jamescalumcampbell

Politics on the Edge.  A Memoir from Within

Rory Stewart (Jonathan Cape, 2023)

This morning I braved the elements, and Storm Debi, to reach the local shop in search of newspapers.  I remarked to the shopkeeper, “The pavement has turned into a river!”  “Really?” he said sceptically.  I ‘doubled down’, as they say.  “Literally a river!”  Then, seeing a picture of the Home Secretary on one of the front pages, I said, “Ms Braverman’s coat is surely on a shoogly peg.  When the PM says he has full confidence in a Secretary of State, you can be sure the Secretary of State will be gone by lunchtime.”  At that precise moment, something pinged on my shopkeeper’s tablet, and he announced, “She’s gone.”

“Fell, or was pushed?”

“Sacked.”

“Who is replacing her?”

“James Cleverly.” 

I resisted the temptation to bask in the warm glow of my apparent prescience.  After all, the dogs in the street knew the Home Secretary was toast.  Now, amid all the shenanigans of our politics, there is nothing more ridiculous than a cabinet reshuffle.  Foreign Secretary today, Home Secretary tomorrow.  Civil engineer today, brain surgeon tomorrow. To master an enormous brief overnight requires a certain chutzpah.

But wait up!  David Cameron has just been spotted strolling into No 10.  And now – I’ve just heard it on Woman’s Hour – even as I write, the ex-PM has been appointed Foreign Secretary!  I didn’t see that coming.  Presumably he will have to be ennobled in order to sit in Cabinet.  Lord Cameron of Jura, or something of that ilk. 

But back to the day job.  Last night, with the intention of blogging about the book today, I finished reading Rory Stewart’s new political memoir.  Only to find this morning that the great ship of state had pitched and rolled on over the stormy seas of ‘events’.    

I thoroughly enjoyed Rory Stewart’s book, not because I necessarily agreed with any opinion he chose to express, but simply because it is so well written.  He recounts his entire experience of political life, from his winning the seat of Penrith and the Border for the Conservatives in 2010, to his appointment as junior minister in various departments, to Secretary of State under Theresa May, and finally to his running for Prime Minister in 2019, a contest which was eventually won by Boris Johnson.  He chooses to end his memoir shortly after that, for him, unsuccessful campaign. 

Rory Stewart comes across as intelligent, thoughtful, articulate, energetic, and extremely hard-working.  By all accounts he was an effective local MP and a worthy representative of his constituents.  His experience as Prisons Minister is fascinating.  I remember at the time the prisons in England were in a bad way, and he famously said that if he could not turn the situation around in a year, he would resign.  Well, a year later, the evidence was that improvements had been made, so he didn’t have to go, but it was shortly after that that he did go, when Mrs May promoted him to Secretary of State for International Development.  He held that office between May 1^st and July 24^th 2019.   

Meanwhile there were all the Brexit negotiations, and then his campaign to become PM.  One wonders how an MP, even one as energetic as Stewart, can simultaneously represent a constituency 350 miles from Westminster, run a government department, debate Brexit, and campaign for the highest office in the land. 

He does not paint a rosy picture of political life.  Indeed he imparts a sense of being something of an outsider.  The clue is in the title.  He is ‘on the edge’.  And, perhaps because he is now done with politics from within, he feels he can be candid in his criticism of colleagues.  (I say ‘done with politics’, but then, look at Mr Cameron.)  David Gauke gets a favourable review, Boris Johnson quite the opposite. 

There are two clichés that recur in any broad discussion about political life.  Politicians say they enter politics ‘to make a difference’.  It came up on Remembrance Day when Nick Robinson interviewed Michael Gove on ‘Political Thinking’.  If you want to make a difference, said Nick, why not become a social worker?  “Mmm!” agreed Mr Gove.  Actually he said “Mmm!” to virtually everything.  The other cliché comes from the electorate, and expresses a diametrically opposing view.  “Politicians are all the same. They’re only in it for themselves.”  I suppose Stewart’s memoir gave the impression that he was in it to make a difference, while lots of his colleagues were in it for personal advancement.  That sounds like a one-sided view, but Stewart is not blind to the fact that he often came across to his colleagues as posh, disdainful, scheming, and intensely ambitious.  My sense is that Stewart did follow the lights of his conscience in good faith, but discovered that the environment he found himself in was toxic.  So he got out.

I have this notion that the more exalted your position in political life, the more effete you become.  Mr Gove who was a journalist told the teachers how to teach; Mr Hancock who was an economist told the doctors how to practise; indeed Mr Stewart who was a diplomat told the prison officers how to run prisons; and Ms Braverman who is a lawyer told the police how to police.  But it is not the function of a Secretary of State to ‘run’ a public service.  Secretaries of State are there to represent the electorate, whom they serve, and to hold public services accountable to the electorate for the way in which services are delivered.  They need to stop telling people what to do, but rather ask them, “What do you need?”

But it must be extremely difficult to retain a sense of humility when the PM invites you to No 10, hands you the credentials of office, and sends you by ministerial limousine to meet your permanent undersecretary in some vast imperial edifice in the heart of Whitehall.  There is an amusing, if somewhat sobering anecdote towards the end of Rory Stewart’s book.  The Welsh MP Robert Buckland was intrigued that Stewart had an MP ancestor named Richard Rich.  Buckland’s favourite film is apparently A Man for All Seasons, based on the play by Robert Bolt, in which Richard Rich betrays Sir Thomas More on his way to becoming Attorney General for Wales, and ultimately Lord Chancellor.  Buckland also aspired to the position of Lord Chancellor.  Buckland backed Johnson in the leadership contest.  Allegedly Boris had promised him the position of Lord Chancellor.

What is it Sir Thomas More said?  I paraphrase: Why Richard, I’ve heard it said, what shall it profit a man if he should lose his own soul in order to gain the world? But for Wales?   

Over morning coffee, ”our group” – sounds like something out of a Dostoevsky novel – ruefully discussed the despicable state of the world, while our youngest member, a seven year old girl unconcerned with contemporary plights, amused herself with whatever trinkets she could find in my living room.  She was intrigued by a calendar on my mantelpiece, consisting of ten pieces of wood forming a cuboid structure of dimensions roughly 10 x 8 x 4 cms.  A base holds six wooden strips bearing on each side, in gold lettering, the names of the months; and on top of these, two cubes bearing again in gold the numbered dates.  There is a subtlety about this simple structure.  One cube holds the numbers 0-1-2-3-4-5.  So the other cube holds 6-7-8-9.  But you also need to repeat 0-1-2 in order to be able to produce, say, December 01, 22, and 31.  In other words the second cube appears to require seven sides.  It would be impossible, but for the fact that 6 can be inverted to double for 9.  For some reason this fact delights me, and I was amused to see that my remarkably self-sufficient young visitor was similarly delighted.  While we discussed the desperate state of the Middle East, she would periodically lighten the mood by contriving an absurdly impossible date and holding it up for inspection.

