jamescalumcampbell

Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

Pithy.  You can always rely upon the Germans to come up with le mot that is juste.

Coming to terms with the past.

It is three score years ago, as the great man might have put it, since Dr Martin Luther King Jr gave his celebrated “I have a dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and before a great throng, in Washington on August 28^th, 1963.  When I first heard the speech, I was captivated by the charisma of the orator, a combination of presence, delivery, but most of all, content.  I was intrigued in particular by a sentence that began:

“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…”

What, I wondered were 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.  It sounds to me like the editing of a text.  You interpose a word here, you nullify a word there, and lo, and behold, with minimal intervention, an entire document has been attenuated, much after the fashion of an infective organism that has been modified to remove its virulence – I nearly wrote virility (Freudian slip) – in the creation of a safe vaccine.  The organism’s virulence, its potency, is annulled, its virility emasculated.   

And note that the governor did not merely speak the words of interposition and nullification; his lips were dripping with them.  That language comes across to me as very biblical; the governor sounds like Anass, or Caiaphas, or Pontius Pilate.  Dr King was a Baptist minister so his adoption of biblical language is not surprising.  The speech and its delivery are utterly spellbinding.  I don’t suppose we have heard oratory to match this, on this side of the pond, since Winston’s great set pieces of the Second World War.  In them we have the same historical awareness, the same adoption of magnificent, slightly archaic language (“Not one jot or tittle of our just demands do we recede!”), the rolling cadences, and always, a close attention to exactitude of meaning.  Who, nowadays, can even begin to speak thus? 

But in order to be an orator, to have an orator’s power to communicate and to move, you must first be sincere.  What you have to say must come from the heart, your own heart.  But what have we now?  Politicians have speech writers.  (Can you imagine Winston employing s speech writer?)  Speeches are cobbled together by think tanks, focus groups, and special advisors.  They must conform to a doctrine, a manifesto, and an ideology.  They must not stray off piste.  (Dr King’s remarkable I have a dream speech came out of a decision to drop the prepared text and speak, impromptu, from the heart.)   Nowadays, any political statement must not make the politician, the party or the government a hostage to fortune by undue reliance on candour.  Doubtless you could program some ghastly Artificial Intelligence contraption to concoct the speech for you.  It would surprise me if this has not already happened.  Perhaps AI could act as an editor.  You submit the speech, and the AI modifies it with the words of interposition and nullification.  Result: “I am busy delivering for hard-working British families who deserve a better future…”

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

And now here is a strange irony.  It is three score years since Dr King’s speech, and it is three score years and ten since the publication of Ian Fleming’s first James Bond book, Casino Royale.  The entire Bond canon is being republished to celebrate this anniversary.  Browsing in Waterstones the other day, I picked up a copy of Live and Let Die and confirmed something I already knew to be the case.  There has been an edit.  The publishers have adopted the words of interposition and nullification.  The words of interposition are in the frontispiece, a repudiation of the attitudes of the time (1953); and the words, rather absence of words, hence nullification, are in an early chapter renamed “Seventh Avenue”, in which an entire rather lengthy conversation had been removed.  It no longer exists.  Ergo, apparently, it has never existed.  Syme, that wretched character in 1984, has sent it down the memory hole.  The Pharisees, not content with controlling the way we live now, persuade us that their way of looking at the world is the norm, because it was ever thus.  They are obliterating history.    

It’s not a new phenomenon.  When the Hanovers made up their mind to subdue the Jacobites, once and for all, not only did they lay waste and depopulate a vast landscape; they destroyed a culture by proscribing a societal structure, modes of dress, music, and, most of all, language.  They obliterated, or tried to obliterate, history. That modus operandi is also biblical.  By the waters of Babylon, I sat down and wept.

The salutary lesson is that such techniques of oppression are effective.  The idea that the Jacobite landscape is an unspoilt wilderness is a myth.  The trendy “North Coast 500” route for tourists that runs round the top of Scotland circumvents Ben Armine Forest, Loch Choire Forest, Borrobol Forest, Benmore Forest, Glendhu Forest, and so on.  But why do none of these forests contain any trees?  The landscape is denuded.  The visitors in their campervans awkwardly negotiating the passing places on the single-track roads are unaware that they are passing obliterated ancient settlements that have been turned into archaeological sites.  

The tall statue to George Leveson-Gower, first Duke of Sutherland (“the Mannie”), a pivotal figure in the highland clearances, still stands, upon Ben Bhraggie, above Golspie, in Sutherland.  Some would have it removed.  Occasionally it is vandalised, much as, following the Maori Wars in New Zealand, Hone Heke, a Maori chief and signatory to the Treaty of Waitangi, would repeatedly cut down the flagstaff bearing the Union Jack on Maiki Hill above the town of Russell, in Northland’s beautiful Bay of Islands; much as the statue of Lord Dundas in Edinburgh is occasionally besmirched with graffiti.  Dundas delayed the abolition of the slave trade, utilising a temporising technique similar to the one Dr King described as “the tranquillising drug of gradualism”.   Justice delayed is justice denied.  Some would erect a plinth beside the Mannie, providing “context”, bearing the words of interposition and nullification.  I would rather leave it alone.  If it is an affront, let it be an affront.  We must bear our scars, not hide them.         

To my enormous relief, Part 3 of the trilogy concerning the life of the troubled doc is being published, with a fair wind, maybe around Christmas or New Year.  We’ve signed the contract, and now I am busy offering suggestions for a cover design, blurb, author bio and so on.  I’m not very good at multi-tasking.  A friend and fellow viola player remarked the other day that she tends to do things in clumps.  (I think she used the word clump.)  So she has a viola clump, or a gardening clump, or a Scottish politics clump.  I’m the same.  I need to focus on one thing at a time.  At school, I was never any good at flitting from class to class, eight times a day, switching off French and switching on Mathematics.  I was in a constant state of preoccupation.  The teacher would say with evident exasperation, “Campbell!  What planet are you on?”  I have this notion that people who excelled at school did so because they had this capacity to compartmentalise, focus and re-focus.

