jamescalumcampbell

I watched Sophie Raworth interview the Prime Minister, apparently in a dimly lit Munich basement, at the weekend.  It was absolutely excruciating.  The interview lasted twenty five minutes but the substantive trafficking of information might have been accomplished in about three.  It would be folly for Russia to attack Ukraine and if Mr Putin fires the starting pistol we will impose economic sanctions; we are going to remove Covid restrictions in England, with caution; I can’t say anything about Partygate while a police investigation is underway; I won’t say anything about the Duke of York’s difficulty, and the public purse.  That was it.  Mr Johnson stonewalled, and let the clock run down.  Ms Raworth needed to take the PM by surprise, with an unexpected flanking manoeuvre, and by stealth.  She didn’t have this in her armamentarium.  She merely continued a full frontal assault, the entrenched warfare of attrition, a heavy and prolonged, but futile bombardment.  By the time the guns fell silent, no advance had been made. 

But how apposite, or perhaps ironic, that the Great Powers (without Russia, who declined to attend the Bavarian security conference) should convene in Munich.  The Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (one time stand-up comic) flew in both to thank NATO for its support, but also to accuse it of appeasing Russia.  Of course “appeasement” invokes the spectre of Munich, 1938.  Meanwhile Russia and Belarus have continued joint military “exercises”, including, most chillingly, rehearsals of “tactical” nuclear missile launches, personally supervised by Mr Putin. 

While Munich 2022 was being reported, a family member was attending church.  I was told the sermon was very good.  It concerned Jesus’ teaching that we turn the other cheek, love our enemies, and do good to those who hate us.  If somebody demands your coat, give him your shirt as well.  Is that what Mr Chamberlain did?  And should we follow that advice with respect to Mr Putin?  There is a letter in today’s National from the redoubtable anti-nuclear arms campaigner Brian Quail, pointing to the grim inevitability of the situation we now find ourselves in.  He quotes the prophetic words of Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels: “Even if we lose, we will win, because our ideas will have penetrated the hearts of our enemies.”  Mr Quail urges us to renounce our devotion to war.  We must stop blaming the other.  “I have seen the enemy, and he is us.”  Did not Wilfred Owen explicitly put himself in his enemy’s shoes?  I am the enemy you killed, my friend.    

Naïve?

From my own limited experience of school bullies in the playground, I remember that one of their prime motivations was fear.  But it only became evident if you stood up to them.  I seem to recall that Jesus rather lost his temper with the commercial entrepreneurs in the temple in Jerusalem, and took a whip to them.  He preached, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you”, and I hope that if I were behaving badly, my friends, and even my enemies, would call it out. 

But I experienced the best of Russia on Saturday evening, at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.  Patricia Kopatchinskaja played the Stravinsky Violin Concerto, and the RSNO played Rachmaninov 2.  Ms K, aside from being a virtuoso violinist, was a real character.  She played with wit.  She engaged the audience.  The music came alive.  Afterwards, she regretted the fact that Stravinsky had not provided her with a cadenza, and proceeded to play one of her own composition, full of the concerto’s themes.  It involved a duet with the RSNO leader Sharon Roffman, herself a stellar performer.  Brought the house down.  As did, after the interval, the gorgeous Rach 2.  After that, it was not difficult to love Mother Russia.  But then, more than a century ago, when it all fell apart, Rachmaninov and Stravinsky both got out. 

But we mustn’t take our eyes of Beijing.  Thanks to the men’s curling team (silver), and the women’s curling team (gold), team GB avoided the embarrassment of coming home from the Winter Olympics empty-handed.  Reviewing the papers on Sophie Raworth’s show on Sunday, Pippa Crerar, the political editor of the Mirror, pointed out that the teams were Scottish.  But then, Ms Crerar has a Scottish accent.  It is good to know that the United Kingdom has been supported in her need by the broad shoulders of Scotland.   

