Scotsman (which, on this occasion at least, I was).  I later regretted it, not least because I found out that 10/9/08 was the day that the conductor Vernon Handley died.  Tod (as he was universally known) was a huge champion of British music and in particular of a great hero of mine, Arnold Bax.  If I’d known that at the time, I think I would have stayed.

So in a sense, Saturday night’s NYO concert was my chance to slip back into the Royal Albert Hall and hear The Planets.  But would I survive Iris ter Schiphorst?  Yes.  It didn’t threaten to knock off more of my high-tone frequencies, the musical language was quite accessible and I had no trouble envisaging the collision of two black holes.  It became evident that the performance was as much a visual as an aural experience, one that I wasn’t capturing on Radio 3, so on Sunday I caught it again on the iPlayer.

There was a bit of theatricality, involving the players wearing masks, swaying (I guess like waves), carrying out some choreographed manoeuvres, and chanting.  I notice this was a BBC commission and a London premiere.  A friend of mine refers to such a performance as a “derriere”.  Will it get another outing?   Hardened professional musicians are notoriously obdurate when it comes to doing anything other than playing their instruments.  The Musicians’ Union even has rules about what you can and can’t ask an orchestra to do.  If the sense of humour of the orchestral musician is sardonic, it is surely because they seek a means of self-preservation.  I recall the great horn player Barry Tuckwell came up to Glasgow to play a Thea Musgrave concerto with the RSNO (then SNO).  The soloist had a kind of itinerant role, and was instructed to move about the orchestra to play in ensemble with relevant sections sharing a common theme.  During the performance, Tuckwell arrived beside the horn section and the principal muttered to him, “Bugger off!”

I wonder if, when Vaughan Williams composed the last movement of his sixth symphony, he had in mind his friend Holst’s last planet, Neptune the Mystic.  The Vaughan Williams never rises above pianissimo.  Music for a nuclear winter.  RVW would have scoffed at that.

I was greatly struck by the NYO chant that closed Gravitational Waves.  It was a quote from Sir Isaac Newton.  “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.”  I suppose it was ever thus, but that is surely the crucial conundrum of our time.  It certainly seemed the most apposite thing you could possibly say on, of all the days of the year, August 6^th.

Antidisestablishmentarianism’s floccinaucinihilipilification…

…was the text of my latest letter to the columns of The Herald, from Disconsolate of Flanders Moss Grimpen.  I should explain the context.  The letters editor was extolling the virtues of short soundbites and he reprinted as an example a particularly pithy three word missive he had received.  He then challenged the readership to come up with a two word missive (with a plea to avoid vulgarity).  It so happened that a substantial number of The Herald letters published that day were written by a constituency of readers who did not wish to disestablish themselves from the European Union and who were therefore rubbishing the Brexit vote and seeking either to ignore it (it was after all purely advisory) or to rerun the referendum – presumably until the desired result was achieved.  I wasn’t published.  At least, not yet.

I’m currently reading A History of British Prime Ministers, by Dick Leonard (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).  Walpole to Cameron (Tracy was not yet on the scene).  I’m reading it backwards.  Not literally, word for word, scanning from right to left as if the text were in Arabic.  (Which reminds me, have you read Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis?  It is a life story told backwards, this time literally so, from death to birth.  Amis keeps up the fiction remorselessly.  Before you go to bed in the morning you take a razor and attach facial hair to your chin.  Half way through – or half way back – as you might expect from Amis, something appalling occurs.  What can this blatant blasphemy against the second law of thermodynamics possibly mean?  Is it a vision of Hell as a kind of recurring Groundhog Day?  It’s very disturbing.  Your Myth of Sisyphus involves standing at the top of a mountain watching a large boulder miraculously rolling up to you.  You get behind it and support its weight and struggle back down the mountain with it, only to see it roll up to the top again.  You go back up (walking backwards) and support its weight and bring it back down, conscious of the futility of the expedition.)

But to return to the august First Lords of the Treasury (Cameron to Walpole in my case), I find there are certain advantages to reading history books backwards.  You are proceeding from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from the known to the unknown.  So far I’ve done Cameron-Brown-Blair-Major-Thatcher-Callaghan-Wilson-Heath-Wilson-Home-Macmillan-Eden-Churchill-Attlee and already it’s before my time.  It is a little like reading the Amis.  You begin to question your perspective on the cause-effect relationship.  I’ve particularly noticed that effect, during this week with regard to the UK’s troubled relationship with the European Union which was the European Economic Community which was the Common Market which was the European Coal and Steel Agreement.  All that time and effort by Mr Heath and (as he was then) Mr Major et al to persuade the public to go in and persuade Europe to have us, and then to stay in, endlessly arguing the case for exceptions and opt-outs.  Bureaucratic nightmare.  And now Messrs Davis, Fox, and Johnson are taking us back out.  Even bigger bureaucratic nightmare.  Maybe De Gaulle (après moi, le deluge) was right to say “non”.  He probably foresaw it would all turn into a labyrinthine cauchemar. It really is the Myth of Sisyphus.

