jamescalumcampbell

“You’re sharp!” said my local shopkeeper, font of all human knowledge, when I dropped in to pick up my newspapers.  “To the bottom of the glass.”

Bottom of the glass?  Ah!  “Harp!” I said.  “Stays sharp, to the bottom of the glass.”  These ancient advertising jingles stay with you for a lifetime.  It’s a measure of how successful the ad-men were.  The chocolates that melt in your mouth, not in the hand; the sweet you can eat between meals, without ruining your appetite; the chocolates with the less fattening centre; amarsadayhelpsyouworkrestandplaythemilkybarkidistoughandstrongdontforgetthefruitgumsmum…

Actually I was sharp.  Up with the lark, still on British Summer Time, in denial.  I hate it when the clocks go back.  I wish they wouldn’t monkey with the time.  This is my least favourite time of year, compounded by these two ghastly medieval festivals, Halloween and Guy Fawkes.  I see that the Big Ben bongs are back, or will be on Armistice Day, chiming out in Greenwich Mean Time for the first time since 2017.  I would prefer to stay on summer time, and have a shorter working day, so that children can walk to school (if they still do) in daylight.  But that would never do, for “productivity” would decline.  And that would adversely affect “growth growth growth”.  Apparently Ms Truss’s heart was in the right place.  I wonder if growth growth growth is an eternal feature of political utopia.  Should we have a 2% increase in Gross Domestic Product every year for perpetuity?  How would that look after another millennium?  

I suspect it would look like hell on earth.

Anyway, what’s in the paper, for which I was so sharp?  I’m in the paper!  I was surprised.  I wrote to them, a truncated version of last week’s blog (Daft Wednesday), and when the letter didn’t appear on Thursday, I just shrugged and echoed the words of Mr Johnson, “Them’s the breaks.”  But lo and behold, I was merely on back-burner, today to be produced, oven-ready.  Now I must hold myself in readiness for ripostes, enjoinders, animadversions, and diktats to wake up and smell the coffee.  So good to chuck one’s hat into the ring.

All news is bad news; or so it would appear.  What a litany of disaster across the world.  It occurs to me that most of it is mad-made.  The Four Horsemen, War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death these days would appear largely to be products of our own lust for growth growth growth.  The war in Ukraine was not inevitable, so neither was the disruption of energy supplies and grain exports.  Neither was the hike in fuel prices, nor therefore the £8 billion (plus) profits in the last quarter for Shell.  It’s a mystery.  Meanwhile some people have to choose between eating and heating.  Yet the rest of the world is in such dire straits that people would risk getting into flimsy dinghies that are less than seaworthy, to risk being deported to Rwanda by Ms Braverman (whose coat remains on a shoogly peg). 

Talking, obliquely, of migrants, I came across, in my German class, Griechischer Wein, an Udo Jürgens song (if I have interpreted it correctly) about Greek migrants getting maudlin about home over a glass or two in the pub.  It is a classic example of Schlager, a style of German language pop-folk music.  Jürgens won Eurovision; in that context it may be said some people find Schlager rather kitsch.  You can see and hear on U-tube a great exponent of Schlager, Helene Fischer, sing Merci, Chérie to an older Udo Jürgens, evidently much moved by her rendition.  I rather like it.  In the Goethe Institute our teacher caught me humming Griechischer Wein at coffee break and said, “It is a musical worm.  You cannot forget it.”  Griechischer Wein reminds me of Schubert’s Das Wirtshaus in Winterreise.  Maybe the greatest Schlager exponent is Schubert.  But I digress. Back to the papers.               

Mr Musk has bought Twitter for $44 billion.  He is to be chief twit.  I wonder how that figure was arrived at.  How can you put a price on something that is merely ethereal and has no material existence?  Another mystery.  It’s a cliché to state that social media constitute the town square, or the agora of ancient Greece.  I never visit.

But I mustn’t affect this disillusionment with the world.  I’m beginning to sound like the last of the Mahler Rückert Songs.  Ich bin der Welt abhandengekommen.  I am lost to the world.  I might flatter myself that I am like late Schubert, circulating his manuscripts amongst a few friends.  But no.  I scribble away.  I hope yet to do some damage.  Hat still in the ring.  Oh yes.  I have a readership.  I have twenty followers!  I’ve had a like!                      

On BBC Radio 4’s Any Answers on Saturday, one Don MacKay, aged 17, phoned in from Cornwall, to express his disaffection with party politics.  Behind his evident reticence, he was highly articulate.  He thought politics was a façade covering dishonesty and corruption, that government ministers evinced no particular skill set – it was the civil service that ran the country – and that the party system fundamentally undermines democracy.  It would be better if MPs were independent.  Hold these thoughts.       

The evening of Wednesday October 19^th must surely represent the nadir for the current administration at Westminster.  Surely.  Labour had put forward a motion to continue the ban on fracking.  The Government issued a three line whip to Conservative members to ensure Labour would be defeated.  There was a division.  Just before members entered the lobbies, a government minister announced that there was no three line whip.  This took the chief whip, and her deputy, by surprise.  They resigned on the spot.  Apparently.  Chaos on the floor of the House ensued, with members allegedly being manhandled into the “appropriate” lobbies.  There was a lot of bad language in the air.  I saw it reported, with bemusement and amusement, on German telly.  “This is a ****ing shambles” und so weiter.  But apparently it had been a vote of confidence after all.  Or had it?  Mysteriously, the whips “unresigned”.  The following day, the Prime Minister resigned.  She has not yet “unresigned”.  At time of writing, Rishi Sunak is the front runner to replace her, but Penny Mordaunt is still in the running.  She has until two o’clock to garner 100 supporters in order to trigger an online ballot of the Tory Party membership.  Boris has ruled himself out.  He isn’t going to be Cincinnatus after all.  But I seem to recall he ruled himself out once before, after David Cameron resigned.     