On Michael Barclay’s Private Passions (Radio 3, Sunday, midday) the geologist Sanjeev Gupta chose a piece of music which happened to be a palindrome, John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean, its second half a mirror image of the first, which, considering the piece was 45 minutes long, was certainly a fairly remarkable undertaking.  Michael played four minutes of the piece, two minutes either side of the midpoint.  I found the music minimalist in style, atmospheric after the nature of a film score that can hypnotise you if you stay behind in a cinema, late at night, to watch the credits scroll endlessly by.  I thought at first the idea was a bit of a gimmick, but then it occurred to me that it would have been the sort of thing J. S. Bach might have done.  There is a famous portrait by Elias Gottlob Haussmann, one of two, in which the master is seen holding a copy of his six-part canon BWV 1076, one of fourteen canons Bach appended to his Goldberg Variations.  If you turn the music upside down and read it back to front, it reads quite differently.  It is the ultimate musical acrostic.      

And again, Haydn composed palindromes.  I had one performed for my benefit on the pianoforte yesterday evening, part of the Hoboken 16 collection, and dedicated to Haydn’s patron Prince Esterházy.  It was very charming, and certainly very clever, but I wonder if it had a certain static quality, like listening to music being generated mechanically by a cuckoo clock.

The Herald has been publishing letters about palindromes, literary ones, all week.  It’s the sort of harmless topic that can capture readers’ interest, generate correspondence, take off and run for a while.  I suspect such preoccupation might serve a useful purpose in diverting, albeit temporarily, our attention from the grim events unfolding on Europe’s eastern border.  I can’t say anybody has written in anything terribly original.  There have been the usual chestnuts: “Able was I ere I saw Elba” (and its parody “Regal was I ere I saw lager”), “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama”, and, that great chat-up line, so apposite on St. Valentine’s Day, “Madam, I’m Adam.”  It made me consider whether I could come up with anything comparable. 

Niagara ban illicit song, A deified Agnostic, ill in a bar again.           

Granted it needs a little context.  It sounds like a newspaper headline, describing a conservative community making clear its disapproval of a pop star with outlandish views and behaviours.  It reminds me of a Canadian community who once tried to ban Madonna from performing acts on stage considered lewd, and corrupting of the town’s young and impressionable.  I have a notion that if I keep my palindrome on ice, something will crop up that will render it sensible and relevant.  I once concocted a panagram (anagram of the alphabet) that did precisely that.  I had read that “Cwm fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz” (statues on the banks of a fjord in a valley disturbed an old man – the sort of thing you would want to say every day) was the only known panagram in the English language.  And I thought, surely, another can be concocted!  I came up with:

“M: Gulf wrack hext spy, viz J. Bond.  Q”

Clearly this is a message from MI6’s quartermaster to his boss, to let him know that 007 is spooked by the appearance of detritus in the Caribbean.

And now here’s the extraordinary thing.  It came true.  Sir Sean Connery made known his disapproval of all sorts of flotsam and jetsam washed up on the beaches of Nassau.

“Jack’s vow: BGLTQ mix fund Zephyr” (Jack pledges the gay community, et al, to finance the purchase of an automobile.) 

I put all this to my good hiking friend Harpoonata Venture and she said, “Why are you preoccupied with all this stuff?”  I replied, by way of admission, “I am like Monsieur Manette, Lucie’s father in A Tale of Two Cities who, when things turn bad on the international scene, reverts to his cobbler’s last.  When the world looks grim and I am fretting, I turn to puzzles and acrostics.” 

“Crosswords?”

“Certainly.  I have a clue for you.”

“I had a horrible feeling you might.”

“Organise BBC game show host! (6,9)”

“I haven’t the foggiest.  Give me a clue.”

“It’s topical.”

“Michael McIntyre.”

“Doesn’t quite fit.”

“I need another clue.”

“It’s a eulogy.”

“Doesn’t help.  I give in.”

“Bamber Gascoigne.”

“That will never do.  University Challenge was on ITV, not BBC.”

“Ah, but that was quite deliberate.  The point is that Bamber Gascoigne is an anagram of ‘Organise BBC game.’  The clue’s definition is ‘show host’.  Therefore the mention of BBC is designed to throw you off the scent.”