It is inherent in democracy, particularly in the context of fixed five year terms, that anything a politician achieves can be “disachieved” in a flash.  President-apparent Trump is going to reverse Obamacare.  Mrs May is musing over Hinkley Point.  It would make any Prime Minister hesitate to embark on any project at all, this knowledge that it’s all going to unravel under the auspices of the next incumbent.  It’s said that PMs during their final term become preoccupied with “legacy”.  Shelley wrote a poem about a great imperial tyrant named Ozymandias who was pretty smug about his Achievement, yet whose sole legacy was his own decayed and shattered statue lying in the middle of a desert.  “Nothing beside remains.”  Winston said of his own career, “I have achieved much, in the end to achieve nothing.”

I couldn’t help wondering whether the French were being a little mischievous last week when England embarked on the summer hols and ended up in a 20 mile traffic jam en route to Dover, tired and thirsty after ten hours, trying to entertain the fractious children in the back.  Perhaps at the channel they were met with a Gallic shrug and a pout.  “Isn’t this what you voted for?”

Maybe the trouble with Huge Projects is that they become inherently unstable.  They are like the Tower of Babel, that absurd staircase to heaven and monument to man’s pride.  After it collapsed, everybody went around talking gibberish – maybe, in the case of the EU, in 28 languages.  Or should that be 27?  No, 28.  I have this hunch that Article 50 will never be triggered.

Mindful of the fact that Donald Trump may very well turn out to be the 45^th President of the United States, I watched, in full, Mr Trump’s acceptance speech for the Republican nomination, on Thursday evening, from Cleveland Ohio.  Then I got a transcript of the speech and read it through again.  I wanted to see if he had an argument, and if his argument stood up to scrutiny.

I don’t think there is any doubt that Mr Trump is a public speaker of extraordinary flair.  I’d noticed it before during the primaries; how he can woo an audience, be alive to a particular atmosphere, think on his feet.  He may not be a funny man, but he has the sensitivity to atmosphere of a stand-up comic, and the ability to go off at a tangent, unexpectedly, if the situation demands it.  He also has an aura that his supporters might describe as charisma and his detractors as something more Machiavellian.  Sometimes it almost amounts to a power of hypnosis.  He spoke for 70 minutes and I wasn’t bored for a moment.  He spoke without notes and he never “um’d and ah’d” and if he was using an autocue it was well concealed.  His delivery was rather old-fashioned in that it was stagey and shouty, perhaps in the manner of a fairground barker of the pre-microphone age – but then he was addressing a hall of 20,000 people.  In demeanour (if not in content), I found him reminiscent of Mussolini.  Where il duce had a smug pout, Mr Trump beams like a Cheshire cat.  He didn’t say he’d get the trains to run on time, but he did say he’d fix the third world US airports.

But to content.  The central themes were US internal security, border control, the economy, and foreign policy.  It is hard to offer an abstract because Mr Trump tended to channel-hop.  A brief summary:  The US is out of control.  Law & Order needs to be restored.  The economy is in a mess.  The US has been humiliated abroad and much of the world is in chaos thanks to the legacy of Hillary Clinton.  I will fix all this my putting America first.

The whole system is rigged against the common man by Big Business, the Democrats, and unfair trade deals.  Hillary Clinton has committed “terrible crimes”.  Egregious (sic) crime is her greatest accomplishment.  “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”

Bernie Sanders’ supporters will join our movement.  Warm tribute to the Vice Presidential nominee, Mike Pence.

“I am the Law & Order candidate.”

The President has “used the pulpit of the Presidency to divide us by race and colour.”

“I will protect our kids.”

We are going to defeat “the barbarians of ISIS.”

I will protect the LGBTQ community.

Re terrorism: improve intelligence, abandon regime change, destroy ISIS, work closely with Israel.

Control immigration: “We are going to build a great border wall.”

On 21/1/17, wake up in a country where the laws of the US are enforced.  (Hillary Clinton is proposing mass amnesty, mass immigration, and mass lawlessness.)

We need a new fair trade policy – not NAFTA, not TPPA, not China’s entry to the WTO.

I will cut and simplify taxes, and stop excessive regulation in the industrial sector.

I will lift restrictions on energy production and protect the mining and steel industries…

…fix infrastructure, and schools… repeal Obamacare… fix the airports, rebuild the military, get the other NATO countries to pay their way, look after our Vets, eliminate wasteful spending projects, appoint to the Supreme Court…

Protect the 2^nd Amendment (Mr Trump has the support of the NRA).

He also has the endorsement of the evangelical community. (There was a wry smile here.)  “I’m not sure I quite deserve it…”

Then some family stuff, and finally some American cheer-leading: America strong again, proud again, safe again, great again.  Thank you.

And that was that.  It took over an hour to deliver but you can read the whole thing in ten minutes.  This is because the delivery was constantly interrupted by protracted periods of adulation and ritual chanting from an audience that certainly appeared to be inspired, uplifted, and occasionally moved to tears.

A very long time ago, a Professor of English Literature at whose feet I sat would throw a critical essay of mine back at me and say, “Campbell, it’s all assertion and no argument!”

Where would you begin?  How are you going to restore Law & Order and simultaneously uphold the 2nd amendment?  The whole place is awash with guns.  How can you blame Mrs Clinton for Middle East unrest when it all goes back to long before 9/11?  Precisely how are you going to destroy ISIS?  What are the implications for global warming of rejuvenating the mining industry?