Whatever the outcome, there is a universal acknowledgment that something is rotten in the state of Westminster.  Sir Keir Starmer, Sir Ed Davey, Nicola Sturgeon, Mark Drakeford, et al, declare that the only way to end this farce is to call a general election.  But would it make any difference?  And in any case, a general election is not within the gift of the opposition parties.  Only the party in government can call a general election and that, so the cliché says, would be like turkeys… Christmas… bla bla bla.  And therein lies the rub.  Why would you vote to lose your job?  As Sir Charles Walker remarked in a scathing indictment of his own government, “There is nothing so ‘ex’ as an ex-politician.”      

All over the world, the satirists are having a field day.  Even Dmitry Medvedev joined in, in congratulating a lettuce on surviving Liz Truss’s premiership.  Witnessing Daft Wednesday was like witnessing the fall of the Roman Empire.  Didn’t Caligula – or was it Nero – make his horse a senator?  Meanwhile Mr Putin continues to bomb Kiev, and Mr Xi has quietly assumed absolute power over China, apparently for life.  Democracy is extremely vulnerable.  The House of Commons needs to be put into special measures. 

I agree with Mr MacKay from Cornwall.  We don’t need merely to tweak the system.  It seems to me there is a fundamental problem with our democracy, as currently practised.  There is an inevitable conflict of interest between pursuing a political career, and following the dictates of your conscience.  It is not unlike the conflict of interest that is recognised in a court of law, when it transpires that a potential jury member happens to know the defendant.  That individual will be excused.  Similarly, when a member of parliament is called upon to vote that fracking be given the go-ahead, or should be banned, it seems to me their vote should be disallowed when it becomes apparent that their future career, their ability to pay their mortgage, put bread on the table, and support their family, is dependent upon how they vote. 

In that sense, the whip is rather like an agent of the defendant in court, who infiltrates the jury and leans on jury members with threats and intimidation. 

The whip is the origin of political humbug.  When you express and avow opinions which in reality you don’t actually hold, you need to adopt techniques of humbuggery which, at least, evince a degree of cognitive dissonance, and at worst, demonstrate an ability to hold two diametrically opposing views simultaneously.  George Orwell called this latter technique “doublethink”.  Such techniques are apprehended universally as the political norm.  When a politician appears on the Laura Kuenssberg Show we no longer expect they will answer a question in a straightforward way, or, indeed, answer the question at all.  You could even argue that the ability to speak the language of humbug is the only skill that is peculiar and particular to the political profession.  People who speak Humbug are under the whip.

The whip is not always applied.  MPs are sometimes afforded a “conscience vote”.  Oddly enough, issues that are absolutely fundamental to our innermost being, issues that are existential, for example, termination of pregnancy, assisted dying, capital punishment – these tend to be conscience votes.  But then, if fracking is going to destroy the planet, then fracking becomes an existential issue, and surely a conscience vote.

In truth, every vote, from how often the council should empty the bins to whether or not Trident should be maintained and updated, is a conscience vote.  But if you are being leaned on, and your spouse reminds you that you need to pay the children’s school fees, what are you to do?     

If the whip is absurd, are then political parties absurd?  We should be careful of going down this road.  Totalitarian regimes think political parties are absurd.  They ban them all – except their own.  It is the most natural thing in the world for people in pursuit of a common goal to organise.  Yet we need to recognise that it is impossible that even a small group of like-minded individuals will share the same opinion on every topic known to man. 

Maybe the absurdity lies at a deeper level.  Perhaps it is the political career that is absurd.  I wonder if the electorate might, at the next general election, whenever it may be, consider bypassing the political class and voting in “normal” people.  A typical candidate might be somebody entering the seventh decade of life, at the top of their professional game whatever it may be, who might be persuaded, albeit reluctantly but out of a sense of civic duty, to stand for Parliament, for one term only.  No whip, every vote a conscience vote, no second term.  Imagine!

Now you may say I’m a dreamer…                               

Back in 2019 I started attending a beginners’ German class in Stirling.  Then the pandemic came along and we had to go on line.  Then that too came to a halt, and all I could do was try to read a little every day.  Jeden Tag versuchte ich, während des Lockdowns, ein bisschen Deutsch zu lesen.  This year, when the autumn leaves began to fall, live meetings in real time began to start up again, and I resolved to find a German class.  I contacted the Goethe Institute in Glasgow.  I had to sit a test, so that I could be placed in an appropriate class.  Then I had an interview on Zoom, mostly in German.  I thought, why on earth am I subjecting myself to this?  I suppose a lifetime of education, then further education, then “professional development” and so forth, becomes habit-forming.  Anyway, I was treated with the greatest kindness and forbearance, and now I attend a class on Thursday mornings in the Institute in Glasgow.

It’s an early start for me.  The morning rush hour on the M80 merging on to the M8 east of Glasgow is horrendous, so I avoid that and take the bucolic route through Strathblane.  Moreover parking in the environs of the Institute is very expensive, so I’ve got into the habit of leaving the car, for free, in Kelvindale, and walking for thirty minutes through Glasgow’s west end.  This is home for me.  I played in these streets as a child.  I don’t think they’ve changed that much; just more traffic.

