jamescalumcampbell

On Saturday, BBC Radio 4 put on a marathon recitation of George Orwell’s 1984, split into several hour-long renditions by various actors, spread across the course of the day.  The occasion was the 75^th anniversary of the publication of the book.  Interspersed were further discussion programmes about Orwell, and also about Franz Kafka, who died 100 years ago this year.  One can readily see a connection between Kafka and Orwell.  The words “Kafkaesque” and “Orwellian” have slipped into the language.  Perhaps we use them somewhat flippantly.  For example, you might spend an hour on the phone trying to negotiate with some faceless bureaucratic monolith, endlessly pressing digits on your keypad in response to multiple menus, speaking with a robot who cannot understand your accent, and finally hanging up in frustration, having got nowhere.  “Honestly!” you say.  “It’s positively Kafkaesque!”  Or you might become aware of the extent to which supermarket stores are cognizant of your purchasing habits, and can target advertisements to which you might be susceptible, in your direction.  Positively Orwellian. 

I hadn’t intended to listen in to 1984, but I chanced upon Part 2, which was broadcast mid-morning, and got hooked.  Syme, a colleague of Winston Smith in the Ministry of Truth, is engaged in the editing of the 11^th edition, the definitive edition, of the Newspeak dictionary.  He has a tremendous enthusiasm for his task, which is essentially to destroy language, or at least to reduce it to a system of communication so circumscribed and so devoid of nuance, that thought, independent thought, originality, becomes literally impossible.  Orwell expands upon this theme in an appendix, The Principles of Newspeak.  It is really a development, indeed a culmination, of previous essays concerning the abuse of language, most notably Politics and the English Language.  The distortion of language, and the imposition of an established orthodoxy, are inextricably linked.  It becomes impossible to entertain a heretic thought, because the language to express it no longer exists. 

Orwell could be extraordinarily prescient.  We see the suppression of heretical thoughts now in the literary world.  Publishing houses employ “sensitivity readers” to comb manuscripts, old and new, on the lookout for passages that are deemed “unacceptable”.  It is not merely individual, offensive words that are removed, but sometimes whole chapters, with, or sometimes even without, the barest explanation.  The offending text disappears down the “memory hole”, to be incinerated.  How Orwellian. 

In addition, the authors of the offending passages are “cancelled”.  Orwell would have said they are “vapourised”.  Granted I would rather be cancelled than vapourised, but the notion of cancellation remains profoundly Orwellian.  It is not merely that the cancelled author can no longer be read; it is rather that the cancelled author no longer exists.  All references to that said individual are removed.  That individual never existed. 

On Saturday I picked up more Orwell later in the day.  When O’Brien, of the Inner Party, interrogates Winston, he tells him he is insane, because he believes that 2 + 2 = 4, when the Party says that 2 = 2 = 5.  Orwellian prescience again.  He understood the concept of “alternative truths”.  But I had to stop listening.  The interrogation is just too painful; literally. 

Kafka and Orwell share the same preoccupation with, and indeed fear of, surveillance.  Almost the first thing that the protagonist in The Trial, K, notices, is that he is being watched.  And Winston becomes terrified when he realises that the young girl with dark hair, Julia, is watching him.  It is impossible to escape surveillance because “telescreens” are everywhere.  We are surrounded by them now.  We carry them with us.    

Yet for all these points of intersection, there is a fundamental difference in literary technique between Orwell and Kafka.  Orwell strives for great clarity on every level.  His books are fundamentally political.  He is devoted to plain speaking.  He wants us to see the world as it really is.  You may say 1984 is a warning.

Kafka’s work defies interpretation.  His stories are like parables.  They seem capable of multiple interpretations, yet always the originals remain elusive, and seem to contain more than any subsequent critique.  They have the quality of nightmare.  In the penultimate chapter of The Trial, In the Cathedral, there is the parable of the man who spends a lifetime striving to attain the Law, who on his deathbed asks the doorkeeper to the court why it is that in all his time seeking justice he has never seen anybody else seek admittance.

“No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended only for you.  I am now going to shut it.”                  

Sitting anonymously, Nicodemus-like, in a rear pew of Dunblane Cathedral, as is my wont, I listen to these ancient stories born out of alien cultures in the Middle East, of strange customs and usage; tales of infanticide, and dangerous crossings out of Israel into Egypt, presumably via Rafah; of a wrathful and vengeful God who doesn’t come across very well, and is decidedly not simpatico, and of his people who ululate with strange cries.  Alleluia!  Hosanna!  And I think to myself, what on earth are you doing here? 

Yesterday the minister preached on the Pharisees, who were great sticklers for the rules.  Jesus’ disciples were wandering through the corn fields on Sunday (strictly speaking Saturday, but Sunday in our culture), helping themselves to the crop.  And then Jesus healed somebody’s withered hand, again on the Sabbath, which was just not done.  The Pharisees asked him what he was playing at.  He in turn asked them if it was better to do good, or evil, on Sunday.  They didn’t have an answer to that, so instead, started plotting to kill him.  These stories are narrated in Mark chapters 2 And 3, so Jesus was on a sticky wicket almost from the start. 