“April the 65^th!”

She and I both found this hysterically funny.  Children can escape the bleak world by simply stepping into another dimension.  Shakespeare did the same.  Didn’t he conjure “forever and a day”?  And perhaps even “the 12^th of never” – or am I confusing Twelfth Night with Johnny Mathis?

Now I find that whenever the world gets me down I can raise my spirits by slipping through a wormhole into an alternative universe.  For example, this morning I see that the government is minded to broaden the definition of extremism.  Officials in the Department for Levelling-Up, Housing and Communities, have come up with the following:

Extremism is the promotion or advancement of any ideology which aims to overturn or undermine the UK’s system of parliamentary democracy, its institutions and values.

“September the 78^th!”

What on earth are the UK’s “values”?  Perhaps they were in evidence last week in the Palace of Westminster, during the Covid Enquiry, when we heard that the erstwhile PM was apparently minded to sacrifice the elderly for the benefit of the economy.  Expletive deleted.

My young guest also amused herself by drawing a picture, which I subsequently found after our group had left.  I remember she borrowed my pen, but I didn’t pay any attention at the time to her artwork.  I think we had moved on to the war in Ukraine.  Anyway I have her picture before me now.  It is a simple line drawing of a robust double decker vehicle.  It might be a bus, but it could as easily be a security van bearing a prisoner from the underpass of a court in the direction of a jail.  There is a single individual, at an upper window.  It reminds me of the similarly whimsical line drawings in John Lennon in his Own Write (Jonathan Cape, 1964).  I think I might frame it.  Incidentally, Lennon would have appreciated distortions of the calendar.  Eight Days a Week.    

Talking of John Lennon, I see that Now and Then is, as I write, heading for the No. 1 spot.  It will be the Beatles’ 18^th No. 1 single.  I suppose it would have gone to No. 1 even supposing it had been released in its crackly state straight off the original cassette.  But thanks to the miracles of modern technology, all four members of the band have been able to participate.  I think it’s terribly good, a tad overproduced perhaps, but Lennon’s voice is instantly recognisable, and it is recognisably a Beatles song, delivered in a characteristically Beatles fashion, the tempo rather slower than you might expect, the tune memorable, and full of an ineffable sadness.  D’you know, I went to hear the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in Glasgow on Saturday night.  They were terribly good, too. They opened with a contemporary work.  I can’t remember what it was called and I can’t remember the composer, and I can’t remember the “tune”.  I didn’t make much of it.  In a way I understood the genre.  It was filmic, and atmospheric.  It conjured a mood.  But I confess most of the time I have a problem with contemporary classical music.  I’m always waiting for it to start.  It seems to set the scene.  But the scene neither commences, nor develops.  It’s one long intro.  Give me the Beatles any time.

But I guess it’s time to let them go too.  Indeed, Now and Then has been billed as a last hurrah.  The Beatles’ incandescent light shone for a remarkably short period; the phenomenon of Beatlemania really only lasted from the release of their second LP With the Beatles on November 22nd 1963 (not exactly a slow news day) to their final public appearance (aside from atop the Apple roof) in Candlestick Park San Francisco on August 29th 1966.  So let it be.  Now we must balefully turn our attention to Mr Sunak’s interview with Mr Musk, who tells us that, thanks to AI, no-one need go to work any longer.

“December the 99^th!”

But hasn’t Mr Musk already told us that AI is an existential threat?  And come to think of it, that particular date is even beyond the reach of my mantelpiece calendar.  It would bamboozle the best cruciverbalists in Bletchley Park back in 1940. 

But that was then; this is now.                               

Indulgently, I dined out, and dined well, on three successive days over the weekend.  Lovely purvey (as we say in Glasgow).  It was a chance to catch up with friends and relatives.  The chat was as nourishing as the food.  My mother was very fond of a quotation from Alexander Pope:

Here let us feast, and to the feast be join’d

Discourse, the sweeter banquet of the mind; 

I’ve been saving it up for any occasion where I might be called upon to say grace.  The last time I said grace in a public manner was at a Burns’ Supper in New Zealand, and it was the Selkirk Grace:

Some hae meat an’ canna eat

And some wu’d eat that want it:

But we hae meat, and we can eat

Sae let the Lord be thankit.

Of course I was asked to recite this because I have a Scottish accent, and indeed, since my father was from Ayrshire, I can make a reasonable fist of Mauchline patois.  When I lived in New Zealand, Scottish Television’s Glasgow-based police drama Taggart was very popular, and I was occasionally called upon to recite the line:

It wuzznae suicide; it wuzz murdur!

Personally I preferred to recite DCI Taggart’s line, when enquiring after the whereabouts of his boss, Superintendent Jack McVitie:

Where’s the biscuit?

Such it is to be a cultural curiosity.  But in fact, to return to the Selkirk Grace, Burns wrote it, at least in the edition on my shelf, in English.

I remember once as a kid dining in Drynoch, Isle of Skye, with the family of a very elderly and some three-time-removed relative (my family genealogy defeats me), who prefaced the meal with a long and, to me, incomprehensible grace in Gaelic, and then after the meal, somewhat mischievously, he tried to put my father on the spot by asking him to “return the blessing”.  Without hesitation, deviation, or repetition, my father intoned, “For what we have received, may the Lord make us truly thankful.”  This appeared to pass muster.             

On Friday I was in Haddington, birthplace of John Knox, and we lunched at the Waterside, overlooking the River Tyne, a stone’s throw from St Mary’s Parish Church, where Knox (in whose company my three-times-removed relative in Skye would have felt perfectly at home) was almost certainly baptised.  The food was delicious.  The sweeter banquet: we touched on Knox’s The First Blast Against The Monstrous Regimen Of Women, and concluded that Knox, were he around today, would be cancelled.  Since, in Edinburgh, the David Hume Tower no longer exists, and the statue of Lord Dundas, who purportedly delayed the abolition of the slave trade, was, at least temporarily, modified by the addition of a plaque, I am surprised that Knox, whose statue resides in St Giles Cathedral, has not been similarly modified and attenuated.  I have an idea that the City Fathers are a little afraid of him.       

On Saturday evening I was back in my local, the Lion & Unicorn, where the food is always delicious.  I was with my cousin from New York, her son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter. The sweeter banquet: we reminisced about my uncle, who emigrated as a teenager from Skye to New York just in time for the Wall Street Crash.  I remember driving along Fifth Avenue with him in 1982, in his 1962 Hillman Minx.  Yellow cab drivers would lean out of their window and yell disparaging remarks at us.

