jamescalumcampbell

Browsing the bookshelves in Waterstones in search of a Christmas gift, I could not help noticing the preponderance of books bearing one word titles.  Kelly Holmes’ bio is Unique, Tim Peake’s Limitless, and of course Prince Harry’s Spare. I always felt the choice of Spare was unfortunate.  Of course there is the heir and the spare, but “spare” for the most part has a pejorative connotation: a redundant Priapus at nuptials; that sort of thing.  I would have preferred Remaindered.  Then there are titles like Eve, and Ovum, or perhaps Ova, and Unbreakable.  The one word title has become a cliché.  I’m certain this trend is editor-driven.  I could imagine Marcel Proust submitting Remembrance of Things Past and being advised, that will never do.  How about Flashback?  Or Goethe and The Sorrows of Young Werther.  Too unwieldy.  How about Gutted?  Or, perhaps, Gutted!

But all of modern “culture” is ridden with cliché.  On Radio 2 you will hear any number of songs of a diatonic nature, sung by a breathless chanteuse – the inhalation prior to each line is part of the soundscape – songs annotated by the composer (if Artificial Intelligence can be so denoted) as semplice, the last verse sung without accompaniment and coming to an abrupt end.  Cinema is perhaps the most cliché-ridden genre of all.  I tried to watch Oppenheimer, a figure about whom as it happens I know a little, but I found the endless cut and paste techniques of modern cinematography absolutely unbearable, and quit after an hour.  If a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end seems unduly prosaic, cut the celluloid into little pieces, cascade them on to the cutting-room floor, pick them up and reattach them ad lib, and see whether the resulting montage hides all the production’s creative faults. 

Come to think of it, Oppenheimer is another one-word title.  It’s as if our attention span has become so truncated that we need to be hooked by a single word, or we are lost.  The implication is that the book trade actually thinks rather badly of the public it purports to serve.  Apparently we need to be spoon-fed.  So if a writer comes along and completely overturns all the accepted conventions, not only of the book trade, but of people’s common understanding of life, then that writer will struggle to get into print.  The bottom line is not originality, but the dollar.                           

Talking of commercialism, this is the time of year when, retail-wise, we are all inclined to push the boat out, at least if we can afford so to do.  It’s a kind of panic-buying, not unlike that of the lockdown, when there was a run on toilet rolls; now it’s mince pies.  I can’t be snooty and pretend I’m above the battle.  I too was adding exotic delicatessen to my basket in Morrison’s.  The aisles were crowded.  Trolley-rage lurked around the cheese counter.  I tried to diffuse the situation with a disarming smile.  I remarked, “Madness!”  And the lady behind her stacked trolley smiled back and replied, “Why do we do it?”  Why indeed.  It’s a kind of obverse of retail therapy; retail neurosis. 

Christmas is the temporal manifestation of retail neurosis.  There is also a spatial manifestation.  It occurs in airports, when people are similarly gripped by a mad impulse to spend spend spend, and acquire stuff they don’t really need.  Vendors, conscious of the fact that people about to board an aircraft are possessed by the compulsion to empty their pockets of currency shortly to become useless, hike the prices.  Everything in an airport is expensive.  Even getting there is expensive.  Take the Edinburgh tram.  You can make the half hour journey from Edinburgh City Centre to Edinburgh Park & Ride, abutting the airport, for less than the price of a cup of coffee.  Stay on the tram for one more stop to the terminal building, and the price is hiked by nearly a factor of four.  Similarly, you can park your car at Park & Ride for free, but venture into airport-land and you will pay an exorbitant tariff just to park for five minutes. 

Duty free is the biggest rip-off.  You might imagine goods divested of tariffs might constitute a bargain.  But I can buy a bottle of single malt Scotch whisky in my local supermarket at a far better price than in airport duty-free.  Everything is exorbitant, clothing especially.  But people will snap up designer labels as gifts for loved ones, wielding a credit card without a qualm, as if taken over by the premonition that their ship is about to go down, and that the bank balance is not going to matter.  People transiting airports are possessed.  They are in a trance, just as people in the supermarket trolley aisles on Christmas Eve are in a trance.  