The Botanic Gardens, Hillhead, Glasgow University Campus, Kelvingrove Park.  How odd to be back in this environment, qua student, of sorts.  I cut through the erstwhile Arts Quadrangle of the university’s main building, and the cloisters.  Mingling with the undergraduates, I feel like a ghost.  I remember at the top of the stairway leading up to the Arts Quadrangle there used to be a prominent poster advertising UGSAS – the Universities of Glasgow & Strathclyde Air Squadron.  It is no longer there, and I don’t suppose UGSAS exists any more.  But I was a cadet pilot in UGSAS all these years ago, and I used to attend “Ground School” at the Squadron’s HQ at 12 Park Circus, also, so far as I remember, held on a Thursday.  The Goethe Institute is fifty metres away, at No. 3.  Walking past No. 12 I feel even more like a ghost.  The only thing to indicate the former life and occupancy of No. 12 is a bare flagstaff above the entrance. 

RAF educational techniques occasionally involved an interview without coffee, a “bollocking”, for some perceived piece of stupidity or insubordination.  All was subsequently forgiven in the bar, where, if not careful, one could rack up a substantial “mess bill”.  There is no bar in the Goethe Institute, but there is coffee.  And a very relaxed atmosphere.  I sometimes have to remind myself that there is no point in harbouring any angst.  It doesn’t in the least matter if I get my verb endings wrong.  I’m doing this for fun.  Still, habits of a lifetime’s past exposure to threats and intimidation are deeply ingrained, and hard to expunge.  I still experience a pang of dread if I discover I have inadvertently missed out a piece of homework.  Absurd! 

After the class, I’ve got into the habit of walking back past No. 12 – per ardua ad astra – and the statue of Lord Roberts of Kandahar sitting astride his horse and looking across Kelvingrove in the direction of Glasgow University tower.  I descend on to Kelvin Way and walk along to the Art Gallery and Museum just in time for the one o’clock organ recital.  In the German class we are tasked this week to describe a museum we have visited and say what is interesting about it.  The Art Galleries would be too obvious.  I’ve opted for the House of Memories, 12,000 miles away in Waipu, North Island, New Zealand, where Scottish settlers formed a community in the middle of the nineteenth century.

After the organ recital in Kelvingrove, I generally have a wander through the paintings and exhibits.  One seems out of place to me – a Supermarine Spitfire hanging from the ceiling.  It is an amazing machine, but it is an engine of war.  Put it in a museum of flight, I say.  It is sobering to think that if I’d been born a generation earlier I might have had to fly one of them in combat with the people I now have a chat with about museums over coffee on Thursday morning.  I’ve been very fortunate.  My most crucial assignment this week is to provide the biscuits.

Das is die Weise, wie der Keks krümelt.                                         

I’ve been thinking a lot about pies this week, ever since the Prime Minister announced that it was her intention, not to divide up the pie among us more equably, but rather to “grow the pie”.  Her idea is that you give free rein to the risk-takers and entrepreneurs to do whatever it is they do – basically, to create pie – without being impeded by needless bureaucracy and red tape, so that the sliver of pie allotted to the disadvantaged grows in absolute, if not relative terms.  She outlined all this during her keynote speech to the Conservative Party Conference last week.  She was briefly and peaceably heckled by Greenpeace who held up a banner asking, “Who voted for this?”  The protestors were removed.  Ms Truss said she had three priorities: growth, growth, and growth.  That reminded me of Mr Blair’s three priorities: education, education, education.  Who are the speech writers who cobble together such clanking soundbites?  The PM went on to say, “I will not allow the anti-growth coalition to hold us back.  Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP.  The militant unions, the vested interests dressed up as think-tanks.  The talking heads, the Brexit deniers and Extinction Rebellion and some of the people we had in the hall earlier.  The fact is they prefer protesting to doing.  They prefer talking on Twitter to taking tough decisions.  They taxi from North London townhouses to the BBC studio to dismiss anyone challenging the status quo.  From broadcast to podcast, they peddle the same old answers.  It’s always more taxes, more regulation and more meddling.  Wrong, wrong, wrong…”

Blimey.

But back to the pie.  What exactly is this pie?  I suppose it is a representation of wealth.  Gross Domestic Product, perhaps.  Energy is a part of it.  Actually, energy is all of it.  That is fundamentally why we eat pie; it is a source of energy.  Mr Putin has switched off some of our energy sources so, it is said, we need to drill and frack for oil and gas, open new nuclear power stations, and keep chasing the disconsolate chimera of nuclear fusion.  The PM has advised the King not to attend COP 27 in Egypt. 

It all sounds like old hat to me, the sort of buccaneering attitude that created the British Empire three hundred years ago.  The East India Company wasn’t much burdened by excessive oversight and red tape.  I think we need to dump this concept of “growth”.  The fact is, the pie is finite.  We are like a colony of bacteria occupying a small and fragile petri dish.  We extract nutrients from the agar, exponentially multiply, and discharge toxic waste into our source of sustenance.  It can’t go on. 

It seems to me that economics is, or should be, applied thermodynamics.  Every time we have fouled up – 2008 would be a prime example – it is because we have tried to ignore the basic laws of thermodynamics, that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, and that there is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine. 

I wonder how many members of the British Cabinet have a working knowledge of, or even a passing familiarity with, the Second Law of Thermodynamics?  The novelist C. P. Snow used to buttonhole members of the London literati at cocktail parties and ask them if they knew the Second Law.  Snow believed that the gulf between the sciences and the humanities was damaging society.  It is salutary to look at the make-up of the British Cabinet in this regard.  Currently it has twenty three members, including the Prime Minister, and a further eight ministers attend cabinet meetings.  Of this total of thirty one, six studied a STEM subject at university; two physicists, two engineers, a chemist, and a mathematician.  The rest for the most part read one of the Humanities, such as history, philosophy, economics, and law.  Ms Truss studied PPE at Oxford.  The current holders of the great offices of state studied classics and history, hospitality, and law.