I last saw my cousin at a wedding in Waxhaw, North Carolina.  She and I had gone to a Presbyterian church in Charlotte.  I felt right at home there.  Of course the folks were very hospitable.  So it was nice to return the compliment, and my cousin and I went to Dunblane Cathedral on Sunday morning.  Then we all foregathered at my place for tea and coffee; here, the sweeter banquet was a piano recital.  Thence to the third of my lunches, at the River House in Stirling.  Despite the restaurant being very busy, the service was impeccable, and again, the food delicious.  The sweeter banquet: we spoke about hospitality, the theme of the service at Dunblane.

In Dunblane, we had celebrated Holy Communion.  More breaking of bread.  And the homily, thoughtful as ever, concerned the superabundance of dinners in the Gospels.  Jesus dined out a lot.  Zacchaeus, I’m coming for dinner tonight!  The minister at Dunblane, who has visited some extraordinary locations across the globe, and has lived and worked with many people of all faiths and none, made the point that, in his experience, the best meetings of minds occur over a meal.  I wondered what chance there was of representatives of the governments from Jerusalem and Gaza City sitting down together over a bowl of humus, if there is any left in the warehouses.  The world as we all know is going to hell in a handcart, and the blanket media coverage of the Middle East might convince you that nothing else across the planet is happening.  But one of our party foregathered in the River House is Russian, and she was able to tell me that the war in Ukraine is currently extremely bitter.  In the cathedral, the minister had prayed for the people of Maine; apposite, such a prayer coming out of Dunblane, of all places.  All violence is local.

The news can be overwhelming, to the extent that one might lose one’s appetite.  Maybe I ought not to have embarked on a culinary tour of central Scotland.  Then again, I am reminded of a line from the Cold War movie Bridge of Spies.  Tom Hanks’ character is a US lawyer called upon to represent a Soviet spy (Mark Rylance) who has been rumbled by the FBI and looks to all intents and purposes to be headed for an appointment with “Old Sparky”.  Hanks says to Rylance, “You don’t seem worried.”  And Rylance replies, “Would it help?”

Better to put some money in the Christian Aid envelope, and then go out for lunch.          

At the Goethe-Institut over the past two or three weeks, we have been looking at German and Austrian painters.  We studied the impressionist Max Liebermann, the expressionist Egon Schiele, a protégé of Gustav Klimt, and most recently George Grosz, specifically his painting of 1926, The Pillars of Society.  It hangs in the Nationalgalerie in Berlin.  The title is borrowed from a play by Ibsen, and its application to the German society of the 1920s is deeply sarcastic.  The painting is a grotesque caricature.

Five individuals are depicted.  In the foreground there is a well-dressed, monocled gentleman drinking a stein of beer and wielding a sword.  He has a duelling scar on a cheek. His tie bears the emblem of the swastika.  His cranium has been removed to reveal, presumably, the content of his mind. It’s quite hard to make out; at first I thought it was a battlefield cannon, but more likely it’s a lancer on a charger. At any rate it depicts an engine of war. 

On his right there is a journalist holding newspapers, and a bloodstained palm branch.  His hat is a chamber pot.  Behind and to the left of the journalist we have a Social Democrat, said to be a caricature of the German president Friedrich Ebert, holding a flag, and a pamphlet stating “Socialism must work”.  His head is open to reveal a steaming pile of excrement.  Behind them is a clergyman, apparently preaching through a window which reveals, outside, a world on fire.  Behind him, a helmeted soldier wielding another sword. 

The overall impression is of a group of individuals who are egotistical, selfish, uncaring, and corrupt. The basic message about these pillars of society is quite clear.  Their heads are all full of s***.

With the rise of National Socialism in the 1920s, Grosz knew what was coming.  He got into trouble with the Nazis and had to get out. He went to America.

The Pillars of Society is a painting which will be contemporary forever.  Surveying current affairs (if we must) both at home and abroad, it would be quite easy to recreate this picture in contemporary terms.  I leave it to your imagination.

For myself, as I said to the class, “Kunst war mein Horrorfach.  Ich hatte absolut kein Talent.”  Art was my horror subject.  I had absolutely no talent.  Saying that, I’ve grown quite interested in painting, even if I was never an exponent, and I always enjoy a turn round the Art Galleries after my German class.  Anyway, as much to lighten up the atmosphere as anything, my contribution was not a painting, but a photograph.  I took along a very famous picture of the Beatles, or the precursor to the Beatles, shot in Hamburg, perhaps around 1960 or 1961, by Astrid Kirchherr (1938 – 2020). It’s a black-and-white photograph of a group of five moody young men, with four guitars, a pair of drumsticks and a side drum, sitting outside on what might be a burnt-out train, in a derelict area with, behind them, what might be a construction site newly arising out of a bombsite.  The members of the group are, from left to right, Pete Best, George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Stuart Sutcliffe. George Harrison was 17 years old around the time this photo was taken. He was too young to get a work permit in Germany, and he got deported back to Liverpool. But somehow he returned. 

Kirchherr and Sutcliffe were an item, and I also have a picture of the two of them, a portrait, again in black-and-white. Even from the perspective of today, in the picture they both look so cool. Tragically, and not so very long after this photograph was taken, Sutcliffe succumbed to a cerebral haemorrhage. 

The Beatles were a very rare phenomenon.  They could easily have remained in total obscurity.  No doubt chance encounters with certain individuals were key, not just to their success, but to the discovery of the intangible essence of the phenomenon: Brian Epstein, George Martin and yes, Astrid Kirchherr and Stuart Sutcliffe. 

Sometimes I think history trundles along on two parallel tracks which rarely appear to converge.  Conventional history is the history of wars and rumours of wars, of the struggles between elites, those with their snouts in the trough, the “pillars of society”.  Meanwhile the Beatles are honing their craft.  Or, while Napoleon is bombarding Vienna, Beethoven retires to a cellar, covers his ears, and composes the Emperor Concerto.  (Not that the man himself would have called it that.)  Of the two parallel tracks of history, I know the one I’m more interested in.  And I’m sure I’m not alone. Recruiting sergeants will tell you that the hardest thing to teach a conscript is that the enemy is inhuman, such that he ought to be skewered with a bayonet.  Despite the hellish state of the world, I believe that most people do not wish to attack their neighbour.  How can we extricate ourselves from this mess?

As John Lennon said, “All you need is love.”

Aye right. Look what happened to him.

Sorry about that.  A sour note. I just slipped from E flat major, the key of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, to E minor, the fading final desolate chord of Vaughan Williams’ Sixth Symphony. Nuclear winter.  Mustn’t do that.  Never give up.   

