Author: jamescalumcampbell

The Old World has recently been quite taken aback by the rapidity with which the New World has been trumpeting fresh initiatives in the form of Presidential Executive Orders.  I suppose things can move this quickly if you don’t have to bother about the checks and balances of parliamentary democracy.  Such it is to be a monarch.  I don’t know about you, but I’m becoming increasingly irritated by the swagger of the new US administration.  They are certainly throwing their weight about.  They have, for example, been critical of the “firewall” policy of mainstream German political parties not to make deals – at least until very recently – with the Far Right.  And they have even been critical of Scottish legislation creating buffer zones around women’s health clinics.  I cite these two examples because they perhaps reflect the provenance of the president, whose grandparents were German and mother Scottish.  Mr Trump is from a family of immigrants. 

You have to put the German issue into context.  Vergangenheitsbewältigung.  Coming to terms with the past.  The Germans don’t want a repeat of the Third Reich.  And of course the German elections are imminent.  I’m not sure if the current US administration has much of a sense of history.  They would do well to remember the much quoted remarks about the past from George Santayana.  If we don’t study it, we are condemned to repeat it.

And the US government has also rather misrepresented Scottish legislation, saying it is illegal to pray for an unborn child in the vicinity of an abortion clinic.  Ergo, this is a thought crime.  That is not entirely accurate. 

But who cares?  I wish somebody would turn round and say to them, “Why don’t you mind your own bleeding business?” 

Of course, these issues may pale into insignificance next to the Gaza Strip “Riviera” initiative, and even more so the impending talks in Saudi Arabia, putatively to discuss the carve up of Ukraine.  Of course the British Empire spent hundreds of years carving up large chucks of the map without much regard to local customs and usage.  It was ever thus with “the great powers”.  At time of writing, Ukraine has not been invited to Saudi Arabia, and nor indeed has Europe.  Apparently the US and Russia are going to take decisions on our behalf.  The Europeans learned this, to general consternation, while attending a security conference in, of all places, Munich, last week.  Munich has of course been associated, since 1938, with the policy of appeasement.  The then disputed territory, the Donbas, or Crimea of that time, was the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.  Mr Chamberlain, who considered himself rather adept at the Art of the Deal, was convinced that Herr Hitler could be trusted, and that he would stop his territorial expansion at the Sudetenland.  Chamberlain came back from Munich with the agreement written down on a piece of paper.  The Czechs were not invited to that meeting.  In fact, Hitler was not about to stop at the Sudetenland.  He took the whole of Czechoslovakia.  But he didn’t stop there.  On September 1^st, 1939, he invaded Poland.  And he didn’t stop there.  On May 10^th, 1940, he invaded the Low Countries.  The same day, Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister.    

The parallels with today are striking.  Yet, with due respect to the Santayana trope, history seldom repeats itself exactly.  Yet it may sometimes rhyme.  Back then, Americans like the aviator Charles Lindbergh, and the Ambassador to the Court of St James, Joe Kennedy, wanted to keep America out of a European War.  But today, the difference is that American policy cannot be described as isolationist.  They are intent on making America great again, in Europe, in the Middle East, in the “Gulf of America”, and Panama, Canada, Greenland…  Between May 10^th 1940 and December 7^th 1941, Churchill bent over backwards trying to get America into the war.  But America has always been guided by self-interest.  They only came in when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, and Hitler declared war on them.

I remember during the Brexit Referendum, the Remainers expressed concern that the UK’s leaving the EU would adversely affect the security of Europe.  The counter-argument from the Brexiteers was that the security of Europe was not dependent upon the EU, but rather NATO.  I think Mr Putin was delighted when we left the EU, and now he will be delighted if the US dissociates itself from NATO.  I wonder if Mr Trump would have been so pally with Mr Putin if Smersh had murdered a couple of people in Salisbury, Maryland, or left a vial of novichok lying around on Fifth Avenue New York; or if Mr Putin decided that the idea of selling Alaska to the Americans had, after all, been a bad one, and that the Russian “sphere of influence” extended across the Bering Strait. 

I’m afraid we live in interesting times.            

Most people give very little thought to the phenomenon of snobbery.  It may even be considered that snobbery is dying out, that snobs are an endangered species, and that meeting a snob socially nowadays is merely an occasion for mild interest and amusement.  Snobs are sometimes featured in television situation comedies because they provide a rich seam for writers to work, exploring the ludicrous and absurd.   Some caricature snobs in British television have achieved cult status.  If Hyacinth Bucket (apparently pronounced Bouquet) and Margo Leadbetter are monsters, they are at least harmless, lovable, and even admirable in their determination to adhere to whatever social norms they cherish. 

It is only if and when you realise you have been harmed, in a personal way, by snobbery, that the phenomenon seems less amusing.   Most people, perhaps the majority of us, never realise we have been harmed by snobbery.  That has become the way snobbery works.  In an earlier age, snobbery was much more blatant, self-confident, and overtly proud of itself, than it is now.  Snobbery wasn’t always in hiding.  You could argue that the strident snobbery of yesteryear was more honest because it did not pretend to be something else.  But, like any other form of prejudice, be it racial prejudice, xenophobia, misogyny, prejudice against minority groups, even religious sectarianism, snobbery, real snobbery, now feels obliged to operate deeply under cover.  The need for snobbery to remain clandestine is perhaps illustrated by an incident said to have occurred at the gates to Downing Street in September, 2012.  On that occasion, the then Conservative Chief Whip was riding his bicycle from, as it happened, No. 9, towards Whitehall.  He asked the attending police to open the gates, and was requested to proceed through a side gate.  He duly complied, but not without, it is alleged, a bit of effing and blinding directed towards a bunch of “plebs”.  Whether or not this incident, or something like it, really occurred may never be known.  But the “pleb” word was enough to force a resignation.  The incident was referred to as “plebgate”, or, even more bizarrely, “gategate”.  One thing was made clear.  A proud affirmation of snobbery was no longer viable. 

Snobbery often works by constructing and maintaining a “glass ceiling”.  The expression “glass ceiling” has recently become rather hackneyed in its almost exclusive application to the phenomenon of prejudice against professional women, who are striving to reach the top of a hierarchy in a given walk of life.  If “glass ceiling” is a cliché, at least it has retained some of its original appositeness.  The ceiling is made of glass in order that it be invisible.  People on the social ascent are therefore unaware that the ceiling is there.  They are only aware of a vague sense of frustration that their social or professional ascent has been inexplicably halted.  Because no outward impediment is evident, the fault must lie within the makeup of the frustrated individual.  Such an individual may lose self-esteem and develop a sense of personal inadequacy.  “I must be to blame.”  The inculcation of this state of mind perpetrated by the Snobbery Gestalt – if I may – is perfectly deliberate, and may be described as “gaslighting”.  “Gaslighting”, like the “glass ceiling”, is another frequently used, sometimes abused, term.  Its origin is to be found within a 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton, Gaslight.  It became a UK film in 1940 and, most famously, a US film in 1944, starring Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, and Joseph Cotten.  Gaslighting is a technique of undermining somebody’s confidence, and indeed sanity, by convincing them, while apparently offering psychological support, that they are indeed going mad.  Similar themes, of moral ambiguity, are explored in the 1941 film Suspicion, starring Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine.  Cary Grant was the past master when it came to playing a character simultaneously charming and devious, and, just possibly, wicked.  What to make of it?  Perhaps it is we, the audience, who are going mad.  The director Alfred Hitchcock recognised a quality in Grant behind the charm, the fooling and the wit; a sinister quality of threat.  Snobbery similarly poses, and operates, under a guise of charm.  We may not realise that behind its cloak of absurdity and farce, there lies a dagger. 

But what exactly is snobbery?  One is tempted to say, “I can’t define what snobbery is; but I know it when I see it.”  Accordingly, I offer three examples.

1.  Our letters about the Beveridge Report crossed.  I fear I am an instinctive Tory.  I sincerely hope that it gets whittled away like an artichoke.  I am all for educating the people into being less awful, less limited, less silly, and for spending lots of money on (1) extended education; (2) better-paid teachers, but not for giving them everything for nothing, which they don’t appreciate anyhow.  Health, yes.  Education, yes.  Old age pensions, yes, I suppose so, in default of euthanasia which I should prefer, as also for the mental deficient.  But not this form of charity which will make people fold their arms and feel that they need have no enterprise since everything will be provided for them.  It is surely a psychological error. 
2.  My Manifesto:  I hate democracy.  I hate la populace.  I wish education had never been introduced.  I don’t like tyranny, but I like an intelligent oligarchy.  I wish la populace had never been encouraged to emerge from its rightful place.  I should like to see them as well fed and well housed as T.T. cows, but no more articulate than that.  (It’s rather what most men feel about most women!)

Letters, Vita Sackville-West to her husband Harold Nicolson, December 3^rd, 1942, and February 7^th, 1945, Diaries and Letters 1939 – 45, Harold Nicolson (Collins, 1967).

•  The intellectual nullity is what constitutes any difficulty there may be in dealing with Snow’s panoptic pseudocogencies…  Snow is, of course, a – no, I can’t say that; he isn’t; Snow thinks of himself as a novelist…  The seriousness with which he takes himself as a novelist is complete – if seriousness can be so ineffably blank, so unaware…  For as a novelist he doesn’t exist; he doesn’t begin to exist.  He can’t be said to know what a novel is.  The nonentity is apparent in every page of his fictions…

The Richmond Lecture, Two Cultures?  The Significance of C. P. Snow, in response to The Rede Lecture, The Two Cultures, 1959 (Chatto and Windus, 1962).  

