jamescalumcampbell

On March 28^th I wrote to the Herald, as follows:

Dear Sir,

Reading the text of the Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill, published today (March 28), I am struck by 3 things.

First is the fact that the delivery of this proposed service is utterly dependent upon the participation of medical practitioners.  If my ex-colleagues decline to take part, the bill will collapse.

Secondly, there is no provision for an unsuccessful attempt.  Remember, there is not a medication in the world, or poison for that matter, that does not have a failure rate.  Under these circumstances it would be rational for the attending healthcare practitioner to administer a coup de grâce, in some form, but that would be illegal.  With this new set of circumstances, the initial directive of the patient (or rather, client), would be null and void, and the healthcare practitioner would be obliged to provide the client, perhaps in a coma, with palliative care. 

Lastly, Paragraph 17, Death certification, states “The terminal illness involved is to be recorded as the disease or condition directly leading to their death (rather than the approved substance provided to them).” 

In other words, the medical practitioner is being instructed to tell a lie.

Food for thought. 

Yours sincerely…

I was published the following day, more or less verbatim.  Well, not quite.  The first sentence was removed and replaced by a banner headline:

There are three major flaws in the provisions of the Assisted Dying Bill.

One thing any seasoned writer to the newspapers knows is that he has no control over the headline covering his piece.  I would not have composed that headline, because it implies that if the three major flaws could be ironed out, the bill would be flawless.  But I have an idea that it would not matter how carefully you crafted this bill, how lengthy it might be in an attempt to anticipate every contingency that might arise in every situation, there would always be a gap, through which somebody might fall.  M’lud might baulk at this, but I think this particular interpretation and elucidation of ethics and morality is beyond the compass of the Law.

I’ve said it before: when you write to the papers, the day following publication you must look out for rejoinders and ripostes, be they bouquets or brickbats.  There was certainly a sizeable correspondence about the issue, but I was neither endorsed, nor instructed to wake up and smell the coffee.  Perhaps the points I was making were considered slightly obscure.

But the focus of my letter was not really an expression in principle of opposition to, or, for that matter, support of Liberal Democrat SMP Liam McArthur’s bill.  Rather it was an expression of irritation at the implication that the cooperation of the medical profession could be taken for granted.  I’m not sure how much consultation has taken place.  I do know that some of the august medical colleges, and associated bodies, have moved from a position of opposition, to one of neutrality.  I remember having a discussion with a very senior representative of the Royal College of General Practitioners about the efficacy, or otherwise, of online consulting.  He thought that post-pandemic, the ratio of virtual to face-to-face consulting might settle down at about fifty-fifty, half and half.  And he raised a finger and said, “Finger in the air.”  I presume he was alluding to the way the wind was blowing.  In other words, whatever the prevailing trend, the RCGP would fit in. 

We see something similar now, with the shift from opposition to “neutrality” with respect to assisted dying.  Polls suggest members of the public are, in the majority, in favour of assisted dying, with safeguards.  Finger in the air.  So whatever our political masters decide, we will play along.

But surely the medical profession should debate this issue and come up with a point of view, and a policy, albeit one that medical practitioners may as individuals wish to eschew on grounds of conscience.  The idea of abstaining, standing on the side-lines awaiting the political vote, and then accepting the result with a shrug, is abhorrent.

I still can’t get over Paragraph 17.  I think I scoffed out loud when I read it.  Here it is in full:

17 Death certification

• This section applies where a terminally ill adult has been lawfully provided with assistance to end their own life and has died as a result.
• For the purposes of section 24 (certificate of cause of death) of the Registration of Births, Deaths and Marriages (Scotland) Act 1965, the terminal illness involved is to be recorded as the disease or condition directly leading to their death (rather than the approved substance provided to them by virtue of section 15).    

Muddled thinking is often characterised by woolly modes of expression.  Sometimes in common parlance we use “their” to mean “his or her”.  In a legal document it sounds almost inarticulate.  Perhaps the law-makers are concerned that people who profess to be non-binary may slip through the loop.  But in any case, how can the politicians take it upon themselves to make, from afar, a pathophysiological diagnosis?  How dare they?                    

Prof Dame Clare Gerada, one time chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners, now co-chair of the NHS Assembly, has been touring the BBC radio studios, trying to introduce some nuance into the debate about the huge rise in work absenteeism due to mental health conditions.  Mel Stride, Work and Pensions Secretary, has made the point that many such conditions are being overdiagnosed, and that the normal vicissitudes, the ups-and-downs of daily life, are being mistaken for pathology.  One can see how a discussion like this tends quickly to become polarised.  On the one hand, we have the stiff upper lip party.  Don’t be a snowflake.  Pull yourself together, pull your socks up, and just get on with it.  On the other hand, we have the “It’s okay not to be okay” party.  If you are struggling, seek help.  There is no stigma.  It’s good to talk.

Clare Gerada had some sympathy with Mel Stride’s point of view.  She felt that overdiagnosis was to some extent an import from the USA.  She quoted “conditions” like loneliness, homesickness, and shyness.  But in any case, whether you are just lonely, or whether you are clinically depressed, in most cases you are much better going to work.  The worst thing you can possibly do for a twenty-year old with a mental health problem, is to sign him, or her, off long term.  In other words, at least from the point of view of the capacity to work, the diagnostic issue is merely a question of semantics.

Yes, said Jeremy Vine (BBC Radio 2), but was the massive increase in numbers of people affected, particularly among the young, actually real? After all, he said, the suicide rate overall is if anything slightly lower than it was 20 years ago.  “Burnout” is on the rise.  But Clare Gerada pointed out that burnout has been around for over 100 years, first appearing in the medical literature about 1910.     Yet in some cases, an epidemic of mental illness appears to be real.  Brian Dow, chair of the charity Mental Health UK, pointed to the extraordinary rise in eating disorders amongst young women.  That is real. 

So the debate has developed this narrative.  Why are so many people off work?  Are they really sick, or are they “throwing a sickie”? 