If economics is a subspecialty of thermodynamics, then you might argue that anybody who is scientifically illiterate must also be economically illiterate.  Judging by the reaction of the markets to Mr Kwarteng’s mini-budget, a lot of financial movers and shakers evidently thought so.  But the trouble with economics is that as a discipline it bestrides science and the humanities.  It is an art as well as a science.  It is a behavioural science, and that is why it is so dismal.    

Greatly looking forward to the inaugural concert of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra’s new season, and having arranged to foregather with friends in Ask Italia, across the road from the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, I descended upon Glasgow circa 1730 on Saturday evening.  I was disappointed, though hardly surprised, as it has been the case for some time now, to find that the Buchanan Galleries car park is still closing at 2100.  What earthly use is that on a Saturday night?  But all is not well with Buchanan Galleries, a splendid shopping mall which, rumour has it, despite being, in terms of the normal life span of a building, virtually brand new, is about to be pulled down.  I guess the “footfall” is dying away as people opt to shop, and carry out virtually everything else, on line.  So I parked in the Concert Square car park, a grim Lager with its sullen ammoniacal reek, and slipped across to the concert hall.      

Closed!  I walked up Sauchiehall Street, past the gently billowing tumbleweed, to Waterstones, browsed, and returned to the concert hall, still closed, not to be opened until 1815.  This is outrageous! – I said to the hapless doorman, conscious that I sounded like Bernard Levin, complaining he could not purchase champagne at the Usher Hall bar during the Edinburgh International Festival.  This is not worthy of a great cosmopolitan city.  Yes, sir.  I will write to the papers!  You do that, sir.  I repaired to Ask Italia, and offloaded my gripes and grumbles upon my longsuffering friends who, under the weather from La Grippe, and from recent Covid and ‘flu vac boosters, now had to put up with my rant.

The lasagne was excellent.

To the concert.  Balsam.  The leader of the RSNO, Maya Iwabuchi, introduced the programme.  She can be quite laconic.  She didn’t say anything about the contemporary work that would start the concert’s second half, but said that later the composer would come on stage and “explain himself”.  But she did give us a warning.  Brace yourselves.  For the first half, the orchestra played Stravinsky’s Fireworks, and the Benjamin Britten Violin Concerto.  Fireworks, Stravinsky’s Opus 4, was enchanting, impressionistic, perhaps reminiscent of Debussy.  The Britten was very haunting, particularly its protracted closing passages, masterfully played by the young American violinist Stefan Jackiw.  We repaired to the bar.  Friends from Canada said they envied us having all this culture on our doorstep. 

Part 2 commenced.  David Fennessy did indeed come on stage to talk about the impending World Première of his commissioned work, The Riot Act.  The composer had at his disposal the forces required for the work that was to follow, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.  The availability of such massive forces is, apparently, a composer’s dream.  The Riot Act was of six minutes’ duration, and Mr Fennessy remarked that he distrusted introductory talks that exceeded the length of the music.  (I think he ran it pretty close.)  The Riot Act concerned an event that took place a stone’s throw (as the composer said, literally a stone’s throw) from where we now were, the Battle of George Square, on January 31^st 1919, aka Black Friday or Bloody Friday.  On January 27^th, 3,000 workers met in St Andrew’s Hall to demonstrate against unemployment, and the imposition of a 47 hour week.  A strike was called, and over the course of the next few days flying pickets amassed 40,000 workers.  In London there was nervousness about an impending Bolshevik uprising.  A War Cabinet was held on January 30^th, chaired, in the absence of the PM, Lloyd George, by Andrew Bonar Law.  The Sheriff of Lanarkshire called for military aid, and troops, along with six tanks, were despatched, but not from nearby Maryhill Barracks, whose occupants might have sympathised with the workers.  A mass crowd had gathered in George Square.  The people were ordered to disperse.  The authorities read the riot act.  Literally.

Our Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the Act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assembles.

GOD SAVE THE KING

In David Fennessy’s piece, the Riot Act was read, or sung, by the tenor Mark Le Brocq, while the orchestra took the part of the rioters. 

The Riot Act proved to be absolutely ghastly.  I say that, not because it was avant garde, or “difficult”, or dissonant, or tuneless (though all of that is true), but because it was painfully, and I mean painfully, loud.  An enormous percussion section, going at full blast, was augmented by four musicians scattered about the choir stalls deploying shrieking police whistles of the Acme Thunderer variety.  It was excruciating.  It was also a health hazard.  I had to cover my ears. 

So from my muffled redoubt I can’t be sure what next transpired.  I think the document being declaimed was snatched away, and since the Riot Act was not fully read, it could not be enacted. But I suspect that’s wishful thinking.  In the event, there was a baton charge by police, some of them mounted.  Machine gun nests were installed in George Square.  The crowd was dispersed.  Fortunately there was only one fatality, a policeman who later died as a result of a head injury.  So perhaps the “Battle” of George Square is an exaggeration.  I’ve been reading Kate Adey’s autobiography, The Kindness of Strangers, in which she gives a very vivid account of events that took place in 1989 in and around Tiananmen Square.  She was there.  Her description is extraordinarily vivid, and the events truly horrific.   

In his talk, David Fennessy extolled our rights of freedom of assembly, and of freedom of speech.  It crossed my mind to stand up during the performance and exercise such rights by carrying out my own personal demonstration against noise pollution.  But I would not have been heard.  People might have thought I was part of the performance.  There was a further irony in the juxtaposition of The Riot Act with The Rite of Spring which, at its first performance in Paris in 1913, caused a riot. 