These examples appear to suggest that there may be two types of snobbery.  The letters from the author Vita Sackville-West to her husband are blatant examples of class snobbery.  On the other hand, if we are to accuse F. R. Leavis on this occasion of being a snob, then his is snobbery within a specific sphere; he is a literary snob.  The extract from Dr Leavis’ Richmond Lecture requires a little explanation.  The polymath Charles Snow – scientist, academic, civil servant, and author – had in his Rede Lecture made the assertion that the arts and the sciences had developed into two independent modes of human activity that had become estranged from one another, and that this evident failure of communication was harmful to society.  F. R. Leavis took exception to this point of view, which of course he was perfectly entitled to do.  But it is not clear why his argument had to involve an attack on Snow’s literary endeavours, other than that he wished to voice an emotional response of utter contempt.  As a critic, he clearly exerted his considerable powers to carry out a demolition job.  Why?  Snow’s central thesis really had nothing to do with his abilities, or otherwise, as a novelist.  He was merely voicing the opinion that people of his time in positions of power and influence were by and large scientifically uneducated, a point which it would have been hard to contest.  That Snow might be a bad writer, and indeed Leavis’ assertion that D. H. Lawrence might be a great one, seems to be quite irrelevant.   But Leavis’ personal attack was ferocious; one assumes that Snow must have touched a nerve, and that Leavis felt in some sense under threat.  Snow was, according to Leavis, a “portent”.  Leavis’ diatribe was an argument ad hominem, which may paradoxically have weakened his case, and indeed bolstered Snow’s, by virtue of displaying the precise gulf that Snow posited.  The distinguished American critic Lionel Trilling summed it up: “There can be no two opinions about the tone in which Dr Leavis deals with Sir Charles.  It is a bad tone, an impermissible tone.”                

But my intention here is not, at least initially, to cast aspersions on snobs, nor to make value judgements concerning snobbery in its various manifestations; rather it is to make some tentative suggestions as to what snobbery actually is.  If we can take some steps towards defining it, then we may recognise it more readily when we come up against it.  We may conclude that while Sackville-West is preoccupied with matters of social class, Dr Leavis is concerned primarily with matters of taste within a particular field of human activity.  There is social snobbery, or class snobbery, and there is “single issue snobbery”.  The Oxford Dictionary of English supports this dichotomy.   

Snob – noun a person with an exaggerated respect for high social position or wealth who seeks to associate with social superiors and looks down on those regarded as socially inferior.

(with adj. or noun modifier) a person who believes that their tastes in a particular area are superior to those of other people: a musical snob.

The snob’s respect for high social position is “exaggerated”.  This would suggest that there may be a level of respect, in this regard, which is in some sense “appropriate”, but the definition does not attempt to delineate the point at which the snob’s deference becomes, in some sense, pathological.  With regard to the latter definition, relating to a specific area of human activity such as music, the Oxford definition also seems to fall short.  If the attribute of “taste” has any validity at all, then there will be people whose tastes in any given field of human endeavour are truly superior to those of the rest of us.  There is good taste and there is bad taste.  An art connoisseur, for example, may well have a self-conscious, refined appreciation that is based on sound knowledge and many years of experience.  For this consciousness of superiority to cross the line into snobbery, there must be in addition an attitude of mind, be it perhaps smugness, complacency, or self-satisfaction.  Lionel Trilling did not object to F. R. Leavis’ viewpoint that D. H. Lawrence as a novelist is superior to C. P. Snow.  He objected to Leavis’ tone.  It is a tone of disdain.  The Bloomsbury Concise English Dictionary, while maintaining the dichotomy of the social snob and the single issue snob, emphasises this quality of disdain.      

Snob 1 an admirer and cultivator of people with high social status who disdains those considered inferior 2 a person who disdains people considered to have inferior knowledge or tastes

The Bloomsbury definitions offer, with the disdain concept, an essential aspect of snobbery which is missing from the Oxford definitions – namely the fact that the attribute of snobbery is always assigned pejoratively.

The question arises as to whether the two entities of class snobbery and single issue snobbery  represent a continuum, the class snob being a sum total of all the available snobberies across the spectrum of human activity, a kind of Grand Integral of the Snobberies; or whether they represent two entirely separate phenomena.  Chambers Dictionary does not allude to the single issue snob – the music snob, the literary snob, the art snob, the wine snob, and so on.  But the sense that snobbery is a pejorative attribute comes through most strongly here:

Snob … one who makes himself ridiculous or odious by the value he sets on social standing or rank, by his fear of being ranked too low, and by his different behaviour towards different classes.

Chambers also offers a number of definitions that can be seen to be more or less obsolete.  Hence:

Snob n. a shoemaker, shoemaker’s apprentice, cobbler (coll.; Scot. snab): a townsman (Cambridge slang): a person of ordinary or low rank (obs): an ostentatious vulgarian (Obs): a blackleg (obs)

Such definitions may not be completely irrelevant and may shed some light on the evolution of the word’s current meaning.  There is an implication that a snob, for all his aspiration to rank, is lowly.  This idea persists in the notion that, for example, the chauffeur is a much bigger snob than his Lordship sitting in the back of the Rolls Royce.  It turns out that the man in the back is a perfectly straightforward individual with no airs and graces at all.  The implication is that if you are in some sense “truly” superior, you are not a snob.  This seems to me to be a dangerous misapprehension, to which I will return.       

It is because snobbery has evolved, has become difficult to spot, that it may be worthwhile spending some time exploring its anatomy.  Then we may more readily recognise snobbery when it confronts us.  A preliminary exploration of single issue snobbery might be a way in, as examples may represent snobbery in its simplest form.  We may, so to speak, construct a “Special Theory” of snobbery, with regard to any single issue, to account for this.  But once we start to construct a “General Theory” of social or class snobbery, we may need to embark on the enormous task of integrating the sum of all the snobberies, to see why a person should consider himself superior across the whole compass of society, or the whole spectrum of human interaction.  The mysterious metaphysical paradox of social snobbery is that snobs consider themselves superior, because they are superior.   That is what makes snobbery such an incomprehensible phenomenon, and why it is worthwhile to give it close scrutiny.   

A Special Theory of Snobbery

As has been said, the “single issue” snob is generally preoccupied with matters of taste. There is nothing inherently snobbish about having taste – or discernment – or striving to cultivate it.   Taste can be complex.  Consider “taste” in its literal sense.  People attend wine-tasting classes run by wine connoisseurs, in order to learn how to appreciate fine wines.  There are premier marques, and there is plonk.  There’s nothing inherently snobbish about being able to tell the difference.  One may or may not consider that vin ordinaire has its place.  The person who drinks only the finest vintages may not necessarily be a wine snob.  Merely, he may have taste.  On matters of taste, I have selected “from my cellar” (actually from my fridge) a bottle of wine more or less at random, and I read this note on the label:

This Viognier has lovely aromas of orange blossom and honeysuckle, with fresh pineapple and dried figs on the palate and a silky textural finish.

Contrast that with a spoof tasting note composed by the American humourist James Thurber in 1946. 

It’s a naïve domestic Burgundy without any breeding, but I think you’ll be amused by its presumption.   

Here we have illustrated another essential component of snobbery.  Can a wine be “naïve”, or “presumptuous”?  Hardly.  This writing is a lampoon of the pretentious.  Snobbery is always characterised by an element of pretence.  We come across the same phenomenon in haute cuisine. Consider the following entrée à la carte, another spoof:

Embattered cheek of halibut festooned in a lavish coulis imbroglio, besmirched with a rock salt vinaigrette, chaperoned by seared pommes frittes enjambements.  45

You may recognise the dish as fish and chips, with salt and vinegar.  The number 45 states the price.  The currency is not stated, and there is no small change.  “45” invites the diner to be indifferent to cost.  It is taken for granted that he has deep pockets.  To suggest otherwise would be an embarrassing impertinence.  Some diners may feel soothed by this, but would you pay £45.00 for fish and chips?  Caveat emptor. 

Then there is the purple language.  Why is the coulis an imbroglio?  And why are the chips enjambements?  Poetic language indeed. Some people believe language can exert a magic quite independent of its meaning.  When the language of the menu is highly perfumed, mind your wallet. 

The same may be said for real estate:

Garden Flat in the heart of Edinburgh’s historic New Town.  Original Adam appointments.  Offers over £1,399,000

A Garden Flat is, of course, a basement.  It’s only bricks and mortar.  But it’s all about location location location.

And one comes across the same phenomenon in the fashion industry.  There is currently a vogue among young women, occasionally young men, and even occasionally older men and women who would prefer to stay young, to wear jeans with extravagant slashes usually cut across the knees.  I call this “Waif Couture”, or “Gamine Chic”.  These garments may be marketed, as new, in this state, for, say, £140, which rather suggests that with the right pitch, and the right hype, you can sell anything to anybody.  I have a notion that, a generation from now, young women will look at old photographs and say to their mothers, “Did you really dress like that?”        

Women who choose to dress in rags will often offset the gamine chic look with bling, and fashion accessories, the expensive watch, the expensive bag, even the expensive car.  These are statements.  They are status symbols, signals indicating social standing within a particular echelon.  A watch that costs £10,000 will not necessarily tell the time more accurately than a watch that costs £10.  But it is a signal of affluence; where there’s Schmuck, there’s brass. 

Single issue snobbery, therefore, can serve a function as an integral part of a commercial enterprise.  The sommelier, the restauranteur, the real estate agent, and the couturier utilise the evidently seductive attraction of snobbery in order to make money.  In addition to the commodity on sale, there is the “label”.  The label affords the buyer prestige.  Prestige, rather than the commodity itself, is really what the buyer is prepared to pay an inflated amount of money for, in order to ensure its acquisition.  But if the prestige is at heart a pretence, then snobbery is essentially the modus operandi of a scam.