But Bethlehem has cancelled Christmas.  At least, Commercial Christmas.  There will be no Christmas tree in Manger Square.  Yet parturition can be neither postponed nor cancelled.  Therefore there remains the image of a baby, wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a heap of rubble.  Just as it was two thousand odd years ago, it remains necessary to attempt the Rafah Crossing into Egypt, in order to avoid the massacre of the innocents.  The reality of a real Christmas rather puts our festive excesses into perspective.  And yet I don’t resent the endless renditions of Christmas songs on the radio.  I didn’t even mind being ambushed by Wham’s Last Christmas, and I’m rather sorry to say that thus far I have not heard Chris Rea driving home for Christmas, stuck in a traffic jam.  I abjure the Bah Humbug Constituency.  I heard a reading on the radio of a part of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and was completely transfixed.  The reformed, perhaps even redeemed, Scrooge observes Bob Cratchit coming in nearly half an hour late for work, and rather winds him up, doing an impersonation of the intimidating persona he has so recently sloughed off.  Then he festoons his employee with benisons, and all is well. 

Brings a tear to the eye.

Chums, by Simon Kuper (Profile Books, 2022)

Orwell’s Island, by Les Wilson (Saraband, 2023)

I read these two books in quick succession this week.  I’m always fascinated by the way that books read in parallel, or closely in series, seem to inform one another.  Chums’ subtitle is How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK, and Orwell’s Island’s surtitle is George, Jura and 1984.  Although both books deal with politics in the widest sense, and indeed are concerned with the biographies of Old Etonians, they have very little in common in terms of the attitudes of the protagonists, if such they be, depicted, and the worlds they inhabit.  Of Chums I will have little to say.  I wonder what Orwell would have made of the world it describes.  The dreamy spires.  Brideshead Revisited.  He would probably have been reminded of the reason why it was a world he chose to reject. Of course Orwell’s world and the world of Chums are seventy years, a whole lifetime, apart.  Orwell published Animal Farm in 1945, and the seminal event of Chums, Brexit, was kicked off in 2016.  There is a single point of intersection in the narratives of the books; it concerns Burma. 

Orwell attended Eton, but instead of going up to Oxford, he joined the police service in Burma.  It was the experience of imposing rule upon a subjugated people that helped formulate his attitude towards imperialism.  Yet he could not but admire Kipling’s poetry, including Mandalay, and its lines:

For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say,

‘Come you back, you British solider, come you back to Mandalay!’

Years later, the British ambassador to Myanmar had to stop Boris Johnson from quoting these lines while visiting the sacred Buddhist Shwedagon Pagoda.

“Not appropriate!”

This vignette appears in both books.  And in a sense that single point of intersection sums up the glaring disparity between two world views, the nostalgia of the Oxford Tories for former imperial glory, and George Orwell’s gradual but complete disillusionment, expressed as it was experienced in real time, with Empire. 

Orwell’s Island may be read as a short biography of the man born Eric Blair.  Like Mr Johnson, and Mr Rees-Mogg, Lord Cameron et al, he attended Eton, but on a scholarship because his parents were poor.  He belonged to the “lower upper middle classes” – of the nuances and niceties of social division he was all too acutely aware.  He had already received an excruciating education in class distinction, and in snobbery, at his preparatory school, which he describes in the long essay Such, Such were the Joys.  Perhaps it was a sense of social inferiority that led him to eschew Oxford and travel to Burma, essentially to protect a colonial authority he shortly came to loathe.  You see the disillusionment setting in in such essays as A Hanging, and Shooting an Elephant.  He quit the police, came home, and deliberately submerged himself in an underworld, the world of the destitute, as described in Down and Out in Paris and London.  He wanted to understand poverty from within, so he deliberately became poor.  The conscious decision to do this, and to carry it through, seems almost Christ-like.  It was not the sort of life-style choice that your average Oxford Etonian would necessarily find attractive.   

By this time, Mr Blair had resolved to become a full-time writer.  He had to work very hard just to make ends meet, so he had to undertake a lot of “hack work” such as book reviewing, while simultaneously trying to write political articles, and novels.  Then he volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War, where he was shot in the neck and nearly died.          