But now I was no longer in the mood.  I’ve been here before.  I attended a London Prom in 2008 (on the night the great champion of Arnold Bax, the conductor Vernon Handley died), featuring Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Antarctica, Iannis Xenakis’ Pléiades, and Holst’s The Planets.  The RVW was beautiful, and the Xenakis, a percussive piece, like The Riot Act, an assault on the delicate mechanisms of the inner ear.  I whispered to my neighbour, “Life’s too short”, and left.

And I would have done the same on Saturday night, but for the fact that my friends might have concluded I had taken ill.  Which, in a way, I had.  But I no longer had any desire to hear the Stravinsky.  Attending a concert is a bit like sitting down to, in this case, a four course meal.  The palate demands a certain congruity, or continuity; each course informs the one to follow.  But now somebody had evacuated on to my plate.

What a racket.  Think I’ll write to the papers.  My friends, wearied of my expostulations, nodded.  “You do that, James.”                 

I agree with President Biden: trickle-down economics don’t work.  The idea is that instead of ensuring a more equitable division of the cake, you make the cake bigger.  The economy must grow.  So you don’t discourage the multinational energy companies by imposing a windfall tax on them.  You don’t make the UK “unattractive” for inward investors.  You remove the cap on bankers’ bonuses so that the financial sector will attract “the best minds”.  The poor get richer precisely because the rich get richer.  But didn’t Her Late Majesty ask Gordon Brown, when he was PM in 2008, how come the bankers got it all wrong?    

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never received a bonus in my life.  Not quite true.  When I did my paper round as a schoolboy for £1 a week – good money at the time – I would get £2 at Christmas.  That was my last bonus.  I certainly never received a bonus throughout my medical career, and indeed I never got extra pay for overtime.  Indeed, the longer I worked, the poorer the hourly rate became.  I was like one of these labourers in Jesus’ parable who toils and sweats all day and then gets the same as the guy who comes along at the end to put in an hour’s graft. 

The gap between the rich and the poor is a recurring theme in the parables.  It doesn’t appear that Jesus believed in trickle-down economics any more than President Biden.  A virtuous young man asked Our Lord what he needed to do, aside from keeping the commandments, to live a perfect life.  Jesus advised him to sell all his possessions and give the money to the poor.  The man went away, exceeding sorrowful, for he was very wealthy.  That figures.  My experience of wealthy people is that they are very careful with their money.  That is why they are wealthy, because they know how to accrue wealth.  The acquisition of money is likely to be their central preoccupation.  Jesus clearly thought such a preoccupation was inherently absurd, and he advised his disciples that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.  I’ve heard it said that a tiny door beside the main gate to Jerusalem was nicknamed “the eye of the needle”, but in any case Jesus conjured an inherently farcical image. 

Wealthy people tend to occupy positions of power and influence, and it is hardly surprising to find that they favour financial systems which protect their wealth, and the status quo.  They dwell in closed and fortified communities, their gates festooned with security cameras.  When they venture out into the world, they do so in bullet-proof limousines with darkened windows.  As the gap between rich and poor increases, the society becomes more fractured and, eventually, more violent. 

Mr Kwarteng defended his decision to cut taxes with the sweetener that more money is going into everybody’s pocket.  But at the same time, a massive bail-out for everybody’s energy bill is going to cost even more than the Covid furlough scheme, and if the Chancellor is not going to raise the money by taxes, he will have to borrow it.  Soon, if not already, the UK debt will be eye-wateringly vast.  (Incidentally, have you noticed the way in which the media tell us the annual household energy cap will be £2,500?  This is untrue.  There will be a cap on the kilowatt hour price, such that an average household will pay something in the order of £2,500 per annum.  That should be made clear.)  But how else can we cut energy costs long term?  We mustn’t be dependent upon Mr Putin’s turning on and off the gas taps on a whim; so, says the government, we need to restart drilling and fracking for oil and gas.  COP26 is history.

While all this is going on, various societal structures are fracturing.  For example, the National Health Service is under intolerable strain, and winter is still more than two months away.  Ms Coffey has outlined her rescue plan for England, dubbed “A, B, C, and D.”  Apparently they stand for Ambulances, Backlogs, (Social) Care, and Doctors & Dentists.  I’m always highly suspicious of these instant back-of-a-fag-packet political solutions to the problems of health care.  Didn’t Tony BIair say, “24 hours to save the NHS!”  I wonder if the Health Secretary knows that in medicine, A is for Airway, B for Breathing, C for Circulation, and D for (Neurological) Disability?  Or indeed that E stands for Exposure & Environment?  The fact that ABCD means one thing for a politician, and another for a doctor or nurse, rather suggests to me that the politicos and the medics are not “singing off the same hymn sheet.”      

Meanwhile, at the Labour Conference in Liverpool, Sir Keir Starmer has outlined ambitious plans for the achievement of 100% energy production from renewables, by 2030.  For the first time since 2010, I have the sense that Labour could win the next general election. 

This strange Limbo which we currently inhabit reminds me of the long haul flight from Glasgow to London Heathrow to Changi Singapore, thence to Auckland New Zealand.  It is one long queue, interspersed by periods of enforced captivity and inactivity.  You check in, go through security, browse the book shelves and the duty free, find a lounge, await the call, board, sit interminably at the gate and then at the holding point, and finally get airborne.  Then you land again and negotiate the endless corridors of the terminals, with that mild anxiety that you might miss the connection.  Then you repeat the whole sequence, only more elaborately.  Baggage checked straight through, fingers crossed.  At security, watch, phone, wallet, loose change, laptop, belt, shoes, all deposited for X-ray scrutiny in a battered tray on the conveyer belt.  Another book shop, more duty free.  Another lounge.  The call to board. Another interminable wait on the taxiways.  You are exhausted and the journey has barely begun.   