Maybe Mr Trump will have a chance to answer some of these questions over the next four months.  Journalists on the other side of the Pond are so polite to their politicians.  Sometimes I wish a BBC interviewer like John Humphreys or Jeremy Paxman or (best of all to my mind) Eddie Mair could interview Mr Trump in a forensic way.  I’m not suggesting for a moment it would be a walkover.  I think Mr Trump is a very formidable man.  As a matter of fact, right now, although there is still a long way to go, and anything might happen, I think he’s going to win.

Following the appalling episode in Nice, Mr Trump has issued a couple of interesting statements, first, that IS is a cancer, and second, that if elected President, he would ask Congress to declare war on IS.  There has even been mention of “World War 3” – though this may be mere Fox News hype.

I recently read The Laws of Medicine by Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies.  Prof Mukherjee is an oncologist and the emperor of all maladies is, of course, cancer.  In The Laws of Medicine, Mukherjee describes the work of William Halsted, a Baltimore surgeon who championed radical mastectomy in the treatment of breast cancer.  In the early twentieth century the surgical treatment of breast cancer was achieving poor results.  Halsted thought this was because the surgeon was not being aggressive enough.  Tumour was being left behind.  What was needed was surgical “extirpation”.  Radical mastectomy involved the removal not only of all breast tissue, but of underlying muscle and associated lymph nodes.  Outcomes remained poor.  But it took 80 years until the conventional wisdom that it was good to be aggressive was questioned in the form of a controlled clinical trial.

The results of the trial showed that radical mastectomy offered the patient no benefit over more conservative surgery, but did cause myriad unwanted side effects and complications.  It seems sensible that a surgeon should choose to be “radical”, but there is a sound pathophysiological reason why it won’t work.  The breast cancer cells that are life-threatening metastasise early.  Long before the condition becomes clinically evident, cancer cells have left the primary tumour and travelled via blood and lymph vessels to take up residence in far distant sites, all over the body.

So Mr Trump’s first assertion, that IS is a cancer, is actually quite apposite.  When you think of all the recent terrorist atrocities – Nice, Paris, Brussels, Orlando, most of the perpetrators have been citizens of the countries they have attacked.  Their links with any putative Middle Eastern Caliphate are tenuous.  The frightening thing about the threat we face is that it is coming from a fifth column which has infiltrated any and every country.  Metastatic disease indeed.

Can the metaphor of international terrorism qua mitotic lesion usefully be extended further?  Modern cancer therapies focus very much on immune surveillance.  The immune system is constantly identifying and “taking out” aberrant cells.  When cancer cells survive and multiply this is seen as a failure of the immune system.  Therapies are directed towards supercharging the immune system to identify tumour cells as alien, as “non-self”, and destroy them.  If the metaphor is going to stand up, we might suppose that in the fight against the cancer of terrorism, the intelligence services fulfil the role of the immune system, but already the metaphor is beginning to look hackneyed and threadbare; I wonder whether it is useful to think of a terrorist as other, as “non-self”.  We do this all the time.  When you hate your enemies, you tend to think, “These people are not like us; they are scarcely human.”

This takes us on to Mr Trump’s second statement, advocating a declaration of war.  It’s not new.  George Bush did exactly the same after 9/11.  He declared a “war on terror”.  That Mr Trump should wish to ask Congress for a formal declaration of war suggests that he is not thinking metaphorically.

Yet how would you conduct such a war?  Who would you bomb?  Who would you invade?  Where would the front line be?  How would you even know if you’d won?  Politicians should pause before they use the word “war” – call it the Dubya word.  Since 2001, the war on terror hasn’t gone very well.

We tend to be a bit smug, complacent, and superior about Mr Trump on this side of the Pond, but watch what happens in Westminster today.  The renewal of Trident will be debated, and – I dare say – £167,000,000,000 (£205,000,000,000 if you believe CND) will be spent over the lifetime of the system on its refurbishment and upkeep.  The advocates of “deterrence” will draw heavily on the events of the past week.  “Now, with all these international threats, is not the time to be destabilising the fragile balance of power.”  There will be no mention of precisely how a 100 kiloton bomb could possibly stop a loner from choosing to drive a truck into a crowd of people.

What’s in the mind of a man who chooses to mow down a whole lot of innocent people with a heavy goods vehicle?  We don’t really know.  The cancer metaphor comes in handy again.  If our treatments of some specific cancers remain very poor, it’s because we don’t understand the disease.  But we know that “extirpation” is not going to work.  We need to think again.  We need to think afresh, laterally, and creatively.  Is there any leader currently on “the world stage” who is doing this?

The worrying thing is, Mr Trump might be President of the USA in six months.  “Events” have come at an awkward time for the UK.  Everybody’s on a steep learning curve.  Mr Hammond was asked what he thought of the Bank of England holding interest rates at 0.5% and he said, wait for the Autumn Statement – that is, give me a chance to master my brief.  The Foreign Secretary wanders around Whitehall mumbling and bumbling.  Is Boris Goodenough? (That’s a pun: see Saturday night’s Albert Hall Prom.) Boris, the Donald… I keep reverting to W B Yeats:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity. 

Where’s Abe Lincoln when you need him?