Apparently he disliked the surname Blair – felt it was too Scottish – and chose a nom de plume that was quintessentially English.  He seems to have had a visceral dislike of Scotsmen.  He called us “Scotchmen” because he knew it irritated us.  He could be dismissive of Scottish Nationalism, and of the Gaelic language.  Yet he mellowed.  Doubtless this has to do with his final years, particularly the time he spent at Barnhill, the remote croft house at the north end of the island of Jura, where he wrote 1984.  He came to like, and admire his neighbours, who were kind and helpful.  And he must have needed some help.  The wet, wild, and windy climate could hardly have been less suitable for a heavy smoker with advanced tuberculosis.  To this day, Barnhill is without electricity, and sits remotely at the end of six miles of rugged track.  Orwell had another narrow brush with death when out at sea one day he lost the motor of his boat, and nearly lost his adopted son, in the notorious Corryvreckan Whirlpool north of Jura.  But it was TB that finally did for him, at the early age of 46.  He had been admitted to Hairmyres Hospital in East Kilbride and treated with the experimental drug streptomycin to which, unfortunately, he was allergic.  His chest consultant’s junior doctor was James Williamson.  Professor Williamson taught me, at Edinburgh Medical School.  It was during a subsequent admission to hospital in London that Orwell died. 

I don’t think George Orwell would have the huge reputation he now has, without his last two significant works, Animal Farm, and 1984.  Animal Farm was rejected by no less a figure than T. S. Eliot, a reader for Faber & Faber, it is said because it was critical of Britain’s old wartime ally, the Soviet Union.  Anti-Soviet sentiment was not popular in the 1940s.  Churchill received the same cold shoulder, at least at first, when he gave his Iron Curtain speech in Fulton Missouri.  So it is quite possible that Animal Farm might never have seen the light of day.  And it was also a possibility that Orwell might have died before he finished 1984.  In that event, he had given instructions to destroy the manuscript.  We might never have known about Big Brother, the Two Minutes Hate, Room 101, and Newspeak.  The world is divided into three great superpowers – Eurasia, Oceania, and Eastasia.  Information is so tightly controlled within these realms that there is no access from within, to the outside world.  Everybody is forced to live within a bubble.  That might have been written, to describe contemporary events, this week.  Meanwhile the Westminster Bubble, and its occupants, prepared for high office by the elite educational system depicted in Chums, seems hopelessly inadequate to rise and meet the challenges of the contemporary world. 

1984 is one of these books that changes everybody’s world view.  But I don’t think I would care to read it again.  Absolutely terrifying. 

During his earlier life, Orwell gave himself an education that he judged would fit with his ambition to become a writer, and specifically to develop a unique style of political writing.  Presumably the Oxford Etonians opted for PPE, the Union – a kind of training ground for the House of Commons – then perhaps a research position under the auspices of the Tory Party, while in search of a safe seat.  I wonder who in the event received the better education.          

10 days to the Winter Solstice.  I said to my local newsagent, “It’s dreich.”

“Aye. Gey dreich.”

 I got my overseas Christmas cards off at the beginning of the month, and blitzed the UK ones last week.  I’m told that the practice of sending cards at Christmas may be dying out, just like the practice of “taking” newspapers printed on paper.  Circulations are ebbing and prices rising as people seek their news, be it real or fake, in their preferred echo chamber online.  And the BBC licence fee is going up.  These are parallel trends.  As people eschew pen and ink in favour of, first, email, and now any number of social media platforms, the Royal Mail has struggled to achieve targets for the delivery of both first and second class letters.  That seems paradoxical.  If the work load diminishes, should not the target be easier to attain?  I suppose the Royal Mail employs fewer people; after all, if everybody has gone online, we don’t need posties.  It’s the same with local branches of the bank.  Apparently everybody prefers online banking.  You might say they are voting with their fingers.  But surely it’s a chicken and egg situation.  Perhaps people went online because they lost their local branch.  As the presence of banks on the High Street diminishes, along with everything else, so cash is disappearing.  There’s been a backlash to that, and now banks will be required to provide an ATM within a mile of city dwellers, and three miles for people out in the sticks.  I can think of large tracts of the Gàidhealtachd where banks will struggle to hit the rural target.  Then perhaps they will be fined by the Financial Conduct Authority, and their liquidity will be even more compromised.  Similarly, Ofcom have fined the Royal Mail £5.6m for failing to deliver 93% of first class letters within 1 day, and 98.5% of second class letters within 3 days.   Fining institutions for failing seems to me to be almost as perverse as rewarding executives with bonuses for failing.  The same thing happens to hospitals that have been put into “special measures”.  This is incomprehensible to me.   If you’re struggling as an institution, you don’t need a fine; you probably need a cash injection. 