But now, at long last, the passengers and their baggage have been secured on board, latecomers have been ensconced with suitably red faces, and the doors have been closed and cross-checked.  The captain has addressed us in clipped and barely audible tones, and the first officer has radioed the tower.

“Speedbird 747 push back.”

An excruciatingly slow reverse, and a protracted taxi round the periphery of the airport.

“Speedbird 747 hold.”

We sit at the holding point, by the threshold.

“Speedbird 747 clear for take-off.”

We’re off! 

How best to pass thirteen hours in the encapsulated quarantine of a mobile cigar tube?  You make some sort of contact with your neighbour.  Surely it is a failure if you do not.  Then there’s a blessed cocktail, and dinner.  You browse the airline mags.  You tune into whatever is on the radio or the telly.  Find the classical music station, find a good movie, read the first few pages of the book you bought at the airport.  At some stage, you take a walk up and down the aisles and visit the loo.  If it’s daylight, you glance out of the window and marry up what you see with the little aeroplane crawling across the map.  But you are in suspended animation, of a state of mind quite incapable of doing anything substantive. 

And with any luck, you sleep. 

All of a sudden, you are summoned to breakfast.  We have commenced our descent into Singapore.  All these hours of enforced inactivity and now we are compelled to bolt breakfast so the stewards can clear up before fastening lap-straps. 

Changi.  An enormous terminal.  You are stopping over, so now you have to retrieve your luggage, negotiate another series of long corridors, customs, immigration, and emerge into the steamy night.  You take a taxi, and catch up on local gossip, en route to the Sheraton Towers, 39 Scott Road.  The roads, and the floral displays on the overpasses are, as ever, impeccably manicured. 

Check in at the Sheraton.  Pause for a G & T at the bar, where an incredibly talented pianist is playing jazz in rich harmony, after the fashion of Bill Evans.  To dine or not to dine?  You have been snacking for the past 24 hours, and lost all sense of the appropriateness of mealtimes.  You’re not even sure if you ought to sleep.  And yet it is night time.  In your room, the telly is on, welcoming you personally.  Behind the message, a fish is meandering about a tank, goggling inanely. 

You awake in the night.  You have no idea where you are, when you are, or even who you are.

Last week the King evidently experienced this same dislocation of time.  Appending the royal signature to another municipal tome, he paused and muttered, “Is it the twelfth?”

“The thirteenth, sir.”

The Queen Consort whispered, “You wrote the twelfth last time.” 

Then the fountain pen exploded and there was a momentary flash of temper.

“…bloody thing…”

The Queen Consort, evidently well used to such petulant displays, went into damage control mode, took his place and, apparently, forged his signature.  I certainly didn’t think badly of the King for momentarily losing it.  Most of us, when we lose a parent, are given a week’s compassionate leave.  He has probably put in the hardest working week of his life.  Besides, temper is hereditary.  George VI, at least according to the movie The King’s Speech, could explode.  And I don’t think the Duke of Edinburgh suffered fools gladly.  The following day, on the Vine Show, Jeremy asked us, “Have you ever had leaky pen trouble?  Call us on 0800…”  And he consulted an expert in fountain pen technology.  Apparently it’s all to do with changes in the room’s atmospheric temperatures and pressures.  In the endless scrutiny of the royal activities of the week, no stone has been left unturned.     

Thus it is with this protracted period of mourning.  There is nothing else to do.  It is as if we have entered a hermetically sealed airship which must negotiate its way across this elaborately orchestrated and choreographed masque.  There is nothing else to be done other than to observe the world turn as we gradually make our way to the other side. 

The live stream from Westminster Hall, and the fish in the aquarium in the Singapore hotel bedroom, are one and the same.  Jetlagged, you stare at the screen, hypnotised.  I kept thinking I recognised faces in the Westminster queue.  Some of the obsequies were extravagant, others rather perfunctory; mostly they were dignified in their solemnity.  The silence was impressive.  No mobile phones!  I watched the endless procession with the distracted detachment of somebody who has completely lost track of time and space. 

Another morning, another taxi, another queue, and all the rituals of checking-in.  Once more we’re off!  And this time, a surge of the heart.  The next time you step out of this ship, you will walk into Aotearoa. 

Jacinda Ardern, the NZ PM, was on the Laura Kuenssberg show.  With extraordinary finesse, she managed to adulate the late Queen, and the current King, while anticipating that New Zealand would, within her lifetime, become a republic.  Here, people have been arrested for voicing republican sentiments during a time of mourning.  The issue was raised in Friday/Saturday’s Any Questions, so admirably chaired by Victoria Derbyshire, who has the grace not to interrupt.  Two questions: should people be allowed to disrupt a period of mourning with protest? …and, will the Queen’s passing strengthen or weaken the United Kingdom?  Somebody heckled, in a voice remarkably loud and clear:

Brexit broke Britain!

There was a shocked silence.  Ms Derbyshire said, “Moving on…” and passed to the next question.

Now it is 9.30 am on Monday morning, and we’re still aboard, somewhere over Australia’s hot red centre.  Back in Blighty, the great and the good have descended upon London.  Shortly, with the exception of President Biden who can retain his motorcade, all the presidents and prime ministers will take the bus to Westminster.  What a security nightmare.  Ms Kuenssberg asked Ms Ardern about the bus.  Ms Ardern couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about it.  Kiwis are very down-to-earth.  Ms Kuenssberg concluded the interview.  “Jacinda Ardern, thank you very much.”