But life goes on.  Yesterday I rehearsed with the Antonine Ensemble, a string chamber orchestra, for a concert we are giving next Sunday in St Michael’s Parish Church in Linlithgow.  “Shades of Baroque”.  The music is beautiful, but some of it is also technically quite demanding.  I need to stop composing literary blurbs in my head and concentrate on the notes.  We are playing Purcell’s Chaconne from Fairy Queen, Corrette’s Organ Concerto No. 1 in B flat, Britten’s Simple Symphony, Chossudovsky’s Phases de Doute, and Respighi’s Suite for Strings and Organ.  Another musical friend, erstwhile fiddler with the LSO, remarked that the second movement of the Britten, Playful Pizzicato, reminds her of the tune to The Archers, but I incline to think it more like “Campbeltown Loch I wish you were whisky”:

The price of the whisky was grim!

The Loch was full up to the brim!

Absurd.  The Respighi concerto is wonderful, very passionate.

And at a very convivial luncheon in Bearsden on Friday, a group of us reminisced on the great good fortune we had, at least in one respect, to be educated in Glasgow at a time when great emphasis was put on music, and the opportunity to learn a musical instrument, with both the instrument and the tuition supplied for free.  But I fear classical music has become a pastime of the elite.  We should remind the education ministers that there is some evidence that learning a musical instrument in early life is protective against the later development of Alzheimer’s disease.  Politicians are more susceptible to that sort of argument than the assertion that Purcell’s Chaconne from Fairy Queen is beautiful.  Whenever economic times are hard, music seems to be the first thing to suffer.  I noticed that at the Prom last night on BBC Radio 3, Sir Simon Rattle went out of his way to talk up the BBC Singers, whom the BBC were inclined to disband earlier this year.  They’re not out of the woods yet.  Sir Simon conducted Mahler 9 from memory.       

Talking of convivial luncheons, last Tuesday I met up with some friends from St Andrews.  We met halfway between our respective domiciles, in the Kingdom of Fife, at a vegetarian farm shop and café improbably named The Pillars of Hercules, in Falkland.  Highly recommended.  It is situated in an extensive, wooded regional park, also containing Falkland Palace.  We dined under a Perspex awning resembling a polytunnel, effectively a greenhouse.  It wasn’t a particularly warm day, but under the awning it was sweltering.  Our accompanying dog chose to sit outside, and pant.  My vegetarian tikka masala seemed super-hot.  Delicious.  I’ll certainly make a return visit.  My friends are moving house in order to downsize.  They are trying to get rid of a ton of books.  Knowing my interest in Churchilliana, they brought along four bagfuls, so I took them off their hands, and said I would probably be arrested later that day for fly-tipping in Loch Leven.  Actually the books are rather good.  Some I’ve read, so they went to Oxfam, but I’ve held on to Winston’s four volume treatment of the Great War, The World Crisis.  In the 1920s, people remarked that in The World Crisis, the author depicted the First World War as a kind of Winston bio-pic, such was his ego.  I dare say.  But he does write very well.

And following another convivial luncheon in Glasgow on Saturday, I was treated to a private piano recital, and heard Ballad from the Lyric Pieces by Grieg.  A melody, quite simple, somewhat severe, repeated with a series of harmonies whose poignancy seems even beyond the capacity for expression of music itself.  For a moment, I stopped trying to compose a cover blurb for Part 3 in the life of Dr Alastair Cameron-Strange.               

“And don’t worry about your work here.  Put it right out of your mind for a couple of weeks.  I’ll tell 009 to take care of the section.”

Fleming I. L., Thunderball, Jonathan Cape, London, 1961.

  It was a dull March evening. The rain slanting against the windowpane sounded like the drumming of fingernails.  His secretary had left the office hours ago.  009 sat moodily swivelling in her chair.  He had his raincoat on but he hadn’t the energy, or even the purpose, to get up and go.  Idly he removed the cover from the ancient office Barlock typewriter.  He straightened a paperclip to form a probe and began to gouge the congealed print matter from the machine’s metallic type-face.  He started with his own number: 009.  He pondered the events – more accurately, non-events – of the past fortnight.

  It seemed to him that he had been woken from an eternal slumber by the din of the phone that was the direct line to M’s office.

  “009?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Miss Moneypenny.  Message from M.  No, it’s all right, you don’t need to come up.  Just to let you know the head of the double-0 section has gone to a health farm on a rest cure.  You’re in charge.  Yes.  You are to take care of the section.”

  And he had experienced a tremendous lift and surge of the heart.  For how long had he been awaiting this call?  He was like an understudy to a great actor, languishing in the wings season after season, but now, suddenly and unexpectedly, informed that he was about to step out on to the stage, into the dazzling limelight.  It just shows you!  If you keep the faith and wait long enough, an opportunity will arise.  Seize the day! 

  The following morning he had arrived early at his office within the anonymous grey building beside Regent’s Park, determined to clear his desk of all the routine signals so that he would be ready, when the red telephone rang again, as surely it must.  Surely.  Rumour had it, rumour from the famous “Powdervine”, that something was brewing, Something Very Big.  Crash dive and ultra-hush.  Well, he was ready.  And he was a hundred per cent fit.  Unlike his superior, he didn’t smoke 60 cigarettes a day, he didn’t consume half a bottle of spirits a day, and he didn’t have behind him – or ahead of him  – a string of untidy affairs which never seemed to burden his superior with an unwanted heir, alimony, or a sexually transmitted disease.  Surely all of that had to constitute some sort of security risk!  And yet, there was no doubt about, it, James was the apple of M’s eye.  He got all the plum jobs – the exotic ones.  009 couldn’t remember that last time he had been summoned to the seventh floor, the inner sanctum, the last time he had sat down at the desk before these damnably clear grey eyes.

  And his colleagues?  The other members of the small, exclusive section?  Yes, they had seen a bit of action.  There was the time Bill – 008 – made it to Peenemunde and back.  He had been in pretty bad shape; had to rest up in Berlin.  That certainly deserved a mention in despatches.  And 0011?  Had he ever made it out of the “dirty half-mile” in Singapore?

  (009 carried on mechanically removing effete print from the Barlock.)

