jamescalumcampbell

After the assassination attempt last week, Mr Trump said he was going to rip up, and rewrite, his speech of acceptance, due in Milwaukee on Thursday, of the nomination to be the Republican candidate for the presidency.  He said he wanted to be president for all Americans, not just half of them.  He wanted to heal divisions.  Perhaps he’s had a Damascene moment.  If you come within a quarter of an inch of losing your life, you are bound to look upon it differently. 

The events that are unfolding across the Pond have a biblical quality.  Mr Trump has attributed his miraculous escape to divine intervention.  He turned his head at just the right moment.  I was reminded of a story in The Little World of Don Camillo, by Giovanni Guareschi, concerning the activities of a parish priest in an obscure village in the Po River valley, with a Communist mayor, in post-war Italy.  Even in such a parochial environment, political tensions were liable to run high, and Don Camillo’s life was endangered because he had knowledge, obtained within the sanctity of the confessional, of the identity of a murderer.  Consequently somebody took a pot-shot at him when he was communing in the church, as was his wont, with Our Lord, on the cross.  He was given a nudge, a quarter of an inch, and Our Lord took the bullet.  Don Camillo said, “You moved my head!” but our Lord shrugged and said, “Don’t get so excited.”

Cynically, we assume that Mr Trump, in ascribing his survival to the intervention of the Almighty, is merely wooing and cultivating the evangelical vote.  But let us for a moment suppose he thinks he has been miraculously preserved for some higher purpose.  I should think his must be a common reaction to an uncommon set of circumstances.  In all the miraculous escapes afforded Winston throughout his military career, he often had the strong sense that he was being preserved for some higher calling.  Those of us who have been critical of the first Trump term might consider such a notion to be absurd.  But the bible is full of similar absurdities.  God has called upon the most unlikely individuals to be his emissary.  Noah was a figure of ridicule, building his ark on dry land.  Moses got nervous as a public speaker.  David was an adulterer and a murderer.  Saul, aka Paul, was a fanatical zealot; he held the coats when they stoned Stephen.  And so on.  It’s a bit like the 1963 film of The Great Escape.  The Forger was blind, and the Tunnel King had claustrophobia.  It’s ridiculous. 

On Thursday, Mr Trump wore a dressing on his right ear.  That’s not just therapeutics, it’s iconography.  What is it about the ear?  When they came to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, one of the disciples rather lost his temper and cut off the ear of a servant of the high priest.  Jesus gently rebuked him.  He might have borrowed a line from Othello.  Keep up you bright swords, for the dew will rust ’em.  The traumatic amputation of an ear once started a war between Great Britain and Spain, Guerra del Asiento (1739 – 1748), or the War of Jenkins’ Ear.  It concerned the slave trade in the Caribbean.  The conflict was subsumed within the War of Austrian Succession.  As Jesus said, those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.

One thing I’ll say about Trump: I don’t think he’s a warmonger.  He says he will end the war in Ukraine with a single phone call.  Good luck with that.  Mr Chamberlain thought he could avert war through similar diplomatic channels, not exactly a phone call, but a trip to Berchtesgaden.  That went well.

But now, all of a sudden, everything has changed.  Mr Biden has bowed to pressure.  He is like an elderly person who has finally been persuaded by his family to hand over the car keys.  He has endorsed his vice president Kamala Harris to be the democratic candidate for the presidency.  Mr Trump has said that she will be an even easier opponent to beat, than “Sleepy Joe”.  Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?  But I don’t think so.  I’ve read her book.  The Truths We Hold.  (Why do American political memoirs always have such portentous titles?)  Incidentally, I don’t think people pronounce Ms Harris’s name correctly.  It should be “Comma-la”.  There is a gag, that if Ms Harris was your lawyer seeking compensation on your behalf, she might add a few commas on to the total sum achieved.  In other words, she’s a fighter.  Early days, but we have the possibility that the presidential contest will be between a prosecutor, and a felon.  All of a sudden, the forthcoming American election has become interesting.      