The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise to the occasion.  We must think anew, and act anew…                                             

Back in the nineties I was Best Man to a friend of mine, an emergency physician who married a paediatrician in Dallas, Texas.  The ceremony took place at 3 pm in a very elegant establishment in a leafy suburb of the city.  I had some time on my hands in the morning and so I took off, as I recall with a charming bunch of the bride’s pals from Johns Hopkins Baltimore, and we went down to Dealey Plaza.

If you check out Dealey Plaza on Google Earth you will see that it is very little changed from November 22^nd 1963, when JFK’s limousine rounded the corner of Elm and Houston and passed by the Texas School Book Depository.  It was an odd experience, to walk on the same triangle of grass from which Mr Zapruder shot his cine film as the president and his entourage passed by; to stand on “the grassy knoll”; to ascend to the sixth floor of the book depository and look out of the same window that Lee Harvey Oswald chose as his vantage point, measuring angles.  Whenever I visit a site of historical importance, already familiar to me from film or TV, I have the odd sense that I’m not at the real location at all, but rather on a kind of mock-up film set.  Maybe the Apollo missions were filmed in a back lot in Hollywood.  Have you seen Capricorn One?  Clever movie.  I’m a Conspiracy Theorist.  After all, it only takes two to form a conspiracy.  Maybe it’s just paranoia, but nowadays I automatically default to conspiracy.  Everything is a deep dark labyrinth of deceit, intrigue, and treachery organized by the military-industrial complex.  I read in The Herald on Friday that the Battle of the Somme was deliberately prolonged as a joint enterprise of Anglo-German arms manufacturers, and it seemed perfectly feasible to me.

Like everybody else, I can remember what I was doing when JFK was assassinated.  I was at my aunt’s house in Glasgow.  She told me the president had been shot.  By the time I got home, he had died.  I was only a kid, but I was aware that something momentous and world-shattering had occurred.  I remember being glued to the grainy black and white pictures on the TV over the next few days, of Jackie in her blood-stained suit crawling over the back of the limousine.  Was she trying to assist the secret service agent to get on board or was she just trying to get the hell out of there?  It seemed utterly extraordinary to me that Jack Ruby should be able to shoot Oswald in the basement of a police station, live on TV.  “I did it for Jackie,” said Jack.  I distinctly remember thinking it was a set-up.  Look at the film. That guy in the white suit with the stetson – he knows something is about to happen.  I just thought America, the Wild West, was a lunatic asylum.

To my mind the most convincing explanation for November 22^nd comes from an Australian criminologist who specialises in cold cases.  His thesis is that Oswald fired his first shot and missed, then fired a second shot which hit both Kennedy and Governor Connally.  At this point, a secret service agent in the car behind, realising something was happening, drew his firearm and accidentally discharged it, fatally wounding the president.  You can see why the secret service might want to cover that up.  It’s just such a monumental cock-up.

I thought of that theory this past week during the appalling events in Dallas, where five police officers have been shot and killed, doubtless in retaliation for the recent fatal shootings by police officers of two black men in Baton Rouge and St Paul.  You might say these retaliatory executions were as much political assassinations as was the killing of JFK.  As with JFK, the sniper shot from a high vantage point.  Maybe Dallas will develop a reputation.  Sniper City.  Sniping is to Dallas as defenestration is to Prague.  The difference between 1963 and 2016 is that while Oswald used a rather low-tech rifle (making a conspiracy theory all the more probable), the automatic weapons used last week turned the place into a war zone.

President Obama made a statement from Warsaw.  He looked very weary.  Has he got anything left to say about guns that he hasn’t said before?  I gather he intends to visit Dallas but I think he should think twice about that.

The gun never solved a single problem in the world.  The great tragedy of our century, of our young millennium, is that the west still buys into what a theologian has called “the fallacy of redemptive violence”.  From our side of the Pond we look askance at the American gun culture.  It seems that every other day a toddler finds his mother’s Saturday night special in her handbag and shoots her dead.  Over here we think it’s all crazy but remember we’re joined at the hip.   We “stand shoulder to shoulder”.  After 9/11 our PM said something close to “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”  Thus, through a fog of fuzzy logic, dodgy syllogisms and non-sequiturs, we started dropping bombs on people, for no apparent reason.  The entire British Parliament voted by a substantial majority to open Pandora’s Box.  Sir John Chilcot has now told us it was all a Huge Mistake and now Parliament seeks to scapegoat one single, haunted individual.

Yet even now the Westminster village remains purblind.  On the Andrew Marr Show the newspaper reviewers babble on endlessly about Mrs Leadsom’s fecundity and Mrs May’s (call it) aridity.  Bread and circuses.

Next week, Parliament will debate the renewal of Trident.  I see American gun culture, and Trident, as two ends of a continuum of violence.  Most of us think the US should have a domestic small arms amnesty, yet Parliament will, I’m sure, vote to renew Trident.  The only substantial voice against it (aside from Mr Corbyn if he’s still around) will be the SNP.  But the numbers will not be enough.  All the SNP will be able to claim is that, as with the EU referendum, this will be another material change of circumstances leading to a second Scottish Independence referendum.

Meanwhile, just as a toddler in, say, Orlando, is rummaging in his mom’s bag to find a fascinating shiny metal toy, a fifteen year old kid in north London, unusually good at computer hacking, sets himself the challenge of communicating with the submariners sliding out of Faslane, to see if he can get them to open the PM’s letter of last resort.