But there’s another way of looking at this, which doesn’t generally seem to have been picked up on.  Maybe the problem isn’t with the workforce at all; maybe the problem is with the work.  Maybe people are exhibiting “work refusal” because the work place has become such a toxic environment.  The deterioration in the workplace certainly drove me, at long last, to refuse to go to work.  Not that I got a sick note, or a “fit note”; I just retired.  But then I was lucky to have that option.  Roughly from the start of the new millennium, I could see the way that the purveyors of, and traffickers in, information technology, had infiltrated my profession and taken over its governance.  Within a remarkably short timeframe, all business taking place within the general practice consulting room was conducted through the prism of the computer screen.  We became paper-light, then paperless.  The patient record, the laboratory investigations, appointments, and GP-consultant correspondence, all became virtual.  This took place during the noughties around the time of the new GP contract.  This defined a Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) that dictated the hurdles a GP needed to leap, or the hoops she needed to pass through, in order to satisfy the criteria for remuneration.  A series of pop-up menus dominated the computer screen, reminding GPs of the tasks required to be undertaken.  They might include documentation of smoking status, fulfilment of targets, say, with respect to cholesterol or BP control, and frequency of medication review.  Initially, the targets were pretty easy to attain and optimal remuneration pretty easy to achieve.  Then things got more complex.  Gradually, the third person in the consultation room, the computer, took over the consultation, which became dominated, not by the patient’s agenda, not even by the GP’s agenda, but by the computer’s agenda.  Who devised this agenda?  Down at the coal-face, we never really knew. But if the overseers were medical, they had bought into the IT model of patient care. 

Next up, “Whole Systems Working”, a series of table-top exercises generally concealing a hidden agenda, such as the perceived need to cut down GP-hospital referral rates. 

Within a decade, the entire modus operandi within general practice had shifted from the traditional model of the medical consultation – history, examination, targeted investigation, diagnosis, formulation, and management, to the imposition of a series of algorithms which rarely bore any resemblance to any real clinical presenting complaint, and the way it might be approached in a caring and compassionate way.  I hated it.  I fashioned a sign and stuck it up on my office wall: The QOF must be destroyed.  Then I got out.

I’m a little out of touch now, but from talking to ex-colleagues I don’t think the situation, either in general practice or in hospital is any better.  The “junior doctors” in England are perpetually on strike, or about to strike, and apparently the dispute is all about money.  But I suspect the discontent goes much deeper than that.  It is a humane and natural response to the dystopian work environment we have created in the twinkling of an eye. 

I don’t know, but I suspect something similar is happening in many other walks of life where IT has established itself, like a cancer, deep within our systems and has dehumanised the workers by making them stare at a computer screen all day, not allowing them to interact with fellow human beings in a normal and compassionate way. 

At work, I was never so happy as when the computers crashed.  For a brief interlude, we were allowed to establish eye contact with our patient, and get on with our job.  You need very little technology to conduct an effective medical consultation. Okay, the MRI scanner needs a computer, but keep it in the back shop.  Out front, all you need is a quiet room, a handful of simple devices such as a stethoscope, BP cuff, tendon hammer, and ophthalmoscope; some knowledge, skill, and wisdom, and an abundance of tender loving care.            

One of my Mitschüler (fellow students) in my German class remarked the other day that I’m always banging on about music.  I think he was more amused than offended by my preoccupation, and indeed I make no apologies for it.  If you talk in German (or any other language) about that which interests you, the attendant vocabulary will stick.  Still I accept it’s an obsession.  Last week I blogged about a Royal Scottish National Orchestra concert, and I wouldn’t normally revisit this theme so soon.  But circumstances prevail. 

A dear pal of mine sent me a text on Saturday to arrange a catch-up, and during our exchange she happened to mention, almost as an afterthought, that she was going to the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall that evening because her daughter, an actor, was to be narrator in Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Whoa!

I also had a ticket for this concert, but I had not known that Christine Steel was the actor in question.  Last week, conductor Thomas Søndergȧrd had talked up the concert and merely said, “We will have an actor to narrate…” or words to that effect.  I remember saying to somebody, “I wonder who they’ll book?  Some thespian luvvie.  It’ll be portentous, vapid, and hammy.”  Talk about rank prejudice! 

But now the concert had assumed a new dimension of fascination. 

We began with Fanny Hensel’s Overture in C Major.  Beautiful, and, I thought, rather Mendelssohnian, which may be hardly surprising as she was Felix Mendelssohn’s older sister, and they were very close.  I guess Felix learned a lot from her.

Then the RSNO Youth Chorus performed James Burton’s The Lost Words.  Acorn-Newt-Lark-Conker-Bluebell-Willow-Wren… All vanished from the childhood vocabulary, presumably because children favour their tablets, and virtual reality, to the great outdoors.  A sobering thought.  Yet the RSNO Youth Chorus’ evocation of that which we have apparently lost was so vivid that I felt there might still be hope that we have not entirely removed ourselves from the natural world.  The music was immediately appealing.  I’d love to hear it again.

Interval.

Then, an hour of pure delight.  If I had any butterflies on behalf of my friends during the break, they were completely dispelled when Ms Steel entered, took her bow, and took her seat beside the conductor’s rostrum.  Carine Tinney, Soprano, and Rosamond Thomas, Mezzo, occupied positions behind the orchestra.  Ms Steel has remarkable stage presence; neither overblown, nor portentous; merely quietly confident. 

There followed fourteen passages of glorious incidental music, mostly orchestral but with some solo voice and Youth Chorus involvement, all joined together by Shakespeare’s glorious verse.  Ms Steel was the star of the show, as she needed to be.  She spoke in an unaffected Scottish accent and her diction was superbly clear.  She spoke the words trippingly.  There was no thespian aura, no overlay.  The language spoke for itself.  It was an extraordinarily musical performance.  The rhythm was always in keeping with the tempo of the music.  It was note perfect.   

I see in this morning’s paper that Herald critic Keith Bruce agrees with me.  Puckish fun makes Mendelssohn’s Shakespeare-inspired tale a dream.  “Alongside the composer’s magnificent melodies and orchestration, shimmering and opulent, the other key element is the text extracted from Shakespeare, which was superbly delivered in this performance by Christine Steel, her verse-speaking an example of clarity and expression with just enough Puckish fun.”

Exactly.

The RSNO had also taken this programme to Dundee’s Caird Hall on Thursday, and Edinburgh’s Usher Hall on Friday.  Christine Steel’s performance will have been noticed.  We are going to hear a lot more of her.  So I will be banging on about music again on Thursday, at our last German conversation class before Easter.  We are all repairing to a local restaurant after the class where I have the honour of proposing a vote of thanks to our teacher.  I’ve always felt slightly uncomfortable speaking in public places like restaurants, where my fellow diners may not wish to overhear what I’m saying.  And in German.  I’m getting sweaty palms thinking about it.  I wish I had Ms Steel’s sanguine performing temperament.  But I will attempt to emulate her Puckishness, and immaculate sense of timing.

Else the puck a liar call.

So, good night unto you all.