A friend of mine, perhaps knowing my lifelong fascination with unusual words, has sent me a short piece about the phenomenon known as petrichor.  It was new to me.  I consulted the various dictionaries on my shelf, Chambers 1990, Chambers 2016, Bloomsbury Concise, The Shorter Oxford.  Petrichor does not appear.  I tried Roget’s Thesaurus, Chambers’ Crossword Dictionary and, as a long shot, Churchill’s Medical Dictionary.  No sign of petrichor.  As a last resort, I went to that final authority of English language and usage, The Oxford English Dictionary, its umpteen volumes compressed in my edition into a single tome, qua microfiche, the decipherment of its hieroglyphics requiring a magnifying glass.  I acquired this version of OED at the end of the last millennium, around the same time I got my complete Encyclopaedia Britannica.  I suppose such items are deemed redundant in the digital age.  Second hand booksellers tell me that Encyclopaedia Britannica is hard to move on. 

Back to OED.  I knew that if I couldn’t find my word, I would be left without recourse.  But there it was.

Petrichor a pleasant, distinctive smell that frequently accompanies the first rain after a long period of warm dry weather in certain regions.

Apparently the word derives from Greek pétra (rock) or pétros (stone) and ikhō’r (the blood of the gods).  The petrichor phenomenon was alluded to in a paper given by Berthelot and André at a meeting of the French Académie des Sciences in 1891, entitled Sur l’odeur propre de la Terre.  But it was not until 1964 that the phenomenon was scientifically described by Isabel Bear and Dick Thomas in Nature.  Thomas coined the term petrichor.  Apparently an oil exuded by some plants in dry periods is absorbed by soil and rock, but during rain the oil is released into the air, along with geosmin, a metabolic by-product of actinobacteria.  Ozone may also be present in lightning storms. 

The ozone rang a bell with me.  For I’m sure I’m quite familiar with the petrichor phenomenon, if not the word.  I can remember, in the Glasgow of my childhood, summer rain falling on the bone dry streets and pavements, and we would all sniff appreciatively.  What’s that smell?  One of my friends said, “Ozone”.  He said it was the same as the smell of the Glasgow underground.  I later dismissed this idea when I read that ozone was a colourless, odourless gas, but there you go. 

It occurs to me that the olfactory world of childhood is far richer than that of adulthood.  Hillhead Subway Station on Byres Road in Glasgow’s west end had a very distinctive smell, as did the nearby Art Gallery and Museum in Kelvingrove.  Hillhead, the Art Galleries, and petrichor had a lot in common.  Now I go into the Art Galleries every Thursday lunchtime after my German class to hear an organ recital, and I can’t say I can detect “the smell”.  Maybe there is a faint echo if it.  Can I remember what that smell was like?  Smell, and memory, are intimately connected, perhaps because the parts of the brain that process smell and memory are similarly intimately connected.  The Hippocampus.  We have all experienced a whiff of something that has transported us back.  Does it work the other way? Can a memory evoke a smell?  I should think not, at least, not unless pathologically.  Such an evocation would be an olfactory hallucination.  Did not George Gershwin complain one night, while playing in concert, of the smell of burning rubber?  Later he succumbed to a brain tumour.

Can you describe a smell so as to evoke it?  I’m not sure that language is capable of conjuring aroma.  If I say “petrichor” the odour does not reach my nostrils.  Some experiences, maybe most sensual experiences, are beyond language. What does marzipan taste like?  I can say it is sweet, but that barely narrows the field.  I might attempt extravagant imagery.  The confectionary acme of jaggery julepy saccharose nectary Turkish delight…  But that is just a word salad. 

In my search for petrichor, you might wonder why I didn’t immediately go online.  It is because I choose to inhabit an analogue world.  It occurs to me that the digital world is devoid of smell.  In Primary School, we always loved it when we were issued with some form of glossy.  The smell of thick magazine paper was utterly beguiling to us.  Mrs Miller would issue some text and we would spend five minutes, enraptured, sniffing the paper.  She was rather impatient with us, after the fashion of a dog-walker who can’t understand why her dog wants to pause and sniff lamp posts.  She has no conception of the doggy experience.  I also love the musty smell of old paper.  It reminds me of fossicking in the cupboards of boarding house common rooms during rainy West of Scotland holidays, and discovering ancient hardback copies of Biggles, and Nevil Shute.  They have an aroma that Kindle can never know.  The experience of holding and reading a real book is also tactile.  I must caress my volumes.     

I’ve just called the plumber.  Ballcock trouble.  He is coming sometime today.  I say “he”; I’ve never met a female plumber, a plumbress, perchance, though doubtless they must exist.  I could imagine a billboard for job opportunities featuring a young lady in chic overalls, supine with a spanner beneath a U-pipe, a smudge of grease on a cheek.  I hope she comes soon.  And I hope my problem can be solved by the tightening, or loosening, of a screw.  But I’m not optimistic.  There will be some kind of deep pipe thrombosis betwixt my house and the main street, unamenable to catheterisation and requiring open surgery.  The road will be up for weeks.      

I’ve never been any good at waiting around for tradespeople.  I feel as if I’m under house arrest.  And I can’t settle to anything.  I have a blog to write and I’m preoccupied conjuring dark scenarios about how the bathroom issues might pan out.  It was the same when the ball was on the other foot and I was on call in medicine.  I could never settle to any substantial task whilst waiting for the phone to ring.  I could only stare inanely at the telly, or do another crossword.  Incidentally there was a terribly good clue in last week’s Engimatic Variations, something like, Compound fracture set in Birmingham A & E (5).

Ester.

Ester? I hear you ask.

Cryptic crossword clues are made up, by and large, of a definition of the solution, and an alternative means of constructing it, designed to send you down the wrong path.  Here, the defining word is “compound”.  You are then instructed to “fracture” set, or break up the letters, and place them in Birmingham A & E.  Birmingham A & E is “ER”, because it is not Birmingham the terminus, as we now know, of HS2, but Birmingham Alabama.  Hence Ester.

I know.  I need to get out more.  But that’s the point.  I can’t.  I’m stuck, waiting for the plumbress.  It’s all the more galling as it is a lovely day, preternaturally warm for October, and, after the deluge over the weekend, blessedly dry.  Still, I can’t complain.  I’ve been out and about.  Having spent a considerable amount of time in the cloistered realms of Academe, I think of October as the start of the new term, Michaelmas, and it is good to re-establish routines.  On Tuesday I went to my first orchestral concert of the new season, given in this case in the Grand Hall of Stirling Castle by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.  It is a medieval hall with, under its recreated and highly elaborate wooden ceiling, a fine acoustic.  The SCO played a concerto for viola and clarinet.  The composer was Max Bruch, the conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, clarinettist Maximiliano Martin, and viola player Max Mandel.  We were, as they say in the world of aviation, “max’d out”.  I played the concerto last year with the Dunblane Chamber Orchestra – not the solo part, I hasten to add, but within the orchestra’s rank and file.  It is a lovely, melodic piece, but already at its first performance in 1912 (the viola player was Bruch’s son Max Felix), Bruch’s musical idiom seemed old-fashioned to the concert-going public.  It wasn’t “progressive”.  It’s a point of view that still dominates orchestral programming today.  All that beautiful music never gets a hearing.  There’s just no time, because Mahler 3 is so long.