(Incidentally, I’m kind of glad I have resisted the overtures of my banks, both here and in New Zealand, to use automatic voice recognition as a secure means of identification on the telephone.  It turns out that AI can pretty much reproduce anybody’s voice so accurately that even the owner of the voice is fooled.  It might slowly dawn on people that the best way for a bank teller to identify a customer, and vice versa, is face-to-face, across the counter, in a High Street bank.)            

I will be interested to see if I receive fewer cards this Christmas than usual.  Thus far this year I have sent 41 cards.  I think that number is less than my average, but that may be because some friends and relatives have departed the world.  When somebody dies, I find myself loath to score their name out of my address book.  I just need to be careful not to send a card to the deceased, particularly if their spouse is still alive.  That would be a faux pas, would it not?  I confess I have sent one overseas card to somebody who I am not sure is still with us.  But perhaps that is precisely the value of sending cards.  It’s a way of saying to people one knows but seldom sees, “I’m still in the land of the living.”

Other Christmas rituals I greatly value.  I went to hear The Nutcracker in Glasgow on Saturday night; not the whole ballet, but a selected suite, played by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and joined for one number by the magnificent RSNO Youth Chorus.  The concert was very well attended, and I had the sense that the audience was not the usual crowd turning up for Shostakovich and Mahler.  There were lots of mums and dads, and it was an early Christmas night out.  Drink was brought into the auditorium, which does not usually happen.  I wasn’t inclined to object; I like the buzz of a packed hall.  But I’m not sure the audience particularly enjoyed the first half of the concert.  Certainly Victoria Vita Polevá’s Nova had an impact.  Polevá is Ukrainian, and Nova is a martial piece, much as Holst’s Planet Mars is a martial piece.  When the brass fanfares and the machine gun rat-tat-tat of the percussion ceased abruptly at the peak of a crescendo, the silence was deafening.  The conductor Andrey Boreyko put his hand on his heart, gestured to the score, and then made a gesture of holding out two fists with thumbs enclosed.  I think this might have been a mime for the German “Daumen drücken” – to press thumbs – the German equivalent of fingers crossed.   

By contrast Tchaikowsky’s Concerto Classico for violin and orchestra was, despite a large orchestra, lightly and delicately scored.  I should point out that this was the Polish Jewish composer André Tchaikowsky (1935-1982), and not the Tchaikovsky of The Nutcracker.  He was born Robert Andrzej Krauthammer.  He entered the Warsaw Ghetto in 1939, but he was smuggled out in 1942 under the name Andrzej Czajkowski.  He studied music in Poland, and emigrated to the UK in 1956.  He died in Oxford, at the age of 46. 

He was very keen on Shakespeare and, bizarrely, he bequeathed his own skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company, specifically so that it would appear as Yorick in Hamlet.  He played opposite, as it were, David Tennant.  When the RSNO’s principal trumpeter recounted this macabre tale at the opening to the concert, the audience gave a gasp.  The trumpeter said, “I know.”

The solo part of the concerto was played, most beautifully, by Ilya Gringolts.  I thought I could hear reminiscences of Alban Berg, Bartok, and Stravinsky.  The applause was polite, and ceased as soon as conductor and soloist left the stage.  I suspect the audience had turned up expecting to hear Tchaikovsky and not Tchaikowsky, and were disappointed.  Personally I was disappointed because Ilya Gringolts didn’t have the opportunity to play an encore.  I don’t remember a soloist not receiving at least one additional curtain call. 

But back to the other Tchaikovsky.  It was wonderful to hear all these famous melodies, played by three flutes, by celeste, by harps, by celli, and so on.  It’s an antidote to the dreich nights. Similarly, I look ahead to a Ceremony of Nine Lessons and Carols I am taking part in, in the West End of Glasgow on December 22^nd.  By then, we will have passed the still point of the turning world, and can begin to look forward, with buoyancy and hope, to 2024.               

I believe 70,000 delegates have flown into Dubai for COP28.  There’ll be a whole lot of schmoozing going on.  Greta Thunberg might call it “blah blah blah”.  The King has given a key-note address.  At least he has been championing ideas of sustainability and the protection of the natural world since long before they became fashionable.  He has been spotted wearing a tie, and also a handkerchief, festooned with Greek flags.  This has nothing to do with the current rumpus about the Parthenon Marbles, according to Buckingham Palace.  Maybe not.  But one aspect of “Tie-gate” that I’ve not heard mentioned, is that the King’s father was Greek.  I rather hope he selected his sartorial ensemble with politic deliberation, and that this might set the trend for future episodes of subtle regnal interference.      