En route to the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s Glasgow concert on Saturday evening, I ran once more the gauntlet of the M80 converging on the M8.  Speed limit?  What speed limit?  But there is a new development.  They are installing average speed cameras.  I’m not sure if they have gone live yet, but their presence certainly makes a difference.  Everybody had slowed down.  Actually there’s not much point in speeding here, because you are only running into a bottleneck.  The M8, for years, has been “up”, and going west it has been reduced down to two lanes.  I think the M8 is posing a fundamental, existential problem for the engineers.  Many people think that, fundamentally, the M8 was a mistake, going back to the 1960s, when it first cut a swathe through Charing Cross and fatally injured the heart of Glasgow.  The RSNO felt its effects even then.  Glasgow’s beautiful St Andrew’s Hall had been destroyed by fire, and the orchestra was relegated to a cinema, the Gaiety Theatre on Argyll Street.  I would take an electric train to Charing Cross and walk through a mud bath to an oasis of culture surrounded by the diggers and pile drivers.  I remember an afternoon concert being abandoned because the orchestra could not compete with the din outside. 

There’s still a bleakness about entering Glasgow to attend a concert.  Doubtless the desertion of the High Street by people who choose to lead their lives online has not helped.  The environ of Sauchiehall Street is a ghost town.  You can almost see the tumbleweed floating east from Charing Cross to the concert hall at the top of Buchanan Street.  Everything shuts early.  There is a seven storey carpark in Buchanan Galleries, just next door to the concert hall, which closes at 9 pm.  What earthly use is that on a Saturday night?  And the Concert Square car park across the road and next door to the bus station is not salubrious.  It has a sullen, ammoniac aroma. 

Despite all that, the RSNO continues to be completely wonderful, even when events conspire to thwart its best endeavours.  At the start of the concert in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday evening, Chris Hart, the orchestra’s principal trumpet, came to the front of the stage to announce that the concert programme had had to be radically altered at the last minute.  I can see why the orchestra’s management would have asked Mr Hart to undertake this unenviable task.  He has a relaxed, laconic style. 

We were anticipating an evening of French music with a watery theme: Trois Femmes de légende by Mel Bonis (1858 – 1937), a Scottish Premiere, les trois femmes in question being Ophélie, Salomé, and Cléopâtre; Ernest Chausson’s Opus 19 Poème de l’amour et de la mer, sung by Scottish Mezzo-soprano Catriona Morison, double winner of the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition in 2017; Ravel’s Une barque sur l’ocean, and Debussy’s La mer.  Alas, Ms Morison had taken unwell.  Conductor Thomas Sondergard later remarked that she had only managed to get through the performance in Edinburgh the previous evening.  Orchestras are often very adept at finding replacement soloists at the last minute, but I imagine finding a Mezzo familiar with this repertoire would be extremely challenging.  Accordingly, the orchestra’s renowned principal flute Katherine Bryan had volunteered to fill in with Francoise Borne’s arrangement of melodies from Bizet’s Carmen.  Then, alas, during rehearsals on Saturday afternoon, Ms Bryan took ill.  Not only was Carmen out, but the orchestra was short of a flute in a French programme typically full of the sound of the flute.  Adam Richardson, a graduate of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, got the phone call at 7.00 pm, and was on stage half an hour later.  He played second flute, and second flautist Jenny Farley was bumped up to the principal position.  So we now had a truncated programme with a revision of the order: Ravel, Bonis, interval, Debussy.  Despite all of that, it was a marvellous concert.  The audience was extremely supportive, and the flute section took a special bow.  Well sight-read!        

Talking of music, The Last Night of the Proms, Part 3 in the life of the troubled doc, is out, not only online, but in print, between covers.  Troubador Publishing Ltd, copyright 2024 James Calum Campbell, ISBN 978 1 80514 311 6.  This is a shameless plug.  Order it at a bookstore near you!

In her biography of the future Prime Minister, Winston Churchill as I Knew Him (Eyre & Spottiswoode and Collins, 1965), H. H. Asquith’s daughter Lady Violet Bonham Carter described her first meeting with the great man, at a dinner party, in 1906, when she was 19 years old.  Churchill asked her if she thought that words had a magic and a music quite independent of their meaning.  She certainly thought so, and quoted Keats as an example:

Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn…

Churchill had never heard The Ode to a Nightingale, but he was entranced, and went on to learn all Keats’ Odes by heart, and then of course, characteristically, to recite them back, mercilessly, verbatim.    

I’ve never been convinced by this notion that the power of language can be divorced from its meaning.  On the contrary, Charm’d magic casements are so powerful precisely because so evocative, the conjured imagery so intense.  The idea of relishing language independent of its meaning I find rather dangerous.  I think we should resist the temptation to value something that sounds mellifluous, even although it is gobbledegook.  You can make any piece of nonsense sound sensible, if your accent is posh enough.  This week I’ve greatly enjoyed reading Miriam Margolyes’ autobiography This Much is true (John Murray, 2021) and its follow-up Oh Miriam! (John Murray 2023).  The actor, perhaps most renowned for her potty mouth and outrageous anecdotes, was educated at Oxford High School and then Newnham College Cambridge, and she understands very well that one reason that she has gone so far in life is that she has “perfect vowels”.  Sometimes if I hear somebody with a cut-glass accent espouse a questionable piece of dogma, I subject the utterance to what I call “the stairheid patois test”, repeat it in broad Glaswegian, and hear the rickety edifice of verbiage crumble and collapse.  Language devoid of meaning is worthless.  So unlike Lady Violet, I would have denied Churchill’s assertion.  But I would have conceded that oratory can exert such magical, even diabolical influence.  Some people can hypnotise an audience by cadence and charisma, even supposing they were reciting the telephone directory.

Churchill of course went on to become an orator, after a fashion.  It didn’t come naturally to him; he had to work at it.  He had a speech impediment and lisped his sibilants.  He turned this to his advantage by cultivating a measured, drawling delivery.  He wasn’t quick on his feet, nor adept at repartee.  Rather he mobilised heavy artillery.  He once experienced a mental block in the House of Commons and dried up altogether, and had to sit down.  He feared he was going to be overcome by the same pathology – at the time termed “general paralysis of the insane” – that had prematurely struck down his father Randolph.  Ever after, Winston wrote his speeches down word for word in verse form, and memorised them.

We shall fight on the beaches

We shall fight on the landing grounds

We shall fight in the fields

And in the streets.