We had our second German class of the term on Thursday in the Goethe Institut in Glasgow.  Viel Spaß.  Afterwards I took a walk through Kelvingrove and attended the 1.00 pm organ recital in the Art Galleries.  Another routine.  The following day I had a beautiful walk with friends around the perimeter of the campus of Stirling University, and even on Saturday, when the heavens opened, I managed a walk around the airts and pairts of Stirling Park and Ride while charging my car up.  And on Sunday I walked round Milngavie Reservoir.  The cloud base was very low and the jets 1,000 feet above our heads on final approach to Runway 23 at Glasgow were invisible.  A tranquil, still, autumn day. 

A kettle of small beer.  Still, better that than a kettle of stinking fish.  I shouldn’t sweat the small stuff.  The world is going to hell in a handcart and I’m exercised because I can’t flush the loo.  Still no sign of the plumber. 

But soft!  A text: “The engineer is now on their way to your property.”

Note the choice of pronoun – “they”.  The plumber may yet be a plumbress.  All will be clear between 12.16 and 12.46.                       

.                          

On Private Passions on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday, Olivia Harrison spoke very movingly about two of the great tragedies of her life – the murder of John Lennon in 1980, and the premature death of her husband George, in 2001, who died at the age of 58 from lung cancer.  Also, she spoke of the night an intruder broke into their home and attacked her, and George, with a knife.  You think you are a man, or woman, of peace, like John, and then all of a sudden you are under attack, and in the blink of an eye you need to forget all that and resort to violence in order to defend yourself, and those you love. 

This dilemma is encountered at a personal level, but also nationally, and globally.  What do you do if your neighbour attacks you?  Turn the other cheek?  But if you do, you will be exterminated.  Our Lord knew this perfectly well.  When his disciples said they would follow him to the ends of the earth, he shook his head and said, you don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for.  Or words to that effect.

Michael Caine, now 90, has made a film, with Glenda Jackson in her last role before her death, about a veteran who breaks out of his care home in England in order to return to the beaches of Normandy for the 70th anniversary of D-Day.  The Great Escaper.  When the title caught my eye I first thought it might be a film about Roger Bushell, because I have a book of that same title, by Simon Pearson (Hodder & Stoughton, 2013) all about Bushell, “Big X” of Stalag Luft III.  Incidentally, I see that David McCallum, “Dispersal” in The Great Escape, also of Ilya Kuryakin fame, has died aged 90.  He was the son of David McCallum, the leader of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, in its heyday under Sir Thomas Beecham.  They provided the soundtrack, along with Yehudi Menuhin, for a film about Paganini, The Magic Bow.  Menuhin screen tested for the starring role (at least they wouldn’t have had to dub Paganini’s violin playing) and there is a rather ridiculous photograph of Menuhin dressed for the part in his autobiography Unfinished Journey.  He didn’t get the part, which went to Stewart Granger.  Granger had to learn at least to look like a fiddle player, and McCallum Sr. was his tutor in this regard.  Now McCallum played a Stradivarius, and it is a measure of his magnanimity that he handed the instrument over to Granger during rehearsals with the LPO.  So Granger dreamed up a gag.  He surreptitiously substituted a cheap fiddle for the Strad and, during rehearsal, apparently frustrated at his own incompetence, he had a fit of temper and proceeded to smash the fiddle to pieces.  McCallum went as white as a sheet.  If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a practical joker.

(This reminds me of another story about an actor trying to look as if he could play a musical instrument.  James Stewart played the part of the band leader Glenn Miller, who played the trombone.  You can watch the late Michael Parkinson’s interview with Stewart, in which the actor recounts the anecdote, in his laconic style, about a trombone teacher brimming with enthusiasm at the prospect of teaching him the trombone, and then proceeding to have a nervous breakdown.  It’s hilarious.) 

But I digress.  Somebody on the film set of The Great Escaper took a look at the endless memorials to the war dead in Normandy, and remarked that it was such a waste.  But no, said Michael Caine.  Not a waste.  Hitler had to be stopped.  So we return to the dilemma, what do you do if your neighbour attacks you? 

I see that the Doomsday Clock, specifically with respect to a nuclear holocaust, has been moved forward to ninety seconds to midnight.  Ironically, it might have been Herr Hitler himself who dreamed up the Doomsday Clock.  Alistair Cooke of Letter from America fame once heard Hitler speak at a rally in a German village during the 1930s.  For some unaccountable reason, Hitler had a nurse in attendance.  Perhaps he felt members of his audience might succumb to emotion.  If so, he was probably right.  He kept saying, “Fünf Minuten vor Mitternacht!” 

Anyway I caught up with the latest Doomsday time-check in an extended article in the Sunday Telegraph (I only take it to attempt the fiendish crossword Enigmatic Variations), Inside the world’s new nuclear weapons arms race, by Lewis Page.  Page is rather dismissive of the latest time check, and indeed employs an argument ad hominem.  The board of 18 members which sets the clock is not made up of atomic scientists, but political scientists, a lawyer, US Democrats and so on; no Republicans. 

The numbers are interesting.  9 countries possess nuclear weapons, the global nuclear stockpile is 12,000 weapons, 90% of them belonging to the USA and Russia.  China has 400, the UK has 120, 40 of them “actively deployed”.  The weapons are becoming increasingly sophisticated, especially in terms of their ability to approach a target undetected, and with extraordinary rapidity.  Lewis Page seems to be quite sanguine about all this.  Apparently we will need nuclear weapons to destroy encroaching asteroids.

I read all this with a gathering sense of dismay, especially as I am currently reading Mike Rossiter’s The Spy who Changed the World (Headline, 2014), all about the scientist Klaus Fuchs who worked on the UK’s nuclear project Tube Alloys, then on the Manhattan Project in the US, and subsequently on the UK’s development of its own bomb, all the while spying for the Soviet Union.  I’ve reached 1949, and I have a sense he is about to be nobbled.  I find him rather a sympathetic character, rather like Mark Rylance’s character Rudolf Abel in the film Bridge of Spies, whom I recall Tom Hanks’s character James B. Donovan also rather took to.  I’m still not clear on what Fuchs’ motivation was, other than that it must have been born of his early life in Germany, and the realisation that, as Michael Caine said, Hitler had to be stopped.  Which brings us back to Olivia Harrison’s dilemma.  What are you to do when you come under violent attack?