On Friday’s Herald, Andy Maciver, founding director of Zero Matters, wrote a piece on the climate crisis in praise of gradualism, and indeed in praise of COP28.  We cannot put planet over profit: Transition is key.  I wondered if the paper’s editor had intentionally concocted a vexatious headline precisely in order to make people like me choke on our porridge oats.  If so, it worked.  Having been silent for some time, I put pen to paper and wrote to the Herald.  I think my piece has rather a dry tone, the tone perhaps, of Dr Kissinger during his very advanced period, when his voice became progressively more staccato and crackly until in the end he sounded like a kind of oracular cicada.

Dear Sir,

I don’t suppose Andy Maciver wrote his own headline (“We cannot put planet over profit: Transition is key”, Herald, December 1^st) but it is surely self-evident that if we don’t put planet over profit, we are lost.  The alternative, putting profit over planet, would be the ultimate act of conspicuous consumption – the destruction of the natural world.  One is reminded of the famous lines from Act 3 Scene 3 of Ben Jonson’s Volpone:

…and, could we get the phoenix,

Though nature lost her kind, she were our dish.

I was in Dubai Airport on March 8^th, 2020.  We taxied for an eternity past hundreds of parked Airbus A380s and I thought, “We can’t go on like this.”  Then with the pandemic the whole world ground to a halt, the skies emptied, and we all said to one another, “We mustn’t go back to our bad old ways.” 

Perhaps the phoenix, a fabulous Arabian bird, the only individual of its kind, said to regenerate from its own ashes, is a metaphor for Planet Earth.  We need to do all in our power to protect her.   

Mr Maciver’s trope, “profit for planet” is a fudge. 

Yours sincerely…

It didn’t appear in Saturday’s Herald, but my experience is that there is sometimes a lag in publishing over the weekend, so I haven’t given up hope.  I’m writing this blog on Sunday evening, so I won’t post it until I take Monday’s Herald.  I’ll let you know.

More news from abroad:  Christopher Luxon, the newly elected centre-right Prime Minister of New Zealand, is set to repeal a whole lot of Labour legislation from the Jacinda Ardern years.  I can’t say I favour any of these volte-faces, with the exception of the one that has been taken up by Rishi Sunak, to be imported into the UK, the idea of stopping any New Zealander born after 2008 from ever buying tobacco.  It might be well-intentioned, but I just don’t think it’s workable.  Come January 1^st 2048, we would have the scenario of a 40 year-old born on 31/12/07 legally buying cigarettes, and one born on 1/1/08 criminalised by the same transaction.  I don’t care for this kind of societal manipulation, which looks on paper as if it might have beneficial health outcomes.  I wish governments would stop telling us what to do.  When I heard of Mr Luxon’s decision (in this one regard) I did feel inclined to light up, in celebration, a Romeo e Julieta Churchill.  Goodness me.  Am I lurching to the right? 

The Herald, Monday, December 4^th.  I’m in.  Now I must hold myself in readiness for brickbat rejoinders.  The champions of coal, gas, oil, and nuclear, who can’t stand the sight of a wind turbine, on- or off-shore, will say, “If Dr Campbell wants to keep the lights on, he needs to wake up and smell the coffee.” 

Blah blah blah.                

Last Wednesday was the sixtieth anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy.  It seemed to pass by unnoticed.  In a stand-up routine somewhere in Canada the comic Paul Merton once asked the audience members if they thought Lee Harvey Oswald remembered, albeit briefly, what he was doing the day JFK was shot.  Nobody laughed.  On that same day, Aldous Huxley died, as did C. S. Lewis.  And the Beatles issued their second LP – With the Beatles.  Of 1963, Philip Larkin wrote in his poem Annus Mirabilis:

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(Which was rather late for me) –

Between the end of the Chatterley ban

And the Beatles’ first LP.