  He had run the section like clockwork.  So efficiently, in fact, that there was never any need for any communication from the floor above.  He might as well have been invisible!  And he wondered, with a pang of jealousy, about James.  James seemed to carry his destiny with him.  009 suddenly developed the odd conviction – like an epiphany – that James would make something out of his rest cure.  What?  God only knew.   Some sort of conflict, some sort of bizarre set-up, involving some sort of farcical contraption and, no doubt, a girl.  There was no second-guessing the content of the report James would subsequently deliver up to M.  It would be completely extraordinary. 

At the Royal Academy of Music’s European Summer School for young musicians, 1973, in Caen, Normandy, we played Brahms 2.  It is a very sunny work.  Herr Dr Brahms, with perhaps rather leaden Teutonic humour, warned his friends that the symphony he was working on was very dark and morose.  I think we must have been playing it in a dark and morose fashion, because during the rehearsal the conductor said to us, “Cheer up!  Have you never been happy?”  And I wondered about that.  The soundtrack of my life has not been Brahms 2, rather Honegger 2.  Not that Honegger 2 is entirely dark and morose.  In its second movement, when it could hardly get any gloomier, there comes a miraculous, God-given vision of utter peace and serenity.  And (eternal optimist as I hope to be), the last movement and its close are extremely up-beat.    

I’ve just finished reading the 20^th Anniversary Edition of The Art of Happiness, a Handbook for Living, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and Howard C. Cutler (Hodder & Stoughton 1998).  “Dedicated to the Reader.   May you find happiness.”  Well, how could I resist?  Dr Howard C. Cutler is a psychiatrist based in Phoenix Arizona, and the book is largely a record of conversations between the psychiatrist and the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people.  The central thesis of the book is that the meaning of life is to be found in the conscientious pursuit of happiness.  Right enough, isn’t that built into the American Constitution? 

The distinguished actor Albert Finney once received a lifetime achievement award, and in his acceptance speech, he quoted a line he once had to render in a play, which at the time he thought was little more than a throwaway remark, but which he had come to realise was profoundly true:  Life is all about having a good time.  That reminded me of a line concerning the meaning of life the Scottish actor Ian Charleson had in a movie – I paraphrase – “I don’t know why we are here, but it’s certainly not to have a good time.”  I suppose that is a profoundly Scottish sentiment. 

The last time I read anything about the Dalai Lama, it was in a short piece by Emily Maitlis in her collection Airhead.  She interviewed His Holiness in a posh London hotel and was rather bemused, because, if I interpreted her correctly, his responses to questions of profound spiritual significance seemed somewhat simplistic.  She went along to interview, literally, a god, only to find that he was a perfectly regular guy, warm hearted and full of smiles.  I got the impression, not so much that she thought he was an impostor, rather that the mythology that had grown up around him was fake.  I had a vague reminiscence of Peter Sellers’ last film, Being There, in which he played a gardener who is regarded as a great sage when in fact he is what used to be called a “natural”, or, after the fashion of Forrest Gump, an idiot.    

Heretofore, it has never crossed my mind to pursue happiness.  I have always thought of happiness as something nebulous, something hard to grasp.  It has occasionally ambushed me and taken me by surprise, but I have never taken seriously the idea of bottling happiness.  I have this idea that if you actively try to pursue it and capture it, it will merely elude you.  On the other hand, if you lay yourself open to the possibility of happiness choosing you, then, just maybe, for a moment, you will get lucky.  What is the inscription at the head of the score of Elgar 2?  Rarely, rarely comest thou, spirit of delight.      

Oddly enough, The Art of Happiness reminded me somewhat of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, a book not so much instructing you how to be happy, as how to survive, how to choose to survive, even in the direst circumstances.  But when it comes to self-help books, my Bible is the classic lampoon of the life-style guides common in 1930s America, James Thurber’s Let Your Mind Alone!  I have no intention of undergoing psychoanalysis.  I have a notion that, for me at least, that level of self-scrutiny might be a path to madness.  On these occasions when I have been surprised by joy, I’ve always found myself embarked on some project that has taken me out of myself – making music with others, trying to master a foreign language, medicine certainly; even writing a book is an escape from self-absorption and introspection because it is intended ultimately to be a communication with other people. 

I recall the psychiatrists in Edinburgh were fond of a stock question about mood, or “affect”, “How are you within yourself?”  Usually, of course, “How are you?” is merely a conventional greeting, and not the sincere, delving enquiry that is a therapist’s overture to an essay at diagnosis.  So I just reply “Good, thanks”, with an antipodean twang.  I find enquiries about my personal happiness slightly discomfiting, and I usually give a stock reply.  “Call no man happy!”  “How’s life?  Roller coaster ride, roller coaster ride!”  I’m not proud of it.  In the doctor’s surgery I have sometimes heard people say, with regret, “If I had the opportunity to live my life again, knowing what I know now, I would live it entirely differently.”  They are reminiscing about a woodland walk among bluebells, in life’s springtime, encountering Robert Frost’s bifurcation of ways, one much like the other.  What difference then?  For myself, I have this odd, inexplicable notion that I took the other path.  In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the late Milan Kundera remarked that you can never know which of two options is the better course, because you can only live out one of them.  So I tend not to dwell on life’s alternative universes.  No regrets then.

One regret.  I wish I had realised that I didn’t have to take on the whole world on my own.                          

There is a story, apocryphal for all I know, about a man who found himself in Hiroshima on August 6^th 1945, and who survived the dropping of the first atomic bomb.  He decided to get out.  Miraculously, some trains were still running, so he took a train to Nagasaki. 

Hold that thought.

It is the time of year in which to revisit apocalyptic visions.  I rewatched Hob.  Hob is the final episode in a six part series which the BBC put on in the winter of 1958-59.  It was the creation of Nigel Kneale.  Quatermass and the Pit.  I was a child of the fifties, so I was very young when the series was shown, but I remember my reaction to seeing it very vividly.  I was simultaneously enthralled, and frightened out of my wits.  I would go into school the following day and say to my friend Billy Clark, “Did you see Quatermass last night?”  I think we were the only two in the class who were allowed by our parents to watch it. 