Sir Tony Blair popped up on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme’s 8.10 am slot one day last week, en route to opening a conference of his highly influential think tank.  He was full of enthusiasm for Artificial Intelligence (AI).  It’s The Next Big Thing.  We in the UK are already pioneers.  We must grasp this opportunity with both hands.  Sir Tony was particularly interested in the application of AI to the running of the National Health Service.  We need to digitise all our data and make it available, as an inexhaustible well of resource.  He was particularly interested in preventative medicine.  Prevention is better than cure.  Your genome, for example, might tell you what awaits you.  Then you can cut the grim reaper off at the pass.  Your laboratory results might lie slightly outwith the quoted “normal” levels.  Therefore you must have a “pre-” condition.  Treat it now.  Big Pharma have sensed this enormous commercial opportunity for quite some time.  Drive your cholesterol down as low as you can; drive your blood pressure down as low as you can; take a poly-pill, and treat half a dozen conditions that you don’t actually have.      

I suppose this is what politicians, or ex-politicians, do.  Finger in the air.  See what’s coming round the corner, get on the front foot, and don’t be left behind.       

It all reminded me of the digital revolution in health that started around the beginning of the millennium.  It was seen as an unstoppable force.  The computer infiltrated the consultation room, like a nanny in a horror movie, taking up residence in the family home, to care for the children, apparently all sweetness and light, but in reality a deeply malignant emissary of the devil.  Everything was going to run smoothly – I was going to say “like clockwork”, but of course it’s not like clockwork at all.  Now, there are 7.5 million people waiting for an outpatient hospital appointment, and that’s just south of the border.  People who can afford it elect to go privately.  I confess when in practice I would sometimes encourage my patients so to do, or at least I would give them the option, and tell them how it was.  The neurologist will see you in eighteen months, or, if you elect to go privately, this afternoon. 

You might imagine Sir Tony’s think tank might pause to consider we may have taken a wrong turn.  But no.  Rather, they are “doubling down”.  AI is the next cure-all.  Here we go again.  Naturally I wrote to The Herald:

Dear Sir,

Artificial Intelligence (AI), according to Sir Demis Hassabis and Sir Tony Blair, “could be one of humanity’s biggest ever inventions” (The Herald, July 10), but I think we should find an alternative name for this entity.      

During my 13 years in emergency medicine in New Zealand, the junior doctors went on strike twice, and the emergency department was run by consultants.  As a group, they were highly intelligent.  They didn’t spend much time perusing data, and their use of investigative technology was spare, and extremely targeted.  Instead, they spent a lot of time taking a very careful history from the patient.  They never thought algorithmically; they used a combination of knowledge, skill, and wisdom, as captured in the motto of the Royal College of General Practice: cum Scientia caritas.  Their approach was not remotely robotic.

On their watch, the recourse to laboratory and imaging diagnostic facilities, and the hospital admission rate, all went down.  Medicine, well-practised, has got nothing to do with Big Data.  Accurate diagnosis is all about filtering out white noise.  AI will no doubt be a very lucrative gravy train for somebody, but it won’t benefit the doctors and nurses, and it certainly won’t benefit the patients.  

Sincerely…

For the remainder of the week I perused my daily paper for my letter.  But it never appeared.  When this happens, I usually try and shrug it off.  After all, the newsprint will be wrapping the fish and chips by tea-time.  But I cannot deny my disappointment.  I have been dismissed as a Luddite.  Yesterday’s man.

But I was taught never to practise Blunderbuss Medicine.  There is no such thing as a “routine” blood test.  You order a test to answer a specific question that has been posed by the patient’s history and examination.  The result may or may not help you to make a clinical diagnosis.  Making a diagnosis is making a decision, and it has to be clear-cut.  There is no such thing as “a touch of diabetes” – much as Big Pharma would like you to think so.  You might as well suffer from a touch of pregnancy.  Think diagnostically.  I call this “the broad brush strokes of medicine”.  Example: don’t conclude somebody has pernicious anaemia just because they have a borderline low vitamin B12 level.  If the patient is well, that result is perfectly normal.  The last time I made a diagnosis of pernicious anaemia, I measured the patient’s B12, and the result came back: zero.  But I wax too technical. 