We shall fight in the hills…

That is perhaps his most famous peroration.  It is in fact so famous, that it has become sentimentalised and widely misunderstood.  It is thought of as an inspirational rallying cry to resistance, which it certainly is.  But it is not devoid of exactitude of meaning.  It is a prediction of an overwhelming invasion, literally a blow-by-blow account of an ordered retreat (note how the fighting theatres move steadily inland until the towns are occupied and the resistance is house-by-house), then a resurgence, taking to the hills and adopting the tactics of guerrilla warfare.  Churchill is telling the nation, without softening the blow, how it’s going to be.  The most remarkable thing about Churchill, his greatest achievement, was that he managed to persuade everybody to go along with him, when anybody in his right mind would have sided with Lord Halifax and sued for peace. 

Two questions we must ask of our orators.  Is what they are saying true?  And are they sincere?  If what they are saying is untrue, then it’s a lie; and if what they are saying is insincere, then it is humbug.  But in any case, are there any orators left?  Rishi Sunak?  Sir Keir Starmer?  I was a bit underwhelmed by Mr Sunak’s sudden appearance at the No. 10 podium on Friday evening, after George Galloway won the Rochdale by-election.  Usually when the Downing Street podium comes out, a world-shattering announcement follows, such as a Prime Ministerial resignation, or a declaration of war.  Mr Sunak regretted the election to Parliament of “Galloway” – he was not granted the courtesy of “Mr”.  Normally when somebody is elected to Parliament, he or she is congratulated, even by their most vociferous opponent.  Mr Sunak also regretted some, but not all ongoing street demonstrations, perhaps as exemplified by the heckler just outside the big gates, in Whitehall.  Apparently we are all tearing ourselves apart, but I didn’t get the sense that the Prime Minister’s speech was going to draw us together.  Meanwhile Sir Keir for the most part avoids oratory.  One has the impression he just wants to get to the general election without making a Big Gaffe.  Apparently the election is his to win (just like Neil Kinnock back in 1992).  It’ll be a shoo-in.  I’m not convinced.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the shenanigans last week in the House of Commons involving the Gaza ceasefire debate delivered him a delayed-action, but nonetheless fatal blow.  Sir Keir’s demeanour reminds me of that of Hilary Clinton at the run-up to the 2016 US Presidential election.  Desperation is not a vote-winner.  A couplet from Siegfried Sassoon comes to mind:

Somehow I always thought you’d get done in,

Because you were so desperate keen to live.

Now Mr Galloway is an orator.  He is currently the most powerful speaker in British politics.  Irrespective of whether you agree with his views, he is utterly formidable. The remarkable debate between him and the late Christopher Hitchens, concerning the Iraq War, which took place at Baruch University, New York, in September 2005, has with some justification been called the debate of the century.  And on the same side of the Pond, another remarkable orator, again irrespective of his views, is Donald Trump.  He can mesmerise a crowd.  That is why it is so important to listen carefully to what people are saying, and to analyse it in the cold light of day.  Give it the stairheid patois test. 

But close textual analysis is not currently flavour of the month.  Rather you can download instant opinions from Social Media, and get some piece of AI software to package it for you.  Nowadays you could probably complete a liberal arts degree without one single, original idea ever crossing your mind.  Dr Leavis (Ms Margolyes is a fan) must be spinning in his grave.  

“I was delighted,” said my boss back in 1982, “to have dinner yesterday evening with Mr. Speaker.”  I wasn’t surprised.  He was very high, an Edinburgh consultant general physician, a breed now all but extinct.  The unit had four consultants, the other three being respectively a neurologist, a cardiologist, and a liver specialist, all of some renown.  I was a Senior House Officer (now known as Foundation Year 2), attached to the unit for six months, and I remember early on my boss asking me where I was from, and what my father did.  I told him I was from Glasgow, and my father a retired policeman.

“Oh.”

I thought he was just making small talk.  I had no idea he was trying to place me, socially.  I have an idea that my bosses at the various Edinburgh hospital units in which I worked thought I came from a higher social caste than I actually did.  I peppered my conversation quite unconsciously with Scots words like “scunnered” or “wabbit” or “glaikit”, and they thought I was being ironic and highly amusing, whereas I was just, like, talking normal.  I must say they all treated me with great kindness, much as I would guess Robert Burns was received by the Edinburgh literati, 200 years before I paced the wards in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.  I expect the manners of the New Town have barely changed in the interim.  “You must come and meet Rabbie!  He has a beguiling turn of phrase!  A little uncouth, of course…”   

One morning I arrived on the ward to hear from the Ward Clerk that the consultant neurologist, a heavy smoker, had dropped dead, as smokers do.  I had the unenviable task of breaking the news to my boss.  I knew they were very close.  I remember his immediate reaction was to take out a tiny diary, study it closely, and muse, “That’s going to complicate the on-call roster.”  Then I informed the consultant cardiologist, who turned as white as a sheet and said, “S*** a brick.” 

But I digress.  I really wanted to talk about Mr Speaker, various Messrs Speaker, and a Madame Speaker.  Speakers are elected by consensus, and there’s a bit of ritualistic dumb-crambo when the elected figure is hauled with faux-reluctance by a cross party posse out of the back benches and manhandled into the Speaker’s chair. The Speaker takes up residence in a rather opulent grace-and-favour apartment within the Palace of Westminster, Speaker’s House, and until recently was expected to wear anachronistic apparel with wigs, breeches and the like.  My consultant’s Mr Speaker was George Thomas (1976 – 83), subsequently Lord Tonypandy, who had succeeded Selwyn Lloyd, and was in turn succeeded by Bernard Weatherill (1983 – 92), and then Betty Boothroyd (1992 – 2000).  If I remember little about them it was because I was completely swallowed up in the world of Medicine, and in any case I spent most of the last fifteen years of the twentieth century abroad.  But in addition, these Speakers, while being colourful characters, avoided publicity and made themselves invisible, essentially by chairing a prolonged committee meeting for the most part with dispassion and even-handedness. 

But as we moved into the twenty-first century the Speakers began to encounter difficulties.  Michael Martin (2000 – 2009) became associated with the MPs expenses scandal.  Essentially he was a scapegoat, as he had presided over MPs’ outlandish claims for the upkeep of moats, duck ponds and the like, and eventually he had to resign.  He was referred to disparagingly as “Gorbals Mick”, a misnomer as his constituency was actually north of the Clyde, in Springburn.  But in any case “Mick” is a highly offensive term for a Roman Catholic.  MPs can be remarkably tin-eared. 

John Bercow (2009 – 19) eventually succumbed to accusations of bullying.  His last days resembled the fall of the Roman Empire.  Brexit was the issue of the day, and for about two years the BBC news was interrupted by the chants of hecklers on College Green.  Interactions across the House became increasingly fractious.  “This Parliament,” bellowed the Attorney-General, “is a dead Parliament!”  It was like the Monty Python dead parrot sketch. 