Some workmen excavating a site in the region of a tube station in Knightsbridge discover a strange skull in the vicinity of a buried metal object.  They unearth a capsule about the size of a railway locomotive.  A palaeontologist, Dr Matthew Roney, aided by his assistant Barbara Judd, enlists the help of the scientist Prof Bernard Quatermass, of the British Rocket Group, who has an uneasy relationship with his military counterpart in the group, Colonel Breen.  Fantastically, the scientists hypothesise the capsule is a Martian space craft, 5,000,000 years old, populated by giant insects come to colonise planet Earth, and to abduct pre-humanoids and genetically modify them.  But the government, and the military, are naturally dismissive of this absurd thesis.  Breen is particularly scathing, and grows increasingly irascible with each episode.  He thinks the object’s provenance is much more recent – a remnant of the war, perhaps an unexploded bomb, or a Nazi propaganda tool designed to frighten Londoners. 

I remember two particularly disturbing scenes.  A policeman enters a decrepit, unoccupied house in nearby Hobbs Lane.  Nothing happens, but he is spooked by an uncanny atmosphere.  Later, an electrician working late, and on his own in the capsule, becomes overwhelmed with terror when objects around him start flying about as if directed by malignant poltergeists.  I can still recall the sight of the man’s spanner disappearing up to the far end of the capsule.  He flees in blind panic.  His posture and his gait are very strange, quite inhuman.  That is because he has been possessed by an insect. 

The populace have noticed disturbances of this nature in Hobbs Lane for centuries.  In old documents, “Hobbs” is spelt “Hob’s”.  A hob is a malignant elf, a hobgoblin. 

There is a stand-off between the boffins on the one hand, and the military on the other, backed by a government minister.  The boffins are ardent and sincere, but perhaps politically naive.  They warn of a dire existential threat to humanity, but the establishment say there is nothing to worry about, and give the press, represented by the ever inquisitive journalist James Fullalove, and the public free access to the site.

So we come to part six, Hob.  You will not be surprised to learn that the boffins were right.  There is an apocalypse.  London is on fire.  Those of the populace with the remnant Martian memory turn on those without it, the other, in “the wild hunt”.  Hob reigns supreme.  Can the boffins find a way to avert absolute catastrophe?

Watching Hob, I remain frightened out of my wits.  You could easily say that a television production of the 1950s is crude, the special effects amateurish.  Yet it hardly matters.  The basic premise, the script, and the cast are so strong that you readily suspend your disbelief.  In fact, it’s all too believable, not so much the Sci-Fi aspects, as the underlying psychological truth.  As a child I hadn’t appreciated Nigel Kneale’s preoccupation with the human psyche.  Quatermass and the Pit is really an examination of the nature of evil, much like Macbeth, as interpreted by G. Wilson Knight and indeed by Roman Polansky, as an external force which can lie dormant, then reawaken and possess humanity.  In Part 6, an American surveillance aircraft broadcasting to the US overflies the conflagration of London and is itself consumed.  It’s really a depiction of the London Blitz.  Everyone, Colonel Breen, Barbara Judd, Quatarmass himself, becomes possessed.  On revisiting, the most chilling thing of all was the change in demeanour of Ms Judd.  Only the Canadian scientist Roney remains immune, and retains his sanity.  But at what cost?

Now why should I revisit this rickety old piece of television history, of a bygone age, depicting outdated manners and customs, with its grainy footage in black and white, and its gimcrack sets? 

It occurs to me that in reality we are all currently re-enacting a Quatermass melodrama.  The essential Nigel Kneale scenario is being acted out.  On the one hand, the boffins are telling the government that the world is on fire, and on the other hand, the government is, despite any lip service they may pay, largely dismissive.  Didn’t Mr Cameron allegedly dismiss all this “green crap”?  Mr Sunak took a private jet up to Aberdeenshire last week, largely as a photo opportunity, and to issue hundreds of licences to develop new oil and gas fields.  He is on the side of the motorist.  Even Sir Keir wants Sadiq Khan to “reflect” on the London ULEZ initiative.  Mr Sunak wants everybody to fly off on holiday.  I get the impression that, on both sides of the Westminster political divide, politicians are not leading by conviction, but are rather licking a finger and sticking it in the air to see which way the wind is blowing.  The aim is to win the next general election.  

So who will prevail, the scientific community or the political establishment?  And how far through our six part series have we travelled?  I reckon we are nearing the end of Part 5.  One episode to go.

Hob.                       

The threat of imminent nuclear warfare is back on the agenda.  It never really goes away.  Somebody went to see the film Oppenheimer last week, was clearly very impressed, and wrote a strong letter to The Herald advocating that the only way to stand up to Russia, China, and North Korea was to arm to the teeth.  I replied as follows:

This panegyric to the doctrine of nuclear deterrence (The lesson we Scots must learn from Oppenheimer, Herald July 24) appears eloquent and persuasive, and is indeed beautifully written, but does the argument stand up?  It is true that Albert Einstein wrote to President Roosevelt as early as August 2^nd 1939, effectively kick-starting the Manhattan Project, but in the event the successful Trinity nuclear detonation occurred two months after Nazi Germany had been defeated.  Then the USA dropped two bombs on two Japanese cities that were exhausted and defenceless, and of no strategic military importance.  The choice of Nagasaki was based on the vagaries of the local weather on August 9^th, 1945.  These detonations were effectively a demonstration to Soviet Russia, and a warning not to encroach any further into Western Europe.  Joseph Goebbels said the Nazis would win in the end, because the allies would have adopted their methods.  Such is the nature of evil.

George Santayana’s remark has become a cliché, that those who do not study the past are condemned to repeat it.  But the trouble is that history seldom repeats itself.  It doesn’t even rhyme, but, like a Wilfred Owen poem, it can half-rhyme.  Back in 1945, the best minds, Chadwick and Feynman and Oppenheimer, devoted themselves to constructing a bomb.  The Danish physicist Niels Bohr thought that nuclear research should be conducted by the scientific community in a spirit of openness, and Churchill wanted to lock him up.  But Churchill in his second term came to realise that the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD) was untenable.  He tried to arrange a “summit” – he even coined the term – of the great powers, in pursuit of a lasting peace, but by then Churchill was a spent force and he failed. 