“I don’t think that’s fair.  You need something in the clue to indicate that ‘organise game show’ is to be anagramised.  Like, ‘Badly organise BBC game show host.’” 

“Not necessary.  There is an explanation mark at the end of the clue, which indicates that there has been a certain truncation of the clue pointers.  That is a crossword convention.  ‘Organise’ becomes the clue’s operator, or key, even though it is itself part of the anagram.”

Bamber Gascoigne hosted University Challenge between 1962 and 1987.  He was charming and patrician; in the show’s reincarnation, Jeremy Paxman rather more acerbic, and intimidating, at least before Dr Parkinson cruelly deprived him of some of his animation.  He could berate contestants for their ignorance but it was only because he knew something they didn’t.  In its structure, University Challenge is very subtle.  The “starter for ten” is a question which moves from obscurity towards clarity.  At what point to do you jump in, and risk the 5 point penalty?  If you strike early, not only do you have to anticipate the answer, you also have to anticipate the question.  Fingers on buzzers no conferring.

“In his thermodynamic equation relating free energy to enthalpy, entropy…”

Bzzzzzz

Glasgow Campbell!  (Aye, right.  Fat chance.)

“Josiah Willard Gibbs.”

“Very well interrupted!”

Applause.

“Three more questions on thermodynamics…”

I’m convinced the best players buzz before they have formulated the answer (best illustrated in the music round), confident it will come to them while the voiceover announces their name.  Of course, if they corpse, they will receive a dressing-down from Mr Paxman.  Get the answer right, and you are afforded the opportunity to confer at leisure, while the other side can only look on helplessly.

I suppose the ultimate quiz show is Mastermind, hilariously parodied by The Two Ronnies in the days when Magnus Magnusson was the quiz inquisitor.  Mastermind pares things down to the bare essentials. The black chair; nowhere to hide.  I watched Celebrity Mastermind on Saturday.  Rufus Hound pipped Chris Mason to the post.  Next morning the host, Clive Myrie, dressed down for the occasion, reviewed the papers with Sophie Raworth.  He invited Sophie on to the show and she said something like, “No way!  I would freeze!”  With that I sympathise.   

But enough of these dried fruits of my idle elucubrations.  I suppose I had better turn on the radio and see if World War III has commenced.

I’ve started so I’ll finish        

Greatly excited at the prospect of a real live orchestral concert in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday evening (RSNO, Beethoven’s 4^th Piano Concerto with Steven Osborne as soloist, and Beethoven’s 4^th symphony), I arranged a pre-concert rendezvous with friends, printed out my e-ticket, printed out my vaccination status, carried out a lateral flow test (negative), and jumped into my car.  I left at 5.30 pm for a 7.30 show start.  I like to leave in plenty of time – I call it the CAHOOTS Doctrine (Campbell adds hours on over the schedule).  I hate being late.  And I hate that sensation of irritation one has for the man in the tractor who is holding one up; he is, after all, putting bread on one’s table.  Do you consider a two hour cushion for a forty five minute trip excessive?  Well…

I joined the tailback on the M80 shortly after the M9 turn-off.  I could see the serried phalanxes of tail lights stretching ahead for miles into the distance.  This was not simply congestion from sheer volume of traffic.  Somewhere up ahead, somebody must have crashed.  I surfed the radio stations for any travel reports but only found some very nice Scottish dance music on the accordion, the six o’clock news and then Clive Anderson on Loose Ends, and Don Giovanni from the New York Met.  Now if I were a bit more tech-savvy I might have an app on my phone.  Being warned in a dream, I might go by another route.  The trouble is, there is a prolonged section of the M80 with no exit.  I just had to sit tight, occasionally edging forward at walking pace, listening to Mozart.