The appointment of Sir Lindsay Hoyle as Speaker was an attempt to give the role back to a safe pair of hands.   But there were remarkable scenes in the House of Commons last week.  There is something deeply ironic in the idea that a debate supposedly seeking, temporarily or otherwise, a sensation of hostilities in the Middle-East, should have descended into chaos in an atmosphere of bitter acrimony.  Blessed are the peacemakers.  Ha!  Over the years we have watched, with smug disdain, schadenfreude, and even hilarity, footage of Parliaments in various corners of the world descending into anarchy.  The representatives have a fist fight.  Or the military Junta of a Latin-American country suddenly bursts in on the scene firing pistols into the air and, as the parliamentarians take cover under the desks, declares martial law.  The military are dressed garishly in outlandish uniforms, often with ridiculous headwear.  We say they belong to a “banana republic”, an expression which I forecast will shortly become taboo.  It is, after all, an affront to bananas.  George Orwell parodied the stereotypical English notion of Johnnie Foreigner, across the water, “jabbering and gesticulating”, while within these islands our leaders calmly and serenely epitomised the great triad of Britishness: parliamentary democracy, fair play, and the rule of law.

No longer.  Our parliamentarians have become the jabberers and gesticulators.  It’s a grave matter when we can no longer take our representatives seriously.  Parliament needs to be placed in Special Measures.

I learned a new word in my German class last Thursday.

Entrümpeln

To declutter.

There is a Turkish entrepreneur in Germany, one Ahmet Eroğlu, who will empty your house for you.  Why are you holding on to six broken umbrellas?  Or these ancient family heirlooms stowed in wall cabinets, cuckoo clocks, coffee grinders, plate, like the tea service you never use, vinyl LPs you never listen to but keep in alphabetical order – this, according to Eroğlu, a quintessentially German trait.  Mr Eroğlu’s warehouse is full of porcelain kitsch. He is something of an anthropologist.  He records his removals and posts the videos online.  Back in Turkey, the folks, millions of them, observe German customs and mores with astonishment.  The wealth!  The superabundance!  Why would you buy another television set when there is already one in the cellar that could easily be repaired?    

I’m all for decluttering, and indeed mending is better than ending, but I’m not sure about the attendant voyeurism.  Personal effects are, after all, personal.  And getting a stranger to tell you what is worth hoarding, and what is worth dumping, seems odd to me.  Some items have a sentimental value.  But maybe this is precisely why a professional declutterer can be so helpful, because he is dispassionate.  He is rather like a conciliator and arbitrator called in to settle an industrial dispute; or a facilitator, a diplomat, chairing peace talks between nations squabbling over a contested border.  Problems always appear so much easier to solve from the outside.  Your attachment to some dog-eared school prize you will never read again is as useless to you as your adherence to some outworn custom or tradition whose ancient historic provenance you have long forgotten.  Yet still you beat the antique drum.

Actually I’m not too bad at decluttering.  I visit my local tip relatively often.  It used to be run by a very nice wee man who would survey my discard pile, pick out an item he admired, and ask if he could have it.  Well, yes of course.  Recycling is a much better option than landfill.  He was a Dickensian figure.  Sometimes I would espy an old clock of mine on the mantelpiece in his Portakabin office, or a picture of mine on the wall.  But he has retired now, and his successor is a slightly intimidating man with the demeanour of a French customs officer, un douanier demanding if you have anything to declare, and then observing whether or not you will nervously lick your upper lip.

My most recent visit to the tip was merely to drop off the bracket of a kitchen ceiling strip light which had, literally, gone on the blink.  I would switch it on and it would flash repeatedly like a strobe.  It had lasted for 21 years so didn’t exactly owe me any favours.  I found a replacement with some difficulty, and tried to fit it myself, but only succeeded in breaking it.  My DIY prowess is lamentable.  At least I didn’t fall off the ladder.  Then, because I have a phobia of hanging around waiting for tradesmen, I lived for some weeks in a culinary twilight, making only occasional visits to the kitchen guided by the light of an open fridge door.  Finally I thought, this is ridiculous.  I got an LED strip light from B & Q, and an electrician fitted it for me with great facility, and now my kitchen is bathed in soft yet incandescent light. 

It’s good to dump stuff you don’t need.  Some neurophysiologists believe that decluttering is the stuff that dreams are made of.  Dreams are essentially our brain’s way of filtering out junk, rather as we might flick through ancient photographs stuffed into a shoebox, discarding most, but filing a few, assembled in order, in an album.  Maybe this is why dreams seem so disjointed, irrational, and bizarre.  There is some evidence that sleep deprivation can be a causative factor in various forms of dementia, and that this in turn might be related to lack of dream time.  The brain hasn’t enough time to declutter.  In other words, dementia might not be an inability to remember, but rather an inability to forget. 

Nowadays, of course, people don’t keep old photos in shoe boxes.  Rather they store them on their phone.  You might say this is the ideal solution to the disposal of junk; but in the context of neurophysiology, is this not just another hoarding habit?  People obsessively curate their lives with their devices.  They take a photo of their entrée in the restaurant, and put it online.  I’d rather occasionally rummage in the shoebox.  There’s a poignancy about looking briefly at the past, and realising that you were too busy at the time to notice its preciousness.  Vonda Shepard, who worked in the bar downstairs from the lawyer’s office in Ally McBeal, sang a wistful song about looking at old photographs, and realising she never knew she was in love, until the object of her affection left the neighbourhood.            

Books are my Achilles’ heel.  Frankly, I inhabit a library.  I try to adhere to the “one book in, one book out” rule but I don’t always succeed.  At least I don’t hoard newspapers.  I don’t suffer from Diogenes Syndrome.  I once visited a patient in a cottage in a rather remote rural setting.  I think it may have been the most bizarre house visit I ever conducted.  He was sitting beside a naked flame, in a room filled virtually floor to ceiling with newspapers.  A tinder box.  He had beside him a loaded rifle.  I asked him what the purpose of the rifle was, and came to discover that he inhabited a strange alternative universe.  I asked him if he would like to be removed from this situation and “sorted out” in hospital, but he assured me there was nothing to sort out.  I took my leave, and then I phoned the police.  One of the skills of referring a patient to a professional colleague, usually a hospital doctor but in this case the police, is to press the right buttons, to emphasise the particular aspect of the patient’s presentation which indubitably falls within the purlieu of the colleague’s expertise.  In this case it was the loaded rifle.  The police could not ignore that.  They kindly arranged the psychiatric referral on my behalf. 