If you put the entire population on a spectrum of ill health, if everybody is on the borderline of something, then you effectively kill off the art of diagnosis, and the waiting lists for access to health care can do nothing other than sky-rocket.

By Saturday I had given up on my letter.  And the world moves on.  Mr Trump took a bullet in the ear.  Conspiracy theories abound.  Apparently he said to the welter of secret service personnel on top of him, “Where are my shoes?  I need my shoes.”  I suppose it’s the sort of thing that preoccupies you when you are inches away from death.  It remains to be seen whether this is an “inflection point” signalling a return of good manners to public life or, rather, the continuation of a downward spiral.

Sunday was at last a beautiful summer’s day and I found myself amid the rolling hills of Ayrshire, having a delightful lunch with family in The Blair (no relation to Sir Tony as far as I know) in Auchentiber.  Then in the evening, it became evident that football, on this occasion, was not coming home.  I watched the match.  I don’t belong to the “Anyone but England” camp; I supported my good neighbour, particularly because the fans had given the mild-mannered Gareth Southgate such a hard time.  I’d heard England were performing below par throughout the competition, but I thought they played very well, even if Spain were the better team.  If a Spaniard hadn’t headed the ball off the goal line it might have gone to extra time, thence to penalties. But these are all counterfactuals.

So life goes on.  This morning I got my paper as usual and opened the letters page with no great expectation.

I’m in!        

The silence is deafening.  Mr Trump is not passing any caustic remarks about Mr Biden’s cognitive function.  Neither, generally, is the Grand Old Party.  Mr Trump is not normally reticent when it comes to trashing the reputation of political opponents.  When he was up against Mrs Clinton in 2016 he had his rally audiences chanting “Lock her up!”  It would be easy now for him to make the current occupant of the White House an object of derision, and mockery.  One could imagine him doing tasteless impersonations on stage, perhaps following a dispute between the two old men, about their respective golf handicaps.  Bald men and a comb come to mind.  But no.  It is the Democratic Party that is making the fuss.  Gathering numbers of Congressmen, and women, on that side of the aisle, are urging the President to step aside.  But not Mr Trump.

The silence speaks volumes.  Mr Trump would rather Mr Biden stay where he is.  Mr Trump thinks he can beat Mr Biden in November.  And, at least as I write, Mr Biden is inclined to hang on.  My pocket diary begins each week with an adage, aphorism, or piece of wisdom from some prominent sage, and it so happens the week beginning December 9^th features Joe Biden:  “Failure at some point in your life is inevitable, but giving up is unforgivable.”  No doubt he is applying this adage to himself.  He has said that nobody short of the Almighty will persuade him to give up.  Kirsty Wark, on Paddy O’Connell’s Broadcasting House (BBC Radio 4) yesterday quipped that this was why the President was aboard Air Force One yesterday.  He hadn’t heard from the Almighty, and was going up to find Him and crave an audience.   

Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, took a call from the President yesterday.  It must be slightly surreal suddenly to be propelled into that world.  “Mr Prime Minister?  It’s the White House.  Can you take a call from the President?”

“Of course.”  (I’d have asked, “Is it collect?”) 

“Patching you through to Air Force One.”    

The President sounded pretty jaunty.  “Congratulations, Mr Prime Minister.  That was the helluva result!”  Or words to that effect.

It is said that all political careers end in failure.  The minister in Dunblane Cathedral preached on failure yesterday.  The lectionary featured Mark Chapter 6.  Jesus visited his home town of Nazareth and found that none of his miracles would work there.  He was mocked and derided.  It’s the tall poppy syndrome.  The villagers remarked, “Ah kent ’is faither.”  The minister recounted the old story of King Robert the Bruce following his crushing defeat at the Battle of Methven in 1306.  He had to flee for is life, and is said to have sought refuge in a cave on the west coast of Arran, where, at his lowest ebb, he is said to have taken inspiration from observing a spider making repeated attempts to spin a web, and finally succeeding.  If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again. 

