jamescalumcampbell

BBC Radio 4 ran a series of fifteen minute programmes last week, after The World at One, on the poetry of Philip Larkin (1922 – 85).  It is the centenary of Larkin’s birth.  As so often, centenaries become a raison-d’être for programming.  Each programme took a poem and discussed it.  I didn’t hear them all, but I picked up Aubade, Toads Revisited, Going Going, and The Whitsun Weddings.  Larkin reads his own poems beautifully.  For the rest, the discussion, the analysis, I could have done without it.  And I could certainly have done without the ghastly musical drivel – I say “musical”, but it was just drivel – the programme’s producer felt compelled to superimpose upon Larkin’s mellifluous tones.  But musical drivel is all-pervasive in broadcasting.  I suppose it reflects the programme-makers’ terror of “dead air”.  They even do it to Professor Brian Cox, whose explanations of the wonder of the universe need to be augmented by a sound track designed to inform you, “This is pretty awesome.”  The producers don’t trust the listener to sit in quietude, and concentrate.  Rather the listener’s consciousness must be inculcated with “mood”.  So they talk about “mood music”.  No thank you.  I will respond to whatever’s on offer with whatever mood I choose.  (It’s the sort of thing Philip Larkin might have said.)   

So I would rather they had let Larkin recite The Whitsun Weddings, and leave it at that.  I’ve grown weary of criticism.  Somebody once asked T. S. Eliot what was the meaning of the line in Ash Wednesday:

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree

And Eliot replied, “It means:

“Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree.”     

Eliot has a reputation for being a poor reciter of verse, which I think is quite unfounded.  He too reads beautifully.  He doesn’t “act”.  He merely recites.  Have you ever noticed that, if you flick the radio on and chance upon a conversation between two people, you can immediately tell whether you are listening to a radio play, or a real conversation in real time between real people?  This is because, in the case of drama, the participants are “acting”.  In fact, in the vanishingly rare occasion in which the thespians manage to conceal their craft utterly, the effect can be quite overpowering, and not a little unnerving.  Michael Caine can do it.  In front of the camera, he seems to be doing nothing at all.  Brian Cox, in his autobiography – the actor not the scientist – is a little disparaging of Caine’s technique, but surely that is because the machinations of technique have so completely vanished.  Caine’s depiction of vulnerability in Educating Rita, or The Quiet American, is more than convincing.  It simply is.  Who else can do this?  Her Majesty.  Her depiction of herself meeting Mr Bond at the 2012 Olympics was flawless.  It’s not easy to portray yourself.

Musicians can also be guilty of portentousness.  Pianists, I venture to say, are the worst, and Chopin, that least portentous of composers, is the composer who suffers most from it.  Misplaced rubato and crocodile tears.        

Just as portentous acting can smother the vessel of a poem in redundant barnacles, “criticism” seldom does much to enhance the original.  Is there anything more soul-destroying than a GCSE sample-paper on English Literature?  Who is the lady Eliot is addressing?  Why are there three leopards and not two, or four, and why are they white?  Why is the tree a juniper tree?  This kind of close textual analysis by diktat, and its implication that the examiners know what they are talking about, is anathema to any true response to literature.  They had much rather have asked, “Choose a poem you have enjoyed reading and say what you like about it.” 

Aubade is a powerful poem, but I can’t say I enjoyed it.  Larkin might have entitled it, “Timor mortis conturbat me”.  I can’t help feeling that if he hadn’t gone to bed half-drunk, he wouldn’t have felt so bloody awful at four o’clock in the morning.  I don’t know if GCSE would regard that as a valid piece of criticism.  Yet all criticism need not be adverse.  For me, the magic of Larkin lies primarily in the extraordinary vividness of the imagery.  But I don’t want to turn into a critic.  The lines speak for themselves.  From Aubade:

…telephones crouch, getting ready to ring…

In Toads Revisited, Larkin observes, I think rather with compassion than with disdain, the unemployed killing time in the local park:

Turning over their failures

By some bed of lobelias

Going Going is a lament, ahead of its time, for an England vanishing under a heap of detritus:

First slum of Europe: a role

It won’t be so hard to win,

With a cast of crooks and tarts.    

The Whitsun Weddings is, amongst other things, a fantastically vivid view from a swiftly moving railway carriage:

A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped

And rose…

Then the poet notices what is in the shade rather than in the sun:

An uncle shouting smut…

Larkin has a reputation for being misanthropic but it seems to me that, if he is deprecatory at all, he is self-deprecatory.  Look at the way he purportedly missed out on the Annus Mirabilis –

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty three

(Which was rather late for me) –

Between the end of the Chatterley ban

And the Beatles’ first L. P.

What would GCSE have to say about that? 

Why did sexual intercourse begin in 1963?  Who is Chatterley, and what connects her to Please Please Me?

Gimme a break.

Yesterday was a very beautiful day here in L’Écosse Profonde; 27 degrees Celsius, and the prospect from a quiet country road heading north from Stirlingshire into Perthshire full of the intense greenery of high summer.  I was reminded of an ancient BBC Radio 2 programme in which the anchor would ham up a kind of posh Scottishness: “Greetings to you.  This is Desmond Carrington, speaking to you from my home in rural Purthsheer, Scutland…”  He evoked the vision of an aristocratic Caledonia that has ceased to exist, if it ever did, and the image of an ancient country seat buried at the head of a remote glen, occupied by Buchanesque figures like Sir Archie Roylance and Sandy Arbuthnot, 16^th Lord Clanroyden, receiving mysterious visitors in fore-and-aft deerstalker hats and ulster wraps, descending from shooting brakes before the grand entrance to the ancestral pile.  Conjuring this image, and just when I thought summer might last forever, clouds began to amass all around the horizon, and the atmosphere became heavy and foreboding.  Back home, around 7 pm, the heavens opened.  In the still air, the downpour was intense, the stair rods absolutely vertical. 

Meanwhile, England is parched.  No green and pleasant land.  The drought is official.  There are hosepipe bans.  And there are mutterings.  Why have no reservoirs been created for many decades?  What is the government going to do about it?  Where, incidentally, is the government? 