The Pharisees are not alien to our culture.  Currently we are awash with Pharisees.  They are very unforgiving.  They cancel people.      

The minister sought a modern Pharisaic equivalent, of people who stick to the rules for rules’ sake, and talked of somebody on the A9 – the A9 being a surrogate marker for foul-ups and frustration – who adheres to the speed limit and drives at 57 mph.  I confess I winced.  So afterwards I said to the minister, “I am one of these people who adheres – one might say religiously – to the speed limit.”  He laughed and said, “So am I, but I needed something for the sermon.  Probably not a very good analogy.”  I said, “Far be it from me to criticise!”  I expect ministers get this sort of thing all the time.  After a young minister preached his first sermon, a member of the congregation said to him, “Son, was it your own idea to go into the ministry, or were you just badly advised?”

Funnily enough, I had a conversation with a gentleman who also didn’t know why he was there.  He stopped attending when the church gave the nod to same-sex relationships.  But here he was, back in the cathedral.  Yet he didn’t know why.  We had a chat about a mutual acquaintance.  We had had a fire drill in the cathedral and our mutual friend said to me, “It’s health and safety gone mad!”  Just like speed limits, I suppose.

Lots of people don’t really know why they find themselves in church.  People attend choral evensong apparently without a scrap of religious faith.  They love the music, and the ritual, and the atmosphere, and the sense of spirituality.  They even adhere to the church’s teachings, or a lot of them.  Sometimes I think they are drawing a distinction that does not really exist.  We see through a glass darkly. 

For myself, I’ve come to rely on the architecture of a typical Church of Scotland service.  There is the organ, the choir, the music, the communal singing.  The first prayer is an expression of gratitude, and of abject apology for the cock-ups of the previous week.  There follows a short homily that used to be a children’s address, but is now dubbed “an address for all ages” because fewer children attend.  The grey-haired demographic is becoming white-haired.  Churches are shrinking, amalgamating, closing.  It is quite conceivable that within a generation they will cease to exist. 

Then follows an Old Testament lesson which is quite likely to be highly repugnant.  Think of Abraham and Isaac, as recounted by Wilfred Owen.  The minister is liable to say, “I confess I struggle with this.”

Anthem.

New Testament Lesson, also quite likely to be incomprehensible.  Jesus curses a fig tree.  Maybe he was just having a bad day.

Sermon. 

Prayers of intercession.  For the lame, the halt, and the blind, the destitute, those caught up in war, and famine, the sick at heart, the poor in spirit…  When you are young, it’s all a bit academic.  Then intercession becomes the heart of the service.  Finally, you realise that the person being prayed for is yourself.

Intimations, closing hymn, and lastly the Benediction.  I greatly value the Benediction.  It fortifies me for the week ahead. 

Organ postlude.  I always stay for it.  And yesterday, having some time on my hands, I stayed behind for coffee.  I’d been warned off the coffee, but it was surprisingly good.  I was also surprised that people knew my name.  Maybe I’m not as anonymous as I’d thought.            

The Tories want to bring back National Service.  Over the weekend the Foreign Secretary did the rounds of the television and radio studios to explain the rationale.  It will be compulsory for eighteen year olds.  Though not mandatory.  Or will it be mandatory but not compulsory?  There are options.  You can give up your weekends, for example, doing voluntary work for the NHS, or the Fire Brigade.

But why?  Apparently it’s more to benefit the eighteen year olds than the armed services, or the social services.  It will get the youngsters out of their “bubble”, crouched over a tablet, absorbed in social media.  Well!  (I shouted at the radio in exasperation.)  Whose fault’s that?  Who told them to get connected, and that IT, and AI, were the future?  But now we are to recede back into the past, the past, precisely, of 1947 – 1963.  What’s that beautiful final sentence from The Great Gatsby?

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

My uncle did National Service.  He had a sunny disposition and a great sense of humour, and would beguile us with amusing stories of his experiences.  He would fall foul of some obscure military regulation, and be commanded by his sergeant major to stand upon a table and recite, “I am a dozy man.”  But it wasn’t all funny.  He was on parade one day, standing to attention, when the man next to him nearly amputated his own thumb with his bayonet.  Blood everywhere.  The man fainted on the parade ground.  Naturally my uncle went to his aid. 

Big mistake.  He was yelled at for stepping out of line.  Does not that little vignette sum it all up?  Army training, especially for conscripts, starts with the inhibition of humane instincts in favour of blind obedience.  How else can you be persuaded to impale another human being with a bayonet?  But this is what the Tories want to bring back for eighteen year olds.  Do them the world of good.     

I wonder what really lies behind it?  I can’t think the government is really much bothered about teenagers being wedded to their devices.  Much better that they be thus pacified, than at the barricades demonstrating against the fossil fuel industries.  And would the armed forces welcome it?  They would be saddled with a duty of care, unable, surely, in this day and age, to send insubordinates out on a yomp on the Brecons, in full kit and at 32 degrees Celsius, followed (should they survive) by a good beasting.   