This raises the question, whether the person who buys the naïve, presumptuous Burgundy, or the torn jeans, or the hugely inflated real estate, knows he is being duped?  Is he aware that the prestige by association that he seeks has no sound basis?  Does he buy something vapid, fully aware he is investing in emperor’s clothes?  It is clear that the snobbery of materialism relies heavily on the allure of conspicuous consumption. 

We tend to use the expression “emperor’s clothes” in an off-hand way to denote something which is grossly overvalued.  The expression comes from the story by Hans Christian Andersen, The Emperor’s New Clothes, and it is worth considering this story in more detail.

The emperor of an ancient realm is obsessed with fashion.  His wardrobe is his entire preoccupation.  A couple of con-men, seeing their chance, move into town, set up a loom, and promise to make the emperor a suit of clothes of unparalleled richness and beauty.  A special feature of this suit is that only the discerning will see it.  If you happen to be stupid and therefore unfit to hold office, it will remain invisible to you.

The fraudsters accept payment in advance as well as the finest textile raw materials, and appear to work away at their empty loom.  The Emperor sends a trusted official, then a second one, to admire work in progress.  The officials see nothing, conclude they are stupid and unworthy, and tell the emperor the suit is magnificent.  Eventually the emperor goes to see for himself, and draws the same conclusion.  When at last the suit is completed, the emperor dons it, and displays himself before his populace.  It is only a child who says, “But he’s got nothing on!”  Of course it is a child who sees, literally, through it all.  When the child says, “But he’s got nothing on!” then the eyes of the populace dislimn.  The child, as it were, permits them all to wake from an hypnotic trance.  But the participants in the procession remain in a state of hysteria because they have too much dignity to lose.  And the chamberlains hold on tighter than ever, and carry the train which does not exist at all.

Yet single issue snobs are not always in it for the money.  It would be quite wrong to level the same charge upon F. R. Leavis that he himself levelled upon C. P. Snow – that of being vapid.  He genuinely thought Snow was as dodgy as a used car salesman trying to sell him a malfunctioning jalopy.  And in no sense was Leavis being venal.  Yet there remains a parallel with the pretensions evident in various commercial enterprises.  Snobbery is about power, and its retention.  In his Richmond lecture, Leavis took pains to emphasise the importance to Cambridge University of Scrutiny, a literary periodical with which he was deeply involved for twenty years.  “We were, and knew we were, Cambridge – the essential Cambridge in spite of Cambridge.”  Is this not somewhat parochial?  This was Cambridge at the height of its scientific and mathematical glory.  What on earth would Rutherford, or J. J. Thomson, or Hardy, or Ramanujan have made of it?      

A General Theory of Snobbery

If snobbery is about power, then class snobbery is about the concentration of power within an elite.  You cannot have class snobbery without entertaining the idea of an Establishment.  Chambers, again:

Establishment: The class in a community or in a field of activity who hold power, usually because they are linked socially, and who are usually considered to have conservative opinions and conventional values. 

In some respects the British Establishment has changed very little over the last 300 years.  We see this in the way that the prestigious English private schools (bizarrely known as public schools), and the elite universities have produced alumni proceeding to fill prominent positions of leadership in society.  It is salutary to consider the provenance of British Prime Ministers, regarding in particular their education, since that high office first evolved in the early 18^th century.  Sir Robert Walpole is widely regarded as Britain’s first Prime Minister.  He occupied the position between 1721 and 1742.  Since 1721 the role has been filled 80 times by, to date, 58 individuals.  The precise figures:  University education:  Oxbridge – 43 Prime ministers (Oxford educated 31 PMs, Cambridge educated 12.)   Some of the public schools:  Eton: 20 PMs, Harrow: 7, Westminster: 5. Winchester: 2. (Incidentally, Glasgow High School has to date produced 2 PMs – Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Andrew Bonar Law.  I remember the golden age of musical education in the Glasgow of the 1960s.  The summer residential course of Glasgow Schools’ First Orchestra was held in Castle Toward by Dunoon.  The High School boys had their own exclusive dormitory.  I suppose their masters did not wish them mixing with the hoi polloi.  And whilst on the subject of Prime Ministers, it might be recalled that when John Major, son of a music hall performer, and his wife Norma, entered 10 Downing Street, it was remarked by a Downing Street member of staff that, a generation ago they could only have gained access through the back door, as the help.) 

The disinterested observer might be forgiven for concluding that this concentration of future leadership within a narrow confine represents something of a stitch-up.  Of course elite education provides pupils and students with what Jane Austen called “useful acquaintance”.  There is a lot of common heritage, and shared traditions of custom and usage, as manifest in language, accent, modes of dressing and modes of behaviour.  It’s a kind of freemasonry.  In Geoffrey Household’s pre-war thriller Rogue Male, the protagonist-without-a-name tries to define, or at least give a sense of, this complex network.

Who belongs to Class X?  I don’t know till I talk to him and then I know at once.  It is not, I think, a question of accent, but rather of the gentle voice.  It is certainly not a question of clothes.  It may be a question of bearing.  I am not talking, of course, of provincial society in which the division between gentry and non-gentry is purely and simply a question of education.                            

 What are the attributes necessary and sufficient to define somebody as a class snob?   I put forward three:

1. Disdain
2. Exclusivity
3. Pride & Prejudice

Snobbery is as old as the hills, and doubtless evident in all cultures.  The gospels, for example, are full of snobs.  First among them are the Pharisees.  They felt themselves to be elite, and exclusive.  They were proud of themselves, and prejudiced against outsiders, whom they regarded with disdain.  Early on in Luke’s Gospel, in chapter IV, Jesus preached in the synagogue of his home town of Nazareth.  At first, the Pharisees were rather impressed, if in a slightly condescending way.  Is not this Joseph’s son?  In Scotland we would say, “I kent his faither.”  Jesus said a few words which on the surface appear rather innocuous:

Many widows were in Israel in the days of Elias, when the heaven was shut up for three years and six months, when great famine was throughout all the land;

But unto none of them was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow.

And many lepers were in Israel in the time of Eliseus the prophet, and none of them was cleansed, saving Naaman the Syrian.

And all they in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath,

And rose up, and thrust him out of the city, and led him unto the brow of the hill, wherein their city was built, that they might cast him down headlong.

But he passing through the midst of them went his way. 

Well, Jesus meant to turn the world upside down.  He sided with the meek and lowly, and the outsiders.  That was why the Pharisees took against him.  He wasn’t buying into their world view.  So they started plotting his demise from very early on.   

Disdain has been examined already in the context of the single issue snob.  It is also readily apparent in the extracts from Vita Sackville-West’s letters, where indeed its presence is so stark as to require little further comment.  But it is worth noting that disdain always goes hand in hand with ignorance.  Sackville-West is apparently completely unaware that the classes she so brutally despises are responsible for the output of Gross Domestic Product upon which she survives and thrives. 

We may think of the establishment as a club, like a very exclusive golf club, with its opaque constitution, written and unwritten, its rules and traditions.  Such institutions tend to be socially conservative, therefore constantly behind the times.  Occasionally a reactionary incident of one kind or another renders the club liable to charges of anachronistic absurdity, and there is a rush to damage limitation, a PR exercise, that has been referred to as “a flurry of blazers”.  Even so, such clubs are not short of aspiring would-be members, and there may be a long waiting list.  Applicants may be black-balled.  The black ball is the equivalent of the glass ceiling.  The black ball will turn up from an anonymous source, and the applicant may never discover his own perceived apparent deficiencies.  The bewildered applicant finds himself in a Kafkaesque situation.  He is black-balled and he doesn’t know it.  He is merely faced with endless obfuscation.  Everything is very difficult.  In the film The King’s Speech, King George VI who is depicted, at least by the end of the film, as a man who is not a snob, asks his Archbishop of Canterbury, who is a snob, to ensure that his speech therapist, Lionel Logue, is seated in that part of Westminster Abbey reserved for the Royal Family, for his Coronation.  A look of horror comes over the Archbishop’s face.  He scratches his chin, shakes his head, and says, “Well, of course I’ll see what can be done, but it’s going to be very, very difficult.”  

Is it possible to have a society that does not have an Establishment?  In 2016, the New Zealand high court judge Dame Lowell Goddard was appointed to head an independent inquiry into child sexual abuse in the UK.  When she took up the job, she was asked if she was concerned about the reaction to her work, of the Establishment.  She expressed bewilderment at the question, explaining that New Zealand does not have an Establishment.

Shortly afterwards she quit the job.  Her letter of resignation was extremely short, and offered no explanation, although she did say she felt very far from home.  Perhaps she found out, at last, what the Establishment was. 

It may be pertinent to add that New Zealand has had a unicameral parliament since 1950.  There is no upper chamber.  Some politicians in the UK, even some prominent amongst the Establishment, have been trying to get rid of the House of Lords, or at least drastically modify it, for over 100 years.  The charges against the House of Lords are that it is unelected, and it is bloated.  There are over 800 members.  It is said to be the second biggest upper chamber in the world, after China’s.  It is manifestly undemocratic.  This would suggest that members of the Establishment, while paying lip service to democracy, don’t really trust it.  They don’t trust the democratic representatives of society to make the “right” decisions.  The great and the good need to exercise the steady hand of sage restraint.           