It was an extraordinary, tumultuous year.  Chatterley, Beatlemania, TW3, the Profumo scandal, the Great Train Robbery… The atmosphere of the time is captured in Bernard Levin’s The Pendulum Years, a review of the sixties, a decade defined in the UK, according to Levin’s view, as a historical turning point, a fulcrum or point d’appui, when Britain sloughed off its starchy, rigorously formal imperial integument and moved on into the “permissive” age.  Nobody knew whether the new laissez faire attitude would usher in an era of personal freedom to be cherished, or bring about the end of civilisation as we knew it; whether satire was a robust utilisation of this new-found freedom, or sheer impertinence.  Whatever it was, it was clearly capable of bringing down a government.

For the record, I do remember where I was when I heard JFK had been shot.  I was at 30 Marlborough Avenue, my Aunt Mhairi’s house in Glasgow’s west end.  It no longer exists, replaced now by a shopping centre.  By the time I’d made the short walk back home to 51 Rowallan Gardens, he was dead.  There was a sense of universal disbelief, and disappointment, perhaps because the President and the First Lady were glamorous, charismatic figures who seemed to represent the new age.  Going back to the beginning of the sixties, I remember the US presidential election, and a posse of ruffians going round the school playground asking each of us who we would vote for, Nixon or Kennedy.  It was a Catch-22 double bind, with no correct solution.  Nixon was a creep, but Kennedy was a Catholic.  But Kennedy seemed to embody the future.  The torch, he said in his Hyannis Port drawl, has been passed to a new generation.  We subsequently found out that the permissive age had certainly not been too late for Jack.  At least, so it is said.  Bu then, as the man himself remarked, there’s no smoke without a smoke machine. 

With the assassination, there was a palpable sense that the US could not cope with the news.  Walter Cronkite looked visibly shaken.  A couple of days later, Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby, live on TV.  The place was completely out of control.  Conspiracy theories had to be concocted because the idea that the event resulted from the random act of a sheer nobody was extremely unpalatable.  In Dallas Texas, Dealey Plaza became a shrine.  I visited in the 1990s.  The Texas School Book Depository at the corner of Elm and Houston was exactly as it had appeared in the grainy black and white footage.  And the grassy knoll.  The entire scenario had the feel of a museum.  I ascended to the sixth floor of the depository and stared at the scene through the window from Oswald’s vantage point, measuring angles.    

C. S. Lewis aside, the other events of 22/11/63 also touched me.  For reasons that I can now scarcely comprehend, I had a childhood fascination for the novels of Aldous Huxley – Chrome Yellow, Eyeless in Gaza, Point Counter-Point etc.  I read them avidly.  Now why should an urban Scottish waif born into a landscape of sodden tenements, bomb sites strewn with nettles and docken leaves, be in the least bothered by the foppish fantasies, as I saw them, of an oversized, oversexed Oxon galoot inhabiting such improbable hamlets as Bole, Tritton, Spavin Delawarr, Knipswich for Timpany, West Bowlby, Camlet-on-the-Water?  Yet I gobbled them up, the Collected Works, in the beautiful Chatto and Windus editions in their cellophane-wrapped russet covers.  I could turn out reams of pseudo-Huxley, the smart-arse post-prandial rantings of smug intellectuals with strange names, saturated in gin and Art, stuffed like Strasbourg geese with indiscriminately acquired knowledge, the A-Z of Encyclopaedia Britannica. 

Fortunately I was saved by the Beatles’ second LP.  I bought it one rainy day in the music shop Cuthbertson’s, which no longer exists, took it home protected from the rain under my duffel coat, and put it on.  I thought they’d sold me a dud.  The Beatles sounded like the Chipmunks.  But once I’d figured out you had to play LPs at 33, and not 45 rpm, all was well.

It won’t be long, yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah…

Seated deep in anonymity within the gloomy recesses of Dunblane Cathedral I heard once more of the parable of the talents, the story of the man I identify with, perhaps more than any other in the gospels, with the possible exception of Nicodemus.  I mean the one talent man.  Afterwards, at the church door, I did here the minister remark that he had passed over the one talent man’s predicament, and concentrated on the two talent, and the five talent men.  Other versions are available: there are five and ten talent men elsewhere, but the message is essentially the same.  (That reminds me of a colleague of my father’s, in the police force, who was known for a certain whimsicality in his dealings with criminal evidence.  In the witness stand, he described the alleged theft of five four pound notes.  The judge corrected him.  “You mean four five pound notes.”  He replied, “Four five pound notes, five four pound notes.  What’s the difference?”) 