If I were an entrepreneur, I would construct a desalination plant, on a ship.  If hot dry summers are the future, then my ship would anchor at the nearest port to the area of drought, and simply desalinate the waters in which she lay.  I could put my idea in front of Dragons’ Den.  “Let me get this straight,” that great heavyweight Scottish bruiser on the panel would say.  “You wanna traipse around the coast in your boat, dock, and change the water into wine.  How’re you gonna pump the fresh water into the reservoirs?  I’m out!” 

Work in progress.  Perhaps I should attend the hustings coming up in Perth tomorrow and put my idea forward to Mr Sunak and Ms Truss.  But, not being a member of the Tory party, I don’t suppose I’d get in.  Security will be very tight, tighter than ever, after what happened last week in Chautauqua.  J. K. Rowling expressed her sympathy on social media, and then received threats herself.  The moral of the tale is, don’t have anything to do with social media.    

Today, cloud, and thundery showers, are expected.  The end of the golden weather?  I’m glad I’ve spent the greater part of the last fortnight out of doors.  For example, last week I had two long walks in Edinburgh.  With the festival in full swing, Princes Street, the Bridges, and the Royal Mile are heaving, but in Edinburgh you only need to depart from the square mile and you would never know the festival was on.  Out west, I parked in Ingliston Park & Ride, by the airport, and walked the ten miles into town following the tram route: Gogarburn, Edinburgh Gateway, Gyle Central, Edinburgh Park Central… here passing the sculpted busts on plinths of the great Scottish poets of the twentieth century.  Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley MacLean, Tom Leonard, Hamish Henderson, Liz Lochhead, Edwin Morgan, to name a few.  Leonard has the most acute ear for the voice of Glasgow:

heh jimmy

yawright ih

stull wayiz urryi

ih      

You can hear Tom Leonard read The six o’clock news online.  It is simultaneously profound, and absolutely priceless.          

…Edinburgh Park Station, Bankhead, Saughton, Balgreen, Murrayfield, Haymarket, West End, Princes Street, St Andrews Square.  I jumped on a tram and retraced my route back to the beginning.

And on another day I walked the seven hills, anticlock: Corstorphine, Craiglockhart… Another encounter with poetry.  Here at the old hospital, Wilfred Owen met Siegfried Sassoon. 

It seemed that out of battle I escaped

Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped…

The half rhyme – escaped/scooped – produces a forlorn cadence like the dying fall of a whizz-bang crossing over the Ypres salient.  Here in Edinburgh, Owen must have observed the crowds on Princes Street, at six o’clock.

In twos and threes, they have not far to roam,

Crowds that thread eastward, gay of eyes;

Those seek no further than their quiet home,

Wives, walking westward, slow and wise.

Owen is sensitive and Keatsian, but Sassoon is hard as nails.

Somehow I always thought you’d get done in

Because you were so desperate keen to live…

I used to think that Owen and Sassoon at Craiglockhart were lost to the remote past, but from the top of Craiglockhart Hill I can see a ship in harbour at Leith.  It is not a desalination plant; it is a floating hotel for Ukrainian refugees.  It looks very smart.  At least it is not a hulk.  But the Great War no longer seems remote to me.  It now seems quite possible that it could lie ahead of us. 

…Braid Hills, Blackford Hill, Arthur’s Seat, Calton, and finally, Castle Hill.  Now there is no escaping the heaving crowds.  I tried to blag my way on to the castle esplanade but was politely turned away.  That’s okay.  I’ve previously attended the military tattoo, twice.  I remember last time, at the close, a disembodied voice with the comforting timbre of Tom Fleming advised us to sleep easily in our beds, “whiles we’ll guerd the toon.”  I can’t say I felt reassured.  But I never think it’s a good idea to disparage the army.  You never know when you might have need of one.                       

In last week’s blog (Hasta la Vista, Baby) I ventured to be critical of the manner in which, having scored the winning goal, the Lionesses shut down the Euro final against Germany.  I sent a truncated version of this to The Herald, conscious of the fact that I was entering a mine field and laying myself open to attack.  Well, I got published, with the banner headline “Women’s football is selling its soul as it treads the sordid path of the men’s game”.  Sure enough, the counterattack appeared the following day.  “Reading Dr Campbell’s letter, I despaired…”  He should have read another Campbell, Aonghas Pàdraig Caimbeul in Friday’s West Highland Free Press, who went further than I did, and quoted George Orwell:

“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play.  It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence.  In other words, it is war minus the shooting.” 

But I can’t say I was inclined to write further on the subject.  I flicked over to The Herald’s obituary columns.  When I used to scan the “matches, hatches, and despatches” in the days of my youth, I never recognised any of the names, but now it seems to me as if I know all of them.  I was saddened last week to read of the passing of an old friend from bygone days of music making in Glasgow.  Bernard Levin once made the observation that he could not get used to the disappearing act that many of his friends seemed to be performing with increasing regularity.  The funeral is tomorrow.  Unsure of the precise location of the church, I took a turn into Glasgow, its streets and pavements a riot of weeds and litter.  I paused to post a letter at a row of shops opposite my old school in the west end, and took a moment to cross the road and stand before the school entrance.  The last time I crossed that entrance was more than half a century ago.  There on the wall before me was the old school motto – Spero meliora – I hope for better things.  Things can only get better.  At least they didn’t try to tell you that your school days are the best days of your life; that would be non spero meliora or, this is as good as it gets.  Abandon hope all ye who enter here.  My recent sojourns around Glasgow’s west end have usually been accompanied by a sense of nostalgia, but this was quite the opposite.  I experienced a strange, vertiginous moment of near syncope, and a conviction that I was back exactly where I had started, and that the intervening fifty years had merely been a hallucination.  Time and space, maybe they are entirely imaginary.  All that hyperactivity was an illusion, and a delusion.  In reality, I have never moved from this spot.  I almost ran back to the car, started her up, and got out of Glasgow.   

I used to think that it would be quite nice to pass through that school entrance and take a look around, anonymously, maybe at some public event like an open day.  But I’ve changed my mind.  Never go back.  I would be terrified that once inside, I would discover that the great surprises of my life – aviation, medicine, New Zealand, and the people who populated these worlds – had all been a dream.  I never got out.  What a nightmare.  If truth be told, school for me was a desert.  The primary school was okay.  When I came out, I could read, write, and count.  After that, all you really need is access to a public library.  But I never learned a thing in secondary school.  Well, maybe I learned to play the viola, but that doesn’t count; that was an extra-curricular activity.  As for the rest, the excruciatingly monotonous drudgery of nine to four, it’s all a blank.  I spent six years of my life in a state of preoccupation and free-floating anxiety, listening out for the clang of the bell.  I would have been better off being a brick layer’s apprentice.  Winston said the same. 