We describe the club as “exclusive”, an expression often used loosely to describe anything top of the range, aspiring to excellence, be it a club, a restaurant, a hotel, a school, and so on.  But being “exclusive” predicates “exclusion”.  The Establishment is a club from which most people are excluded.  That is not to say that someone of lowly status cannot make application to join the club.  The main criterion for membership – not, perhaps, full membership, but some kind of associate membership – is that one holds the club in high esteem, and signs up to honour, respect and adhere to the club rules.  Thus the lowliest individuals may become integral to the smooth running of the club.  The club doorman, for example, may never venture into the club’s interior much further than its foyer, but he becomes a crucial associate member of the club because he becomes the instrument of exclusion, barring any possible entry by the unworthy.  If he does his job well, the club chairman will take some time and effort to sustain him in his task, pausing to chat briefly when the door is held open for him.

“Morning, Caruthers.”

“Sir.”

“All well?”

“Sir.”

“I hope you are managing some quality time with your family.”

“Indeed, sir.”

“Splendid!  Keep up the good work!”

This vignette emphasises the reason why it is a mistake to withhold the charge of snobbery from the man at the top.  If he appears not to manifest airs of exclusivity, pride, and disdain, it is because he has employed a staff to fulfil such functions.  An essential feature of the membership at the summit of the Snobbery Gestalt, is hypocrisy.

With respect to pride and prejudice, the snob has a high opinion of himself.  We have seen that his self-regard may or may not be ostentatious.  But he is certainly delighted to be a member of the exclusive club, and his membership does not encourage humility.  He often carries himself with a certain air of pomposity which has an insolent quality, so well captured by Robert Burns:

Ye see yon birkie ca’d ‘a lord,’

Wha struts, an stares, an a’ that?

These are lines from the great radical poem A Man’s a Man for a’ that, that may be read, can hardly otherwise be read, as a coruscating indictment of snobbery.  Tinsel show, ribband, star, prince, marquis, duke… blah blah blah!       

Pride, and prejudice, of course evoke Jane Austen’s novel of the same name.  Pride and Prejudice might be interpreted as a study of the anatomy of snobbery.  If the word pride describes Mr Darcy, then prejudice alludes to Miss Elizabeth Bennet.  Miss Bennet identifies Mr Darcy early on as a snob.  He is a man of rank and considerable wealth who has an aloof and haughty manner.  Apparently taciturn, he makes little effort to put those around him at ease.  You might say he lacks social skills and sees no need to acquire and cultivate them.  But Miss Eliza has her own form of pride; she takes pleasure in identifying and mocking that which is pretentious and ridiculous, a characteristic she has in common with her father and which she undoubtedly shares with Jane Austen herself.  There is plenty within the pages of Pride & Prejudice for her to mock.  The book is riddled with snobs.  Chief among them is Lady Catherine de Burgh, but there are others.  Mr Bingley’s sister Caroline is a snob, although she is chiefly motivated to ridicule the Bennet family, not because of considerations of rank, but because she is jealous of Elizabeth whom she knows Darcy admires.  And the parson Mr Collins is a frightful snob intent on ingratiating himself with Lady de Burgh. 

But as the book proceeds, Elizabeth learns to her mortification that she has at least to some extent misjudged, prejudged, Darcy.  His reserve and hauteur have blinded her to his many sterling qualities.  Her mortification is in the realisation that her world view is as purblind as that of the people she chooses to criticise.  She is, if you will, an inverted snob.  The book might have been entitled, admittedly awkwardly but with some accuracy, Snobbery and Inverted Snobbery.

Can the word Pride be regarded as synonymous with Snobbery?  Elizabeth’s younger sister, the bookish Mary, gives us a definition of Pride:

“Pride,” observed Mary, who piqued herself upon the solidity of her reflections, “is a very common failing I believe.  By all that I have read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed, that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary.  Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously.  A person may be proud without being vain.  Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”

This highly articulate utterance leads me to wonder whether Jane Austen employed a technique later adopted by Alfred Hitchcock, who would appear in front of camera for a few seconds in each of the films he directed.  If the author’s wit could encompass self-parody, then perhaps Ms Austen’s cameo role is as Mary.  Mary is not portrayed as an attractive personality.  She is plain, bookish, and rather cheerless.  She does like to perform at the fortepiano, but indifferently, and she is inclined to overstay her welcome.        

Mary’s observation strikes a chord.  The snob is really indifferent to the opinion of somebody whom he considers beneath him.  He does not care what that person thinks because he holds his opinion as worthless and beneath contempt.  One begins to see why the sin of Pride was regarded as so vile in the medieval world.  Pride is chief among the seven deadly sins. 

The idea that social snobbery might be a grand integral of all the single issue snobberies is of course fanciful.  But it is apposite in one sense.  Social snobs are attracted to, and gravitate towards, perceived excellence, as if they hope to be sprinkled with stardust.  When the Beatles were awarded their MBEs in 1965, retired colonels, disgruntled from Tunbridge Wells, returned their gongs to the palace in disgust.  Granted the award had been engineered by a Labour Prime Minister, but that the Beatles had already appeared in the Royal Command Performance showed how the great and the good were enchanted, like the rest of us, by the whole Beatles phenomenon.  The exposure to the Establishment was all new to the Beatles.  They hadn’t really come across “Hooray Henry” types.  John Lennon was outraged when a toff cut off a bit of Ringo’s hair for a memento.  At length there was a disillusionment.  Lennon returned the gong in 1969.  The Beatles had a sense they had been used, abused, and ripped off by high society.  George Harrison muttered wistfully, “All that corduroy we sold for them……”

Gongs have a specific purpose within the Snobbery Gestalt.  They appear to confer an honour upon an individual, but that is not their primary purpose.  Their primary purpose is to absorb the talent and achievement of the recipient into the realm of the Establishment, and enhance its own sense of elitism.  The Gestalt gathers excellence unto itself.  Occasionally, the recipient of an honour subsequently blots his copy book in some way.  He is rendered despicable, and, like some disgraced member of the clergy, defrocked.  Like Dreyfus, his epaulettes are ceremoniously torn from his shoulders.  The function of such a ceremony is not to further disgrace the individual, but to protect and preserve the supposedly unblemished sanctity of the elite.  That person is not a knight.  He was never a knight.  So when it all goes wrong, disgraced individuals are obliged to return their gong.  They are publicly humiliated.  If they have been found guilty of a crime, it is likely that the public service broadcaster will cease to afford them even the courtesy of a “Mr” or “Ms” preceding their name, but will refer to them solely by their surname.  They are outcast.  Cancelled.  Blot your copybook, and they will drop you like hot coals. 

Honours are finely graded.  An unsung hero of low social caste who has been carrying out sterling work, perhaps as a carer, or a road sweeper, for a lifetime, is liable to receive the British Empire Medal, rather than to receive the Order of Merit or to become a Companion of Honour.  Not that a person from the humblest background cannot rise to the highest ranks of society.  The Establishment rather champions the idea of social mobility.  Social mobility is not the same as “levelling up”.  When, during a state opening of parliament, the late queen had to announce that her government was committed to “levelling up”, I thought I could detect, in somebody usually adept at maintaining a straight, expressionless face, a sense that she found the expression excruciating.  You might think that “social mobility” and “levelling up” are synonymous, but in fact they are quite different concepts.  Social mobility promises promotion to the individual; levelling up promises promotion to an entire stratum of society.  Social mobility gives the possibility of moving, for example, from the working class to the middle class, but it has no interest in eroding the class system.  It might better and more accurately be termed “class mobility”.  “Levelling up” is altogether more radical, but given that the size of the economic cake is finite, it would be more honest to describe a redistribution of wealth as “levelling down”.  I think we may be confident that, no matter the complexion of the current government, or any subsequent government, the “levelling” aspiration, be it up or down, will quietly disappear.

 We cannot discuss class snobbery without mentioning Heraldry, surely manifesting the most precious and exquisitely distilled language of snobbery.  We have already mentioned the highly perfumed language of the advertising of luxury products, but surely Heraldry tops the most extravagant of them.  Take, for example (and purely at random) the heraldic description of the badge of the clan Maclaren:

A mermaid Proper her tail part upended Argent, holding in her dexterr hand, a spray of laurel paleways Vert and her dexter hand a looking-glass Proper, mounted Gules upon which is…

And so on.

It can hardly be surprising that Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond novels, in his later years, looking for ever more bizarre and indeed farcical themes on which to base his novels, turned to heraldry, or more broadly, to the subject of snobbery.  Fleming took snobbery as a central theme in On her Majesty’s Secret Service.  It is really the second novel in a trilogy about the arch villain, one Ernst Stavro Blofeld, mastermind behind the criminal organisation SPECTRE.  Following Thunderball, Bond is, somewhat reluctantly, on Blofeld’s trail.  He gets a lead with the discovery that Blofeld has an Achilles’ heel.  He is a snob.  And, as befits a snob, he desires a title, allowing Bond to go under cover as a “pursuivant”, and pretend to work on researching Blofeld’s ancestry.  It is a completely absurd notion.   

In the 1950s and 60s, the James Bond novels were widely marketed as books full of sex, sadism, and snobbery.  Doubtless these were regarded as powerful selling points.  The depiction, and the apparent accessibility of fine food, fine wines, and exotic locations were very attractive to a populace, poverty-stricken by the war and still on rationing.  With respect to brand, Fleming certainly understood the power of the label.  When the books came to be filmed, many people were surprised that the fictional Old Etonian (even if his tenure was rather ignominiously cut short) was to be played by a milkman from Fountainbridge, Edinburgh.  Fleming had had in mind somebody like David Niven, who does get a fond mention in You Only Live Twice.  No doubt it was Mssrs Saltzman and Broccoli, from the USA, who recognised the seductive and dangerous magnetism of Sean Connery.  Fleming was doubtful.  In turn, Connery thought Fleming was an interesting man, but a snob.  But despite Eton, and Fettes, Bond comes across as rather a classless man and it was to Fleming’s credit that towards the end of his life he said, that while writing the books he had not had somebody like Connery in mind, he would have, if writing now.  Indeed in Bond’s Obit in You Only Live Twice he gives a bit of back story and makes Bond half Scottish, half Swiss.  And in The Man with the Golden Gun, Bond describes himself as a Scottish peasant. 