Just for the hell of it.

Why did Boris throw the towel in?

When he dropped his bombshell, I had that feeling I’ve experienced countless times when I’ve taken a history from a patient who is holding something back.  The history just doesn’t make any sense, and you realise that a vital piece of the jigsaw is unavailable to you, so that you are unable to create a complete picture of the predicament in which the patient finds himself.  The contrast between Boris and Mr Corbyn could not be greater.  Almost the entire Parliamentary Labour Party, and all the Labour grandees, want Mr Corbyn to go, and he’s not budging.  But all Mr Gove needs to do is tell us that Boris is not a leader, and Boris collapses.  Why?  I listened to Mr Gove making his pitch, and something very odd happened.  He said – I paraphrase – something like “I never wanted this to happen”, then, almost as an aside to somebody in the room, “Believe me, I really didn’t!” – this, greeted with a knowing ripple of laughter.  That’s when I thought, they know something we’re not privy to.  It was ever thus, in the corridors of power.

Another contrast very evident this week has been between Westminster and Holyrood.  On Saturday Her Majesty opened the fifth session of the reconvened Scottish Parliament.  It was a happy occasion, full of music, poetry, and laughter.  The Presiding Officer made a genuinely witty speech.  He cracked a joke that made the Queen and even the po-faced Duke of Edinburgh both burst out laughing.  The First Minister’s speech reflected the sense of purpose, the self-confidence, the sense of identity, and – at least for a day – the sense of unity of those who had taken their seats.   Young thespians declaimed the words of makars old and new.  There was a rendition of Burns’ For A’ That.  I recall this was sung at the opening of the first session in 1999.  Ye see yon birkie, ca’d a lord…  I wonder what the Duke of Hamilton made of that.  And an MSP played the pipes, most sweetly.

And a third contrast – in the European Parliament – between Alyn Smith and Nigel Farage.  Mr Smith, SNP MEP, literally begged the parliament not to abandon Scotland.  “Chers collegues…”  He got a standing ovation.  Mr Farage stood up to rub salt in the wound.  He might have said (he nearly did), “They all laughed when Christopher Columbus…”  It was the most extraordinarily brazen display of schadenfreude.  Whatever you may think, you have to be in awe at the sheer brass neck of the man.  President Juncker said, “Why are you here?”  Mr Farage told the parliament that the UK would not be the last to go.  I thought, that’s why he’s there.  He doesn’t just want the UK out, he wants to destroy the European project.

Meanwhile down in Westminster, anarchy reigns on both sides of the House.  I confess during this past week I’ve become something of a news junkie, switching on the telly every hour on the hour to catch the latest episode of the soap opera.  Each revelation is more cataclysmic than the last, as if a team of script writers are aware that an addicted audience needs a stronger hit every time.  The thing about a soap opera is that you have to remember, it’s not real.  What are we witnessing in Westminster?  Is it history, tragedy, tragicomedy, comedy, or farce?  I seem to recall that ancient Brian Rix productions were actually called Whitehall Farces.  It seems to me we have even moved beyond the farcical realm into some kind of surreal alternative universe.  Harold Pinter once said that the thing about tragedy is that it is funny, and then it is no longer funny.  On Sunday morning I watched the Andrew Marr Show.  Some of the cast still think the play is a history, but they have entered the Theatre of the Absurd, and they don’t know it.

 

In the midst of the current tumult, Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon came on air to remind the nation that the Scottish Government was keeping its eye on the ball, and was continuing to govern the country with respect specifically to Health and Education.  She might have said “Keep calm and carry on”, or, more colloquially, “Keep the heid”.  Anyway I’m taking her advice and devoting this blog to an aspect of Health.

I got this invitation from the Royal College of General Practitioners to go on a course, entitled You as a collaborative leader.  This was “Cohort 2” I so guess it has already happened.  Here is a digest of the blurb:

You as a Collaborative Leader is part of the Leadership for Integration programme, which supports leadership development for health and social care integration…

You as a Collaborative Leader supports you to recognise your own leadership strengths and sources of resilience so you can lead more collaboratively and effectively in delivering integrated care.  It is completed over a period of approximately four months and involves:

• Three 1:1 coaching sessions (one at the start, middle and end of the programme)
• A 360-degree assessment and feedback exercise on your leadership capability
• Two full-day workshops on 06 October and 10 November in Edinburgh, focusing on leadership capabilities for health and social care integration
• A tailored personal development plan to help you sustain your learning in practice

I don’t think I would have understood a word of all this but for the fact that I had a little prior knowledge as to what it is all about.  The blurb reminded me of job adverts you occasionally see in the Situations Vacant columns of newspapers which describe in glowing – if somewhat abstract – terms the qualities a company is looking for in a candidate for a job whose specification is never spelled out.  What is the company called?  What do they do?  What do they make?  What values do they live by?  It doesn’t seem to matter, so long as you demonstrate that you have leadership strengths and sources of resilience etc etc.

I’m not going to embark on You as a Collaborative Leader.  I’d just be a spoiler, like Nigel Farage in the European Parliament.  I just don’t believe in the project.  The integration of health and social care – ever closer union if you will – is just a step too far.   It seems to me that behind the whole project lurks a series of misconceptions about the nature of life, aging, decrepitude, and death that could only have been formulated by people with very little first-hand experience of these phenomena.