Maybe the Tories are just flying a kite.  It’s like mood music, setting the scene.  We are, after all, moving from a post-war world to a pre-war world, and we had better get used to it.  I notice that Mr Sunak’s much cherished dynamic sliding-scale smoking ban has quietly been stubbed out, at least for the time being.  That would certainly fit with this latest conscription wheeze.  I remember at school asking a teacher – in a fit of bold precocity which would occasionally overtake me – why it was that we were forbidden to smoke, when all our teachers smoked.  He replied briefly, “We were all in the army.”  In other words, it was really foisted upon them.  The cigarettes were dirt cheap, and then they became addicted. 

But it’s never a good idea to badmouth your army.  You never know when you might have need of it.  Didn’t Kipling say as much?  I suppose, after a manner of speaking, I did my own National Service, quite voluntarily.  I was in the University Air Squadron, hence the RAF Volunteer Reserve, for about two and half years.  So I know a little bit about being beaten about the ears and told I was a bloody idiot.  I remember dining in the officers’ mess on an RAF station in Oxfordshire, sitting beside a US Air Force officer who was completely silent, and who sat rigidly to attention, consuming his meal, utilising cutlery in a series of right-angled manoeuvres, as if presenting arms.  Not for me.  But I stuck it out, largely because I liked to fly the aeroplanes.  After a while, my superiors began to cut me some slack.  “Take this Chipmunk, Campbell, up to 7,000 feet.  Spin it seven times over Loch Lomond.  If you haven’t recovered by 3,000 feet, bale out.  Now bugger off.  There’s a good fellow.”

Later on, I flew a great deal in New Zealand, and couldn’t get over everybody’s relaxed, laid back attitude.  Aviation became a very rich seam, for me, and I suppose I have the RAF to thank for that.  So I guess the military never did me any harm (apart from the nightmares, the facial tic, and the puddle of urine appearing at my feet).                        

The other day I came across a ridiculous German word.

Der Eierschalensollbruchverursacher.

It’s an item of cutlery, somewhat like an elongated spoon you might utilise if you chose to sup with the devil.  In fact it’s a device for removing the top, or bottom, depending upon whether you are a “little endian” or a “big endian”, of a boiled egg.  I came across it while watching a video posted on U-tube by one Liam Carpenter.  Mr Carpenter is an Englishman who went to Germany to play professional basketball.  I’m not sure that his career on the basketball court really took off, but he has made a name for himself by making short, humorous videos, mostly making fun of the cultural differences between the Germans and the English.  For example his English persona clearly finds the existence of an Eierschalensollbruchverursacher to be inherently absurd.  It says something about the German stereotype of the national devotion to efficiency.  Vorsprung durch Technik.  Equally absurd as the entity is its name, apparently cobbled together, literally something like “eggshell designed to break causative agent.”  Of course, long words in English can also be cobbled together.  They usually have a Latinate provenance, and often they are tongue in cheek.  Floccinaucinihilipilification bears a double irony, because its meaning – a belittling – is in inverse proportion to the word’s length.  But the seemingly limitless German penchant for concocting long words is entirely devoid of irony, and this is what the English find so amusing.  Well done, Mr Carpenter.  Humor hilft immer.  Or, as the Reader’s Digest used to say, laughter is the best medicine.

Perhaps by way of contrast, Taylor Swift is coming to play Edinburgh, as part of her “eras” tour.  Apparently the world tour has already grossed over a billion dollars in ticket sales.  Ms Swift appears on the cover of Time magazine.  I don’t get it.  I went to the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday night to hear the greatest music in the world played by the greatest musicians in the world to a hall half full, or half empty, depending on your temperament.  It occurred to me that, although I would have recognised Ms Swift by appearance, with her trademark signature red lipstick, I had no idea what her voice sounded like.  So I went out and bought her latest CD, The Tortured Poets Department.  I wondered if that title owed anything to one of my favourite films, Dead Poets Society.  Perhaps membership of the department allows, and predates, admission to the society.  Anyway I quite like the CD, and now I would recognise Ms Swift’s voice.  It’s a nice voice.  (Good heavens.  Am I becoming a Swiftie?)  The musical language is diatonic, and very simple.  The lyrics are clever.  But I don’t really get it.  I don’t get the hype.  It’s not the Beatles.  The Beatles, at least the early Beatles, had joy, even when heartbroken.  But the world of the tortured poets is indeed tortured.  Frankly, it’s miserable, and maybe that’s why Ms Swift has struck a chord.  Teenage angst has reached a new and even lower depth of despair.  It also seems to be temporally perpetuating itself; Ms Swift is, after all, 34 years old, but she’s still singing “F*** it if I can’t have him.  Down bad.  Down bad.” 

I could perfectly believe that youth is more miserable than ever.  Look at the world we have bequeathed them.  It’s not just the global warming, the pollution of habitats, the mass extinction of species, and the destruction of the natural world.  All these are bad enough.  Infinitely worse is the implication that it doesn’t matter, because we can all live virtually.  All of our problems can be sorted by access to a tablet.  Presumably that is why everybody is wandering the streets in a trance, staring at a mobile.  I heard an artificial intelligence guru on the radio say that pretty soon all our “menial” jobs would be undertaken by robots, ergo it would be better to make all the “menial” employees redundant, and give them a basic wage.  The head of “smart places at FarrPoint”, one Steve Smith, wrote an agenda article to the Herald earlier this month, entitled “Could AI help find answer to social care problems?”  He wants to install a device into the kettle of an elderly person, to alert family if the loved one is no longer making a cup of tea.  “Smart technology” writes Mr Smith, “assisted by artificial intelligence, has the potential to revolutionise social care by improving quality and efficiency, while also empowering people to live independently for longer.”