So, snobbery has to evolve.  If the outward manifestations of snobbery become too refined, then they become vulnerable to ridicule.  BBC English as it was before the Second World War, and even beyond, sounds archaic to the modern ear.  Received Pronunciation is now more subdued, flatter, almost accent-less.  It may be said to be more democratic.  Recently there has been a tendency for the elite to utilise the glottal stop, which a generation ago would have characterised a heavily industrial regional accent such as could be heard in Glasgow.  This is an attempt by the elite to be invisible. 

This raises the issue of the utility of snobbery.  What is its purpose?  Whom does it benefit?  Does snobbery have an adaptive value?

Only to the elite.  Snobbery is not beneficial to society as a whole.  It only helps to widen the gulf between the rich and the poor.  One thing the Pandemic taught us was to identify the people that society most depend on in order to keep functioning.  They turn out to be health care workers, carers, shopkeepers, road sweepers, refuse collectors, and grave diggers.  That list is not exhaustive, but I don’t think it includes Hedge Fund managers.        

The Chancellor of the Exchequer has been doing the rounds of the television studios, trumpeting the mantra, “Growth growth growth”, after the fashion of Tony Blair who used to say “education education education”.  Sir Tony immortalised several other soundbites; “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”; and, “Twenty four hours to save the NHS!”  If such glib utterances tell us anything at all, perhaps it is that, of all people, politicians are least best placed to effect real change, “change” being another favoured buzz word of the current administration.

I don’t really get “growth”.  Occasionally I make reference to a textbook of economics in an attempt to familiarise myself with the dismal science.  Economic growth, I read, is the change in potential output of the economy shown by a shift to the right of the production possibility frontier.  What does it mean when we say we need to “grow” the economy?  I suppose it refers to an increase in some index of productivity, such as Gross Domestic Product.  If you increase GDP, then you can increase national income.  We need either to produce more goods or supply more services, or both.  It is said that if we do not do this, if we do not “create wealth”, then we cannot afford to invest in public services, such as schools, hospitals, policing, public libraries, and so on.  The business community often reminds us of this, rather sharply, by way of a reprimand. 

But can wealth really be “created”?  Is it not rather discovered, as a source available in nature, and then utilised?  Coal, for example, made these islands very wealthy throughout the last 300 years.  But coal, or any other fossil fuel, was not created; it was discovered, deep underground.  It was, and for some remains, a source of energy.  It can be neither created nor destroyed.  It can be metamorphosed.  For example, it can be turned into carbon dioxide which hangs around, and gradually increases the temperature of the planet’s atmosphere.  You might argue that the concept of wealth creation is in defiance of the First Law of Thermodynamics. 

People who are seriously interested in wealth want to maximise income and minimise expenditure.  So they try to create a system that generates wealth whilst running on a shoestring.  It is much better for example, to run a service with robots rather than human beings, because robots do not need to be paid.  Therefore it would be much better if a public service were entirely automated.  This is what lies behind these dismal experiences we have all had, of attempting to contact a company, being bombarded with endless menus requiring us repeatedly to press digits on our cell phone key pad, and then being interviewed by a robot who cannot understand our regional accent.  The great entrepreneurial movers and shakers are trying to create a perpetual motion machine, likely unaware that they are in defiance of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, therefore doomed to failure.       

Yet still, in search of growth, government ministers traipse across the globe looking to make trade deals.  The Chancellor visited China shortly after taking office, and made a deal worth a few modest millions.  It was an awkward time for her to depart from the UK because the markets were very jumpy about something or other.  She was criticised for abandoning her post during a crisis, but she defended herself by re-emphasising the need for growth.  For a time, her coat seemed to be on a shoogly peg.  But the PM affirmed his full confidence in his Chancellor.  I’m not sure that helped.  Sometimes people who have the full confidence of the PM are gone by lunchtime.  Some people refer to the first ever female Chancellor of the Exchequer in British history as “Rachel from Accounts”.  It is a classic put-down, misogyny disguised as “banter”. 

Today, unusually, the PM is attending a meeting of the European Council, looking for closer ties, short of membership, with the EU.  Meanwhile Mr Trump has imposed tariffs of 25% on his nearest neighbours, Mexico and Canada, and 10% on China.  He is looking to do the same with the EU, and he hasn’t quite made his mind up about the UK.  Apparently Sir Keir was “very nice” on the telephone.  But I have a notion that if there is going to be a trade war, the UK will have to decide whether to be close to Europe, or close to the US.  It will have to be one or the other.  Meanwhile Mr Trump has his eye on Canada as the 51^st US state.  Next stop, Greenland.  He is certainly intent on growing the US economy.    

But surely growth, thermodynamically, and biologically, is unsustainable.  We are like bacteria on a plate of agar of finite dimensions.  We feed on the agar, multiply exponentially, and produce a toxic waste product, for example, alcohol.  If we continue to consume and to multiply, we will perish in a toxic environment that can no longer support life.  The government should be focusing its attention on nurturing a stable and sustainable environment.  But no.  The government wants to build a third runway at Heathrow.  The UK will be a hub.  It “doubles down” on its devotion to growth, while always on the lookout for some Deus ex Machina that will somehow defy the second law of thermodynamics, and annul the ever increasing entropy of the universe.  The latest magic bullet is Artificial Intelligence.  AI is the Next Big Thing.  If we don’t invest heavily in AI, if we don’t become “world leaders”, then we will sink without trace. 

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree…                              

Storm Éowyn swept through the village on Friday.  It had been a quiet night, but the wind picked up at dawn, and when I emerged to make the short walk to the village store, my “Berlin (Est. 1237) Down Town” cap flew off my head and disappeared 50 metres down the Loan.  Fortunately I retrieved it, and struggled against the gale in the direction of the shop, to fetch the morning papers, keeping a sharp eye open for flying debris.  But the delivery van had been held up by a fallen tree.  I made another abortive attempt an hour later.  There weren’t going to be any papers that day.  I went home and switched on my digital radio, but, I suppose due to the atmospheric disturbance, there was a continuous background burpling din, and the announcer sounded like a Dalek. 

Then a strange hooting noise wafted through the house.  At first I thought it was the warning klaxon of a van reversing down the Loan, but it turned out to be emanating from my mobile, followed by an announcement about the red weather warning, and the imperative to stay indoors.  I did as I was told.

So, in the absence of newspapers, I took the opportunity to reread Prof. Harry G. Frankfurt’s amazing tract On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005), and its equally amazing sequel On Truth (Pimlico, 2007).  As the Duke said to Escalus in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, “This news is old enough, yet it is every day’s news.”

There seems to be a kind of post-modernist notion abroad i’ the world, that there is really no such thing as objective truth.  Common sense would tell us that sustaining such a belief is inherently absurd.  I might have made the assertion on Friday, “It’s stormy today.”  Could anybody reply with a straight face, “Nonsense; there’s not a breath of wind”?  It seems to me that holding the view that there is no such thing as “external” truth, is rather akin to holding the view (another post-modernistic view widely held) that there is no such thing as free will.  Stephen Hawking said (at least he is purported to have said), “I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.”  Similarly, even people dubious about the concept of truth, would rather that their surgeon, their airline pilot, the teachers of their children, had accumulated a reliable body of knowledge. 

Yet the habit of doubt is deeply embedded in western civilisation and culture.  As Anthony Quayle’s character Jack Loder says in his blunt Yorkshire accent in the 1974 film The Tamarind Seed, “In my line of business I’ve learned three things: no-one’s to be trusted, nothing’s to be believed, and anybody is capable of doing anything.”  Bertrand Russell invested a lot of time in examining the validity of statements.  He took a piece of paper and wrote down the sentence, “The statement on the other side of this sheet of paper is true.”  Then he turned the paper over and wrote, “The statement on the other side of this sheet of paper is false.” Then he sat and stared in silence at the sheet of paper for 18 months.  He came to the conclusion that the whole of epistemology is founded upon quicksand. 

So you might argue that people who are cavalier, “economical” with the truth, are merely following a proud and noble intellectual tradition.  You may say, since we cannot access the truth, all we can do is construct a model, and see if it stands up to scrutiny.  Ergo, my version of the truth is as good as yours.”  It is, arguably, a Cartesian notion.  The only thing Descartes was sure of was his own existence.  “Cogito ergo sum.” 

But I don’t think that people who are guilty of deliberate “terminological inexactitude” can really claim that they are following in a revered philosophical tradition.  There is a difference between the idea that the truth is out there, even if we can never with certainty access it, and the idea that the truth is inaccessible, therefore we may be indifferent to it; the truth, if you like, can be anything you want it to be.  G. K. Chesterton once said that the trouble with ceasing to believe something is that you start to believe everything.  Prof. Frankfurt makes the point that the purveyor of bullshit doesn’t really care whether what he says is true or not. 

Does it matter?  One of the things most of us learn very early on in life is that the truth is, indeed, out there.  As we toddle around, we learn that if we are not careful we fall over.  If we don’t look where we are going we crash into hard objects.  We discover that there are limitations to our omnipotence.  We rebel against this.  This attempt to retain absolute power is what characterises that difficult phase of life, “the terrible twos”.  But if we are nurtured, and guided, and loved, we learn to accept that limitations exist, whether we like them or not.  Prof. Frankfurt makes the point that if we don’t accept this, then we find it hard to discern the boundary between ourselves and the outside world.