I’ve grown suspicious of nostalgia.  It’s a means to avoid living in the present.  It’s a trick our memory plays on us.  It’s a narcotic; it’s anodyne – a drawing down of blinds.  Old men playing pétanque in the blazing afternoon sunshine.  Aye, we’ve seen the best of it.

Thou hast nor youth, nor age,

But as it were an after dinner’s sleep

Dreaming on both.

So tomorrow I will pay my respects to an old friend, and perhaps run into a few still in the land of the living, though whether I will recognise them, or they me, is another matter.  But I don’t think I’ll hang around.  That was the week that was; it’s over, let it go. 

Spero meliora.  I really do hope for better things.  Hope.  It’s a kind of nostalgia for the future.                        

Flicked on the telly last night around 7 pm to find the score at Wembley was England 1 Germany 1 and they were into extra time.  So I watched.  I had thought that the ladies’ version of the beautiful game was altogether superior, lacking in petulance, bad temper, and melodrama.  Alas, I was disabused.  It is exactly the same as the men’s game.  Taking a dive, rolling in agony, aggression, foul language (the commentator said you didn’t need to be a lip reader), shirt pulling and indeed, after the winning goal was scored, shirt removal.  Then with about ten minutes to go, England took the ball to Germany’s left corner line and footered around, letting the clock run down.  No more open play; they shut the game down.  When the final whistle blew, Wembley erupted.  England was over the moon and Germany sick as a parrot.    

A Pyrrhic victory, if you ask me.  What shall it profit a woman if she gain the whole world, and lose her own soul?  But why is it that sport at a high level has become so deadly serious?  So deadly.

The answer is Money.  Where there’s muck, there’s brass.  Now that the Big Sponsors see the woman’s game can fill Wembley Stadium, the big movers and shakers will converge, broadcasting rights will be assigned, and television deals struck.  Already this Euro final is being cast as a game changer, a pivotal moment, and an inspiration to all young girls who want to play football.  Dare to follow your dream.  You too can be a histrionic shirt-puller. 

What were the words of the mythical T. E. Henley?  “It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose, but how you play the game.”  The young Alan Bennett ridiculed this – not so much the sentiment as its rendition by an Anglican vicar in his immortal Beyond the Fringe sketch.  The modern sensibility looks upon the idea of sportsmanship, or sportswomanship, with disdain and derision.  Didn’t an American football coach say that winning was not the most important thing, it was the only thing?  And of course Bob Shankly was famously misquoted when he purportedly said that football was more important than a matter of life and death.  He actually meant precisely the opposite, but somehow he got lost in translation.              

Meanwhile, the Commonwealth Games proceed apace in Birmingham.  The Prime Minister (still Boris) issued a statement of justification for the government’s spending three quarters of a billion on the project.  It was an “emphatic yes” to “legacy”.  His mode of delivery was similar to that of his closing remarks at his final PMQs.  The words came out so rapidly that they fell over one another.  He seems to have developed pressure of speech, said to be a sign of hypomania.  Bread and circuses.  Hasta la vista, baby.  Meanwhile the two contenders vying to be Her Majesty’s fifteenth PM employ strategies not dissimilar to a sports team who are having an off day but who know how to dig deep and produce a result even when it doesn’t look pretty.  Mr Sunak has decided to lower the base rate of income tax which, apparently far from being a U-turn, is entirely consistent with his earlier assertion that tax cuts belonged to a fantasy world.  But where is he going to find the money?  He’s going to fine everybody who doesn’t turn up for their GP appointment a tenner.  Meanwhile Ms Truss wants to give every school leaver with top grades automatic entry to Oxbridge.  I suppose that’s part of the “levelling up” agenda.  I wonder if Mr Sunak consulted the GPs, or Ms Truss Oxbridge, before they produced, like rabbits out of a hat, such policies.  But it isn’t the GPs, nor the universities, that the Prime Ministerial pretenders need, for the moment, to placate.  Rather it is – we are told – about 160,000 members of the Conservative Party.  Presumably once the premiership has been secured, any rash promises can then be nullified by executing a U-turn that is not a U-turn.  Sometimes in order to win, you need to win ugly.                

At a time when the UK is struggling to redefine her role in the world, we should remember the close links that have always existed between imperial ambition, and the sports field.  The Empire was forged on the playing fields of Eton.  There’s a breathless hush in the close tonight…  Play up, play up, and play the game.  This is why Boris was so keen to spend a lot on Birmingham.  It is a question of prestige, or, in modern parlance, “soft power”.  I’ve never liked the expression “soft power”.  It implies the coexistence of “hard power”.  So the country puts on a double act on “the international stage”.  Guns and roses.  The hard man soft man act.  The steel fist in the velvet glove.  Trident and The Last Night of the Proms. 

And yet…  Talking of the Proms, I listened to the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, live from the Royal Albert Hall, on Sunday morning.  They played Valentyn Silvestrov, Chopin, Beethoven, Brahms, and a beautiful version of the Ukrainian National Anthem.  I wonder if Mr Putin listened.  But I don’t know what his musical tastes might be.  Pussy Riot?  The Freedom Orchestra played beautifully.  During the slow movement of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony, it occurred to me.  Mr Putin, in the end, you cannot defeat this.                      

Last week, on the hottest day ever recorded in Scotland, with the sole purpose of being perverse, I went into the sauna at my local gym.  85 Celsius.  I fell into conversation with a Ukrainian refugee who asked me what the English word was for the machine in the gym on which you could run.  I couldn’t think, and replied, rather lamely, “a running machine.”  Then it came to me.  “A treadmill.”

“I haven’t heard that word.  Why treadmill?”

I had the image of a pony attached to a wheel at a pithead, endlessly walking in a circle to uplift a bucket of coal from the bowels of the earth.  I said, “It’s a kind of metaphor for carrying out an uncongenial repetitive task.  If you are obliged to persist, you’re on a treadmill.”