I thought, good heavens, in evoking one of the great proponents of Scottish Nationalism, is the minister making a barely oblique reference to the General Election, in which the SNP took a drubbing (or, Andrew Neil’s word, a skelping).  Some people in the congregation might take offence.  I could imagine some droll wit posting an aphorism in my pocket diary, along the lines of, “If at first you don’t succeed, pack it in.”  Winston Churchill, with characteristic pugnacity, told the boys at Harrow, “Never give in, never give in.  Never never never never…”  But even Winston had to add a rider – “…except for convictions of honour and good sense.” 

The turnout at the General Election was 60%.  You can imagine the remaining 40% saying, “Why bother?  They’re all the same.  In it for themselves.”  I’m told the Labour Party got approximately 60% of the seats with 34% of the vote.  Reform UK got a large popular vote, and won only 5 seats.  Nigel Farage is calling for electoral reform.  Meanwhile the new government has hit the ground running.  I doubt if electoral reform will be high on their agenda. 

Turnout in yesterday’s French run-off election was much higher than in their first election last week.  The centre left, and hard left, conspired to thwart Mme Le Pen.  Consequently, there is a hung parliament, and it is anticipated French politics will become gridlocked.  In this year when more people in the democratic world than ever before are exercising their franchise, there is a frequently expressed view that democracy is under threat, because of irreconcilably deep and toxic divisions. 

Here, one thing we must be grateful for is that the General Election result was accepted without demur.  I rather enjoyed the elaborate gavotte of the transfer of power; the gracious farewell from the Downing Street lectern, the trip to the palace for an audience with the king.  For about half an hour we were without a Prime Minister, yet the wheels did not come off the jalopy.  Then Sir Keir was asked to form a government, and it was his turn to say gracious words from the lectern.  The outgoing PM did not incite an insurrection, and nobody tried to invade the Palace of Westminster.   

But I rather wish Sir Keir hadn’t hit the ground running.  I wish he had dissolved parliament for the summer recess, and, like Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, had gone off to Marienbad for six weeks to read novels.  And not taken his mobile.  We should run the show like a golf club, with a captain, secretary, treasurer and committee, each member serving a single term out of a sense of civic duty.  Surely one term is enough.  Was it Calvin Coolidge who said, “I do not choose to run”?

Perhaps the First Lady will have a word with the President.  There’s another great aphorism in my pocket diary, this one from Jim Carrey, week beginning December 23^rd:

“Behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes.”

The other day I boarded the Edinburgh tram at Ingliston Park & Ride, next door to the airport, and travelled eastward to the end of the line at Newhaven, on the Firth of Forth.  It cost me £2, which I thought was value for money.  It would have cost me £2 even if I had alighted at the first stop, Gogarburn.  You could recast the Gospel parable of the vineyard owner hiring labour at a flat rate, on to the Edinburgh tram.  £2 for one stop, £2 for 12 stops, unless you choose to go west from Ingliston, one stop to the airport terminal, when the fare is hiked up by more than a factor of 4.  Makes no sense.

It was a lovely day in Newhaven.  There was a softness in the air and, down at the harbour, I could have been in Italy.  I walked back by the tram lines, one stop, to Ocean Terminal, where the Royal Yacht Britannia is berthed.  I was minded to board, but frankly I resented paying £19.50 so I just kept walking.  Incidentally, I see that Balmoral Castle is opening up to visitors for a short summer season.  £100 for a visit, £150 if you include afternoon tea.  Are the Royals short of a bob or two?  £50 for a cup of tea?  Come on!  Extraordinarily, the place got booked up within about 40 minutes.