“You take care now.”                                                          

I find myself getting increasingly irritated today by a recurring piece of BBC reportage, stating that senior members of the Royal Family will accompany Her Late Majesty’s coffin from Holyrood Palace down the Royal Mile to St Giles’s Cathedral.  I find myself yelling at the radio.  “Not St Giles’s.  St Giles.  And, more importantly, not down the Royal Mile.  Up the Royal Mile.  It would only be down the Royal Mile if they were proceeding from the castle.  How can these people be so ignorant?”

And I confess I was irritated on Saturday night to find that the Last Night of the Proms had been cancelled.  I perfectly understand that the BBC would not wish to go ahead with the traditional knees-up, but they could easily have changed the format and the tone of the last night.  There is precedence here; in 2001, after 9/11, 21 years ago almost to the day, the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the American conductor Leonard Slatkin performed the piece that has become an iconic expression of US grief on solemn occasions, Barber’s Adagio for Strings.  Orchestral musicians are the most adept and versatile professionals in the world at making changes at short notice.  A conductor or a soloist is indisposed; a few phone calls are made to find who is available; sometimes the entire programme is recast one day before the performance.  The BBC Symphony Orchestra could quite easily have performed – as somebody put to me – Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, the Elgar Cello Concerto, and Brahms’ Fourth Symphony.  Sheku Kanneh-Mason was already booked to play, and the Elgar is in his repertoire.  I heard him play it, most beautifully, at a recent Edinburgh Festival.  What more natural thing, at a time of loss, than for people to come together and listen to great music?

And I’m even more irritated by a report from The Telegraph on September 10^th, by Victoria Ward, royal correspondent, that King Charles III and Prime Minister Liz Truss will tour the UK to “share the grief” of the late Queen’s death.  Some reports are dubbing this mini-tour “Operation Spring Tide” though I suspect this is a conflation; I believe Spring Tide alludes to the whole procedure of the King’s accession.  No. 10 has been quick to say that the King and the PM will not be doing joint walkabouts in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales.  I should hope not.  At least No. 10 recognise what a toxic mix that would be.

I don’t think I’ll pop through to Edinburgh today to stand on the Royal Mile.  Usually I’m a pushover for a piece of pageantry.  I quite appreciate a little magical stardust, even if I know it’s not real.  I used to sing in the choir of St Giles, and Her Majesty would drop by from time to time.  I sang Zadok the Priest to her.  It was said to be a piece she admired, but who knows?  Maybe she groaned inwardly.  Not Zadok again.  Anyway I think I will retain that as my last memory of the Queen in St Giles.    

But what a difference a week makes.  A week is indeed a long time in politics.  A week ago today, aeons ago, the Queen was on the throne, and Boris was Prime minister.  And now, Spring Tide has been activated.   I’m all for Spring Tide as a seamless means of transfer of power.  But Spring Tide as an orchestration of public grief, Spring Tide as a manifestation of unity, both political and constitutional, Spring Tide as emotional manipulation: no thank you.  It has always seemed to me that within the constitutional monarchy of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the most manipulated of all, the most subjected as it were, are the Royals themselves.  Who would volunteer to occupy that gilded cage?  King Charles has promised to surrender his charitable work to others, never again – at least in public – to speak his mind.  It’s really a form of abuse.    

It seems to me that this proposed conflation of a royal and prime ministerial tour, like that of a rock star and his supporting act, is, despite the denials of No. 10, an early attempt by the political establishment to manipulate the King while his antennae may not yet be fully deployed.  And yet I have a notion it won’t work.  I don’t think Charles will be a pushover.  People are asking, what will differentiate the Carolinian from the Elizabethan age?  What will characterise Charles III?

Stubbornness.

God save the King.   

“The launch director,” declared the NASA anchor man on September 2^nd, with evident disappointment, “has declared a scrub.”  It’s back to the drawing board.  Artemis must trundle laboriously back to the laboratory.  The news featured briefly on the brand new Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, and one of the pundits – was it Emily Thornberry? – remarked that NASA’s aborted mission was a kind of metaphor for the current political situation in the UK.  Presumably she was referring to the impending launch of the new Prime Minister.

Inevitably, the Kuenssberg Show has already received a few brickbats from the TV critics.  Newbie on Sunday show gets off to a confused start is the banner headline of Alison Rowat’s piece in today’s Herald.  Ms Rowat complained that Ms Kuenssberg’s black sparkly dress contrasted with the light, bright graphics, in turn at odds with the pink trouser suit she wore in the credits.  No-one, said Ms Rowat, would probably comment on the clothes if it (sic) had been a man.  Well, Ms Rowat, you just did.

If the show failed to set the heather alight, I cannot think Ms Kuenssberg was entirely to blame.  Interviewing Liz Truss must be akin to having a conversation with one of these effigies on Easter Island.  Ms K asked Ms T is she were about to inherit a crisis (that she would be a shoo-in come Monday lunchtime seemed taken as read), and Ms T certainly foresaw challenges ahead.  Yes, persisted Ms K, but is it a crisis?  The Easter Island obelisk repeated that there would be challenges ahead. 

I can’t help but compare and contrast the current situation with the last time Britain in crisis – real crisis – had to choose between two individuals for the role of PM.  On May 10^th 1940 the choice was between Winston and Lord Halifax.  Halifax was the front runner but he declined, on the grounds that he would be unable to lead effectively from the House of Lords.  Chamberlain, with evident regret, had to advise the king to send for Winston.  Halifax was a good friend of George VI, who in turn was dismayed to have to ask Winston to form a government.  Not that he let it show.  Winston’s own account of the trip to Buckingham Palace in The Gathering Storm is very amusing. 