When I was a junior hospital doctor there was in vogue a rather disparaging term – “social admission” – descriptive of a patient, usually elderly, brought on to the ward because, frankly, they had nowhere else to go.  Amongst ourselves – I shudder to think of it now – elderly patients with multiple morbidities were called “crumblies”.  We were supposed to be bright young people and yet it clearly never occurred to us that to call a patient a “crumbly” – or even a “social admission” – was nothing less than an abrogation of our responsibility to do all in our power to make their lot better.  The great skill – and compassion – of a consultant in aging and health (we used to call them geriatricians but the name itself now has a geriatric quality) is the insight that not all of the adversities faced by the elderly are irreversible.

There is huge political pressure on the Health Service at the moment that it do its damnedest to look after frail elderly patients at home.  This is the driving force behind the Leadership for Integration Programme.  If only we could get social services and health care workers to come up with a way of shoring these people up at home, we could free up x numbers of hospital beds and save y million pounds in the process.

It’s a fallacy.  Any experienced GP carrying out a home visit on a sick elderly patient can tell within a minute of entering the house whether the patient needs to be admitted to hospital.  Sometimes the decision to admit is based on a diagnosis, but more often it is predicated on the patient’s inability to cope at home, to move, to feed, to wash, to get to the toilet.  In other words, for the time being, they need nursing care.  It is theoretically – and occasionally practically – possible to provide such nursing care at home, on a one-to-one basis, but it is very expensive.  It is far more efficient and cost effective to have a small group of nurses looking after a larger group of patients in a single location – call it a ward – itself situated in an environment designed to do this sort of work – call it a hospital.

Most district general hospitals in the UK run close to capacity with near 100% bed occupancy – and sometimes beyond that.  Beds and trolleys line the corridors and patients awaiting discharge are lodged in the ward day room to free the beds up for the next occupants.  It’s almost “Cox & Box”.  Would it not be better to create more hospital beds, and train more doctors and nurses, rather than spending money on supporting me to recognise my sources of resilience with a 360 degree assessment of my leadership capability?  What a load of nonsense.

“It’s a dislocation of the mechanism of human reasoning, a general loosening of screws.”

(“Dr Greenslade Theorizes”, The Three Hostages, by John Buchan.)

 

When the historians – should any of them survive – come to write the history of World War III, how will they characterise its aetiology?  What pat list of causes will school pupils – if spared – be required to learn by rote for purposes of passing examinations?  For guidance – after all we are always condemned to fight the last war – we might look to the run up to World War II.  We might reasonably make a list as follows:

Draconian reparation demands on Germany at the Treaty of Versailles resulting in…

Economic hardship, hyperinflation, unemployment and civil unrest resulting in…

The collapse of the Weimar Republic and a political vacuum resulting in…

The rise of the extreme right and the coming to power of the National Socialist Party whose ambitions for lebensraum through German militarism resulted in…

Rearmament, expansionism, (tolerated within a climate of appeasement) resulting in…

Blitzkrieg.   

It’s a rational way of looking at things; a concatenation of circumstances (or, as Allan Bennett said perhaps more eloquently in The History Boys – “Just one f****** thing after another.”)  That was the way we were taught History.  “Take out your Warner, Martin and Muir!” said Miss Leitch.  We learned a series of soundbites.  Coriolanus – moved by a mother’s tears.  John Sobieski – stopped the Turk at the gates of Vienna.  (Why is there always only one Turk?  Nigel Farage reminds us there are 79,000,000.)  The Archduke Franz Ferdinand – shot by a Bosnian-Serb fanatic.  It’s all a bit reminiscent of the way we were taught Shakespearean Tragedy.  It was all about great men with a hamartia or fatal flaw.  Hamlet’s indecisiveness, Othello’s jealousy, Macbeth’s vaulting ambition.  It’s all very logical, rational, and clear-cut, and it’s entirely unconvincing.  Why is evil abroad i’ the world?  If you’d asked a medieval monk he might have invoked Satan, witches, and other assorted hags, foul fiends, and flibbertigibbets.  I can’t help thinking he would have had a better handle on it than we have.  I’ve been revisiting Yeats’ The Second Coming.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… 

It’s the poem for our time.  This week I’ve been watching utter nutters in various stages of undress hurl chairs at one another in the estaminets of Lille and Versailles.  “The blood-dimmed tide” indeed.  I can’t speak for our mainland European friends, but when it comes to football, we in these islands have a problem.  Football has a problem, and it is one of which we are largely in denial.  The people who get angry with the gendarmerie for using water cannon and tear gas, who accuse them of being heavy-handed and incompetent, have no insight into the fact that to invade and occupy a town square, whether at home or abroad, to be drunk, slovenly, loud and abusive, is completely unacceptable.  It’s behaviour exactly analogous to that of these ghastly hen and stag parties in aircraft en route to Ibiza who turn everybody else’s journey into a nightmare.