I walked back up Leith Walk towards Edinburgh’s Princes Street.  Towards the top end of Leith Walk on the north side there are two second-hand bookshops.  I ducked in, in my continued futile quest for two first edition Bonds – Casino Royale and Moonraker, and also for any single one of the Corrigan series of children’s books by R. B. Maddock.  But early Bonds are vanishingly rare, and Maddock I suspect has been cancelled, as the colonial outlook has expired.  When I emerged, the weather had suddenly changed.  There was a squall, so I dashed across the road to Topping, a magnificent bookshop you can lose yourself in, on another apparently futile quest, for the one Nevil Shute missing from my complete collection, The Rainbow and the Rose.

Eureka!  Who would have thought it?  I bought it, got another £2 tram ticket at Picardy Place, and hopped on a tram back to Ingliston.  A hapless fellow traveller didn’t have a ticket and was faced with the choice of alighting to buy a ticket at the tram stop for £2, or buying one on board for £10.  Like the airport tariff, it makes no sense.  It’s a gravy tram.

En route, I settled down with The Rainbow and the Rose, and was immediately hooked.  The title is borrowed from a beautiful sonnet by Rupert Brooke, The Treasure, initially mysterious yet, on finishing the novel and in retrospect, entirely apposite.  Like Corrigan, the Shute is politically completely incorrect.  It was published in 1958 by William Heinemann, but the edition I picked up in Topping was a Vintage Classic, published in 2009.  Congratulations to Vintage for not employing “sensitivity readers” to attenuate Shute for modern sensibilities.  I dare say Shute novels are dated.  They are certainly of their time.  The style is often said to be pedestrian, more resembling an academic report than a novel, the plots predictable, and clunky.  And yet many of these books have never been out of print.  Shute was a pilot and an aeronautical engineer, aviation is a recurring theme, and the books are full of technical detail.  The Rainbow and the Rose paints a picture of civil aviation as it was, particularly across the South Seas, in 1958.

Many of the books have a fey, dreamlike, supernatural quality, and this is certainly true of The Rainbow and the Rose.  Here, Shute employs and evokes an elision of personalities that might confuse the non-alert reader.  You stop and say, who is the narrator?  It’s a very clever idea.  A recurring theme of Shute’s is the idea of the independent man forging a career, and a life, through self-will, determination, and hard work.  I’m not sure what his politics exactly were, but I have a notion that the post war government in Britain was not to his taste, so he upped sticks and moved to Australia, where enterprise and entrepreneurship he considered were valued, and rewarded.  He left a drab, bankrupt country in search of life, hope, and colour.  I wonder what he would have made of the choices on offer here at the General Election on July 4^th.  It would not appear that the main political protagonists, or antagonists, are stirred and moved by any compelling or inspirational idea.  We have a contest between bureaucrats determined to persuade us that they are not going to wreck the economy, and similarly determined not to make a big campaign gaffe at the last minute.  I am reminded of a remark passed by a tutor of mine at Glasgow University back in the Dark Ages.  “The only difference between Mr Heath and Mr Wilson, so far as I can see, is that they are both exactly the same.”                                         

The Prime Minister is due in Edinburgh today, ten days shy of the General Election.  His welcome may not be as warm as that recently afforded to Taylor Swift.  He certainly doesn’t have his troubles to seek.  The number of “flutters” on the date of the election, allegedly placed by people in his party with insider knowledge, seems to be increasing.  Mr Sunak is “incredibly angry”, and no wonder.  Only last week, the psephologist Sir John Curtice was discussing the fact that trust in politicians among the general public, is apparently at an all-time low.  Fluttergate has been likened to Partygate – one rule for us, one rule for them. 

So it might have been fortunate for the Conservatives that Crapgate only came to light yesterday, perhaps a good day for burying further bad news.  At a private function, James Sunderland, aide to Home Secretary James Cleverly, described the plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda as “crap”.  I first heard of this yesterday on the news on BBC Radio 4.  Radio 4 doesn’t normally use words like “crap” on the national news, but I guess they must have decided on this occasion that plain speaking was in the public interest.  Before he gave this utterance, Mr Sunderland asked everybody in the room to switch off their devices, a sure-fire way, I’d have thought, of making sure he was going to be recorded.  Mr Cleverly toured the Sunday morning TV studios to reassure us that Mr Sunderland was simply using the word “crap” for dramatic effect.  The Rwanda policy was not crap. 