Had the king sent for Halifax, history would doubtless have gone down a very different track.  In the film Darkest Hour, Halifax’s decision to decline the premiership is portrayed as a piece of political skulduggery; the chalice Winston was about to receive was so poisoned that any government he formed would inevitably collapse in short order, and Halifax could then move in, from a reinforced position of strength. 

And who knows, perhaps something similar is taking place even as we speak.  Ms Truss may wish to call a crisis a challenge, but the contents of Tuesday morning’s in-tray may prove so toxic that she, or anybody else for that matter, may not be able to deal with it.  Maybe this is why the Tory Party has voted her in.  When she founders, once more the palace (or Balmoral) can send for Boris.  Just flying a kite.

Of course, in 1940 Winston came through with flying colours, albeit having to endure a long and bumpy ride.  1940 might have been his finest hour, but 1941 was a terrible year of cumulative failure, and his political position was not secure until Montgomery secured victory at El Alamein in 1942, “the end of the beginning”.  So who would dare predict what “events” (Macmillan’s term) will confront Ms Truss.  Whatever scrutiny and criticism Laura Kuenssberg has to endure will be nothing compared with that levelled against Liz Truss.

But the highlight of Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg had to be the interview, in Kiev, with Ukraine’s very elegant, and articulate, First Lady.  Mrs Zelensky chose to speak Ukrainian, although I have an idea she would have been as eloquent speaking in English.  Her answers were very thoughtful.  Questions in English and answers in Ukrainian demand that the interview must, of necessity, be allowed to run its course, devoid of interjection.  The interview of a foreign dignitary on her own soil must also be respectful and not aggressive.  But it occurs to me that that style of interview could be perfectly well carried over to the hurly-burly of domestic politics.  If Ms Truss is going to be robotic, repetitive, thin on detail and, frankly, boring, let all of that run; let her speak for herself.

But I get ahead of myself.  It is 10.15 on Monday morning, even as I write.  The result of the prime ministerial contest is due around 12.30.  Maybe Mr Sunak will get in.  Or maybe there will be some kind of procedural glitch and they will have to run the contest again.  The returning officer has declared a scrub.     

The Dunblane Chamber Orchestra met up on Sunday afternoon, not to rehearse, but just to play music for fun.  We played Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, Haydn 6, his Trumpet Concerto, Fauré’s Pavanne, and Mozart 32.  Great fun indeed.  Mozart 32 is fantastic.  It is not so much a symphony as an extended overture, in the Italian style.  Its development section is out of this world.  I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t had the viola out of its case since we performed Schubert 2 in June.  I could easily have opened the case to find the Archinto Strad had vanished, and I would be like the Glasgow boy having to explain himself to his teacher: “The dug ett i’.”  But in fact the viola was there; it was even, more or less, in tune.  And I was even able, more or less, to negotiate the notes.  I suppose if you have put in the 10,000 hours, something of the muscle memory remains.  I heard last week on the radio a report of a study that suggested that the vocabulary of people who studied a foreign language at school decades ago remained as extensive as that of recent school leavers.  That suggests to me a lesson about hobbies and pastimes: never give anything up.  Unless, for one reason or another, you have to.

New Year is supposed to be the time for resolution, but I prefer to be resolved for September, because it is the start of Martinmas, the “new term”, the academic year, and I’ve never been able to lose the habit of thinking in terms of “terms” even if, thank heaven, I have no academic commitments.  There is a character in a Graham Greene novel – is it Fowler in The Quiet American, or Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, or Bendrix in The End of the Affair, or Query in A Burnt Out Case, who remarks, with evident self-loathing, “At the time, I still took my future seriously.”  They always have peculiar names, these Greene characters, awkward, uncomfortable names befitting a square peg in a round hole.  Once you stop taking your future seriously, you abandon hope.  If you abandon hope, you abandon resolution.  So, as Abe said, “We hereby highly resolve…”

There are seven things I try to do every day.  I start with a muttered consecration, a prayer of dedication if you will.  I read something; I write something; I play a musical instrument; I speak a foreign language; I get some exercise; seventhly, and perhaps more nebulously, I try to get outside of myself and attempt something generous.  All of these things are easy, with the exception of the seventh.  It is the seventh one which I fail to do most often.  I am haunted by that story in the Gospels.  “I was hungry and you fed me; I was naked and you clothed me; I was in prison and you visited me…”  I haven’t carried out too many prison visitations recently.  I’m bad at hospitality.  Yesterday the minister in Dunblane Cathedral, who has a mischievous sense of humour, said “Guests are like fish.  They go off after about three days.”  Unlike some of my friends, I haven’t taken in any Ukrainian refugees.  I send money to salve my conscience.  Then I say, “Don’t beat yourself up.  You had an entire career tending the sick and needy.  How many times did you get up in the night?  Anything now would just be virtue-signalling – ‘cold as charity’.”

It doesn’t work.

Then there are the bucket lists.  You really must learn Wagner’s Ring Cycle!  You really must read Proust!  You really must master Maxwell’s equations!  (As you can see, I’m not exactly a bundle of laughs.)  But actually, I’ve largely dispensed with bucket lists.  Or at least I’ve whittled them down to one thing only.  I’ve lodged a book with the publisher (thereby hangs a tale), and I have another on the stocks.  This is the extent of my bucket list – finish the next tome.  It is a benison, to know what one is supposed to be about.

So here I am.  I may be holed up in my citadel, in company with my hostages bitterness, acidie, and self-recrimination, but I can still hear the tinny voice through the megaphone of the negotiator outside: “James, you still have a future.  Come out with your hands in the air.”

Or, as a character of mine remarked in Cobra, “The curtain has not come down on the opera, Sir Sphagnum, until you have heard the aria of the obese contralto.”