That sentence could have been generated by a piece of AI software. It’s a portent of a dystopia; a vision of Hell.                       

I didn’t manage to catch the aurora that has graced our skies over the last two or three nights, thanks to all the unusual solar activity.  I did take a stroll around my village on Saturday evening at about 10.30.  The skies were clear following a very beautiful day when the temperatures had reached 25 degrees Celsius.  But it was still too light, and I decided not to set the alarm for 2 am.  Actually, on occasions such as these, I am reminded of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, in which, if memory serves me right, virtually the entire population of the world goes blind having been exposed to a spectacular cosmic light show.  I know it’s absurd, but Wyndham’s brand of Sci-Fi made such an impression on me when I was a child, that I’ve tended to avoid gazing at auroras.  Following Triffids (1951), John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (1903- 1969) went on to write such memorable tomes as The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos, Trouble with Lichen, and The Seeds of Time.  They seem to capture the spirit of an age, with an atmosphere not dissimilar to that encountered in the novels of Wyndham’s contemporary Nevil Shute (1899 – 1960).  Shute, an aeronautical engineer, was also interested in science.  The English scientific world in the 1950s has a peculiar atmosphere, captured by C. P. Snow – whatever F. R. Leavis might have to say – and also by Nigel Kneale of Quatermass and the Pit fame.  I call it “The Jodrell Bank effect”.  A sense of oppression, threat, and paranoia, doubtless attributable to the Cold War, and the ever-present, never-absent Bomb, hanging over us like the manifestation of “Hob”, the devil, overhanging an apocalyptic vision of a London on fire, whose population goes on the rampage in “the hunt”, the search for “the other”; a depiction of what the Germans call „Völker-Mord“, or ethnic cleansing.  Like Wyndham, Kneale was not so much interested in science fiction, or even fiction, as in ethical codes. 

Quatermass is a bit like Macbeth, an exploration of the way in which humanity can be overtaken by a malevolent external force.  Last week the BBC unearthed a radio play version of Macbeth from the 70s, which was thought to have been lost.  Ever since I saw the horrific Roman Polanski film, I have shied away from the Scottish Play.  But I did manage to listen to a few passages, with their exalted verse.  Actually Macbeth works very well as a radio play.  The language is distilled; the on-stage gore is left to the imagination.  I have always admired G. Wilson Knight’s critique of Macbeth in The Wheel of Fire, Macbeth and the Metaphysic of Evil.  Prior to Knight’s essay, critics thought of Shakespearian tragedy in terms of great heroes with an hamartia or fatal flaw, in Macbeth’s case, “vaulting ambition”.  His lust for the crown led him to murder.  I was taught this at school, just as I was taught about “the causes of the First World War” in terms of “the cockpit of Europe”, the balance of power, and failed diplomacy.  Even at the time it crossed my mind that all of that did little to explain the collective insanity that led to the trenches and the horrors of the Western Front.  A medieval outlook, the notion that we had become possessed by evil spirits, seemed more accurate, and that still pertains today.  Ukraine.  Gaza.

What can you do?  Well, as St Paul said, “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”  So yesterday afternoon I played in the Dunblane Chamber Orchestra’s spring concert.  Mozart’s Symphonia Concertante for oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon; Faure’s Pavane, and Mozart again, the fortieth symphony.  Just before the concert started, an orchestra committee member, and fellow viola player, asked me, “What do we do in the event that somebody in the audience collapses?” 

I suggested, “Make an announcement.  Is there a doctor in the house?  But do you realise, you’ve just put the hex on the concert.  Now, something will happen.”

Sure enough, half-way through the third movement of Mozart 40, there was an almighty crash from the rear of the hall.  Well, I’m retired.  Things move on in medicine very quickly.  I’d only be a liability.  So I kept playing Mozart.  At the close of the movement, the conductor, all credit to him, turned to the audience and asked if everything was all right.  Apparently it was.  So we went on to the last movement, and finished the concert.         

Then everybody left by the south door, because the north door was inaccessible, part of the ceiling having collapsed.  As a friend subsequently remarked to me, as we dined in the Lion & Unicorn, “You brought the house down.”  At least nobody was hurt.

Mozart 40 is extraordinary.  Very syncopated; very chromatic.  The second half of the finale commences with a reiteration of the main theme that is so distorted that the audience in 1791 must have been completely nonplussed.  In fact it’s a tone row, incorporating every note in the twelve note chromatic scale, except that of the home key of G.  Mozart anticipated Schoenberg by well over a century.  It really is enough to make an edifice collapse.            

Standing in a queue in the local shop the other day, the man ahead of me turned round and said, “Hello, doctor, how are you?”

“Doing away,” I replied.  “And yourself?”