“Treadmill.”  He lodged it away.  He’d only been in Scotland for two weeks, but already he’d picked up a job as a translator.  I told him I thought he’d be very good at it.  Where did he learn English?  School?  He said he’d studied it at school and got nowhere, but then he just picked it up from U-tube.  I asked him if he found the Scottish accent difficult.  Not at all.  I told him sometimes I couldn’t understand the guys in the gym when they spoke rough urban Stirling, and I’m from Glasgow, 25 miles away.  The third occupant of the cubicle, a young lady, flashed me a grin.

The treadmill used to be a feature of life in prison.  Hard labour is punitive.  The labour is even more punitive if it is pointless, like painting coal white, cleaning a parade ground with a toothbrush, or moving heavy sacks from point A to point B, then from point B back to point A.  Such tasks are designed to break the spirit.  Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves…  Such is the myth of Sisyphus.  You push the heavy stone to the top of the hill, only for it to roll back down to the bottom.  You go back down and start all over again.  I remember at school, we all thought it preferable to receive two smart strokes of the tawse than to be forced to write out a hundred times, “I must not forget my pencil.”  The prefects were not allowed to beat us, but they could hand out lines.  Their favourite was, “Discipline is the fundamental basis of any well-organised society.”  The galling thing about that is that it’s not even true.  Discipline is the fundamental basis of any totalitarian regime.  I wonder what would have happened if I had gone to the headmaster and said, “I refuse to condone a lie.”  Like the guy in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible who refused to sign a confession, I would doubtless have paid a heavy price.  “Love is the fundamental basis of any well-organised society.  And by the way, the school toilets are a disgrace.”  I might have received three swipes of the strap, accompanied by the mantra, “GOD – IS – LOVE!”  So I would never have taken the risk.  But I might have buried deep in my 100 lines, say around line 63, one single seditious message.  You know where you can stick your well-organised society.  Safe enough.  You might write 100 lines, but nobody will ever read them.   

If you find yourself on a treadmill, what do you do?  Well, obviously, you get off.  But what if you can’t?  What if you are a galley slave, chained to your oar?  All you can do is try to retain a sense of self.  An attitude to your situation.  Survive.  And wait.  And try, somehow, to communicate with your peers, who are in the same boat.  At school, you would perform a small ceremonial act of rebellion, like sticking chewing gum to the underside of your desk, and you would hope like hell that your neighbour wasn’t a stooge, in the pocket of the authorities, and a clype.  

Sitting in the sauna, I conjured this thought experiment.  You are on a treadmill in the gym, pelting along at full tilt, and the conveyor belt abruptly halts.  Do you crash forward over the front of the machine, or fall off the back?  Either way, when Boris’s treadmill came to an abrupt halt, I think he would have done well to get off.  He might have followed the example of his great hero, Winston, who, when the electorate rejected him in 1945, couldn’t get out fast enough, even if he was determined in due course to make a come-back.  But they say that Boris is hanging around because he doesn’t believe either Rishi or Liz can cut the mustard.  The Tories will self-destruct and then Boris will say, “Here am I.  I can save you.  All you need do is ask.”  But Indispensability Syndrome is a terminal condition.  If you think you are indispensable, the caustic aphorism runs, just look at your appointments book the week after you are dead.

Sweating away in the sauna, I can’t decide whether the suddenly halted treadmill hurls you forward or tosses you back.  I’ll have to Google it.  But not now.  One of the advantages of the sauna is that it is a device-free zone.  I have never seen anybody bring their smartphone into the sauna.  Another advantage of sauna etiquette is that it allows conversation to be abruptly terminated.  The other day a guy was passing inappropriate remarks about a personable young lady whom he could observe through the Perspex door, conducting a children’s swimming class.  You know the sort of thing.  “Do you think if I told her I was seven years old I could join the class?  She can be my lifesaver any time…”  It was all very creepy.  I muttered, “Heat stroke”, left, and slid into the pool. 

I was amused to hear the five remaining candidates (as I write) for the Tory leadership being asked that hoary old chestnut of the standard job interview, “What is your main weakness?”  Anyone who has been groomed for high office will have been asked just that during the mock interview, and later advised, “Whatever you do, don’t let them discover your real weakness.  I drink too much, I take illicit substances, I’m sexually incontinent… I don’t think so.  Don’t even admit to something far less flagrant.  I swither, I dither, I suffer from Impostor Syndrome.  No.  What you must do is present a strength disguised as a weakness.”  Thus:

Rishi Sunak (Wykehamist, PPE at Oxford, MBA at Stanford on a Fulbright Scholarship, Goldman Sachs, Hedge Funds etc.)  Weakness: “I work too hard and am too perfectionist.”  This has been widely perceived as too cheesy.

Liz Truss (West Primary School, Paisley, Roundhay School Leeds, PPE at Oxford, worked for Shell.)  Weakness: “I’m excessively overenthusiastic.”  Given her style of delivery, often described as robotic, this seems hard to believe.  Besides, is it a tautology?  You can be overenthusiastic, or you can be excessively enthusiastic, but is being excessively overenthusiastic not a bit OTT?  Demonstrates the point, I guess.

Tom Tugendhat (St Paul’s London, Theology at Bristol, Masters in Islamic Studies, Gonville and Caius, learned Arabic in Yemen, Lieutenant Colonel in the Territorials, served in Iraq and Afghanistan.)  Weakness: “I may talk about the army a little too much.”  I don’t think the army will object.

Penny Mordaunt (Oaklands Roman Catholic Comprehensive School, Hants, Philosophy at Reading, has worked as a magician’s assistant.)  Weakness: “I’m tempted to say Burmese cats.  I have four and introducing them into No. 10 might present some challenges with Larry.”  She dodged the question.  Then, an apparent non-sequitur:  “I think over the years I’ve learned to be able to delegate to become more effective.  But I think all of us are going to need to learn to build a team of all the talents in the party.”  Is this where the cats come in?  Is it just me, or does Ms Mordaunt bear an uncanny physical resemblance to Marine le Pen?  Do you ever see them both in the same room?