Ever working night and day

Getting neither thanks nor pay…

It was a cold, dreich night, but at least it had stopped sleeting, and I was comfy in my car with the blower on.  I sat and listened to Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte’s account of the lurid activities of that great sex pest, Don G.  I’m surprised he hasn’t been cancelled.  We were talking about cancel culture over lunch on Friday, and somebody remarked that you can’t just airbrush unsavoury facts, or people, from history.  Actually, remarked another, you can.  The powerful can suppress a truth, or eliminate an individual without trace, and within a generation the memory of the truth, or the person, is gone.  That is why people who are cavalier with the truth are such a menace. 

I edged forward another ten metres.

Should I phone my friends and tell them I’m going to be late?  But you shouldn’t use your mobile while behind the wheel, even supposing you are stationary.  Pull over on the hard shoulder and switch on the hazard lights?  But the emergency services might need the hard shoulder.  Am I being too precious?  Another hour of this, and I might do something totally crazy, like crashing through somebody’s back garden to access a side street, or obliterating the central reservation’s crash barrier to access the other carriageway.  You see, m’lud, with my fragile mental health, I really needed to hear Beethoven.

Ten more metres.  Where the devil am I?  Abeam Dunipace.  Carry on at this pace, and I might make it for Rachmaninov 2, on February 19^th.    

Talking of hearing Beethoven, I’ve just read a very interesting book, Hearing Beethoven, A Story of Musical Loss and Discovery, by Robin Wallace (The University of Chicago Press, 2018).  It is a very unusual book.  Two books in one, really.  Robin Wallace is a musicologist whose late wife, Barbara, happened to be profoundly deaf.  The experiences of Beethoven’s deafness, and Barbara’s deafness, are explored in parallel, and inform one another.  The exploration gives an insight into how Beethoven might have heard the world.                                

Beethoven kept his deafness to himself for as long as he could.  He seemed to have had a sense of shame about it.  He seemed unable to express the fact that he was not at all a bad-tempered misanthrope, but on the contrary a warm-hearted and social individual.  But his deafness cut him off from his fellow men, and women.  So to some extent he was in a state of denial.  This state of denial is very common, even, perhaps especially, with presbyacusis, the almost inevitable diminished hearing of later life, and I encountered it in medical practice constantly.  Whereas people adjust to presbyopia quite easily, perhaps in their mid to late forties, and acquire some reading glasses, most people hold out against a hearing aid, until their level of disability is positively Beethovenian.  This is unfortunate, because using a hearing aid, or aids, is a skill that demands time to be acquired and perfected.  Consequently people are disappointed by the apparent uselessness of their aid, and may stop using it, and opt for social isolation.  They regard their hearing aid, even a miniature digital aid, as a badge of decrepitude. 

Abeam Denny.  I caught the seven o’clock news on Radio Scotland.  Yes, there had been a serious crash on the M80.  Here am I fretting about being late for a concert, while some poor soul has set off on a journey, never to return.  I decided to cut my losses and head for home, pulled off at the earliest opportunity, abeam Bonnybridge, and took the A872, which closely parallels the M80, northbound.  As soon as I could, I pulled over, made a phone call, and sent a text, so that people wouldn’t send out Search & Rescue.  Then I drove through Denny.  I don’t really know Denny, other than its aerial aspect, for it is the reporting point for air traffic heading to Cumbernauld Airport from the North East.  “Cumbernauld Radio, Denny inbound…”  Oddly enough, from the air it looks uncannily like Drury, the reporting point for Ardmore Airport, 12,500 miles away in New Zealand.  Sometimes I would say to Cumbernauld in a fit of absentmindedness, “Drury inbound.”

“Where?”

I really ought not to be allowed out. 

And so back home.  The best-laid schemes o mice an men / Gang aft agley…

But I still listened to some Beethoven.  I chose the Adagio sostenuto from the Piano Sonata in B flat Für das Hammerclavier, Opus 106.  Balsam.   

Welcome to XXX Insurance.  Please be aware that your call may be recorded for training and monitoring purposes.  You will now hear five options.  You can make your selection at any time.  If you would like to renew or cancel your policy press one.  If you would like to take out a new policy it’s two.  If you would like to make a claim on an existing policy it’s three. If you would like to declare a change of circumstances relating to an existing policy it’s four.  For all other enquiries please press five. 