I could as easily have received last week a visit from my own GP, who might have glanced appraisingly across my packed bookshelves, who might have chanced to espy my deadly Papua New Guinean bow and its quiver of arrows, given me by the lepers at Yampu, barely discernible under the flickering half-light emanating from my kitchen.  Would I care to escape from this situation, and spend a few days in a secure facility, while Mr Eroğlu wird meinen Schuppen entrümpeln?        

Vielen Dank, but I can assure you, there is nothing to sort out.                                  

I much enjoyed hearing Any Questions, from St Matthew’s Church in Perth, On BBC Radio 4 on Saturday afternoon.  I was pleasantly surprised.  Normally I catch the first ten minutes of this weekly political knockabout, and get exasperated by the incessant carping and sniping, the bad temper, the party political posturing, the din of people talking over one another, and the constant interruptions of the chair who, keen to steer the debate in a particular direction, becomes a fifth member of the panel.  I can’t bear it, and generally switch off before the end of the first question.  Question Time on the TV is even worse, and I haven’t watched it for ages.  Come to think of it, I haven’t turned the telly on for about a month. 

But this time I listened to Any Questions from start to finish.  I was in the car, and when I reached my destination I remained seated and heard the programme out.  This is how radio can enthral you.

In the chair, Alex Forsyth.  On the panel, Dame Jackie Baillie MSP (Labour), Murdo Fraser MSP (Conservative), Alyn Smith MP (SNP), and Joyce McMillan, freelance journalist and theatre critic for The Scotsman.  Five questions were asked.  All the panellists and questioners had Scottish accents; not that that matters, except in the sense that an extra character in the line-up was the City of Perth herself.  Perth City Hall, a magnificent building near the banks of the River Tay which until recently was threatened with demolition, has been refurbished as Perth Museum, which will house the Stone of Destiny and is due to open next month.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Any Questions will prove instrumental in increasing the footfall to the museum, and Perth city centre.

Listening to the programme, I had the sense that the panellists knew, and perhaps even quite liked, one another.  There was mutual respect, good humour, sometimes jocularity, and none of the toxic hate-filled rants, now so familiar on social media, of people deaf to the opinions of others who do not occupy a particular silo, or echo chamber.  The first question related to the advisability of political parties espousing tax cuts at a time when public services, such as the NHS, were struggling.  Murdo Fraser perhaps predictably favoured wealth creation as a means of supplying the prosperity necessary to improve public amenities. I can’t say this is an argument that attracts me, but at least I was able to hear its exposition uninterrupted, and to hear various counterarguments, of which Joyce McMillan’s was perhaps the most nuanced. 

Second up, alcohol minimum pricing.  Good or bad?  The Scottish Government is increasing the minimum unit price from 50p to 65p, which apparently will make a bottle of wine cost at least £6.09.  (Goodness.  When I think of the cost of a bottle of NZ Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc, I blush.)  I’ve grown used to the dismissive tone of frequent letters to The Herald.  Unintended consequences! Another example of the SNP government’s incompetence!  The alcoholics will just stop eating in order to finance their drink habit.  But no.  The panellists were inclined to follow the medical evidence base, and monitor events.  How refreshing.  But there was puzzlement as to why potential increased revenues are not taxed, far less hypothecated, but flow straight into the coffers of the supermarkets. 

The third questioner pointed out that the lower age limit for standing to be US President is 35.  Should there also be an upper limit?  Well, Trump is 77, Biden 81.  People are saying that Biden is losing his memory, while Trump’s apparent encouragement to Mr Putin, that he attack NATO members who don’t put 2% of GDP into defence, has been described as “unhinged”.  They say Trump is looking at Tucker Carlson as a potential running mate.  Jackie Baillie had a good gag, that Gordon Brown has apparently said he is too old for British politics, and too young for American.  Apparently she stole this anecdote from Alyn Smith.  There is cross-party collaboration after all.  What a contrast between this conversation, and the stand-off between the Democrats and Republicans across the Pond.  Far from “reaching out across the aisle”, the last outgoing party staged an insurrection when things didn’t go their way.

The fourth question brought the impending opening of Perth Museum into the spotlight, and asked for an evaluation of the importance of the Arts in the regeneration of decaying city centres.  Apparently Melvyn Bragg has been expounding the importance of the Arts in the House of Lords.  There was agreement and consensus within the panel, which I didn’t think was mere lip-service.  Alyn Smith gave a special plug for the Smith Museum (no relation) in his constituency in Stirling.  He’s quite right.  It’s a great resource.

Fifth question.  Just time for a quickie.  Football is introducing “blue cards” for consigning badly behaved players to the Sin Bin for ten minutes.  Who would the panellists put on the naughty step?  Alyn Smith sin-binned Jackie Baillie for stealing his Gordon Brown joke.

Great programme.  It was a fine exemplar of what could be achieved in public life, if people were kind and courteous to one another.  It was also a great advert for Perth.  It’s a great town, only 45 minutes up the A9 from where I am, and I often visit.  Generally I park in the carpark by South Inch, and sometimes pop into the nearby Fergusson Gallery.  From there I take a walk by the footbridge beside the railway track across the River Tay, and then follow the east bank of the Tay to access North Inch, and its neighbouring golf course.  The round trip brings me back into the city in the vicinity of the magnificent Concert Hall, much favoured by renowned musicians from all over the world, for its fine acoustic.  Perth Theatre, itself recently refurbished, is two minutes away.  And I can’t resist popping into Waterstones, a stone’s throw from the new museum.

I can’t wait to visit.        

Ian Fleming

The Complete Man

Nicholas Shakespeare

Harvill Secker 2023

When The Spy Who Loved Me, the tenth James Bond book in the canon of fourteen, was published in 1962, it proved to be commercially less successful than its predecessors.  Ian Fleming told Roy Plomley on Desert Island Discs that this was most likely due to the fact that he had departed from his usual formula, and made his female protagonist, Vivienne Michel, the narrator.  Fleming was rather dismissive of the work, with the old Etonian’s predilection for the Anglo-Saxon, litotes tradition of understatement.  It didn’t help that James Bond only made his first appearance two thirds of the way through the book.     

The same charge might be levelled against the latest Fleming biography, by Nicholas Shakespeare.  In a book with 70 chapters and over 800 pages, Fleming doesn’t get round to rolling a sheet of paper into his “battered Royal portable typewriter” at Goldeneye, until page 453.  The name’s “Secretan, James Secretan.”  If Fleming had stuck with that, I don’t suppose we would have heard any more about it.  But we can hardly blame Nicholas Shakespeare for delaying Bond’s debut.  He has after all written a life of Fleming, not of Bond.  And unbelievably, Fleming squeezed the entire Bond canon into the last 12 of his 56 years.              