Kemi Badenoch (University of Lagos Staff Secondary School, Phoenix College Morden, MEng University of Sussex, computer systems software engineer, LLB Burbeck.)  Weakness: “Allowing my sense of humour to look like I’m flippant about issues.”  How can a sense of humour be a weakness?

Well, I suppose we all do it.  We present a sanitised, cosmetic version of ourselves to the wider world.  We describe ourselves not as we are, but as we would wish to be.  We play charades, much as Cary Grant hides behind a plethora of identities in the 1963 film Charade, until finally he comes out of hiding for Audrey Hepburn’s Reggie Lampert.  “Reggie, I beg you.  That man is Carson Dyle!  Trust me just one more time.”

“Why should I?”

“I can’t think of a reason in the world.”

So of course, she does.

That would be a great answer for an aspiring Prime Minister.  “Why should we entrust you with the title deeds to the highest office in the land?” 

“I can’t think of a reason in the world.” 

Political suicide?  Oddly enough, it’s the sort of answer that Boris, a man allegedly economical with the truth, might have gotten away with.  He has the patrician’s indifference to the threat of dropping a clanger.  But then, Boris can say what he likes, being yesterday’s man.  Or is he?  He’s still in the bunker.  Maybe he thinks the five contenders will implode and self-destruct, and he will once more be summoned to the Palace.          

I’ve just heard that Rishi and Liz have withdrawn from the next TV debate, which is thus likely to be cancelled.  At least we will be spared further reiterations of humbug.  Humbug is the Lingua Franca of political discourse.  The trouble with humbug is that it can’t be taken seriously.  It turns the Tory leadership contest into a reality TV game show.  Indeed, the manner of the sequential elimination of the candidates closely resembles a game show.  I’m a Strictly Baked-Off Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!  “The person who will not be returning next week is…”

…prolonged agonising silence while the camera focuses on each anguished face…

The name is announced, and the overhead limelight is extinguished.  At least we are spared the hugs and kisses, and the crocodile tears of the survivors.  We move on to the next round.  It’s worthy of mention that the Tory Party, which has always championed First Past the Post at General Elections, has opted to anoint the next PM by a far more complicated system absorbing various elements of Proportional Representation. 

I didn’t listen to the second televised debate, which I gather was ill-tempered, but instead listened again to the magnificent Sinfonia of London at the Proms, under the baton of the most musical man on the planet, John Wilson.  I heard them on Radio 3 on Saturday, and I watched them on BBC 4 on Sunday.  A programme of British music.  They played Arnold Bax’s tone poem, Tintagel.  I love Bax’s music.  But it is rarely heard in the concert hall.  I once drove into Tintagel, on the coast of Cornwall, with the car windows down and the sound system blaring Bax’s tone poem.  Nobody paid any attention.  The Tintagel coastline is straight out of Tristan and Isolde, wild and Celtic, but the Arthurian “improvements” are a bit naff.  Bogus Lancelot. 

Today England has an unprecedented red alert for the weather.  Some establishment figure has said that it is not surprising that in snowflake Britain, the snowflakes are melting.  This reminded me of the time the decision was made to silence the bongs of Big Ben for four years, to protect the hearing of scaffolders during the refurbishment of the Palace of Westminster.  A grandee passed a crass remark along the lines of, “Why don’t the poor dears just wear ear muffs?  It’s health and safety gone mad I tell you.”  People who pass remarks like that tend not to be scaffolders by profession.  Some people think the BBC has been “excessively overenthusiastic” about telling everybody to close the curtains and sit still.  I expect the constituency of the bloody-minded will ignore the advice and head for the beach.  For myself, I’ve got a jumper on.  The local weather forecast in the paper says today it will be 15 – 16 C.  The weather, and the climate, are different up here.  In all sorts of ways.           

Never having tasted it before, I bought some sauerkraut from Waitrose the other day.  Incidentally, I heard a very amusing story about an immensely wealthy sheikh who asked a lady acquaintance where she went for her groceries.  She recommended Waitrose.  She chanced to meet the sheikh a little later and asked him if he had favoured the store with his patronage.  “Oh yes.  Very good indeed, but my goodness, terribly expensive!”     

I didn’t care for the sauerkraut.  Unusual for me – I’m not picky, I can eat almost anything.    Naturally fermented, live cultured, it belongs to a range of “versatile super condiments that will elevate your sandwich…”  I should think it would levitate the Palace of Westminster.  I was describing my sauerkraut experience to somebody yesterday who said, “What is sauerkraut?” and, thumbing through the Oxford Dictionary of English, as will happen, got side-tracked.

“Do you know what Erik Satie’s middle names were?”

I did not.

“Alfred Leslie.  Scottish mother, you see.  Where were we?  Sauerkraut.  A German dish of chopped pickled cabbage, from German sauer, sour, and Kraut, vegetable.  I suppose that’s the origin of the derogatory term for a German.”

Anyway, what am I to do with this tub of sauerkraut, “live cultured,” it says, “for tasty Gutness.”?  Gutness?  I checked the Oxford again, and got side-tracked.  Gutbucket – a glutton.  Also, of jazz or blues, raw and spirited in style: his gutbucket guitar solos.  And gutta-percha – a kind of rubber, from Malay getah perca.  I knew about gutta-percha because my Ayrshire grannie used to sing The Drunkard’s Ragged Wean to me:

He stands at Jimmy’s corner

Till Jimmy cries him in

To see if he’s got oany bits

Or gutta-percha shin…

Where were we?  An Oxford entry for gutless, but not for gutness.  I presume this is a kind of clumsy German pun on goodness.  If it’s doing my gut any good maybe I should persevere.  I hate to throw food out.  Besides, the brown bucket isn’t due for uplift for another three weeks and meantime it will be like having a nuclear fission reactor on the back patio.  And with a looming world food crisis maybe I’ll be glad to have fermented cabbage.  No need to rush into anything.  It’s good in the fridge until August 27th, by which time I’ll gratefully intone the Selkirk Grace over it.  Apparently Burns delivered it, extempore, before the Earl of Selkirk.

Some hae meat, and canna eat

And some wad eat that want it;

But we hae meat

And we can eat

Sae let the Lord be thankit.

How would that go in German?

Manche Leute haben Fleisch,

Und können nicht ja essen…

(usw.)