Sometimes I wonder if this is what underpins the President of the United States’ refusal to accept that he lost the 2020 Presidential election.  The irresistible force meets the immovable object.  This cannot be!  There has to be a mistake!  Therefore he allegedly called up an official and asked him to find all the uncounted votes that surely had to be there.  And he allegedly blew a dog-whistle that resulted in the storming of the Capitol on January 6^th, 2021.  And now that he is returned to office, and apparently vindicated, he has issued virtually a blanket pardon to the imprisoned Capitol insurgents. 

I’m very puzzled by this notion of pardon, just as I am by the notion of the president’s executive orders.  Pardons occasionally get issued on this side of the Pond, but the word “pardon” is usually a misnomer.  The recipients of the pardon have usually been shown to be innocent of the crime they allegedly committed; therefore they should not be pardoned, they should be exonerated.  The innocent don’t need a pardon; they need an apology, and compensation.  But if the pardoner is indifferent as to whether a conviction has been “safe”, then the distinction hardly matters.  I thought that the founding fathers in 1776 were trying to escape the omnipotence of the monarchy.  And I thought there was supposed to be a separation between the executive, and the law.  No doubt some silken-tongued lawyer could explain the rationale behind it all, but I bet it would be bullshit.  And that’s the point.  Once you deny the existence of objective truth, anything, indeed everything, is possible.                                                 

The USA, as I write, is waking up to the day in which “45” will morph into “47”.  A butterfly flaps its wings in Washington, and apparently precipitates a hurricane in London.  Keep calm, and carry on.  The world continues to turn.

Last Thursday was the first day of the new term at the Goethe Institut in Glasgow, and I attended my class Deutsch für Alltag as usual.  Not quite as usual.  We have a new teacher.  Change is always a little unsettling, but as it turned out it was fine, she was good, and as ever there was lots of laughter.  We also had some new faces in the class, so as is common in language classes we went round the table each divulging something of our potted autobiographies.  A language class must be the only “safe” space left where you can ask prying questions like, “Where are you from?”  I seem to recall a lady-in-waiting to the late Queen got into a spot of bother at a reception by asking this question of a person of colour, and following it up with, “Yes, but where are you really from?”  That reminded me of another reception, in Buckingham Palace, captured on TV in a fly-on-the-wall documentary, when in response to the “where are you from?” question, the guest mentioned the place in question, an outpost of old empire, and asked the interlocutor if she had been there.  “Been there?  I gave you your independence!”  This particular tin-eared individual was oblivious to the fact that the sole purpose of the programme was to ridicule the aristocracy.

But in a language class you are permitted to be uninhibited, even politically incorrect.  Where are you from?  Where do you live?  Are you married?  How many children do you have?  It all sounds quite prying, but the get-out clause is that you don’t have to tell the truth.  Just make it up.  After all, it’s just language practice.  The conversation shifted to family attributes, and the person on my right said his family were all musical.  I asked him if he played a musical instrument, and he said no, he and his family weren’t musical at all!  The teacher gave him a thumbs-up.  We went on to family-related idiomatic expressions:  it runs in the family; it stays within the family; it happens in the best families…  Did we know any others?  I thought of the opening sentence to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina:

Alle glücklichen Familien gleichen einander, aber jede unglückliche Familie ist unglücklich nach ihrer eigenen Art.

Or words to that effect.  All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.  I have a notion that that is not true; in fact, that quite the opposite is true.

Opening sentences to novels tend to stick in my memory.  When I was a student I once got a postcard from a friend on holiday, composed entirely of first sentences of novels, and written in stream of consciousness style, after the fashion of the end (as opposed to the beginning) of James Joyce’s Ulysses.  Something like:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that it was the best of times it was the worst of time present and time past are both on the 24^th of February 1815 there was no possibility of taking a walk that day call me Ishmael  

I suppose it was more interesting than “weather lovely, wish you were here.”  In fact I lodged it, or something like it, in my memory, and used it in the surreal chapter XXV of my latest tome, The Last Night of the Proms.  First sentences stick, last sentences less so.  It’s rather like any recurring life experience that turns out to be important – a job, a hobby, the membership of a club, a romantic relationship.  We remember the epiphanic first time, but are hazy, even oblivious, of the last.  So it is with a book’s end, with the possible exception of that beautiful close to Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

That floats my boat!  But then, my boat is definitely going against the current.  This Brave New World which we now inhabit seems to me increasingly inimical.  I think the Luddites were on to something.  Perhaps their descendants will take the sledgehammers to the latter day looms of social media platforms and super computers.  The Prime Minister thinks that Artificial Intelligence will be good at identifying potholes.  I can’t get enthusiastic.  I heard him on the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2 last week and he was quite ecstatic at the potential of AI to solve the problems of the NHS.  AI could identify the precise location of a blood clot on the brain so much quicker than a radiologist could.  Yes, said Jeremy, pertinently, but is that important if the patient is waiting in a corridor for 50 hours?  Good point.  I find that Jeremy is rather clued up about health, possibly because his show has a weekly health slot, “Medical Monday”.  There is a concept in biochemistry, with respect to biochemical pathways such as the metabolism of glucose, the Embden-Meyerhof pathway, of “the rate limiting step”.  One particular chemical reaction will be the slowest; so it doesn’t matter how rapid the other steps are, because everything gets held up at this point.  I used to apply this concept in the emergency department to “the patient journey” (odious expression), and if I knew that a particular laboratory investigation was going to hold the patient up, I got the request in as early as possible.        

But I get the distinct impression that the Prime Minister doesn’t really have a handle on the machinations of health care delivery, and that some corporate IT/AI whizz kid, perhaps an “influencer”, has bent his ear.  AI is a method in search of an application, and it has its baleful eye on the NHS.  I hope somebody in the medical profession puts his or her head above the parapet and tells the tech companies where to go.  But in the UK, that can be tantamount to professional suicide.  They’ll take back your gong.  Who cares?  I wouldn’t.  Ich bin der Welt abhandengekommen.

I wonder if it is possible to apply the diagnostic models we usually utilise with respect to individual patients, to entire communities, and societies.  Of course, pathophysiologically, we recognise epidemics, and pandemics, typically bacterial, like the plague, or viral, like flu or covid.  Then we may talk more loosely about an epidemic of obesity, often conjoined with hypertension, hyperlipidaemia, and diabetes, a suite of disabilities that has previously been dubbed Syndrome X, long before Mr Musk gave his social media platform the same name. 

Could there also be an epidemic of psychiatric illness?  I read somewhere the other day (fake news for all I know) that 15% of the adult population of the UK is on antidepressant medication.  Mid-January, it is quite credible that we are all a little low.  Is low mood contagious?  And perhaps, other mental states?  Anger, desperation, dysphoria, even psychosis?

Reading the letters page of the Herald makes me think so.  This is how I start my day, with a cup of coffee.  Maybe I had rather go out for a walk.  Yet I read all the letters.  There are, for example, nine letters in today’s Herald.  I occasionally write in, but not today.   The total word count is usually about 2,500, so people can be quite expansive in what they say.  By and large, the letters are well written.  But the prevailing mood is not good.  Let’s take an inventory:

1. Both the US and the UK are in a state of decline, mired in corruption.
2. Never mind Musk.  The UK itself is mired in corruption (again).  Brexit a disaster.
3. Labour has hoodwinked us.  “Savings” affect Society’s most vulnerable.
4. An expression of fear at the prospect of Scottish Independence associated with bankruptcy, the slump of world markets, and the coming of war.
5. Hypocrisy of the UK paying lip-service to a “two state solution” in the Middle East, while effectively supporting Israel in obliterating Palestine. 
6. The lack of public conveniences an absolute disgrace.
7. Scottish education has collapsed, replacing the love of knowledge with the pursuit of a means to lucrative employment.  Lamentable.
8. Transient Visitor Levy a bad idea.  Tourism industry already faced with substantial rise in staff costs. 
9. (By way of light relief) A Lampoon of Burns’ Address to a Haggis.

Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face apart, it doesn’t make for light reading.  The prevailing mood is one of anger.  It’s bad enough on the printed page.  Heaven knows how much worse it is on social media.  But I never look.  And there is desperation, a sense that the common man, and woman, are helpless in the face of overwhelming external forces, market forces, the machinations of the rich and powerful.  Constructive ideas are few and far between.  The state of the Health Service, for example, may be bemoaned, but creative solutions are not forthcoming.  Elsewhere in the paper, I see that nurses are being trained for a specific role working in corridors.  This is universally recognised as being completely unacceptable.  Yes, but what is to be done?  Hand-wringing, apparently.  The collective mental state we all share arises from a sense that the individual is impotent.  And oddly enough, this mental state seems to affect even people who appear to exercise a degree of clout.  My impression of the Labour Government is that they have come to realise that the leverage they have available to affect the “change” they trumpeted before the election, is extremely limited.  We seem to be in the grip of sinister external forces.  It’s an antique view.  Our fate is in the lap of the gods.        

Internationally, the situation is even grimmer.  The Middle East, Ukraine, Sudan etc.  A week today, Mr Trump commences his second term in the White House.  He has his baleful eye on Canada, Panama, and Greenland.  He wants to open up the north-west passage to trade.  Once the Greenland ice cap has melted, he can mine for nickel and cobalt.  Drill, baby, drill.  Meanwhile, Pacific Palisades is reduced to ashes.  The Grand Old Party doesn’t see a connection there.  LA is apparently burning because the fire hydrants were poorly resourced and maintained.

With respect to “the world stage”, there is another highly relevant report in today’s Herald.  The Royal Mint is issuing a £2 coin to commemorate the 75^th anniversary of the death of George Orwell.  The coin depicts the image of an eye, which on closer inspection is a camera lens.  This is encircled by the quote, “Big Brother is watching you”.  There is another inscription round the coin’s edge that is surely an animadversion on the current Zeitgeist: “There was truth and there was untruth”.