“Very well.”  And when he had left the shop, I said to the shopkeeper, “Who’s he?”  The shopkeeper was very amused.  He was able to identify the man for me.  But then, my shopkeeper knows everybody.  It’s a great talent, and one I don’t have.

The following day I was in a Starbucks coffee house and another man ahead of me said, “Hello, doctor, how are you?” 

“Doing away,” I replied.  “And yourself?”

“Very well.”  But then, “Do you remember me?”

I always think it’s best to be completely up front, otherwise you will land yourself in all sorts of difficulty.  “I’m afraid not.”

He introduced himself, and even gave his address.  “Remember now?”

I said, “Forgive me.  Since I retired, everything is a blur.”  I’ve often found this to be a reassurance to people.  Whatever confidential information I was once privy to, has been deleted from the memory banks.  But I had the odd notion that the man in Starbucks was slightly miffed.  Probably my imagination. 

The following day I complimented my German teacher on her remarkable ability to remember the name of everybody in the class.  I told her about these recurring episodes when I am accosted in the supermarket by somebody who says, “Hi, doc”, then points to a particular part of the anatomy, or holds up a limb.  “It’s much better now!”  Actually I’m on safer ground here.  I explained to my teacher that I can’t remember names, but I can remember diagnoses.  She found this very amusing.  

We doctors call this difficulty with names, rather pompously, “nominal aphasia”.  Actually it’s a misnomer.  I believe nominal aphasia is actually a real clinical entity, perhaps a complication of a stroke, in which the unfortunate patient really can’t remember names, even of loved ones.  It’s the sort of thing the neurologist Oliver Sacks would have written about in books like The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. But I doubt if my difficulty with names is truly pathological, more likely a character failing on my part; a reprehensible, remote detachment.  After all, the technique of remembering names can be learned.  When I was working in Broadford Hospital, Isle of Skye, at the beginning of this century, there was a general election, and the late, much missed Charles Kennedy dropped by, by helicopter, as you do.  I was introduced to him.  “This is James Calum Campbell.”  (Or words to that effect.)  He shook my hand, looked at my face as if taking a photograph, and said, “Hello, James Calum Campbell.”  So, he had a technique. 

Group introductions I find particularly difficult.  You know the sort of thing.  I find I have to introduce six people to six other people.  I’d much rather go round the table and ask everybody to introduce themselves, as you might do at a committee meeting.  But if it’s not a committee meeting, but rather a dinner party, that’s really not on.  I am inclined to panic.  All I can do is try to anticipate the event, and rehearse. 

Then there is the socially awkward phenomenon of being on familiar terms with somebody you have been acquainted with for quite some time, but whose name escapes you.  You really ought to have owned up months ago, but you let the opportunity pass you by, and now it’s too late.  You suspect you might know their name, but you’re not sure.  To give it a stab and get it wrong would be quite the faux pas.  The only possible solution is to find some mutual acquaintance and extract the necessary information from them. 

Then there are the people who you know just have the wrong name.  I know a Liz who really ought to be Jill. I once called her Jill and she looked puzzled.  Some names get mixed up.  I confuse Deborah and Rebecca, even in their shortened forms, Debs and Becks.   

Why are people affronted when their name is not remembered?  What’s in a name?  Romeo’s Juliet evidently thought, not much.

That which we call a rose

By any other word wold smell as sweet…

…Romeo, doff thy name,

And for thy name – which is no part of thee –

Take all myself. 

For myself, I don’t mind not being recognised as I move about the world.  I concealed my name when I published my first book.  At least, I lost it in translation.  I did it, ostensibly, because I was still in practice at the time, my book contained a lot of medicine, and I did not wish my patients to suspect they were appearing in my book.  Now I have published four books, and I have retained the habit of concealment, ostensibly, for continuity’s sake.  Yet I suspect the real reason lies deeper.  I crave neither fame nor notoriety.  I highly prize the gift of being able to walk down the street unmolested. 

Of course I would prefer that the books that have been printed be sold rather than pulped.  I have no desire to be remaindered.  But success and fame are not the same.  I should like to observe any such success from a position of anonymity.  I wish James Calum Campbell all the luck in the world.     

When I first heard that Dame Esther Rantzen was campaigning in favour of assisted dying, I thought, “That’s it.  Sooner or later, the bill will pass.”  The presenter of the long-running consumer affairs programme entitled – perhaps rather inappropriately in this context – “That’s Life!”, is such a powerful persuader, in modern parlance an “influencer”, always with the keenest antennae for the public mood (finger on the pulse – another inapt phrase), that it is hard to imagine that the nations of the United Kingdom will not, in due course, follow in the footsteps of such countries as the Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada, and New Zealand.  Esther Rantzen has stage 4 lung cancer.  It is impossible not to have the deepest sympathy for her situation.  She was interviewed this morning on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.  She has collected more than 200,000 signatures to a petition triggering an MP’s debate, to be held later today, in Westminster Hall.     