The thing about Burns is, he packs a lot of meaning into just a few words.  We could translate the Selkirk Grace into modern management-speak:

Despite the ready availability of low hanging fruit, and perhaps because of a significant digestive malfunction going forward…

I wonder if, post-Brexit, there is an enormous backlog of sauerkraut at Dover, awaiting customs checks.  We could ask the pretenders to the apex of Westminster’s “slipper slope” and greasy pole if they have a sauerkraut policy.  When the runners and riders for the race for PM became rather numerous, the paddock overcrowded, I was reminded of an ancient Hollywood “Sword and Sandals” movie in which the position of Caesar comes up for grabs during the last decadent days of the Roman Empire, and as the unseemly struggle for power commences, the film’s hero and his love interest leave Rome to live happily ever after in deepest rural Tuscany.  They already knew the game was up for the Empire, when Caligula made his horse a senator.

Elections to the Conservative leadership are notoriously unpredictable.  The stalking horse who kicks off procedures doesn’t usually get it, and neither does the front runner.  No, the race falls to the dark horse.  Think of 1963.  Quintin Hogg?  Rab Butler?  No.  Alec Douglas-Home.  Once the 22 sets the rules, we can expect a media feeding-frenzy.  I heard a political reporter on the BBC describing the life of a journalist covering the Lobby.  Wear flat shoes, she said, keep a phone charger in your bag, carry snacks, and keep abreast of the goings-on on Twitter and WhatsApp.  It sounded like an absolute nightmare to me.  My favourite Prime Minister of the 20^th Century is Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1905 – 08).  Glasgow Boy.  Glasgow High School educated, but we won’t hold that against him.  His period of tenure was notably un-tumultuous.  Every September, he went off on holiday for six weeks to Marienbad.  He didn’t keep in touch by Facebook.  Rather he spent his time reading German literature.  I don’t suppose the Prime Minister-apparent, whoever he or she may be, would risk letting the charge on the mobile run down.  What a life to strive for.  But them’s the breaks.                         

I see that the competitive Scrabble world is in turmoil over the proscription of 419 words that have been deemed offensive and unusable.  I can well imagine the fury of some members of the London Scrabble Association who have tendered their resignation.  If you put down n*****, they say, you are not casting a racial slur.  It just happens to be a word in the dictionary.  Next, you will expurgate the dictionary itself.  Such a word does not exist; it never existed.  Enough of this woke nonsense.  Then again, maybe “woke” itself is a bit questionable.  It started out as a rallying call among the disadvantaged, to remain constantly aware of the slings and arrows of their particularly outrageous fortune.  “Stay woke, man.”  But then the people who couldn’t be bothered with all this brouhaha – generally middle-aged white males – started to use it in a pejorative sense.  Perhaps the International Scrabble Committee will interrogate you as to whether you intend “woke” as a term of approbation, or a slur, or maybe just the past tense of the verb to wake.

I rather think there will be few people who are absolutist in their espousal of total freedom to say what you like, even on the Scrabble board.  My freedom stops at the end of your nose.  And if names are as hurtful as sticks and stones, then maybe there are limits.  Clearly I think so, otherwise I wouldn’t have obscured the n-word in a flurry of asterisks. 

Manners and morals of a past age can become offensive to us, and we may wish to revise our opinions and attitudes.  But still I think it is a mistake to attempt to alter, or obliterate the past.  In BBC Radio 4’s A Good Read (which is a good listen), Harriett Gilbert extolled the virtues of an historical romance by Georgette Heyer (was it The Grand Sophy?) with one reservation.  There was in the book a passage describing in repugnant terms a Jewish usurer of backstreet London.  Ms Gilbert thought the passage lent nothing to the overall structure of a fine book, and that in any subsequent editions, it ought to be removed.  Well, I haven’t read the book, so I must choose another example.  There is a wonderful chapter in John Buchan’s Mr Standfast, “The Village Named Morality”, in which Richard Hannay is extracted from the Great War trenches by the intelligence services and placed deeply under cover in the village of Biggleswick, a repository for artists, pacifists, and various assortments of “the half-baked”, in search of a German spy network.  Thus a purportedly slow-witted South African man of brawn and muscle exercises his veldt-craft in highly unlikely surroundings resembling the drawing rooms of Knightsbridge and Bloomsbury.  His descriptions of pacifist meetings in the village’s Moot Hall are hilarious.  Then along comes this appalling sentence:

And to my joy, one night there was a great buck n***** who had a lot to say about “Africa for the Africans.”  I had a few words with him in Sesutu afterwards, and rather spoiled his visit. 

That sentence has been altered in recent editions of Mr Standfast.  The question arises as to whether we are hearing the voice of Richard Hannay, or of John Buchan himself.  Is there a remove between Buchan and Hannay?  Does Buchan realise that Hannay is a racist?  Either way, should the sentence have been edited out? 

The natural successor to Hannay in the intelligence world is James Bond.  Bond’s attitudes and opinions can be as startling to the modern ear as Richard Hannay’s.  Now Bond is not racist.  Nor is he a snob (unlike his creator, at least according to Sean Connery) though of course he can hardly escape entirely the innate sense of superiority of the old Etonian.  But Bond is sexist.  From Thunderball: 

Women are often meticulous and safe drivers, but they are very seldom first-class.  In general Bond regarded them as a mild hazard…  Four women in a car he regarded as the highest potential danger…

(I think if Bond had done his research, he might have found that the most dangerous drivers were males between the ages of 17 and 35.) 

From Casino Royale:

These blithering women who thought they could do a man’s work.  Why the hell couldn’t they stay at home and mind their pots and pans and stick to their frocks and gossip and leave men’s work to the men… The silly bitch. 

Bond is also homophobic.  From Goldfinger: 

Bond came to the conclusion that Tilly Masterton was one of these girls whose hormones had got mixed up.  He knew the type well and thought they and their male counterparts were a direct consequence of giving votes to women and “sex equality”…  Pansies of both sexes were everywhere… He was sorry for them, but he had no time for them.

Again, Casino Royale:

And now he knew that she was profoundly, excitingly sensual, but that the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have the sweet tang of rape. 

And, on the same theme, in The Spy Who Loved Me, a real whopper:

All women love semi-rape. 