The idea that MAD is going to carry on assuring peace is fallacious.  There have been several near misses over the years, and in our own time with our devotion to automated systems, “artificial intelligence”, and managerial pseudoscience, it is only a matter of time before an “accident” occurs.  We need, somehow, to get rid of these hellish contraptions.  Today, rather than creating increasingly sophisticated weapons of mass destruction, our brightest and best need to address the question crucial to our own time: how can we all get along together, without destroying ourselves and the planet?  

Then today I read, again in The Herald, that former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, in response to a drone strike on the Moscow Central Business District, said, “If we imagine that the offensive of the (Ukrainians) with the support of NATO was successful, and they seized part of our land, then we would have to, by virtue of the rules of the decree of the President of Russia dated 06/02/20, go for the use of nuclear weapons.  There is simply no other way out.”              

I dare say this piece of sabre rattling is designed for domestic consumption. I don’t think Mr Zelenskyy has any ambitions to invade Russia, although he would rather like the Russians to clear off out of Crimea and the Donetsk region.  And if the Kremlin sends missiles to Kyiv, they can hardly complain if Kyiv sends a few back.    

But under the threat of the mushroom cloud, life goes on.  I’m enjoying my new electric car.  I’m still on the learning curve.  I was sitting at the head of a huge queue of cars at a four way temporary traffic light yesterday and, as it was rather a long wait, I put the park brake on.  Then when the light turned green, I couldn’t get it off again!  People behind me grew irate.  I thought, not only have the Chinese tampered with all their own exported electric vehicles, they have somehow infiltrated the Czech Republic!  Somebody has thrown a switch in Shanghai, and all the electric cars in the UK have ground to a halt! 

Not so.  I needed to depress the brake pedal to release the parking brake.  Silly ass. Well, nobody died. 

The threat of imminent nuclear annihilation does rather put the day to day vicissitudes of quotidian experience into perspective.  Should the Welsh Rugby Union ban the singing of Delilah?  (I think across the border in England, people are threatening to throw a switch and bring Swing Low, Sweet Chariot to a grinding halt.)  I didn’t know what Delilah was all about, other than that the eponymous anti-heroine was some kind of femme fatale.  Improbably, I once heard a rendition of Delilah in Motherwell in the 1970s, given by the Red Army Ensemble.  So I attribute my ignorance of the song’s lyrics to a rather thick Russian accent.

Fore-giff mya Delilah, ah jyust kchood not tyke annie mehr! 

It’s all about a jealous guy who sees his girlfriend with another man, and stabs her.  It occurs to me that if we cancel Delilah, then we might as well cancel the whole of Grand Opera, which seems largely devoted to the idea of seducing and/or murdering prima donnas in a fit of jealous rage.  Just as an example, I think of the close of Act 1 of Puccini’s Tosca, in which the corrupt Chief of Police Baron Scarpia, in an “evil, be thou my good” moment, concocts his fiendish plot of seduction and murder in the church of Sant’ Andrea della Valle, against a background of the Te Deum, the tolling of church bells, and the intermittent boom of the cannon from the Castle of Sant’ Angelo.  The effect is overwhelming.  

I could easily envisage that Tosca, an opera that stages an execution (at least the torture is off stage, though audible), could be cancelled simply because the audience might find it too upsetting.  The audience might not feel “safe”.  But is not the whole point of music drama, theatre, literature, and the arts in general, that dangerous topics can be explored in an environment that is, of itself, safe?  Tosca is cathartic.  Is it too fanciful to suppose that “the purgation of pity and terror” makes the outbreak of unbridled violence in reality less likely?  I dare say the Red Army singing Delilah in Motherwell contributed, albeit infinitesimally, to a détente at the height of the cold war.    

So I hope Sir Tom Jones carries on singing Delilah.  And I expect the crowd at Cardiff may wish to join in.  It’s not unusual.                  

On Friday I bought a new car.  Well, new to me.  A Skoda Enyaq iV, all electric, a showroom demo car, 21 months old, 11,000 miles on the clock.  My previous, a Volvo V40 diesel, had 143,000 miles + on the clock and owed me no favours.  I’d acquired it in 2015 when it was a year old and had then, as I recall, 9,000 miles on the clock.  Interestingly, it was sold to me as a “green” car.  The speedometer on the dash, or was it the rev counter – I’ve forgotten already – had a green zone, adherence to which meant you were being eco-friendly.  Then diesel started to get a bad name, not so much because it contributed to the build-up of greenhouse gases, rather because it produced particulate matter which in high concentration was bad for your health.  And some German car manufacturers got into hot water because they were allegedly fiddling their emissions data.  Since June I had been unable to drive the Volvo into the low emissions zone of Glasgow city centre.  It was time for a change.

Over the years I’ve tended to buy my cars the way you might buy a bag of potatoes.  What’s the point of agonising?  I popped into my local Skoda dealer and told them what I was looking for.  I was treated with the greatest courtesy, and they produced the goods.  Would I care to take it for a test drive?  Yes indeed.

I was surprised the dealer didn’t want to accompany me.  I just had to sign a form making me liable for the first £750 worth of damages. Fair dos.  I think this “going solo” trend was started by the pandemic, and has persisted.  I did tell the dealer that I’d never driven an electric car before, so he kindly talked me through the gizmos.  This reminded me of a time way back in New Zealand, when I was a member of the much-loved but now sadly defunct Waitemata Aero Club.  I expressed a desire to fly a Tomahawk, a two-seater trainer aircraft I’d not previously flown.  In aviation, if you fly a new aircraft type, you usually undergo a “type rating” where your competence to fly the machine is checked out.  So I was surprised when the instructor tossed me the keys and said, “You can fly a Tomahawk.”  I recall at that stage I had about three type ratings under my belt.  So I thought, “Well, if he thinks it’s okay…” and I strapped myself in and perused the manual. 

There was a knock on the Perspex canopy.  “Couple of things you might want to know about the Tomahawk…”  Only in New Zealand.

After that, taking the Enyaq out on to the Stirling roads didn’t seem so daunting.  I was, immediately, utterly, besotted.  I love the silence.  I had a second test drive, got a good offer on the Volvo, and clinched the deal. 