True enough, Mr Sunderland had gone on to point out that the policy had been modelled on a similar initiative in Australia, which had proved very effective in deterring migrants down under.  So, what exactly was he referring to as crap?  One interpretation might be that the offer of asylum in Rwanda is a crap offer that nobody would wish to accept.  Perhaps Mr Sunderland asked everybody to switch off their mobiles, because it is necessary to insist that Rwanda is a safe destination, whilst sending out a subliminal message that it is a crap destination – a classic example of cognitive dissonance.  Another interpretation would be that the depiction of Rwanda as a favourable destination is crap, or, another apposite word, bullshit. 

But I suspect this story will just peter out.  Fluttergate, on the other hand, has legs.  The media may have the opportunity to drip feed further allegations.  Drip, drip, drip.  In Edinburgh, Mr Sunak will wish to discuss the economy, jobs, and hospitals, but the reporters will keep asking him for more flutterers’ names. 

Likewise, amid the furore, Mr Farage will not be much damaged by his alleged remark that the West, and the expansion of NATO to the East, is at least partly responsible for the war in Ukraine.  One of the problems of obsessing over a scandal like Fluttergate is that we are inclined to take our eye off the ball, especially with regard to foreign affairs.  The relationship between Russia and the West was brought into sharp focus for me last week when I read Giles Milton’s wonderful book The Stalin Affair, The impossible alliance that won the war (John Murray, 2024).  I was put on to it again by BBC Radio 4 which has been serialising it, read most beautifully by Nigel Anthony.  When the Nazis launched Operation Barbarossa on midsummer’s day, 1941, and attacked Russia, Churchill, who had been an implacable foe of Communism since 1917, immediately pledged Stalin the support of Great Britain.  He was criticised for this; many thought that the Nazis and the Reds should be allowed to get on with it and destroy one another, but Churchill argued that if Germany had an easy victory, as seemed likely, then the Nazis could turn their entire attention to the west, and Continental Europe would become an impregnable fortress.  He made the famous remark that, if the Nazis should attack Hell, he would not hesitate to make a pact with the devil.  That was in essence what he thought he was doing. 

The Big Three, Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt, and the famous summits at Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam form the backdrop to Giles Milton’s book, but the focus is on subsidiary characters, Roosevelt’s representative Averell Harriman, the British ambassadors Sir Stafford Cripps and subsequently Archie Clark Kerr, the Russian foreign commissar Molotov (“Old Bootface”), and the interpreter Arthur Birse.  This focus on (not quite) ordinary people caught up in extraordinary affairs gives the book an atmosphere not unlike that of a historical novel by Walter Scott.  It is certainly as vivid.  But the star of the show is Harriman’s daughter Kathy, who accompanied her father, got involved in his work, and learned to speak Russian.  She saved a file of letters and documents which has only recently come to light.  She comes across as a thoroughly modern woman. 

Churchill’s power on the world stage waned throughout this period, just as Roosevelt’s health deteriorated.  It is really Stalin who dominated the Big Three, and got most of what he wanted.  It was perhaps Averell Harriman who was the first to realise that Stalin was going to become an enormous threat to the west. 

And here we are again.  The riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.  The US has given Ukraine permission to launch missiles deep into Russia.  A factory producing drones has recently been attacked.  As the Government never tires of telling us, we are living in an incredibly dangerous world.  But not so dangerous, apparently, that some people don’t have time for a flutter at the bookies.                                        

There was an odd juxtaposition of two reports in one of the Scottish Sunday newspapers yesterday.  The first indicated the overwhelming support in the Scottish Parliament for buffer zones outside abortion clinics, wherein “pro-life” people would not be allowed to demonstrate.  The second indicated that Glasgow City Council is not minded to support similar buffer zones outside Roman Catholic churches, wherein members of the Orange Order would not be able to march.  I wondered what distinction was being made by our legislators and our city fathers, who chose to uphold the right to demonstrate in one case, but not in another. 