It is salutary to think that, but for the publication of Animal Farm and 1984 at the end of Orwell’s short life, he would have been remembered as a minor novelist, essayist, and political pamphleteer.  Yet now, 1984 still grows more prescient by the day.  I recall the depiction of three huge power blocs across the world – Air Strip 1, Eurasia, and East Asia.  Or perhaps, US/UK, the EU, and China? 

The darkness in 1984 is unrelenting.  We should take it as a warning, but not succumb to it.  “If there is hope,” wrote Winston Smith in his diary, “it lies with the proles.”  And although Winston became rather disillusioned by the proles, I think he was right.  Hope lies within the hearts of ordinary, individual men and women, trying to work together in concert, and in harmony.  So next time I write into the Herald, I hope to have something positive, and constructive, to say.              

To be honest, I don’t know where last year has gone.  Gone in a flash.  The acceleration of the seasons.  It seems no time at all since, in the twilit zone twixt Christmas and Hogmanay, 2023, I was drawing up some absurd catalogue of resolutions, a bucket list, while fully conscious at the time that the definition of insanity is to repeatedly indulge in behaviours that have never produced a desired result.  There is a first person narrator in a Graham Greene novel – I think it might be Fowler in The Quiet American – who reminisces about a time “when I still took my future seriously”.  Evelyn Waugh thought Fowler was a despicable creature, yet I rather identify with him.  Michael Caine played him beautifully in film.      

I recall I described “the daily bread” under 7 bullet points:

• Pray
• Read
• Write
• Play a musical instrument
• Speak a foreign language
• Get some exercise
• Look out!

Or something along these lines.

Well, how did that go? 

Actually, not too badly.  I always start the day with a muttered consecration.  Here I feel the need to self-deprecate.  I don’t wish to be ridiculed for speaking to an Imaginary Friend.  But you see, He once sat with me, on Ninety Mile Beach at the outlet of Te Paki stream, and told me that everything was going to be okay. 

I read voraciously, if in an undisciplined fashion.  This week I read Sarah Rainsford’s wonderful, if harrowing, Goodbye to Russia (Bloomsbury 2024 – signed by the author – it’s a terrible signature, but at least she has dated it, Oct. 2024).  Reading it on the back of the late Alexei Navalni’s Patriot, I have the sense of a country that has changed little from the one depicted through the music of Dmitry Shostakovich, the music of a lunatic asylum. 

And I’m currently reading Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies (Faber and Faber 2020).  It was given me as a gift.  I probably wouldn’t have bought it for myself, but is not this the beauty of an unsolicited gift?  It offers you something you ordinarily would never experience.  It is funny, touching, intensely Scottish, and full of humanity. 

And yes, I scribble away.  Last year I published The Last Night of the Proms.  A friend emailed me the other day and asked, is this worth reading?  I resisted the (intensely Scottish) impulse to say “No!”, but informed him that it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.  And now I am embarked on publication No. 5 – if spared.  People I know kindly ask me what it is all about, but I am coy about that, fearing that giving the game away will in some sense burst a bubble.  So the most I tell them is that it is in form “epistolatory” – you know, like Richardson’s Clarissa.  Aye, right. 

An die Musik.  In November, in the Dunblane Chamber Orchestra, we played Quilter’s Children’s Overture, Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, and Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.  The conductor, himself a violist, keeps saying to me, “James!  Play nearer the bridge!  You play like a folk musician.”  I took that as a compliment.  But I think it may be a bridge too far.  Old dog, new tricks.  Schwanengesang? 

Ich spreche Deutsch.  Nur Anfängers Kenntnisse.  Aber… I continue to attend the class Deutsch für Alltag in the Goethe Institut in Glasgow.  I’m not at all sure that I have any gift for languages, but anyway I enjoy it.   

I walk every day, and swim maybe every other day.  I need to be a little bit more “aerobic” – as the personal trainers say – when actually they mean “anaerobic”.  That is, get out of breath.  Sometimes I go on the treadmill, though the joints are beginning to complain.  It’s as easily done walking up a hill, or indeed in the pool.  I keep exercising because I don’t want to develop atrial fibrillation.  Then I’d have to go on an anticoagulant, and no doubt the medics would find good cause to put me on a suite of antihypertensives, statins, and medications for “pre-diabetes”.  I would be treated for a whole series of conditions I do not have.  I have a deep distrust of the medical profession. 

Look out!  I struggle to articulate.  I mean, stop navel-gazing.  (Is that what this is?)  I need to do something that is not inward-looking, but rather communal, collegiate, outgoing, even altruistic.  Here, I have a bad track record.  On the last two committees on which I served, I lasted two hours before I resigned.  I guess I’m not a committee man.  Sometimes I try to salve my conscience by reminding myself that I am retired, and that I spent my professional life tending the sick and needy.  But it doesn’t really work. 

Still, at the end of the day, maybe the thing to do is to identify a vocation, that which you are called upon to do, and then to do it with all your heart and all your might.  I’d better get on with the epistolatory novel.  Love, and do as you will.                       

I once attended a lecture given by an expert in stroke management who asked the audience what was the definition of a transient ischaemic attack (TIA).  Somebody volunteered a traditional definition, that it was a “cerebrovascular accident” (there’s an archaic term) whose symptoms and signs resolved completely within 24 hours.  “Too long,” said the lecturer.  Somebody else suggested resolution within one hour.  “Too long.”  “We give in,” said the audience.  The lecturer said, “Three minutes, four at the most.”

It makes sense.  We know that the success of cardiopulmonary resuscitation in the context of cardiac arrest drops off drastically with each passing minute of delay.  A neuron deprived of oxygen will die in a few minutes.  Therefore a TIA that lasts longer than a few minutes is not a TIA; it is a stroke.  The deficit may be subtle, but it will be there.  Nature may be said to be kinder to us in the context of myocardial infarction.  Heart muscle deprived of oxygen will survive for longer.  But “time is muscle”.  We talk here of “the golden hour”. 

I thought of this on Friday when a retired GP told me she had been with a patient who was clearly suffering a heart attack.  She phoned for an ambulance.  She came up against a call handler who was clearly working through an algorithm.  “Is the patient conscious and breathing?”  “Look.  I’m a doctor.  The patient is having a heart attack and needs a blue light ambulance immediately.”  “Is the patient conscious and breathing?”

In the event, the golden hour elapsed without the ambulance arriving, and the patient died.

This story has become painfully familiar.  Sometimes an episode like this is described as an “anecdote”, as if it were some kind of amusing after dinner entertainment.  But the anecdotes mount up.  Just before the lockdown I was in a restaurant in Glasgow when somebody collapsed.  I phoned for an ambulance.  Four times.  But the ambulance never came.  It was a Saturday evening and they were too busy.  Earlier this year I tended a patient who had collapsed in the street late one evening.  Another 999 call, for an ambulance that never came.

What’s the problem?  I’m told that the ambulances convey patients to hospital, but cannot offload them, because the hospital is full.  There is no room in the inn.  So the patient stays in the ambulance, parked at the hospital’s front door, until space is found.  The patient in the ambulance is said to be in an environment which is “safe”.  That may be so, but it is the next patient out in the community who is not safe.  The ambulance is out of action because, in turn, in-patients cannot be discharged via the hospital’s back door, because there is no viable social care service.  So the entire system is constipated.  I’m reminded of a piece of whimsy from the number theorists.  If a hotel has an infinite number of rooms filled by an infinite number of guests, can the hotel accommodate another guest?  Yes.  You move the guest from Room 1 to Room 2, and the guest from Room 2 to Room 3 (or is it 4? – a subtlety that eludes me), and so on, thus freeing up Room 1.  Actually, you can accommodate an infinite number of new guests this way.  However, hospitals are not like this hotel because the capacity is finite.  You really need to discharge people, but it seems that hospitals are like the Hotel California, or Heartbreak Hotel, from which there is no escape.

An immediate, makeshift solution to the ambulance problem seems obvious; you create an emergency holding bay which mirrors the safe environment of the ambulance.  Why has this not been done?  I can only assume that hospital managers don’t consider that something adverse happening out in the community is their problem. 

I’m intrigued by the lack of a sense of urgency that is often shared by people occupying senior roles in many walks of life.  You certainly see the same thing in the justice system.  It does not appear to bother purveyors of justice, that justice delayed is justice denied.  Here, a police investigation has been rumbling on for years now concerning certain alleged financial irregularities within the Scottish National Party.  Operation Branchform.  (For some reason I keep wanting to call it Operation Trench Foot.)  A report has been, or perhaps shortly will be, or perhaps never will be, submitted to the Procurator Fiscal.  It sits there, static, like an ambulance parked outside the Emergency Department; or like a mobile home parked beside a suburban garden lawn in which has been pitched a tent of the sort you see when forensic scientists start digging up the bodies.

But sometimes, when the Establishment gets a fright, they move with extraordinary rapidity.  When there was civil unrest earlier this year following a series of murders at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class, summary justice saw the perpetrators tried, found guilty, sentenced, and jailed, almost overnight.  National emergencies call for quick action.  In 1982, when Argentina invaded the Falklands, a cruise ship, the SS Uganda, was commandeered in the Mediterranean, emptied of school children, sailed to Gibraltar, and converted into a hospital ship virtually over the course of a weekend. 

But when it comes to the constipated NHS with its protracted waiting times, outside ED in the short term, or on an elective surgical waiting list in the long term, while people certainly get exercised, the great and the good don’t seem much bothered.  Yes, the politicians knock spots off one another, but they don’t really have any original ideas, and sadly, the medical profession has not offered much by way of leadership.