I’m afraid I don’t share Lewis Page’s apparent complacency.  And I don’t think our current crop of political masters spends too much time thinking about global issues.  As James Donovan might say, they don’t seem worried – to which Rudolf Abel might reply, would it help?  They are too busy trying to win the next general election.  I’m getting an attack of the vapours.  I need to be attended by the Führer’s Krankenschwester, with a dose of smelling salts.     

The Herald published two letters from me during this past week, so I suppose that must qualify me, for the time being, as a frequent contributor.  I scribble away.  People will be saying, “Not him again!”  The most frequent contributors to the letters pages of the Herald tend to write, almost exclusively, on the Scottish constitutional question.  Supporters of Scottish independence (the Unionists call them “separatists” because they want to “rip apart” the UK) tend to think that the Unionists are universally morose and consider Scotland “too wee, too poor, and too stupid” to be an independent nation, while the Unionists consider that the “separatists” have a massive chip on their shoulder, an endless and insatiable grievance, and continually deflect criticism of the SNP by using the technique of “whataboutery”, and casting aspersions on Westminster.  For myself, I tend to avoid the constitutional question, not because I don’t hold views, but because I always remember the advice of a former President of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine: “Don’t be seduced into entering an argument with somebody whose views cannot be changed.”  Besides, there is much else to write about.  For example, the debate about Assisted Dying is back before the Scottish Parliament, which prompted my first letter:

In the ongoing debate around the Assisted Dying Bill currently before Holyrood, it occurs to me that in our age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), it would be theoretically and indeed practically possible to remove human agency entirely from any end of life procedure, which could be undertaken by robots, thus obviating any requirement for new legislation.  It is after all not against the law to end one’s own life, merely to assist another so to do.  The terminally ill patient, should he or she so choose, would instruct the robot to conduct a home visit, arriving by driverless car, to administer a lethal cocktail.  I don’t mean to be facetious about this, far less vexatious.  Robotic surgeons already carry out operations far more complex than this. 

Of course there would be a flurry of parliamentary activity as our MSPs practised catch-up legislation.  Doubtless it already exists in draft form.  The science fiction author Isaac Asimov introduced the Three Laws of Robotics in his 1942 short story Runaround (part of the 1950 collection I, Robot), presented in the fictional Handbook of Robotics, 56^th Edition, 2058 A.D.  The laws are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders could conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

To these three laws, Asimov subsequently and retrospectively added a Zeroth Law:

• A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. 

The ethical issue that arises is whether or not the termination of a life deemed intolerable by the person living it constitutes a “harm”.  It is said that if you chance to see a distressed individual in a railway station about to fall in front of an approaching train, a useful question to ask is, “Is it living, or the pain that you want to stop?”  I can’t say I would relish AI moving into the field of thanatology, which sounds like something out of a dystopian novel by Aldous Huxley, but at least the medical and nursing professions could keep their distance, and concentrate on the day job.   

I was amused to find that Asimov considered it necessary to concoct a Zeroth Law to precede his Three Laws of Robotics.  I suppose he must have modelled this on the laws of thermodynamics, to wit, in brief, that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, there is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine, absolute zero (-273C) can be approached but never attained (thus flouting Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle)… and then, in retrospect, something that was first appreciated by James Clerk Maxwell, that if A has the same temperature as B, and B has the same temperature as C, then A has the same temperature as C.  I suppose that is why we believe in thermometers.  Maxwell’s insight was that this statement is, as our philosophers would say, a posteriori, rather than a priori; that is, it is not self-evident but has to be experimentally demonstrated, and vindicated.

Asimov’s Laws of Robotics are less flippant than they look.  The Zeroth Law is the moral equivalent of the fourth pillar of the axiomatic principles of medical ethics of Beauchamp and Childress, justice, itself a kind of zeroth law, added retrospectively after autonomy, beneficence, and non-maleficence.  The plight of an individual at the end of life has to be seen within the context of humanity at large.  Therefore do not send to know for whom the bell tolls.          

I remember being present at the annual conference of the Royal College of General Practitioners – it was either in Liverpool or in Harrogate, I can’t remember which – when the late Margo MacDonald put forward her then proposed Bill before the Scottish Parliament for the introduction of assisted dying under stringently controlled conditions.  I remember a GP sitting on my left whispered to me, “She’s not very bright, is she?”  I am convinced the only reason why he thought such a thing, was that Ms MacDonald spoke with a pronounced, industrialised West of Scotland accent.  I can’t think of any other reason. I reassured the GP, “On the contrary, she is very bright.” 

I respected what Margo MacDonald had to say, but as you can tell from my letter, I’m not for it.  To be honest, I’m phobic of it.  My visceral reaction to it is the same as my reaction to capital punishment.  It occurs to me, what would happen if somebody on Death Row in the US requested to be transferred to Oregon for an assisted suicide?  Would the prisoner fit the criteria?  It could be argued that he had a terminal disease, the condition of being on Death Row, and a life expectancy of less than six months might be valid.

I have another question about assisted suicide.  What happens if it all goes wrong?  All the hoops have been gone through, all the forms are signed, and the lethal cocktail is quaffed.

But it doesn’t work.

(Just in case you imagine this can’t happen, may I remind you of an adage frequently recited in medicine: show me a treatment that has no side effects, and I’ll show you a treatment that doesn’t work.)

What are the attending doctors to do with a patient who has not succumbed?  Do the signed papers still hold good, such that some kind of coup de grace may be administered, or are we in virgin territory, in which a decompensating patient must now be resuscitated?  I don’t know. 

Bur enough of this baleful topic. Moving on to Herald letter No. 2, it so happened that during the week, a plaque was removed from the base of an Edinburgh statue of Henry Dundas.  Dundas, at least according to the plaque, delayed the abolition of slavery to the extent that half a million slaves still got transported across the Atlantic while he swithered.  The historian T. M. Devine disputes this interpretation.  With this skeletal background, here is my letter.  Some of the material has previously appeared in this my weekly blog. 

Dr Martin Luther King’s memorable “I have a dream” speech, given before the Lincoln Memorial on August 28^th, 1963, contains a remarkable sentence which begins:

“I have a dream that one day down in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification…”

All my life I’ve wondered, what are the words of interposition and nullification?  I don’t know, but I would hazard a guess that they were the governor’s way of putting a brake on the aspirations of the civil rights movement. 