When this very substantial biography of the creator of James Bond hit the bookshelves, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to avoid reading it.  I think I’ve read most of the Fleming retrospectives that have appeared throughout the last 60 years.  John Pearson’s seminal biography appeared in 1966, two years after Fleming’s death, published by Fleming’s own publisher, Jonathan Cape, who published the last Bond book, Octopussy and The Living Daylights, that same year.  Cape also published the first substantial critical analysis of Bond, The James Bond Dossier by Kingsley Amis, in 1965.  Other significant memoirs over the years have included Ivar Bryce’s You Only Live Once, Matthew Parker’s Goldeneye, biographies by Andrew Lycett and Robert Harling, and a collection of Ian Flemings’s letters (The Man with the Golden Typewriter) edited by Fergus Fleming.   

What does Shakespeare add to the mix?  His is a scholarly work, carefully annotated, indexed, and referenced, and as such is a fund of information.  Critics of Ian Fleming over the years have said that his books are charged with sex, sadism, and snobbery, arguably the characteristics that turned them all into bestsellers.  Certainly the snobbery is much in evidence throughout this latest memoir.  The upper class world it depicts is, frankly, repugnant.  Another aspect of Fleming’s character that comes through very strongly is his melancholia.  All his life he wanted to write the spy story that would end all spy stories; yet when he finally achieved his goal, he seems to have derived little satisfaction from it.  Having smoked sixty cigarettes a day all his adult life, he suffered a series of heart attacks.  His last days were, by all accounts, miserable.           

 Bond has become a kind of specialist interest for me; not the films; the books.  If I had to face an inquisition on the Mastermind chair, I would probably choose as my subject the novels of Ian Fleming.  I’m not proud of it.  I don’t think the influence of these books upon me has been particularly benign.  Yet the fact is they have been a presence in my life for almost as long as I have been able to read.  I can remember vividly my first encounter with 007.  My father borrowed Dr. No from the local public library.  The original hardback cover showed the silhouette of a naked woman amid tropical shrubbery, holding up her hands perhaps in distress, perhaps in horror.  Dr. No sounded like a monster.  I opened at chapter one and read its remarkable opening sentence, a distillation of Fleming’s unique world. Look it up.  Dr. No, the whole book, is itself a distillation of Fleming’s themes of exotica, menace, and the bizarre.

I also vividly remember the day Fleming died, in hospital in Canterbury, in August 1964.  Oddly enough I wasn’t that far away, holidaying in Midhurst.   

The first Bond book I read cover to cover was the second in the canon, Live and Let Die.  I incline to think now that I had better had let alone a book with such a title, and stayed with Louisa M. Alcott.  After all, the mantra Live and Let Die is probably going to kill us all.  And indeed, Live and Let Die is in many ways a pretty disgusting book, what with people getting eaten alive by big fish.  Yet I was fascinated by another monster – Mr. Big.  I could see that Mr. Big and Dr. No shared certain characteristics.  I could discern that the Bond books followed a pattern:

A blip on the periphery of the intelligence world.

Bond’s summons to the anonymous grey building in Regent’s Park, to be briefed by M.  He is introduced to a mystery, and a “mistery” – a professional world, of gold, of diamonds, of heraldry, of toxic flora.

An exotic location.  A girl.

A preliminary skirmish with an outlandish monster, a megalomaniac.  Perhaps a card game, or a game of golf. 

Researches, in the exotic location, into the activities of the monster’s empire.   

Discovery, and apprehension.

A severe lecture, akin to the admonition of a headmaster, prior to a caning.

A supreme ordeal.

Bond’s survival, and the grotesque monster’s gruesome demise.

Relationship with girl consummated. 

It’s pretty racy stuff.  You can see why Mrs Ann Fleming’s arty friends read the books aloud and chortled over them, while Fleming avoided their company and retreated to his library in the attic.  I suppose Ann’s friends thought they were John Buchan’s “shilling shockers”, formulaic.  Yet it is clear from Book 3, Moonraker, which lacks an exotic location, and in which Bond doesn’t get the girl, that Fleming is continually breaking the mould.  Moreover, Fleming’s own physical, and perhaps psychological, deterioration is reflected in the later books.  We first pick up on the arc of Bond’s own mental and physical decline at the opening to Goldfinger, when Bond sits in Miami International Airport and muses morosely on the sordidness of his own professional life.  From there on, each book starts with Bond in a state of depression, that can only be lifted by his taking on a gargantuan task.  At the start of Thunderball the cigarettes and spirits are beginning to take their toll.  He is full of self-loathing.  By the opening of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service he has decided to jack it all in and resign.  At the start of You Only live Twice he has lost his wife, his capacity to function, and his will to live.  And by the start of The Man with the Golden Gun, he has lost the plot.  He attempts to murder M.

Against this background of decay and disintegration, the world he inhabits becomes increasingly bizarre, and increasingly absurd.  Fleming himself grew morose because he felt he was running out of ideas.  And yet the worlds conjured in the later books are the most imaginative, and the most fantastical.  Fleming developed the power, utterly unique, of being simultaneously menacing and farcical.  We see it in the Ernst Stavro Blofeld trilogy of Thunderball, OHMSS, and You Only Live Twice.  In Thunderball, two extremely ruthless men conduct a feud on a diet of carrot juice, weaponising the paraphernalia of a Health Farm.  In OHMSS, Blofeld reveals his own Achilles Heel, snobbery; he wants a title.  And in You Only Live Twice, Blofeld retires to Japan “to cultivate his garden”.  And what a garden!  At the end of the day, in a strange way, the Bond books are absolutely hilarious.

It’s just a pity that the oeuvres were produced at such a cost, and perhaps also that effective interventions in cardiology in the 1960s were virtually non-existent.  Today, a catheter lab and the modern pharmacopoeia might have saved Ian Fleming’s life.  But would he have been able, or willing, to quit smoking?  Somehow I doubt it.    

One of the great curses of the virtual, digital world we are increasingly obliged to inhabit, is that we have all been rendered liable, and vulnerable, to the Scam.  With monotonous regularity, for example, I receive emails that just don’t look right.  Some of them are rather amateurish.  I am told, for example, that my television licence is about to expire and I must pay the fee ASAP to avoid prosecution.  Well, I happen to know my TV licence is current.  So I delete the email.  Sometimes I delete emails with dodgy subject headings without even bothering to open them.  Then there are the telephone calls preceded by a silence, followed by an automated voice, often with an overseas accent, telling me that my banking details have been compromised and I urgently need to do such and such.  I hang up.  Mostly I hang up during the initial silence.  If it isn’t going to be a scam, it’s going to be an unsolicited cold call.