The Today programme went on to interview a palliative care expert, Dr Amy Proffitt, past president of the Association for Palliative Medicine of Great Britain and Ireland, who deplored the lack of nuance in what has become a divisive binary dispute.  She thought the debate at this stage had rather be in the public domain than in the Palace of Westminster.  She compared the current level of discourse with that which surrounded Brexit eight years ago.  People did not know what they were voting for.  Interestingly, in the Today interview she did not express direct opposition to assisted dying; rather she wanted to remove the entire process, whatever it might be, from the domain of the NHS. 

I’m very struck by the tacit assumption of the supporters of assisted dying, that the participation of doctors will be integral to any end of life procedure.  There is a close parallel here with the formulation of David Steel’s 1967 Abortion Bill.  I make this point without putting forward any judgment as to the moral-ethical rights or wrongs of either termination of pregnancy, or of assisted dying.  Termination of pregnancy is actually illegal in this country, except in very specific circumstances.  The relevant act of parliament dates back to 1861, and remains on the statute book.  In order for a termination of pregnancy to be legal, two independent medical practitioners must make a judgment as to whether the person requesting the termination fits into one of several strict criteria.  In most cases, the termination goes ahead because two doctors consider that a continuation of the pregnancy would harm the physical or mental health of the pregnant patient.  Now it is true that, de facto, patients may undergo termination of early pregnancy, on request, because doctors who may not wish to sanction the process, on grounds of conscience, are nonetheless obliged not to frustrate the will of the patient, but rather to point her in the direction of clinicians who are prepared to carry out her wishes.  But it would be wrong to assert that termination is a patient’s right.  The decision to terminate resides solely with doctors, empowered by an Act of Parliament.  It could all turn on a dime.  Think of Roe v. Wade.

Now we find that assisted dying, should it become legal, will also depend upon the judgment of two doctors.  When I was a medical student I remember asking a consultant obstetrician how he (of course he was male) went about making a judgment as to whether or not to proceed with termination.  He told me quite frankly that he provided terminations solely and simply on request.  Who am I, he said, to make judgments as to the level of my patient’s anguish?  By the same token, I can well imagine something similar happening with assisted dying.  When termination was debated in parliament in 1967, proponents of the bill reassured those who were dubious, particularly in the House of Lords, that termination would only occur in exceptional circumstances.  Then look what happened.  I could well imagine that, 60 years from now, assisted dying will be available on demand.

This notion is often referred to as “the slippery slope” argument.  Mission creep.  Not so, say the advocates of the bill.  Safeguards, measures of protection, will be robust.  Well, one way to ensure that the mission will creep is to hand the administration of it over to doctors.  You see, we doctors understand that everybody is terminally ill, and that everybody is not quite of sound mind.  And everybody, one way or another, is being coerced.  And we are notoriously bad at prognosis.  (When Mr al-Megrahi, allegedly responsible for Lockerbie, the worst act of terrorism on British soil, was released from prison, terminally ill, on August 20^th, 2009, and returned to Libya, on compassionate grounds, he lived far longer than was anticipated.  He died on May 20^th, 2012.)

Sixty years hence, a sixteen year old girl will present herself to one of my colleagues and say, “Doctor, I’ve had enough.  I’m suffering intolerably. I want you to end it for me.”  And my colleague, reaching for the relevant forms, will say to himself, who am I to make a judgment about the extent of my patient’s suffering?                                                   

On Saturday evening in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra performed a concert of music which the programme described as “all British”.  Actually it was all English – The Forgotten Rite by John Ireland, Elgar’s Sea Pictures with soloist Alice Coote, and Holst’s suite The Planets.  I don’t know why the English are so reticent about the extraordinary flowering of English music that occurred during the late nineteenth and twentieth century.  Talking of planets, the conductor was the most musical man on this planet – John Wilson.  I noticed that the pre-concert talk was an interview between John Wilson, and the RSNO’s principal flute Katherine Bryan.  I don’t normally attend pre-concert talks, but I thought that was pretty special, and went along.  I’m a great fan of both.  I’ve heard it said that Katherine Bryan is one of the six greatest flautists who has ever lived.  How you could reach such a conclusion I’m not quite sure, but I could certainly believe it.  John Wilson made his name by conducting various manifestations of the Great American Songbook at the London Proms.  But his range knows no limits.  And great musicians love to play for him, perhaps attracted by his meticulous attention to detail, the composer’s detail within the score, and his complete absence of pomposity.                   

I was amused by an exchange of anecdotes concerning Holst’s final planet, Neptune.  It concludes with a wordless, offstage, female chorus, in a fade-out.  Fade-outs in pop music are commonplace, or at least used to be.  In the recording studio they were easily managed.  The singer, or the group, would reiterate the final jingle, while the recording engineer simply turned the volume down.  I always thought well of the Beatles, in that they rarely employed the fade-out technique.  Their extraordinarily terse utterances had a beginning, a middle, and an end.  Anyway Holst wanted a fade-put for Neptune, and that is not so easily managed in the concert hall.  There are loads of tales of Neptune fade-outs going wrong.  Ms Bryan and Mr Wilson recounted a few, for example, a back stage choir vanishing into the distance along a corridor, only to find that an intervening door had been locked.  I myself can remember a previous performance of The Planets in Glasgow, when the gradual fade out of the choir was abruptly terminated by the sound of a door slamming.  And by an odd coincidence, in an ancient tape recording of the piece I once made from a live radio performance, the tape ran out seconds from the end of Neptune, so that the choir was stopped by a sudden unscheduled descent of pitch, followed by an abrupt click.  What a strange thing is the musical memory.  On every subsequent occasion that I have heard this piece, I have anticipated the loss of pitch, and the click.