Now I find, by a strange ironic twist, that the words of interposition and nullification are everywhere.  They are, or were, on the plaque at the base of the statue of Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, in St Andrew Square, providing “context”.  They are on the frontispiece of the 2023 republication of Ian Fleming’s Live and Let Die, telling us that social attitudes were different in 1953.  Duh.  An early chapter in that book has been renamed “Seventh Avenue”, and gutted.  We can look to the United States to see the inevitable corollary to such interventions, with the banning of books from schools and libraries (Book bans hit record high in US libraries, Herald, September 21).  Some of the books in question are To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, Huckleberry Finn, Slaughterhouse Five, and the Harry Potter series.  They have been assigned to oblivion, as if by that wretched character in 1984, Syme, whose job it was to obliterate the English language.  And look what happened to him.

I wish people would stop telling us, you and me, what to think.  I am quite capable of reading a book, or looking at a statue, which is after all a work of art, and making up my own mind about its meaning and purport.  I can do without the context of somebody else’s interposition and nullification.  We only need three words on a book’s frontispiece, or a statue’s plaque:

Complete and Unabridged.                                    

Being in Glasgow yesterday, emerging from Kelvingrove Art Gallery to find it had stopped raining of a preternaturally warm autumn afternoon, we strolled up to the top of Kelvingrove Park to view the statue of Lord Roberts of Kandahar, just to see whether anybody had reapplied in red paint the word “Monster”, or indeed whether somebody had appended a plaque of interposition and nullification.  All was well with the statue.  However, we did also pass the statues of Lord Kelvin, and Joseph Lister on the way back, both bedecked with traffic cones after the fashion of the Duke of Wellington outside the Gallery of Modern Art.  I think it is unfortunate that Banksy allegedly remarked that the traffic cone atop the Duke of Wellington is Glasgow’s finest work of art.  Arthur Wellesley’s Glasgow bunnet is, I fear, a permanent fixture.  I’m thinking of crafting a plaque to add to the statue’s base, which would provide “context” to future generations:

The traffic cone was a late amendment to this statue, tolerated at a time when people were more resigned to Glasgow’s edginess, its litter culture, Old Firm sectarianism, and anarchic loutishness.  Wha’s like us?      

The theme of the Church of Scotland’s lectionary this week was forgiveness.  The Old Testament reading was Genesis Chapter 50, verses 15 – 21, in which Joseph forgave his brothers for selling him into slavery; and the New Testament reading was Matthew Chapter 18, verses 21 – 35, in which Peter asks Jesus how often he should forgive his brother for sinning against him.  Seven times?  No, says Our Lord, but seventy times seven times.  One could imagine a literalist might store up a grudge 490 times and, on the 491^st episode of enduring harm, letting rip with a vengeance.  But, you may say, surely our Lord meant that our capacity to forgive should be unending.  But does the illustrative parable Jesus went on to tell back up such an interpretation? 

A certain servant owed his king a vast sum of money – 10,000 talents.  He begged the king to give him time to repay the debt.  The king took pity on him, and cancelled the debt.  But then the servant went out and confronted his servant, who owed him a far smaller debt, 100 pence.  The wretched man begged for time to repay the debt but no!  He was flung into debtor’s prison.  Well!  When the king came to hear about it, he was absolutely furious.  He summoned the man who had owed him 10,000 talents, tore a strip off him, reneged on his promise to cancel the debt, flung the man into prison, and had him tortured.

Of such is the kingdom of heaven.

But wait a minute.  Far from enduring a wrong 490 times, the king only forgave once.  Two strikes and you’re out.  How does Jesus’ parable reinforce his doctrine of forgiveness?  Ah but, I hear you say.  The king in the parable is God, and God is perfectly entitled to act by a different set of rules.  Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.  In fact, far from forgiving the servant this time round, he tortures him.  Lurking anonymously like Nicodemus in the rear pews of Dunblane Cathedral on Sunday I couldn’t help noticing that the reader chose to skip the bit about torture.  It is the way of the modern world.  There might have been a rider in the order of service: “This parable was written 2,000 years ago, when no Declaration of Human Rights existed, and torture was widely regarded as an appropriate corrective procedure…”  No change there, then. 

I could imagine Richard Dawkins, who is single-handedly waging a personal crusade against God, might add this parable to a very long list of incidences in which God is not portrayed in a very favourable light.  There was an extensive piece about Richard Dawkins (The Sunday Interview) in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph.  I think he must be mellowing.  He professes to vaguely enjoying Anglicanism.  “I suppose I’m a cultural Anglican and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green.”  You can take the man out of the church, but you can’t take the church out of the man.  I dare say he would have thought more kindly of Joseph in the Old Testament, who forgave his brothers for selling him into slavery.  In fact, Prof Dawkins has views on the modern predicament in which the UK finds itself, having historically made vast sums of money out of slavery.  You can’t, he says, apologise to people who are dead, on behalf of other people who are dead.  That reminded me of a remark overheard by a neighbour of mine, when he recently attended a conference of Freemasons in the unlikely location of Beirut, when an Indian gentleman remarked to a Black American, “Listen friend.  I don’t own any slaves, and you don’t pick any cotton.” 

But it’s never as simple as that.  My fellow Americans, said Abe Lincoln, who after all abolished slavery, we cannot escape history.  You only need to go to places which have notable pasts, either recent or remote, and you feel history all around you. I think of Belfast; I think of Gibraltar – two remarkably similar places.  No surrender! 

Not surprisingly, Prof Dawkins has trenchant views on gender reform.  “I shall continue to use every one of the prohibited words.”  Interestingly, on the front page of the same Sunday Telegraph, there is the headline, “GMC removes word mother from staff maternity guidance”. 

In today’s culture wars, forgiveness is not much in evidence, but rather its diametric opposite, cancellation.  Yet we are taught to pray for forgiveness.  The Church of Scotland uses two versions of the Lord’s Prayer.  One, which is working class, says “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”, and the other, which is middle class, says “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  There is no upper class version.  The upper classes cannot trespass, they can only be trespassed upon.  The working class doesn’t give a hoot about trespass; in Scotland there is after all a right to roam.  But they are very scared of landing in debt.  Sometimes in C of S Orders of Service you see “The Lord’s Prayer (debts).”  It has a parsimonious ring. 

I have to admit I’m something of an outsider in Dunblane Cathedral.  I slip in, I maybe have a brief chat with some acquaintances, and I slip out.  A couple of years back the minister asked me to join the cathedral’s music committee (there is a lively music scene in Dunblane Cathedral) to represent the congregation, and I did so.  I confess I lasted two hours.  I felt like a fish out of water.  I guess I’m not a committee man.  I resigned.  Then, quite recently, the minister was giving a sermon on Doors of Opportunity.  “Remember,” he said, “that when a minister, or a church member, asks you to do something, it may not be the minister or the church member who is posing you the question” – and at this point, so it seemed to me, the minister was looking directly at me, “It may be God.”