I may be accused of going over the top in comparing a bunch of football hooligans to the Sturmabteilung, but I think the behaviour and the motivation is essentially the same.  Rentamob.  There are always people around – and their number is not unsubstantial – holding themselves in readiness for the opportunity to go on the rampage.  While they form an occult underground secret society, they permeate all levels of society.  They are in place, like sleepers, primed, ready to go, waiting for the nod.  Every now and then they sense an opportunity to seize power and enter the Big League.  They get the summons.  They all begin to migrate as if in some magnetic field of evil towards some dark black hole.  What did Yeats say?

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?                 

I am a cruciverbaholic.

Yet I take heart.  I have joined a support group, courtesy of The Herald.  We meet, monthly, in an upstairs room in Curlers, an ancient pub in the west end of Glasgow.  My first time, I went with some apprehension.  There were nineteen of us – 12 men and 7 women, the age range slightly younger than I’d expected.  (Do the demographics surprise you?)  Would I be asked to stand up and share with the group “my story”?  It would be familiar enough – the long descent from the apparently harmless habit – perhaps acquired in the dentist’s waiting room – of jotting down a few answers to the simple crossword in The Daily Record, towards that Rubicon moment when you first cast your eye over the cryptics – “the hard stuff”.  And you take that flight of fancy, much as somebody on LSD thinks it’s a good idea to attempt flight off a rooftop.

Now I am like Monsieur Manette, Lucie’s father in A Tale of Two Cities.  He had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and when he suffered relapses he would return to his cobbler’s last and manufacture shoes in much the same way as I solve clues, or pose them, in a kind of fugue state.

I didn’t have to give my testimonial in Curlers.  Instead, Myops, the great doyen of the Saturday Crossword, and The Wee Stinker, gave us a lecture on cruciverbalism.  Myops’ great hero is Ximenes.  I never grappled with Ximenes’ puzzles but I did get entangled with the Telegraph’s Enigmatic Variations, much as an addict might become beholden to a ruthless baron ensconced in some Central American fortress dispensing designer commodities.

Next month, MCC (The Man who was Thursday) had us setting and solving clues.  I won a prize.  Ah – the lure, the hook.  Now I send The Herald clues that are increasingly surreal and bizarre, stretching the limits of cryptography.  I aspire to be the Arnold Schoenberg of cruciverbalism.

Elmer an’ them got rhythm.  Who could ask for anything more? (5,6)

Next Tuesday we reconvene in Curlers like some occult witenagemot.  We will be constructing crossword grids.  I have software for this at home, but I think to take it along would not be in the spirit of the thing.  I was fascinated to learn that Myops does not use software.  Mind you, he’s been doing it for years.  Why would he need it?

By way of rehearsal, I attempted to construct a grid of a standard composition, 15 squares squared, with, initially, every second square blacked out on alternate rows and columns.  To this basic pattern may be added additional black squares on the clear rows and columns, but they must be added so as to preserve a pattern symmetrical around a single (diagonal) axis.

Got it?

I fancied the idea of including a solution of every available word length – 2 to 15 letters long.  It proved difficult.  So difficult, in fact, that I began to suspect it was impossible.  Now having 2 letter words on crossword grids is a little infra dig, so I dropped that and stuck with solutions 3 to 15 letters long.  It didn’t make any difference.

I have now convinced myself that there is no solution to this conundrum.  It is an impossibility.  The problem lies in the crossword’s symmetry.  Every clue length has to appear twice.  You’ve got 13 clue lengths and a combined total of 16 rows and columns.  They fill the rows and columns like this:

15, 14, 13, 12, 11-3, 10-4, 9-5, 8-6, 8-6, 9-5, 10-4, 11-3, 12, 13, 14, 15.

All your rows and columns are filled but you have not represented a 7 letter word.  You could arrange to represent a 7 letter word, but then you would fail to represent a word of another length.

There is another possibility.  Start the alternating black squares on the first square of a row.  This means that, while preserving symmetry, there will be a midpoint row and a midpoint column that need not be duplicated.  Thus, two words consisting of an odd number of letters, for example, both a 15 letter word, and a 13 letter word, need only appear on the grid once.

It’s no help.  There are now only a total of 14 rows and columns available, and they are filled thus –

15, 14, 13, 12, 11-3, 10-4, 9-5, 8-6, 8-6, 9-5, 10-4, 11-3, 12, 14.

The elusive 7 letter word is missing.

You can see why I need help.

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows…

Saturday… bombarded all week – as no doubt you were – by Brexit saying immigration would be out of control for as long as we remained, and by Remain saying the UK would be an economic basket case if we departed, I sought spiritual succour at the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s final concert of the season.  Ironic really.  They played the EU anthem, Beethoven 9.  For one crazy moment I thought the conductor might announce, “Before you make your decision, I would think very carefully…”  It set me wondering, how would Beethoven have voted in the referendum?  Like Burns, he was certainly attracted by the universal brotherhood of man.   Alle Menschen warden Bruder…  But then, I can imagine him hearing (with difficulty) reports that maybe the EU wasn’t as democratic as it purported to be, that it misused public funds, that the powerful nations of the north forced harsh austerity on the poorer nations of the south.  He might then fly into a rage, enter the polling booth and spoil his ballet paper, much as he defaced the title page of the Eroica Symphony when Napoleon declared himself Emperor.