Mind you, prior to this weekend, the last time I attended a performance of The Planets was at a London Prom.  The Prom opened with a magnificent performance of Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Antarctica, followed by an execrable performance of Xenakis’ Pleiades.  And I say “execrable” not necessarily because the percussive music was awful, but simply because it was, painfully, pathologically, too loud.  So I never heard the second half of that concert – The Planets.  Instead I repaired to the bar, and then, in a mood, left.  It was only subsequently that I learned that the day of that concert had been the day on which the conductor Vernon Handley had died.  When I heard that, I regretted that I had not been able to calm my disturbed emotions, and stay on.  I was a great fan of Vernon Handley, principally because he championed the music of a great hero of mine, Arnold Bax.  I cherish his recordings of the seven Bax symphonies, as well as his enlightening conversation in the same box set with Radio 3’s Andrew McGregor. 

I bring all this up, because this weekend formed a strange parallel with that London concert.  I learned on Sunday that the distinguished conductor Sir Andrew Davis has died.  A frequent visitor to Scotland, Sir Andrew also frequently conducted the Last Night of the Proms.  I hope nobody takes umbrage, and to be honest I’m rather glad, that Sir Andrew conducted the Last Night in my novel of the same name.  I particularly remember the fiftieth anniversary concert, in the Royal Albert Hall in 2008, of the death of Ralph Vaughan Williams.  Sir Andrew conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in an all-RVW programme – the Tallis Fantasia, Serenade to Music, Job: a Masque for Dancing, and the Ninth Symphony.  It was quite magnificent.  Stephen Bryant, the leader of the BBC, had a huge part to play, and I remember Sir Andrew making eye contact with him at the end, as if to say, I told you you’d be wonderful!   

Over the weekend I read Salman Rushdie’s memoir Knife, Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Jonathan Cape, 2024).  On August 12^th 2022, Salman Rushdie was attacked by a man with a knife while he was giving a lecture in upstate New York, on the importance of security and protection for writers.  He nearly died.  He lost the sight of one eye.  The memoir deals with the incident in the context of Rushdie’s personal life at the time, the immediate aftermath, and then a long process of recovery.  I expected the account to be harrowing, and indeed it was, but I was surprised by the book’s message of gratitude, optimism, and hope.  It is not a book of hatred.  On the contrary, it is a book of love.  Rushdie takes a profoundly negative experience, and turns it into something else.  I was reminded of George Orwell, who received an injury not unlike at least one of Rushdie’s, when he was shot in the neck during the Spanish Civil War.  Orwell, too, wrote about his experience, with a similar analytical dispassion.

In Knife, the first responders at Chautauqua NY, and subsequently all the doctors, nurses, and health care professionals come out of the tale very well.  No wonder Rushdie dedicated the book to them all.             

The “button” question has come up again.  The nuclear button.  Actually, I’m given to understand, the button is not a button at all, but more resembles a starting pistol.  Would Sir Keir Starmer, widely expected to be the UK’s next Prime Minister, be prepared to fire it?  Yes, unequivocally, said Sir Keir.  The deterrent “only works if there is a preparedness to use it.” 

That’s a very strange utterance.  How can you use a deterrent?  If you deploy a hydrogen bomb in anger, it will be either as a pre-emptive strike, or as a retaliation.  In the first instance, you will not have been deterred by the nuclear capability of the opposition; in the second instance, you will have been subject to a nuclear attack.  This would show that the deterrent did not work, and had never worked. 

Prime Ministers, and prospective Prime Ministers, are routinely asked the “button” question.  I remember Mrs May answered in the affirmative, looked very uncomfortable, and was not inclined to expand upon a monosyllabic reply.  I had the sense she was saying something along the lines of, “The nuclear deterrent functions as a deterrent every day.  For its deterrent value to have credence, my answer has to be ‘yes’.”  I suppose she could have been bluffing.  But then, had she responded with a monosyllabic “no”, that, too, could have been a bluff.  Who knows what she wrote in her letters of last resort, residing in the four safes of the continuous at sea deterrent (CASD). 

Jeremy Corbyn when he was campaigning for the premiership said “no”.  I had the distinct sense that was not a bluff.  Some people say that reply, among other things, made him unelectable. 

Nicola Sturgeon said “no”, but then that was rather academic, defence being a reserved and not a devolved issue.  I recall that during PMQs in Westminster Michael Gove asked the PM – I forget which one, there have been so many recently –  the question, clearly a plant, whether he agreed that the SNP’s quibbling about the prospective cost of the Trident upgrade was akin to a eunuch moaning about the cost of Viagra.

(Other erectile dysfunction treatments are available.)

The PM’s reply was once more monosyllabic.  Yes.