I was amused by the reaction of some acquaintances.  A sage shaking of heads and remarks about “range anxiety”.  In the gym, somebody said, “How far away is your house?  Ten miles?  You’ll get here okay but you’ll need to find a charger on the way home.”  Then there was, “Electric’s not the way forward.  It’s hydrogen.  And just look at the exorbitant costs of the charging facilities!”  And then, “These cars are not as green as they look.  The manufacturing process is dirty as hell.  And they send kids down the lithium mines in the Congo…”  I asked these self-appointed advisers if they had ever owned an electric car.  But none had.  At least there were no sarcastic remarks, as was once de rigueur, about Skoda.  “Chaos in Czecholand…”  As a friend of mine remarked, nowadays people swear by, rather than swear at Skoda.  

For myself, I was surprised by my own emotional and indeed visceral reaction to driving the car.  This didn’t have anything to do with green credentials or virtue signalling or the smugness of the righteous.  I just drove it and thought, instinctively, this is the future. 

I promise not to glue myself to the highway, or pour tomato soup over a Van Gogh.

Funnily enough, driving around in my new acquisition, every time I turned on the radio the topic seemed to be, one way or another, the environment.  The fact that the Tories have held on to Boris’s old seat in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election has been put down to the electorate’s angry reaction to Sadiq Khan’s ultra-low emissions zone.  They say politics is the art of the possible, and no matter how worthy your aspirations, you need to take the people with you.  The Sunday Telegraph suggests a referendum to see if people still want to reach net zero by 2050.                       

I’m not sure how robust the evidence is that the ULEZ was the critical factor in Uxbridge, nor that the results of the three by-elections demonstrated much of a trend.  After all, the Tories, the Lib-Dems, and Labour each won a seat.  Mr Sunak is right to say the next general election is not a done deal, and Sir Keir is right not to be complacent.  The only thing less predictable than the result of a general election is the result of a referendum.  I think these poor people running from their hotels on Rhodes on to the beach, and into the sea, might vote for net zero ASAP.                    

Over a convivial luncheon on Saturday, six Glasgow University alumni fell to talking about James McCune Smith.  You may perhaps be forgiven if you haven’t heard of Dr Smith, because plenty of his contemporaries would have been quite content had his name been expunged from history.  The only reason why I have heard of him is that Glasgow University’s new Learning Hub building has been named after him, or as they say in the United States, named for him: the James McCune Smith Learning Hub.  Dr Smith was also an alumnus of Glasgow.  He was the first African American in the world to earn a medical degree. 

He was born into slavery in Manhattan in 1813.  (New York abolished slavery in 1827.)  He attended the African Free School in Manhattan.  He was exceptionally bright.  He wanted to study medicine but none of the US medical schools would accept him.  So of course, as you do, he came to Glasgow.  He graduated in 1837.  He worked in Glasgow and Paris, and he published academic papers in London. Then he went home.    

Back in Manhattan, he worked as a physician for twenty five years, carried on publishing, but was never admitted to the American Medical Association. His practice was in Lower Manhattan.  He opened a pharmacy at 93 West Broadway.  He was appointed the only physician to the “Colored Orphan Asylum”.  He was active in the abolitionist movement.  He encountered much professional opposition due to the colour of his skin, some of it violent, but he countered preconceptions about the supposed intellectual inferiority of African peoples by using the academic skills he had acquired in Scotland, in the emerging academic disciplines of statistics, and statistical analysis.  He refuted fallacious argument, using data. 

He died of congestive cardiac failure in 1865, shortly before the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution which abolished slavery.

So over lunch we were discussing this remarkable individual who, had he been present on the occasion, would have been one of seven Glas Uni alumni, and one of four statisticians present, one of whom explained, “His mother was a slave…”

“No, you can’t say that,” said I, somewhat mischievously.  “You have to say, ‘She was an enslaved person’.”  I was only quoting the author Lionel Shriver.  A New Zealand friend had happened to send me the link to a book club interview and Q & A Ms Shriver had recently undertaken at a meeting I think in London.  She was asked to talk about the phenomenon in the publishing world of the “sensitivity reader”.  (I myself have discussed sensitivity readers before in this blog, with respect to such disparate writers as Ian Fleming and Enid Blyton.)  Should an author refer to a character in a novel as a “slave”, a sensitivity reader might wish to change this to an “enslaved person”.  I can’t truthfully avow that Ms Shriver rolled her eyes to the ceiling, but I certainly felt she conveyed the sense that the distinction was somewhat precious.  Similarly, you ought not to say that somebody is “obese”, (or, indeed “fat”, the word favoured by Roald Dahl) rather that somebody “is living with obesity.”  As if, said Ms Shriver, amusingly, obesity was a flat-mate living down the hall.  Her point was that this separation of the individual from the condition was, in essence, a lie.

Much as I felt the urge to agree with Ms Shriver, I also felt it worthwhile to reflect on why such fine distinctions are made.  There is a pattern here: slave and enslaved person, obese and living with obesity.  The point is that people may not wish to be defined by a particular aspect of their situation.  I encountered this frequently in medicine: I and my colleagues might refer to “the stroke in Resus”; “the infarct in Bay 4”; “the pissed-fell-over in the waiting room…”  It is a dehumanising shorthand.  I don’t believe I ever said to a patient, “Your problem is that you’re fat.”  I would be more inclined to say, “It would be good for your health if you could lose a pound or two, and here are a couple of things you might try in order to achieve that…”  It softens the blow and is intended to be kindly.  Of course you might say these are weasel words.  I happened to read an article in The West Highland Free Press the other day about the Scottish poet Robert Fergusson, a contemporary of Robert Burns, sometimes referred to as “the other Robert”.  He died at the tragically early age of 24, I read, in “the asylum for pauper lunatics”.   They certainly didn’t mince their words then.  Nowadays I don’t think “asylum for pauper lunatics” would survive the sensitivity reader’s blue pencil.  The caring environment for people with cash-flow problems and mental health issues.    