(Incidentally, with respect to termination services, why not just absorb them within women’s health generally, and offer them within the gynaecology clinic?  Nobody has a right to know why somebody is attending hospital.  I suspect the answer is that the juxtaposition of women happy to bear a child, with those unhappy to find themselves pregnant, would be too hard to bear for both parties.)  

But why this proposed curtailment of the right to demonstrate, either in front of clinics or churches?  Perhaps the police have advised that one of these scenarios is just potentially too volatile.  We know for example that “pro-choice” workers receive death threats in the United States; indeed some of them have been carried out.  But this has not occurred on this side of the Pond, where the demonstrators are often characterised as grandads and grandmas, holding placards offering help, while silently praying.  Many of these demonstrators, though not all, profess a religious faith, and indeed many of them are Roman Catholic…

…which takes us nicely to the other demo.  Here, the marchers are Protestant, though the profession of a religious faith may be less obvious.  The marches, in Glasgow, take one of several routes which seem to pass within sight, and sound, and often directly, by an inordinate number of Roman Catholic churches.  These demonstrations are much larger than those taking place outside abortion clinics, needing a police presence, and they are certainly much louder, aided as they are by substantial bands of fifes and drums.  By and large the marches take place peacefully enough, although there have been episodes of intimidation occasionally leading to violence.

In the Scotland of my childhood, you were expected to be either blue or green.  I was brought up on the blue side of the tracks.  My father was in the City of Glasgow Police.  The police held their annual sports day in Ibrox, the home of Glasgow Rangers.  I first attended a football match in Ibrox, when I was a child.  My uncle lifted me over the turnstile.  (For the record, Rangers beat Stirling Albion 4 – 1.)  Many of my uncles were freemasons.  They attended Burns suppers.  I don’t think I knowingly met a Roman Catholic until I was about 12 years old.  Then I met two cousins – an uncle had married a Roman Catholic girl; what a scandal that was.

This great sectarian divide dates back to ancient history – Luther’s 95 Theses and the Reformation, Mary Queen of Scots, James VI and I, the gunpowder plot (“Remember, remember…”), James II, William and Mary, the Battle of the Boyne…  The Reformation was triggered by doctrinal differences, theological arguments, and perhaps more importantly, accusations of corruption.  I think Luther thought the sale of indulgences was a scam.  But I don’t suppose many of today’s Orange Order could discourse on a single Lutheran thesis, or upon the doctrine of transubstantiation.  Yet the great divide remains.  Not only ancient history, but also modern history, is seen through the prism of the sectarian schism.  Many people regard the cause of Scottish Nationalism as a Popish Plot.  Before the 2014 referendum, a very large Orange March took place in Edinburgh, which was largely an expression of Unionism.  Many people went across from Glasgow to “the far east” to attend that rally.  Edinburgh is often regarded by Glasgwegians as a kind of toffee-nosed little England, but in truth, Glasgow, the second city of empire, is less Scottish than Edinburgh, and far more “British”.  I have a notion that when the Scottish football team lost 5 – 1 to Germany the other night, lots of Rangers supporters wouldn’t have been much bothered.

The championing of the ancient language of Gaelic is another Popish Plot, inspired by the Irish Republic.  People write irate letters in to The Herald, expressing outrage that our road signs and our emergency vehicles should bear Gaelic names.  The Northern Ireland Assembly was out of action for over two years, partly, and significantly, because Stormont couldn’t agree about support for Irish Gaelic. 

For myself, I think people should stop beating the antique drum, and let it go.  The trouble is that for many, the drum is not antique, and I suspect that is what underlies the difference in attitude of our representatives, and city fathers, with respect to abortion clinic and church buffer zones.  Protestantism remains in the ascendancy.                      

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.