5

Please have your policy number ready.  Our call handlers are currently experiencing a very high level of demand.  Please hold, as your call is important to us.  Alternatively you can contact us on line at www…

I held.

Suddenly, a blizzard of strings.  Winter, from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.  Now, like an Airbus A380 pilot orbiting in the stack above Heathrow, I was truly in a holding pattern.  Like Pachelbel’s Canon or Mozart 40, the Vivaldi is a telephonic cliché.  How apposite that I should be on hold to the strain of Winter, the season when nature hunkers down, lies dormant, and waits.  Other wintry scenes are available, and might have been evoked.  Schubert’s Winterreise.  But that would never do.  That blighted, unrequited individual looking up with longing at the window of his lost love would make “hold” a miserable, even a desperate experience. 

Fremd bin ich eingezogen

Fremd zieh’ ich wieder aus…

I came here as a stranger, and I will depart as a stranger…

But I get impatient with these fragile Schubertian Werther-like figurers who wander off into the winter snow, to seek accommodation in a cemetery.  So she chucked you, mate.  Get over it.  Don’t adopt the mantle of victimhood. 

On the other hand, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is as effervescent as champagne, music that will be contemporary for ever.  Sempiternal.  These thickly textured falling cadences in this first movement sound so modern, and evergreen.  Even in winter.

Thank you for holding.  Your call will be answered shortly…

When I was a child, I would lift the receiver of the black Bakelite telephone, and immediately, immediately, the rich contralto voice of Kathleen Ferrier would ask me, “Number, please?”  I remember the numbers of my childhood.  Kelvin 4994.  West 3018.  Bell 3500.  Pennsylvania six five thousand…

Customer satisfaction is our highest priority…

Why do we put up with this?  It is self-evident that any automated system of such clunky design is not there for the benefit of the user.  It is there for the benefit of the Masters of XXX.  It is there to promote “efficiency”.  If you are “efficient”, you can make staff redundant and close High Street branches.  Have you noticed, if you transact your affairs via internet banking, that the banks have made you your own (unpaid) teller?  Not only that, they flag up dire warnings of scams that may look awfully authentic, and expect you to be able to detect them.  Not only are you your own teller, you are your own self-funded security officer, guarding the vaults.  

Winter, second movement.  A clip-clop sleigh ride, with a beguiling melody for the solo violin, lulling you into a false sense of security.  If the person who finally takes your call is a scammer, your guard will certainly be down.  But see, the thing is, you have been scammed already.  And this is the subtle point.  The said financial institution is the scam.  Why do we accept that the money men, the merchants and the hedgers and the masters of the universe, should earn eye-watering sums of money – our money – topped up by eye-watering bonuses, while offering us this pitiful apology for a service?  Friends, we are being had.    

Thank you for holding.  Your call…

It is incredible to me that anybody should think this is a rightful way, not just to conduct business, or any form of societal interchange or social intercourse, but to lead one’s life, far less to consider that it might be “efficient”.  Life, real life, just isn’t like that.  Nearly always, your enquiry will not fall under options 1, 2, 3, or 4.  Your enquiry will be 3.14159….  Life cannot be reduced to an algorithm.  Every caller, every enquirer, is unique.  “Efficiency” is the quantification of human souls. 

We took a catastrophic wrong turn when we tried to run all our community services – banks, post offices, health, social care, police, education, by computer algorithms.  The people who devise these systems – how far removed they are from the interface between service provider and customer.  But all the transactions that really matter in life are one-on-one, be they in the banks, the doctor’s surgery, the care home, in the local shop and at the supermarket check-out, Citizen’s Advice, the police station or the lawyer’s office.  We need to dump all the digitised menus, come straight to the point, and simply ask, “What can I do for you?  How may I help you?”

Third movement.  A subdued opening, as of nature holding her breath.  A violinistic recitative.

At the moment, by the time you reach the bottom of the algorithm and press five, you might be put through to a call handler situated anywhere on the planet.  One thing they won’t have is local knowledge.  What a dystopia we have created.  Is there any way back, any way out of this labyrinth we have wilfully constructed and now lost ourselves in? 