Anyway, the essential message of this parable, apparently, is that we must use the God-given talents, no matter how modest, that have been bestowed upon us, for the benefit of all.  Don’t bury your talent in the ground.  I suppose that is a bit like hiding your light under a bushel.  Yeez are, after all, the light of the world. 

But I feel for the man who hid his talent in the ground.  After all, he dug it up again and gave it back, untouched, to his master.  He knew his master was a hard man.  He certainly got that right.  His master called him wicked and lazy, and threw him out into the darkness, to weep and gnash his teeth.  But I don’t think the one talent man was either wicked or lazy; he was afraid. 

Is the minister’s interpretation of this parable justified?  What exactly is a talent?  As usual I consulted Chambers.

talent n.  An ancient unit of weight and of money – 60 minas or 6000 drachmas, or about 38 kilograms (Aeginetan talent), 25 (Euboic), 26 (Attic), of gold or silver: hence (from the parable, Matt. xxv. 14-30) faculty: any natural or special gift: special aptitude: eminent ability short of genius: persons of special ability: young girls or young men, esp. attractive, handsome, etc (coll.): disposition: (Shak. tallent) perh. wealth, abundance, or perh. golden tresses.     

We might add to this that BBC managers sometimes refer to the people at the mic, or in front of the camera, as “the talent”.  But it would appear that our modern understanding of talent is based solely on a metaphorical interpretation of a biblical parable.  Yet the parable itself is all about money.  When the master rebukes the one talent man, he tells him that the least he could have done was to put his one talent in the bank, in order that it might accrue interest.  It would appear that the two and five talent men were more adventurous than this.  They “cast their bread upon the waters”.  They were venture capitalists.  Entrepreneurs.  There’s something a bit fawning about the way they reported back to their master to say they had doubled his money.  They got a pat on the back and were rewarded with considerably more responsibility.  I suppose they were entrusted with a superabundance of talents in order to double them again.  They must have become very wealthy.  Were they alive today, they would be hoping that Mr Hunt in his Autumn Statement on Wednesday abolishes inheritance tax.  Meanwhile I worry about the one talent man, cast out into darkness.  I see him sitting on the pavement outside the Thistle Centre in Stirling, holding an empty polystyrene cup, shivering.  I put a pound into the cup, conscious that Ms Braverman would rebuke me.  I’m only encouraging him in his lifestyle choice.  Even Mrs Thatcher was more compassionate than that.  In her “Sermon on the Mound”, she had a good word for the Good Samaritan who went out of his way to assist a man who had been mugged.  But, she pointed out, he was only able to do that because he was a wealth creator.  He had cast his bread upon the waters and doubled his talents.

I find most of the parables to be extremely disturbing.  I’ve given up trying to interpret them.  There’s the one about the banquet which none of the invited guests attend.  So the master (could be the same one as in the talents parable) instructs his servants to trawl the street and bring in the lame, the halt and the blind.  Perhaps the one talent man, already cast out, was included.  But then, it turns out that one of this latest batch of invitees is improperly dressed.  So he gets chucked out.  Perhaps once more it was that one talent guy.  He might have raised his eyes despairingly to heaven and cried, “Not again!”  What on earth is all that about?  It comes across to me as an anxiety dream.  It reminds me of a professional orchestral musician I know who has a recurring dream that she turns up on the night of the concert wearing the wrong attire.  She is humiliated and instructed to leave.  More outer darkness and teeth gnashing. 

Talking of dress codes, after the morning service I dressed soberly in black and turned up in the chapel of Queen Victoria School to perform with the Dunblane Chamber Orchestra.  I was not evicted, although sometimes, when my viola sounds like a Black & Decker drill, I feel I ought to be.  We played Mozart’s Overture to Idomeneo, the Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola, and then, after the interval, Beethoven 7.  The Apotheosis of the Dance, said Wagner.  It’s an exhausting play on the viola, constantly fortissimo, even once fff.  Sturm und Drang.  I’m not sure that Haydn would have approved.  And didn’t Benjamin Britten say that, with Beethoven, the rot set in?  Maybe Beethoven wrote fff because it was the only way he could hear his own music.  The poor man knew more about gnashing of teeth than most of us.  I will seize fate by the throat!  After Beethoven 7, I was exhausted, and a mass of aches and pains.  But we repaired to the Lion & Unicorn, and a pint, a plate of lasagne, and the company of dear friends did much to attenuate my customary post-performance flatness.         

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.