I wonder if that one has survived the blue pen of a latter-day Bowdler.  Or, like Hannay’s great buck n*****, has it been erased?  I’m not for this kind of revision.  Stet, as the newspaper editor says.  Let it stand.  It seems to me that reconstructions of this kind resemble the act of stripping a disgraced individual of an honour.  Somebody blots his copybook and is relinquished of a knighthood.  It’s a way of rewriting history.  It’s the establishment’s way of distancing itself from a bad odour.  That thoroughly filthy fellow is not a knight; he was never a knight.  Do we make the world a better place by forgetting how awful it used to be?  Do we pull the statues down, or let them remain, as our monuments to shame?    

But to return to the Scrabble board, lubra is out.  It means an Aboriginal woman.  I had thought the term was gin – because I’ve seen it in Nevil Shute books.  I had thought that gin was just short for aborigine, but according to the Oxford Dictionary of English it comes from the Dharuk diyin, woman, wife.  Dharuk?  The Oxford again: an aboriginal language of the area round Sydney, Australia, now extinct.  I worked in Brisbane, Queensland, and I was certainly aware that the Aboriginal people were so marginalised as to be virtually invisible.  I couldn’t have told you the name of a single Aboriginal language.  Perhaps by now, for all I know, they are all extinct.  At least a word like lubra, or gin, is a potential portal to the rediscovery of the past.

I believe greybeard is out.  It’s ageist.  And Jesuit, and Jesuitic, which, if placed on the appropriate squares, used to earn you a whopping 200 points.  But I was surprised Jesuit was ever an option.  I didn’t think proper names were allowed.      

You know the old gag: I used to be indecisive, but now I’m not so sure.  It certainly pertains to me.  In my opinion I’ve become less opinionated.  With regard to ethical issues, I have taken on board the advice of Oliver Cromwell, to consider in the bowels of Christ, that I may be wrong.  I can see, for example, that people who support a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy deploy arguments as powerful as people who support the rights of the unborn child.  The only thing I felt sure about in this debate was that the medical profession in this country has been manipulated, and has allowed itself to be manipulated, into ticking box 2C – if memory serves me right – in a form designed by Lord Steel et al in 1968.

Nevertheless, one day last week when the BBC Radio 4 newscaster announced, “Within the last hour, the United States Supreme Court has overturned the historic judgment Roe v. Wade…” I did feel a visceral stab of dismay.  Maybe that was because I had just finished reading Margaret Atwood’s 2019 Booker Prize winner, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments (Chatto & Windus, 2019).  Terrific book, very funny in a black way, and also a real nail-biter.  The Handmaid’s Tale was being readied for publication in 1984 (the Orwellian influence is clearly discernible), and in 2019 we find that Gilead, the USA dystopia, is worse than ever.  Life for a woman in Gilead resembles life under the Taliban.  And now life imitates art.  President Trump front-loaded the Supreme Court with right-leaning justices who have altered the law.  I thought, naively, that it was the business of judges to interpret law, and not to make it.  Surely the court’s decision is political, rather than legal, just as a doctor’s ticking box 2C is making a judgment that is moral-ethical, rather than pathological-diagnostic.  I remember the first time I visited the United States, in 1982, being met by my American uncle at JFK in New York, who said, with profound irony bordering on sarcasm, “Welcome to the land of the free.”

One of the defining characteristics of occupying a dystopia is that you don’t know it.  The ruling elite makes sure of this.  Hence Winston Smith’s task is to obliterate unpalatable truths in the memory hole, and women in Gilead are rendered illiterate by being denied access to books.  The current dystopia we are constructing for ourselves here and now is characterised by the obliteration of human communication.  When we make contact with any corporate organization our first port of call is liable to be a robot, who is keen to ascertain that we are not a robot. 

“Please state in a few words the reason for your call.”

“Well, it’s a little complicated.  You see, to let you understand…”

“I’m sorry.  I didn’t catch that.  Do you wish to alter the terms of your policy?”

The robot is keen that your problem, whatever it is, fits neatly into a template.  If it doesn’t, it can’t cope.  But it won’t tell you.  Things just grind to a halt.  Say you buy a concert ticket on line.  You go through the rigmarole of making the booking, presenting credit card details, proceeding to the check-out counter, and pressing “Proceed”.  And nothing happens.  The problem is simple to solve.  You haven’t ticked the box to say that you have read the terms and conditions.  So you retrace your steps and tick the box (without reading the terms and conditions).  Hey Presto. 

Now this relatively straightforward scenario has become a model for all sorts of interaction.  Even if your interlocutor is not a robot, he will exhibit robotic behaviour, and if your request or enquiry is a little out of the norm, he will cease to function on your behalf.  It simply isn’t what he has been programmed to do. 

Another aspect of this kind of interaction, or lack of it, is the absence of the courtesy of acknowledgment.  You submit an enquiry electronically to a financial institution, an insurance company, a publishing house, the Inland Revenue… You press submit, cast your bread upon the waters, and hope for the best.  After a week or two you grow doubtful as to whether your message-in-a-bottle has reached dry land, and you send out another bottle.  Did you get my message?

Stoney silence. 

Not every human enterprise has been puddled by this noxious pollutant.  Aviators remain good communicators.  I can still remember the poetic mantra twixt control tower and London shuttle while I sat in my Chipmunk at the holding point at Glasgow Airport, number two to a Trident 3.  “You’re clear to London Heathrow via White Nine Amber One, to cross Lanark and Talla at flight level 55, and to climb when instructed by Scottish Radar to Flight Level 230 today.”

The pilot would read it back, word perfect.

“Read back correct.”

It wasn’t just a courtesy.  It was a matter of life and death. 

But for the most part, in our society, human communication is being rapidly eroded. You can’t get an appointment with your GP, you can’t buy a train ticket from somebody at the station ticket office, and you can’t ask a bank teller to effect a financial transaction.  That is our peculiar dystopia, and we don’t recognise it.  The next dystopia is never like the last dystopia.

Is the USA really morphing into Gilead?  You might argue that it already has.  Margaret Atwood makes the observation that The Testaments is not really a futuristic novel; she made a point of depicting nothing that doesn’t already exist.  The way out of Gilead is escape north to Canada.  I did that in 1982.  I hired a car and drove up through New York State across to Ontario via Thousand Island Country.  Very beautiful.  I went round Lake Ontario, through Margaret Atwood’s home town Toronto, and headed for the border at Buffalo.  A Canadian looked at me dubiously and said, “Why on earth are you going back down there?”   