But is it not odd that this sort of circumlocution has infiltrated the publishing world, and in particular the realm of fiction?  It might be hurtful for a person “living with obesity” to hear that he (she?) is indeed, obese, perhaps even “morbidly obese”, but why should it be hurtful for her (him? What are my preferred pronouns?  Let’s not go there today.) …for “them” to read about one fictional character imparting this same information to another fictional character?  Surely one of the great strengths of the novel is that the form allows the writer to explore issues that might well be deeply uncomfortable for us all.  Sensitivity readers bowdlerise controversy.  Why has this come about?  Ms Shriver had a very interesting theory.  She said that publishing houses are in our time dominated by women, and women have a profound desire to be non-confrontational.  I have an idea that a sensitivity reader employed by a publishing house might well have expunged that remark.

Ms Shriver is deeply concerned that universities now tend to shy away from controversy.  Whereas seats of learning used to be places which championed freedom of speech, and places where opposing views could be aired and debated, they have now become “safe places” where contentious views may not be expressed because they might be hurtful to the students.  Ms Shriver could not understand why the students were not rebelling against this trend.  She did not use the expression “snowflake generation”, but this was the implication.  Rather than “cancelling” speakers who air views contrary to some kind of perceived contemporary norm, would it not be better to debate with them?  This, after all, is what James McCune Smith spent his entire professional life doing, listening to opinions and prejudices that must have been personally deeply hurtful to him, and countering them with arguments based on science, statistical data, and sound argument.  I have a sense of pride that my alma mater should have matriculated and graduated this particular student, and is now honouring him, just as I have a sense of shame that my otheralma mater, 44 miles to the east, should have cancelled that great philosopher of the Scottish enlightenment, David Hume, because he once passed a remark, no doubt based on the received wisdom of his time, that one racial group of people was intellectually inferior to another.  As a result, the David Hume Tower no longer exists.  Cancelled.  Disappeared.  It never existed.  James McCune Smith would never have done that.  He would simply have explained, with scientific precision, why on this occasion David Hume had been wrong.                                              

A General Practice not far from my neck of the woods has sent out a text message to its flock of patients, advising that for a period of three consecutive days later this month, the practice will only be open for emergencies, and that during this time, patients will not be seen for “routine matters”, and repeat medication will not be issued.  The reason for this disruption is that the computer server requires an essential upgrade.

Well!

Nothing could be more redolent of the fact that computing, information technology, and the digital world have completely taken over our lives, than this passive assumption that general practice, or any other form of medical practice, becomes impossible just because you can’t switch the computer on.  I dare say the particular practice who has sent out this text will not be alone, and indeed I imagine this idea that outage equals paralysis has already been normalised.  When you crash, you close.  It’s de rigueur.   

But on the other hand I’m sure I’m not alone when I say I have seen all this coming since the start of the new millennium.  Champions of IT systems targeted medicine as a potential market, just as they targeted education, banking, policing, and any other public service you care to name.  Early on, I remember I questioned whether we actually needed the latest sophisticated program, and a colleague said to me, “It’s coming, James.  You can’t turn back a tidal wave.”  I was a Luddite.  I was King Cnut down on the beach sitting on my throne with the waves lapping around my ankles.  Some people think Cnut had an exaggerated sense of his own powers, others have suggested he was merely demonstrating to his people the futility of resisting the inevitable.  Either way, the tide was going to come in.

Actually I never had any problem with going paper-light, or even paper-less, so long as we had some sort of back-up system that could kick in when the systems crashed or the server required an upgrade.  At its simplest, the back-up could be pen and ink.  What I objected to was the way in which the purveyors of data processing would foist elaborate systems on us that we really didn’t need.  We needed something that would fulfil the function of the patient record.  That would contain some demographic data, and then a narrative, comprising a sequential record of doctor-patient interactions, correspondence between health care professionals, laboratory and radiological results, and a record of therapeutic interventions.  That’s all.  In that sense, the digital record didn’t offer anything substantial over and above the paper record, or, in the jargon, it wasn’t “value-added”.  Oh sure, it was, or could be, quicker to use, the record would likely be more legible, and perhaps more accessible (unless the server was being upgraded).  And that’s fine.  But look what happened.  The systems themselves rapidly developed delusions of grandeur.  They were not merely a record of the medical consultation, they began to direct the way in which that consultation would be conducted.  The sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship, a confidential interchange in an atmosphere of absolute trust, was disrupted, and entirely altered, by the presence of a third party in the room, the computer screen. 

Then, scurrilously, the systems became inextricably linked with emolument.  Adoption of computerised systems got written into the contract.  Doctors had to tick boxes to make money.  One was required, for example, to record whether or not a patient had the smoking habit.  I don’t recall being rewarded for getting anybody to kick the habit, nevertheless I usually attached some health advice to the tick box exercise.  “Do you smoke?  Yes?”  Tick!  “Just in case nobody has ever told you, it’s very bad for you.” 

The designers of the new contract with these contractual obligations clearly had no idea how good doctors would be at jumping through hoops.  But most doctors have been performing gymnastics of one kind or another since they were groomed for medicine while still at school.  No matter how outlandish the hurdle, the GPs leapt over it, and mostly fulfilled 100% of the prescribed tasks. 

So the systems got more complicated.  Before long, the medical consultation got drowned out by the incessant jibber-jabber of the computer’s pop-up screens.  Have you done this?  Have you done that?

Information Technology worked its way into continuing medical education.  Doctors went on courses, not to learn more medicine, but to learn how to operate increasingly complex computer systems.  The sessions were dismal in the extreme.  Scroll down the page to find the drop down menu.  Click on blah.  Right click on blah-blah.  We were put into “break-out groups” that usually had a thinly-disguised political/managerial motive.  Consider three ways in which you might be able to reduce your rate of referral to hospital.  As if we were making these referrals on a whim. 

But I can’t say the doctors were exempt from blame.  After all, we accepted it all.  We just said, “It’s coming.  You can’t turn back a tidal wave.”

But that was profoundly fallacious.  General Practice is, or could be, a very powerful body.  All we needed to say to the sharp-suited computer whizz kids was, “No, we’re not doing that.”  All the English docs needed to say to erstwhile Health Minister Matt Hancock, when he insisted all routine general practice went on line was, “No, we’re not doing that.”  But I’m afraid we are not very good at sticking our heads above the parapet.  Why not?  Maybe the medical leadership is too preoccupied in pursuit of a gong.         