Probably just my imagination. 

The pews in Dunblane, as with many other Churches of Scotland, are getting very scant.  And there are very few children.  What are they all doing?  Staring at their tablets?  No wonder there is so little forgiveness in our society.  No-one is being taught its value.  At this rate, once my generation is gone, the pews will be empty, and Richard Dawkins will have fulfilled his Great Ministry.  Yet, apparently, for one reason or another, he is going to miss choral evensong.                                         

On Friday, the second last night of the Proms happened to coincide with the opening of the Rugby World Cup in Paris, but I guess it was no mere coincidence that the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra opened with Arthur Honegger’s second Mouvement Symphonique, Rugby.  Apparently rugby was Honegger’s favourite game.  I certainly found myself imagining the development of play during a lively orchestral interlude.  That sounds like a line-out, now a ruck, a smuggled ball, a rolling maul, now the ball flashed out to the backs, a tackle on the try line, a forward pass… scrum down.  It was all very vivid.

On Saturday, The Herald published a glossy, as it is intermittently wont to do, talking up some of the private schools in Scotland.  And, in turn therein, somebody wrote about the sport of rugby, and its importance in the school ethos, as informing the other disciplines of the school in terms of esprit de corps, teamwork as well as personal endeavour, perseverance, courage in adversity, determination, grit, and so on.

And then on Sunday, marrying these two themes, BBC Radio 4’s Morning Worship came from Rugby, the school, where the game was invented precisely 200 years ago, and this time the ethos of rugby became inextricably bound up with Christianity.  There is a story, apocryphal for all I know, about a boy named William Web Ellis who, playing soccer one day on the school pitch, “The Close”, and “with a fine disregard” for the rules, took it into his head to pick the spherical ball up, tuck it under his arm (he probably realised immediately that an oval ball would be more convenient), and run for the opposition’s line.  Thus the game of rugby was born.  I don’t know whether the masters at Rugby immediately recognised an act of originality amounting to genius; but had he done it at my old school, woe betide him, he would have been given short shrift.  But apparently he was to be praised for breaking the rules, or, as they subsequently became known in rugby, the laws.  Laws have been defied magnificently at other times in history.  In 1905, Einstein defied Newton’s Laws and created the Special Theory of Relativity.  In 1955, Rosa Parks defied the municipal laws of apartheid in Montgomery Alabama, when she sat down in a seat reserved for white people.  And of course Jesus was the biggest law breaker of them all.  He was continually getting up the Pharisees’ noses. 

So breaking the rules can be an admirable thing to do – yet not, however (the man from Rugby hastened to add), if these rules happen to be the ones current at Rugby School.  Ha! 

Then one Naomi, BBC Young Chorister of the Year, sang Swing Low Sweet Chariot, accompanied by a music teacher on piano.  It was quite magnificent.  I almost warmed to the Rugby ethos.

But not quite.  I have never liked rugby.  I played rugby at school. We were pathetic.  Posh schools used to rack up scores like century breaks in snooker against us.  Our school was much better at football.  I was only vaguely aware at the time of the class division that separated the gentleman’s game played by hooligans, and the hooligan’s game played by gentlemen.  I remember playing football in the street with my pals one day, and a smartly dressed young gentleman of the Muscular Christianity constituency passed by and remarked, “Don’t like the shape of the ball you’re playing with, chaps.” 

When I was about 14 years old I got thumped in the head during a rugby match one Saturday morning.  I got carried off.  I developed an impressive swelling over my right eyebrow.  I think the PE teacher drove me home, but I can’t remember.  The doctor came, and I remember he subjected me to the “serial 7s” test.  You subtract 7 from 100, then 7 from 93, 7 from 86, etc., down to zero.  Well, down to 2, if you get it right.  I didn’t get past 93.  The GP announced that I was concussed, but I would get better.  Well, I suppose he only had two options – watchful waiting, or a craniotomy.  CT scans were yet to be invented.   

I remember I was rather proud of the black eye I could show off at school on Monday morning, and the surrounding bruise, all the colours of the rainbow.  I got better.  Or did I?  My third year at secondary school marked the apogee of any academic excellence I may have aspired to.  After that, everything was a struggle.  My exam results became mediocre, I was easily distracted, chronically disconsolate, and I couldn’t remember a thing.  Now, with the increasing physicality of the game, the Rugby Union wonder whether there might be a correlation between repeated head trauma and early onset dementia. Duh.  Incidentally, when the RU refer to “physicality”, they actually mean brutality, or violence. 

I lived in New Zealand for 13 years.  When I bought my house in Devonport on Auckland’s North Shore, the real estate agent was an ex-All Black.  The New Zealanders are obsessed with rugby.  Of course the posh schools play rugby, but it’s much less of a class thing there because the society is much more egalitarian.  The Maori and the Polynesians, who live in disadvantaged South Auckland, are very good at rugby.  Kids play from a very early age, and their parents yell at them from the side lines urging them to be more aggressive.  I remember in the emergency department tending a kid who broke his neck on the rugby field.  His master leaned over the spinal board and said, “Never mind, Darryl, you played a blinder.”  

In New Zealand, my colleague Dr Alastair Cameron-Strange voiced the opinion that rugby is a metaphor for the First World War, played at the Front.  A war of attrition.  The backs are the officers, and the forwards are the other ranks.  There is an impasse – the scrum.  The Big Push.  Then there is a mid-field incident of bloodiness, the ball gets flashed from the scrum half to the stand-off, and you’re in Berlin by Christmas.  Or maybe not. 

“Physicality” in rugby is not against the laws.  The big no-no is the forward pass.  In the next war, Herr Hitler took the allies by surprise by developing Blitzkrieg, rapid armour, the technique of the forward pass.  The bounder.  In his own way, he was the Reich’s William Web Ellis.   

Not for me.  I got out.  I escaped the Saturday morning purgatory by joining Glasgow Schools’ First Orchestra which met on a Saturday morning.  I see that in the current World Cup Scotland and New Zealand, my two homelands, both lost their opening games.  Scotland will be relieved the trouncing wasn’t worse, while New Zealand will be in deep mourning.  For myself, I am indifferent.  I still favour music over rugby.  On Saturday at the Last Night of the Proms, Sheku Kanneh-Mason played Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, and accompanied soprano Lise Davidsen, along with the cello section of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, in Heitor Villa Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras Number 5.  Magnificent.  I hope Sheku never goes near a rugby pitch, but protects his fingers, and his God-given talent.