The following is a calypso, after the style of Cy Grant, on BBC’s Tonight, anchored by the imperturbable Cliff Michelmore.

Shortly after my father, as a young man, joined the City of Glasgow Police, he was involved in a fracas in a public house, during which he injured his hand.  After the battle, he received some attention, and advice from a senior officer.  “Son, next time you’re in a rammy, use your stick.”  Which US President was it said, “Talk softly, and carry a big stick”?  In the 1930s, when Winston saw what was happening in Nazi Germany, he declared that we had to rearm, not in order to fight, but in order to parlay.  Preparation for war was the sole guarantor of peace.  Now the new head of the army, General Sir Patrick Sanders, is glooming us up about the imminent possibility of World War 3.  British troops “must be prepared for battle in Europe once again”.  Boots on the ground.  Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?  That a military man should ask government for more manpower and weaponry is de rigueur.           

Last week the Prime Minister made a surprise visit to Kyiv to pledge the imminent delivery of more big sticks.  Kyiv must have seemed a more attractive destination to him, on the day, than Doncaster.  It’s a photo opportunity he clearly relishes, and carries off rather well.  “Volodymyr, good to see you!”  “Ah!  Boris!  Welcome!”  He pledged a lot of stuff, arms, training, economic assistance.  Mind, President Zelensky might do well to take any promise from the PM with a pinch of salt.  The PM’s opponents say he is making the script up as he goes along, chiefly to divert attention from intractable difficulties at home.    

I wonder which member of the government originally came up with the Rwanda wheeze.  When I first heard about it, I thought it was a rather belated April Fool’s gag, in very bad taste.  We are going to export our refugees the way we export our plastic detritus.  Out of sight, out of mind, like landfill. We associate Rwanda with the genocide of 1994, against the Tutsi.  Not at all, said the government.  Rwanda is an up-and-coming nation with a fast-growing economy.  And the people-traffickers must be deterred.  This is an example of cognitive dissonance: Rwanda is an attractive destination – look at these nice pictures of plush hotel bedrooms – and it is an unattractive destination, otherwise the traffickers, and the refugees themselves crossing the channel at great personal risk, will not be deterred.

Lord Geidt, erstwhile ethical advisor to the government, has resigned.  At first, the government was rather coy about publishing his letter of resignation, but they really needn’t have worried, because Lord Geidt himself was rather coy about expressing the reasons behind his action, other than saying he had been put in an “odious” position.  I thought “odious” was an unusual choice of word.  He might have called his position “invidious”.  It’s one of these words that gets bandied around without anyone being quite sure what it means.  I would say that being in an invidious position is like being in what the psychiatrists call a “bind” or, worse still a “double bind”.  It doesn’t matter what you do; you are in a “lose-lose” situation.  You are stuck between a rock and a hard place.  Now “between a rock and a hard place” is another strange expression, as if you can’t think of another synonym for “rock”.  But I digress.  In fact, “invidious” comes from the Latin for envy, invidia.  If you are in an invidious position, you are likely to excite envy in others, and thus, ill will.  Now that is odd.  Surely an invidious position is unenviable. 

But Lord Geidt did not say his position was invidious.  He said it was odious, or hateful, from the Latin for hatred, odium.  That is a strong word.  He was being asked to rubber-stamp as ethical a course of action that he considered unethical.  In order to do so, you need to go beyond the realm of cognitive dissonance and enter the realm of doublethink.  Either that, or you resign. 

What else is going on at home?  The trains grind to a halt this evening.  Sir Keir Starmer doesn’t believe the government wants to keep them going.  Rather HMG wants everything to seize up so as to sow class division.  Some of the unions are even calling for a general strike.  Would that be the first since 1926? 

And the problem posed by the Good Friday Agreement, the Northern Ireland Protocol, and a hard border in the Irish Sea, continues to bamboozle Westminster.  It’s like trying to solve the ancient problem of trisecting an angle using only ruler and compasses.  It is manifestly impossible. 

Now that Brexit is beginning to bite, I rather suspect that some of the old school Tory remainers who were purged from the party must look back upon the SNP’s paper of 2014, Scotland’s Future, with a certain nostalgia.  A politically independent Scotland within the Union of the Crowns, a shared currency and bank of last resort, and an open border.  What’s not to like?  Had that been the case, it seems very unlikely that the rump of the UK would have chosen to leave the EU.  But of course that is mere conjecture.  That opportunity is gone.  At the time, Alex Salmond passed a remark that has since been widely, perhaps wilfully, misunderstood.  He said that the chance for independence was a “once in a generation” opportunity.  He wasn’t choosing that it be so.  He was merely saying carpe diem, seize the day, because the day may not soon recur.  He might have quoted the words of Brutus in Julius Caesar Act IV scene III:

There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune,

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

No point in crying over spilt milk.  In modern parlance, we are where we are.  Energy crisis, soaring cost of living, inflation, recession (= stagflation), and, apparently imminently, a general strike, and World War 3.  How is the government responding to all this?  Is anybody in government up to the task?  Cometh the hour, cometh the man, or woman.  Or are they merely responding to each impending crisis with back-of-a-fag-packet formulae?  I see that a Google software engineer has been suspended because he has gone public with the notion that his Artificial Intelligence Device – like HAL in 2001 – has gone sentient.  His going public was apparently a breach of confidentiality.  Whose confidentiality?  The device’s?  Maybe Google suspended him because they think he’s crazy, or maybe because they think he’s right.  I myself don’t believe that machines can be like us, although I do strongly suspect several prominent politicians are turning themselves into machines.  As soon as you surrender yourself to the whip, you become a machine.  Winston again, back in the 30s:  “So they go on, in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.”

The European Court of Human Rights, to which we remain a signatory as it is part of the European Council rather than the European Union, has for the moment stopped the flights to Rwanda.  One way out for the government is to withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights.

Meanwhile in our hospitals, the frail and elderly are stacked up in the departure lounge, with nowhere to go, while the ambulances are stacked up outside “A & E”.

Drip, drip, drip.