Some scams are more sophisticated.  I got a letter from my bank the other day congratulating me on renewing my insurance (for something unspecified), and offering me a £20 reward which I could reclaim by visiting a certain website.  It all might have been quite bona fide.  But there was no postal address given.  And it just didn’t look right.  I binned it.

I dare say at some point I have been scammed without even subsequently realising it.  The problem here is that, nowadays, there is no firm demarcation line between a scam which is blatantly illegal, and a business practice which comes within the letter of the law, but which might be described as “sharp”.  This occurred to me: is it possible that we are all of us currently embroiled in an Enormous Scam?

It would be a hideous notion, would it not, if all our most cherished institutions were conjured, designed, and maintained, with the sole purpose of ripping us all off?  There is an article in today’s Sunday Herald entitled Learning made easy PC?  Why Edinburgh Uni is blazing a trail harnessing ‘life-changing’ power of AI.  Above the headline is a picture of a robot typing on a laptop.  Beside the robot is a young student looking utterly dejected.  He probably senses he’s being sold a pig in a poke.  Who’d be a young person nowadays?  Education is a cyber nightmare; he can’t get on the housing ladder; and now, apparently, he is going to be conscripted.  Despite the “levelling up agenda”, both at home and abroad, the gap between rich and poor is widening.  The rich and powerful, the great and the good, are running the show.  Who are these people?  They may be politicians, or captains of industry, or entrepreneurs.  Are they peddling a scam?  Are they selling us something they only persuade us that we need? 

I put forward seven postulates, currently bankrolling the world, which are, in essence, a swindle.    

1.  Entrepreneurs “create” wealth. 

This notion is often espoused by political parties to the right of centre, who believe in low taxation.  Rather than dividing up “the pie” more equably, you increase the size of “the pie”.  You do this by creating wealth.  As “the pie” gets bigger, so do the sectors that are sliced off for the poor and needy.  Some people call this the “trickle-down effect”.

It’s a scam.  You can’t “create” wealth.  You might find a means of accessing, and of distributing, the wealth that is already there, but you cannot conjure it out of thin air.  That would be a violation of the First Law of Thermodynamics. 

• You can create a perpetual motion machine.

You can’t.  That would be a violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  And yet, this is what the managers of many institutions strive to do.  They strive to automate their systems, and make their employees redundant.  When you try to interact with these institutions, you are faced with lengthy delays on the telephone, culminating, if you’re lucky, in a conversation with a robot who cannot understand your accent, and in any case cannot cope with the unique nuance of your problem.  Consequently we are all tearing our hair out.  The managers have not constructed this “provider-client interface” for our benefit.  They have tried to construct a magic money tree that does not need to be tended, cultivated, and nurtured. 

•  In order to recruit the “best” people, you need to pay top dollar. 

This is a scam.  How often have the “best” people, faced with an unexpected crisis, proved to be woefully inadequate?  The system, whatever it may be, recruits the person who is most likely to perpetuate the system.

The next three swindles are closely related to one another.

•  We are machines.

There is a widespread assumption that there is no qualitative difference between a computer and a human being.  This harks back to the work of Alan Turing at Bletchley Park and “the imitation game”, made famous by the film of the same name.  Turing posited that, if you were playing a game, like chess, against a computer, and you could not tell, from the moves of the computer, whether or not your opponent was an intelligent being, then to all intents and purposes your opponent was an intelligent being.  (In my student days I used to play chess against a computer, the size of a warehouse, located in East Kilbride.  I once beat it, and, when it found itself to be in checkmate, it passed a self-deprecatory remark.  For a moment, but only for a moment, I thought I was interacting with a sentient being.)  I have a notion that Turing’s statement may have been widely misinterpreted, but it so happens that it forms the basis of our concept and understanding of “artificial intelligence” (AI).  If a computer can resemble, indeed be, a human being, then a human being can be a computer.  One of the reasons why AI is so feared, is that these machines may become so sophisticated as to supplant us.  They will be superior to us. 

I have never bought into this notion.  We are not machines.  We do not solve a problem in the way that a computer solves a problem.  I don’t believe we have the first idea as to what intelligence, or consciousness, or self-awareness, or experience, or identity are. 

•  Because we are machines, we think algorithmically. 

No we don’t.  And yet, we have algorithms thrust upon us.  Many institutions would have employees function algorithmically because their behaviours will leave an audit trail that can be subsequently evaluated.  During the pandemic, our senior school pupils were subjected to an algorithm which modified their exam results sometimes with devastating consequences.  I can tell you that medical students are often taught by algorithm.  If this, do that.  Algorithms appear as a tree of options with a series of binary bifurcations.  But medical consultants don’t remotely think like that.             

•  Artificial intelligence can do what we do, only better.

There is no doubt that some automated systems perform tasks, often of a laborious and repetitive nature, better than we do.  But this can hardly be described as “intelligent”.  My own feeling is that the term “artificial intelligence” should be scrapped.  It’s a con.  Call it number-crunching. 

•  It’s coming.  No point in playing King Cnut to an unstoppable tidal wave.

This notion that the little person can do nothing to stop “the inevitable”, the quantification of human souls, is the most scurrilous scam of them all.  We’ve all been subjected to it.  So the High Street is finished.  Live with it.  Go online.  Politicians are all in it for themselves.  What did you expect?  Individually you can’t do anything about climate change.  So why bother? War is inevitable.  Why bother being a peacemaker?    

Because the fate of the world is dependent upon the grand integral of the thoughts and actions of every individual, the man, or woman, in the street.

When I was putting all these scams together, and noticed they added up to seven, I couldn’t help but think of As you like it, so, with apologies to the Bard, I give this précis in sonnet form:

The Seven Dodges of Man

All the world’s a scam,

Its movers and its shakers merely fraudsters

Whose smoke and mirrors hide their obfuscations,

Their propaganda being seven dodges:

Wealth’s energy is conjured from thin air,

Thence grown upon a magic money-tree,

Atop this Ponzi scheme the filthy rich,

(You need to pay “top dollar” for “the best”);

The rest, below, are binary machines

Too wee, to poor, too stupid to discern

Their shackles, cast by algorithmic laws,

By artificial intellect construed.

Thus the elite, gonged, ermined, Upper-Housed…

And us, sans house, cash, health, sans everything.