With respect to the queuing ambulances, I believe that hospitals need to be “front loaded”.  Patients should not be transferred to some diminutive, miserable “Cas”, but rather to an extensive and well equipped, well-staffed Department of Emergency Medicine which should be the hub of the hospital.  All medicine is acute. 

I once wrote into the Herald to say that I thought that Emergency Medicine and Acute Medicine (two putatively disparate specialities) should dump the silo mentality, bury the hatchet, and amalgamate.  Some wag wrote in to say the newly formed specialty would be the Scottish College Royal of Emergency & Acute Medicine, or SCREAM.  Well in a way that’s quite funny, but you know, it betrays a profoundly British sense of cynicism and hopelessness.  How often do I hear it?  That’s pie in the sky.  It’s not going to happen. 

We should make a conjoined, societal New Year’s Resolution, to dump negativity.  There’s nothing worthy that cannot be achieved, if men and women of good faith set their minds to it.  But, especially in medicine, time is of the essence.  Carpe diem.          

My Autobiography

Charles Chaplin

(The Bodley Head, 1964)

Meeting Churchill, A Life in 90 Encounters

Sinclair McKay

(Viking, 2023)

I often notice when reading two apparently unconnected books in parallel, that there is some point of intersection, that one book informs the other, and vice versa. 

I picked up the handsome, hardback first edition of Chaplin’s autobiography in a second hand bookshop last week.  I can’t say I ever found Charlie Chaplin on film, in his persona as the tramp, terribly amusing.  Maybe humour – think of these clunky cartoon captions in nineteenth century Punch magazines – doesn’t travel well through time.  I saw the Richard Attenborough biopic, Chaplin, and again it didn’t make much impression.

But Charles Chaplin, the autobiographer, is completely fascinating.  You could hardly conceive of a more starkly contrasted rags-to-riches story, from a childhood of extreme poverty in late nineteenth century London, through the harsh grinding struggle in theatrical Vaudeville.  This was hardly alleviated by a move to the United States.  But then came the rise of the silent movies in the motion picture industry.  He moved to LA, and might have continued to struggle, but for the fact that the movers and shakers of that world began to notice that Charlie Chaplin was box office.  Then he was moving in a world of fantastic glamour, the world of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, and socialising with august luminaries like Melba, Paderewski, Nijinsky and Pavlova, and later Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Heifetz, Shaw, Thomas Mann, Churchill…  And of course, William Randolph Hearst.  Hearst’s enormous pile on the west coast sounds even more surreal than the Xanadu depicted in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. 

Then of course the talkies came in, and Chaplin realised that the tramp could not be given a voice.  It would change his persona.  The talkies signalled the twilight of Chaplin’s career on screen, and his attention shifted more towards directing.  The world was changing in the 1930s, in more ways than one.  Then came the rise of the extreme right in Germany, leading eventually to the Second World War.  This is where the book really takes off.  Chaplin was always – hardly surprising considering his humble origins – left-leaning.  When Hitler attacked Communist Russia on June 22^nd 1941 in Operation Barbarossa, Chaplin had sympathies with the Russian people and was advocating the opening of a second front even before Pearl Harbour.  It was from this point that the USA began to harbour the suspicion that he was a Communist.  In the 1950s, during the Cold War, America fell out of love with Charlie Chaplin.  Inevitably, he fell foul of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.  People were out to get him, on a variety of fronts.  He had to get out, hiding in his cabin on the Queen Elizabeth as it left New York for Europe, waiting until the pilot disembark, lest the Feds slap him with a court summons.  He made it.  He settled in Switzerland with his beautiful young wife Oona, daughter of Eugene O’Neill, and lived happily ever after. 

The point of intersection with Churchill is of course that they met frequently.  Churchill was a fan.  Sinclair McKay’s is a clever idea, to see the biography –  yet another one – of Churchill through the prism of 90 encounters with other people, 90, presumably, being one for each year of his life.  In fact Charlie Chaplin is mentioned in despatches twice, in 1929, and then in 1956.  He first met Churchill in Marion Davies’ beach-house when they were introduced to one another by William Randolph Hearst.  They met frequently in Hollywood, and subsequently in London, and at Chartwell.  Chaplin was then due to meet Gandhi.  It may be said that Churchill’s and Chaplin’s political differences caused some strain. 

In 1956 they met in the Savoy Grill, in London.  Churchill had resigned from his second premiership the previous year.  On this occasion, Chaplin was about to meet Khrushchev.  There is again a sense of strain, a frigid politeness.

It seems to me there is an irony, and a paradox, in the way these two individuals expressed political views at different times, that landed them both in some hot water.  Chaplin and Churchill both supported Russia in 1941, at a time when many people both in the UK and the US wished that Germany and Russia should be allowed to knock spots off one another.  Chaplin espoused a second front, but Churchill, mindful of the trench warfare of the western front in the First War was more circumspect, much to Stalin’s fury.  But he had rather go for the “soft underbelly”, through North Africa and Italy.  That policy was also not without risk.  Churchill might well have thought of a similar strategy he advocated a quarter century before when he was First Lord of the Admiralty, leading to the catastrophe of the Dardanelles, and Gallipoli. 

Then in 1946 President Truman invited Churchill, now out of office, to Fulton Missouri to give a speech, not knowing what Churchill was going to say.  This of course was the famous “Iron Curtain” speech which might be said to have signalled the start of the Cold War.  Here, Chaplin was on the side of the US because he did not think this speech was helpful.  In the US at that time, Uncle Joe was in good odour after the great patriotic victory, and people thought, again, that Churchill was a sabre-rattling war-monger.  So on the one hand, Chaplin was essentially forced out of the US because he sided with Russia, and on the other, Churchill was black-balled because he did not.  It’s all a question of timing.

When I was about nine years old, my father gave me a present, either a birthday or a Christmas present – can’t remember which – of a typewriter. It was an ancient office Barlock that weighed a ton. I think it was being thrown out of the Chief Constable’s Office in the City of Glasgow Police, where he worked, and he got it for £1. It was, and remains, the best present I have ever received. It was astute of him. He knew I had a fascination with words, and I loved “composition”, an opportunity every Friday afternoon in Primary School to wax eloquent in prose. On many other occasions as a present he would give me, and my many cousins, a book. When I won a prize at the end of Primary School he suggested that I ask for Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, a tome I still possess. He had a friend, one Elphinstone Dalglish, who loved exuberant language; he described any form of humbug, or waffle, as “a farrago of heterogeneous irrelevancies”. For better or worse, I collected expressions like that.

I got quite adept on the Barlock typewriter. I was quite fast, though I can’t say I could touch-type. But I started writing stories. They were of course extremely derivative. They were modelled on Ian Fleming’s Bond novels, and I can blame my father for that as well. He borrowed Dr No from Partick Borough Library. I opened it, read that first astonishing sentence, and was immediately hooked.

Punctually at six o’clock the sun set with a last yellow flash behind the Blue Mountains, a wave of violet shadow poured down Richmond Road, and the crickets and tree frogs in the fine gardens began to zing and tinkle.

Waow!

I suppose it was unusual at the time for somebody to be so familiar with the QWERTY keyboard at such a young age. You might say now that I was way ahead of my time. But no. It really was a different age, the age of carbon paper and Gestetners. Now anybody with a mobile phone is familiar with a QWERTY keyboard, but may be less skilled in calligraphy, or what used to be called “real writing”. It could even be that the habit of putting pen to paper is dying out. The scrawl has given way to the scroll. Perhaps paper will become obsolete, as people spend untold hours staring at smart phones, ipads, and computer screens. I resist this. I love the ritual of reading the physical entity of my broadsheet morning paper.

Talking of The Herald, I wrote in on Friday. Two articles caught my eye, and they seemed to me to share a common thematic thread. A software company supplying IT systems for GPs has gone into administration. Meanwhile another company is currently wooing the NHS with promises of the enormous potential benefits of robotics. I was moved to write.

Dear Sir,

I don’t think our GPs should get too upset if they can’t transition from EMIS to Vision (Software supplier to Scots doctors goes bust, Herald, December 13th). Personally while in practice I was never so happy as when the computers crashed. We never really needed them. All a GP needs is a quiet room, and the ability to take a history and conduct an examination.

Of much more concern is the latest threat to the sanctity of the medical consultation – robotics (Robotics could transform our NHS, Agenda, Herald December 13th). Robotics are “the arms and legs of AI” according to the Tony Blair Institute, in delivering “real world impact”. This is a mirror image of the rise of Information Technology 30 years ago. It’s not that a doctor is seeking a technical solution to a clinical problem; rather that a new technology is seeking a market place. AI has its baleful eye on the NHS. It’s a hard sell. If we don’t embrace the new technology, we will be overtaken by competitors. That sort of argument is why teenagers are addicted to smart phones – fear of missing out.

But do we really want the kettle of an isolated, elderly patient to inform an enormous data base that it has not recently boiled, so as to send a robot round to make a cup of tea? That sounds like hell on earth to me. We are not robots. I don’t doubt they have a place; some of them are good at certain surgeries, albeit under supervision. But what the NHS really needs to invest in is people, doctors, nurses, and allied professionals who don’t think algorithmically but who utilise knowledge and skill with wisdom and compassion, who adopt a technology when it is needed, but will, I trust, refuse to have one imposed upon them.

Yours sincerely…

So there you go. All these years later, still typing away. We will see if it appears in tomorrow’s Herald. I have this theory that I continually write to the papers because I have a perverse desire to be castigated, to be told to wake up and smell the coffee. Dr Campbell’s latest Luddite tirade is nothing more than a farrago of heterogeneous irrelevancies…