For myself, I finally snapped.  I remember once in my previous life as an emergency physician attending a Morbidity & Mortality meeting in Middlemore Hospital in South Auckland, New Zealand.  There had been a tragedy.  A child, a victim of abdominal trauma, had been transferred from Middlemore to Auckland Hospital.  Auckland had taken a “conservative” approach to the child’s management, and had not operated.  The child died.  With the aid of the so-called “retrospectoscope”, an operation would have been the better option.  At the time, relations between Auckland and Middlemore Hospitals were not that good.  I remember a friend of mine in Middlemore, an intensivist, got up and delivered a “speech” – I won’t say of denunciation – but of sharp criticism.  There is no more intimidating audience than a sophisticated medical audience, and I remember thinking at the time, “I could never have done that.” 

Fifteen years later I found myself in Scotland at a medical meeting which was championing a computer system for so called “Whole Systems Working”.  I got up and delivered a “speech” – I won’t say of sharp criticism – more of denunciation.  It was met with a stunned silence.  The meeting came to an end.  I thought, “That went down like a lead balloon!”  I think it was at that precise moment that I realised that I needed to get out.  In fairness, a colleague came up to me afterwards and said, “I’m sorry I didn’t support you.  You were only saying what we were all thinking.”

But I did think of my friend in Auckland.  I’d thought I’d never make a speech like that, but in effect I did.  Subsequently, another colleague told me that my “speech” came up for discussion at another medical meeting, and a young GP had said, “Oh that guy.  He’s a legend.”  Of course that could mean anything, but I take it as a compliment, and if it is indulgent of me to record this, then as mitigation I can only say that that was the proudest moment of my medical life.                                                                     

Yesterday in Dunblane Cathedral the minister prefaced his homily, mischievously, as is sometimes his wont, with the remark, “You know, I’m not very good at forward planning.  If I was, I would have anticipated today’s lectionary and made sure I was on holiday.”  Not that Church of Scotland ministers need necessarily stick to the prescribed texts, one of which was Genesis 22: 1-14, but in the event he bit the bullet and talked about Abraham’s abortive attempt to immolate his only beloved son on the altar of… well, of what, exactly?  What would be worth such a sacrifice? 

It’s a well-known tale but, if you don’t know it, may I refer you to Wilfred Owen’s poem The Parable of the Old Man and the Young, which recounts the tale faithfully in fourteen terse lines, after the manner of a sonnet, and then adds a couplet and a fatal twist, literally a fatal twist, at the end.  From a technical point of view, Owen clearly recognised the enormous power of the 1611 King James translation, and plundered it, piecemeal and wholesale.  It is a story often recounted by people who are antagonistic towards religion of any description, to demonstrate that the God of the Old Testament is a Nasty Piece of Work, and his acolytes not much better.  I was intrigued to hear whether the minister in Dunblane would attempt some sort of justification for the behaviour of the protagonists, and I confess I attempted to send him a telepathic message: “Remember the words of Alexander Pope:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;

The proper study of mankind is man.

So talk about Wilfred Owen!”   He didn’t.  But he is a remarkably gifted man and he certainly needed no help from me.     

Owen’s theme is always the same – the pity, and the futility, of war.  Even when, ostensibly, he is not writing a war poem, he always returns to the war.  Take Miners.

There was a whispering in my hearth,

A sigh of the coal,

Grown wistful of a former earth

It might recall…

Then, midway through the poem, an abrupt change of tone:

But the coals were murmuring of their mine,

And moans down there

Of boys that slept wry sleep, and men

Writhing for air.

And I saw white bones in the cinder-shard.

Bones without number…

Similarly, The Parable of the Old Man and the Young only becomes a war poem in its last couplet.  

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,

And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Sometimes with Owen there is a stark and sudden flash of anger.  It is at its most explicit in the most uncompromising of all his poems, with its grim exposure of “The Old Lie”, Dulce et Decorum Est.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning…

I dare say Siegfried Sassoon, a harder, harsher poet than Owen, must have greatly admired Dulce et Decorum Est.

Owen depicts the war as an act of gross abuse perpetrated by the old upon the young.  Wars are fought by youth.  In the Battle of Britain, most of the “few” were barely out of their teens.  The old are not conscripted.  I wonder why not?  I suppose an old man, or woman, handed a tin hat and a rifle, would say, “What am I supposed to do with these?”  Two of the compensations of growing old are that you are unlikely to be called for jury service, and unlikely to be called up.  The young do well to be critical of their elders when failed policy and failed diplomacy plunge the world into war.  Perhaps we are witnessing something similar across the world when every year statesmen and diplomats jet into exotic locations for a Conference of the Parties, and proceed to ratify a piece of humbug.  Blah blah blah.  The world is on fire, and it is the young who will pay the price.                  

Benjamin Britten set Owen’s The Parable of the Old Man and the Young in the Offertorium, part of his War Requiem.  The setting is surrounded by the echoing choir of young boys and their ghostly chant of the Latin Requiem Mass.  War always looks futile, even absurd, from a distance.  Nowadays we think of the Great War as complete madness, a grotesque Blackadder sketch.  Field Marshall Viscount Montgomery thought the generals of the first war were complete amateurs.  Thirty thousand British soldiers, said Monty in his wide-eyed way, were killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, before lunch.

“Before lunch!”

And the Second World War was partly made possible by the crippling reparations exacted by the Treaty of Versailles, resulting in the sort of inflation which threatened to price a loaf of bread at around a billion Deutschmarks.  Churchill of all people called the second war “the unnecessary war”.              

I was intrigued to hear that a stash of wrecked Hurricane fighter planes have been found in a gorge in Ukraine.  A large number of them were shipped across to the Soviet Union during the war, to assist in the war against Nazi Germany.  And now we are sending ordnance and matériel to assist in the defence of Ukraine against Russian aggression.  Who was it said that history does not repeat itself, but sometimes rhymes? 

Or perhaps, as with Wilfred Owen’s poetry, half-rhymes.