Sunday… took communion at Dunblane Cathedral.  The holier I get, the less I believe anything.  I have no opinion on the doctrine of transubstantiation.  In my quotidian experience I’d prefer not to encounter the miraculous, and I’m not at all sure what the continued consciousness of JCC ad infinitum would entail, far less whether it would be either felicitous to myself, or propitious to anybody else.  Yet in the cathedral, somebody shared with me a confidence of such intensity that I was completely undermined.  Lachrymae.  But of this I cannot speak.

Monday… and talking of banks, my local branch is closing.  I wasn’t surprised.  It has been providing an intermittent service for some time now.  I got the letter to gloom me up at the beginning of the week.  “Don’t worry – we’ll take care of everything for you.”  A plug for internet banking, then “You can check your balance at the Post Office.”  Actually the Post Office in my village closed some years ago.  Like the bank, it downgraded first.  A dedicated building closed, the village shop took over for a while, and now we have a van that occasionally parks by the village hall.  I always suspect that when something goes from full-time to part-time, it’s the beginning of the end.  In a way it’s no big deal.  My 14 mile round trip to the bank/PO is now going to be a 20 mile round trip.

Tuesday… entered the Bridport literary comp, at the last possible moment, twice.  One short story, one snippet of “flash” fiction.  Cast your bread upon the waters.  And, suitably galvanised, sent a piece, designed to entertain rather than inform, to a prestigious medical journal.  All submissions to this ancient organ must now be electronic.  I bit the bullet and negotiated the endless menus.  Mostly I could write “not applicable”.  No, I did not need informed patient consent for this piece of whimsy.  Sometimes I had difficulty negotiating a compulsory field.  The system admonished me in red and sent me back to the template I’d tried to ignore.  But nothing in the drop-down menu would fit my special case.  So I just made something up, attached my flight of fancy, and pressed send.  I got an automated acknowledgement…

Wednesday… … followed by an email from a person of flesh and blood to say they couldn’t open my attachment.  This was because my piece was a little fantastic and employed a special piece of software.  I suggested the best solution would be that I send the piece by the Royal Mail.  Negative.  All submissions must be electronic.  I said I’d see what I could do.

Thursday… printed out the piece and then scanned it back into my computer as a pdf doc.  Then renegotiated the endless menus of the prestigious journal and resubmitted.  I think it worked.         This is the wonder of life upon which our digital dystopia will founder; we are all a special case – you will not be found in a drop down menu.  F R Leavis said, “Only in living individuals is life there, and individual lives cannot be aggregated or equated or dealt with quantitatively in any way.”

Friday… Ebola survivor Pauline Cafferkey revealed that NHS 24 failed to put her in touch with a medical professional when she called the hotline.  She said, I thought rather diplomatically, “NHS 24 weren’t a great deal of help.”  I should mention that this information is in the public domain (Herald, June 3).   She called 111 to say she had a high fever, and rigors.  The call was not escalated.  Fortunately, being a nurse, she had NHS contacts and was able to arrange her own hospital admission.  The extraordinary thing is – it happened twice.  The second time, she had Ebola meningitis.  She called 111 and complained of severe headache, neck pain, photosensitivity, and vomiting.  The call was not escalated.  In other words, somebody without any medical training scrolled through some algorithms on a computer screen, ticking boxes, and then, presumably, “reassured” the patient.  It beggars belief.

Saturday… brings us back to this wretched question of whether in or out.  People are put off by the remoteness of Brussels, not just because it’s overseas, but because of the impregnability of the institutions.  What differentiates the European Council, the Council of Europe, and the Council of the European Union, and which one of these is not actually in the European Union, although each EU member state is in the council in question?  All politics are local, but do you know your MEP?  As a Scot, I have six.  There are 2 Ians, 2 Davids, an Alyn and a Catherine but I could only put one face to one name.  Do they hold any local surgeries?  I don’t know.  I like face to face interactions.  The whole of the art of medicine is based on the beautiful medical consultation, which is why medical advice over the phone is such a disaster.  I’d like the option of going to the bank or the post office.  A live orchestral concert is more rewarding than a performance on a CD or on some download mechanism.  I’d like the option of contacting my prestigious medical journal by mail.  On the web site of big multinational conglomerates the hardest thing to find is a High St address.

Will any of this disillusion with the faceless impersonal world we now inhabit, help me in my decision?  I can certainly see a reason for coming out, and dumping all that bureaucracy.  And the Remain Campaign has been pretty grim.  They make staying in taste like a heavy dose of castor oil.

Yet there is (heaven help us) a “third way”.  We could actually join the EU – properly.  We’ve always been a bit semi-detached.  Mr Cameron never had any remote chance of renegotiating conditions.  Imagine trying to change the constitution of a golf club if you were only a part-time and reluctant member.  Nobody would pay you the slightest attention.  No, if you want to change something from the inside, you need to get in with the bricks, and become integral.  Why do this?  Do it, because the greatest problems facing the world today, among them poverty, disease, climate change, anarchy, and (the elephant in the room) overpopulation, can only be solved by global institutions working on a global scale.  I worry about the people who want to leave.  I suspect a lot of them still believe in the reality of the British Empire.  But the Empire is no more.  And as for the special relationship, who knows who the President-elect will turn out to be in November?  Our island begins to look to me like Prospero’s Castle.  Read Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death.  It swayed the issue for me.  You might say I made up my mind after paying attention to a crazy guy from New York.