I thought of the Viagra allusion when I heard about the recent test-firing of a Trident missile off the coast of Florida earlier this year.  Defence Secretary Grant Shapps was in attendance.  The missile was intended to fly several thousand miles, but in fact only managed a few hundred yards before falling into the sea.  Apparently an “anomaly” had occurred.  I was reminded of Elon Musk’s description of a failed launch of one of his space rockets: “rapid unscheduled disassembly”.  Grant Shapps stated the test had “reaffirmed the effectiveness” of the deterrent.  Thus do our political masters inhabit a universe parallel to our real one.       

The redoubtable Brian Quail, famous in the greater Glasgow area (the prime target in the UK) for his implacable opposition to nuclear arms, has written a characteristically subtle letter to today’s National, praising Sir Keir for his candour.  His point is that “yes” means “yes”.  That truth lies at the kernel of the doctrine of nuclear deterrence.  Deterrence is guaranteed – supposed to be guaranteed – by the fact that the systems are “locked and loaded”.  A nuclear attack will be so swift that there is no time during the event to make executive decisions.  They have to be prearranged.  We are effectively saying to our enemy, “If you attack us, we will immediately attack you.”  In the event, there’s nothing to be done about it.  We have effectively concluded with our putative adversaries a suicide pact.  The world is awash with nuclear weapons – about 12,000 of them.  It’s an “accident” waiting to happen.

I have a modest proposal.  Why doesn’t my Alma Mater, the University of Glasgow, since it is directly in the firing line, create a Faculty of Peace, and offer a Master’s degree inviting our best young minds, not to get swallowed up in the financial sector, but to consider the question, how can we best get along with one another, without destroying ourselves, and the planet?    

A young lady acquaintance of mine sent me a text the other day, outlining one of life’s difficulties she had encountered, perhaps seeking the sage advice of an elder statesman – though why anybody should consider that somebody who has led a life as chaotic and ramshackle as mine should be a fount – or should that be font? – of all human wisdom, I simply can’t imagine.  Anyway I did my best.  First I commiserated: “Dearie me!”  Then I didn’t presume to give advice, although I think I may have said what I would have done under similar circumstances – which of course is not the same thing.  Anyway I pitched my spiel and, just prior to pressing “send”, went back to the top to check the text.

“Desire me!”

You see – predictive text could have landed me in all sorts of bother.  Fortunately I spotted the error and corrected it.  I wonder what would have happened if I had received such a message rather than (nearly) sent it.  I could have been the victim of a so-called “honey-trap”.  Honey-traps have been in the news last week because an MP fell into one.  A honey-trap works by seducing the victim, who then compromises himself, and renders himself vulnerable to blackmail.  Honey-traps are intimately associated with social media, because so many people seems to conduct their affairs (as it were) using a myriad of platforms seemingly designed for the task.

But honey-traps of one kind or another existed long before the advent of the silicon chip.  They predate Samson and Delilah.  The femme fatale with the hidden agenda.  Hollywood noir is full of them.  In Double Indemnity, Barbara Stanwyck sees the hapless insurance agent Fred MacMurray coming, and seduces him into murdering her husband, he for love, she for money.  It all ends very badly.  In From Russia with Love, the chess grandmaster Kronsteen, working for the KGB, concocts an exquisite honey-trap designed to enmesh James Bond, the lure being one Tatiana Romanova.  Actually James is not really seduced by Tatiana.  Rather M is seduced by the prospect of getting his hands on a Spektor decryption machine. 

But the sad fact of modern life is that every time you answer the phone, or open an email, or even a letter delivered by the Royal Mail, the first question you need to ask is, “Is this real?”  Scams of one kind or another are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and our institutions in turn try to keep up by introducing increasingly refined security measures.  The result is cyber warfare and a cyber arms race, as each side tries to outdo the other.  Whenever a representative of a bank tells me their digital vaults are impregnable, I cock an eyebrow.

Being the victim of a burglary (house-breaking north of the border) is a painful experience, not merely because of the loss of property, but because of the intrusion into your private life.  Your filing cabinets have been rummaged and rifled by alien hands.  Similarly, being the victim of a scam is painful not merely because of the loss of money, but because you have been tricked.  It is a form of character assassination.  You are a patsy; a fall guy.  How could you possibly be so naïve?  What an idiot.  It is an injury to self-esteem.

We shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves.  After all, our sole misdemeanour was that we were trusting of our fellow human beings.  You might resolve never to be taken advantage of again, and regard every subsequent human interaction with profound suspicion.  But by now you have retreated into your security bunker, surrounded by high walls, barbed wire, goon boxes, and security cameras.  All human transaction becomes remote.  Before you can begin to communicate, you must enter a PIN, then a password, another PIN, another password, then a six digit number sent to your mobile.  This is the way we live now.

There is a theory given wide credence, that there is nothing intrinsically good or bad about any given digital platform; what matters is how you use it.  I am beginning to doubt this familiar trope.  We have gone down the wrong track.  The dystopia we have recreated cannot be beneficent.  We are not designed to sit huddled over a computer screen.  We are meant to be out and about.  In my latest novel, The Last Night of the Proms, I took the liberty of quoting Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native:

The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among mankind.

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