Another blizzard of violins, a final dazzling flourish, a momentary, barely perceptible pause, and the last, emphatic chord.

Silence. 

Should I stay on hold?  If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?                                   

I have a horrible feeling that the balloon is about to go up.

I have a vague recollection of a surreal film by the director Luis Buñuel – I forget which one – in which a couple move around their world conscious that acts of violence are taking place in various distant lands.  They pass a shop window and see through it a television showing the carnage following an act of terrorism.  Wherever it is happening, it is elsewhere.  Throughout the film, the depictions of destruction move closer towards the protagonists until eventually, they too are swallowed up by it.

Another film image:  Darkest Hour begins very ominously with a panning shot, screened in silence, of mile after mile of tanks, presumably assembled at the German – Polish border.  It has the look of footage that has been retrieved from an archive.  It looks real.  I think of that shot when I see pictures of troops, arms, and matériel assembled at the Russian – Ukraine border.  The fact that the US has ordered families of embassy staff to leave Ukraine is surely very concerning.  Yet Ukraine, some might say, is “a faraway country of which we know nothing”.  That’s what Nevil Chamberlain said about Czechoslovakia in September 1938 at the time of the Sudetenland crisis.  Twenty months later, in the Commons, Leo Amery echoed the words of Cromwell to the Long Parliament when he said to Chamberlain, “You have sat there too long for all the good you have done.  In the name of God, go.”  And of course, last week David Davis resurrected these words once more and directed them at Boris Johnson.  Mr Davis said Mr Johnson would be familiar with the words, but Mr Johnson said he didn’t know what Mr Davis was talking about.  This, considering Mr Johnson has written a biography of Churchill, I find hard to believe. 

The thing is, we’re not prepared.  We are preoccupied with other matters.  I wonder if Sue Gray’s report will be published this week in time for the great Wednesday lunchtime soap opera that is PMQs; and, if it is, how much of it will be open to public view, and how much redacted.  Over the last couple of weeks we have grown used to the endless repetition of this exchange across the floor of the Commons:

“When is the Prime Minister going to admit that the game is up, and resign?”

“I think you should be patient, and wait until the civil service report, which will detail all the facts, is published.”

“Why does the Prime Minister need a report to tell him that he went to a boozy party?”

“I am concentrating on bringing the country out of the pandemic, through our world-leading scientific research that created and mass-produced an effective vaccine, oversaw its roll-out, organized a furlough scheme made only possible by utilising the full resources of this broad-shouldered United Kingdom, which can now boast the fastest economic recovery in Western Europe.”

It’s a deflection tactic, to answer a question about Partygate by bragging about governmental achievement.  It’s a non-sequitur.  But in any case, is it true?  Did the government do any of these things?  Vaccines were created by scientists, they were mass produced by pharmaceutical companies, and they were delivered into arms by the National Health Service.  What did the government do?  It printed a lot of money.  It introduced lockdown legislation which apparently did not pertain to itself.

We have other preoccupations.  We are preoccupied by issues of gender.  Does a woman have a cervix, or is womanhood merely a state of mind?  If you think the former, should you be cancelled?  Should Lord Dundas’s statue in Edinburgh be removed because he delayed the abolition of the slave trade?  Should the BBC make “woke cuts” to comedy reruns containing politically incorrect jokes?  (This, I recall, was the work of one Syme, in Orwell’s 1984 – to rewrite history.  Syme himself of course was erased.  Cancelled.  Disappeared.  He never existed.)    

Are the party whips bullies?  Duh.  A Tory grandee on Any Questions said (I paraphrase), “The whips need to maintain discipline.  If everybody voted according to their conscience, government would grind to a halt!”

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. 

It occurs to me that the ongoing shenanigans in No. 10 might in due course provide rich material for a Hollywood blockbuster, a Broadway musical, or perhaps a Glyndebourne opera.  Working title: Allegra con brio!  Then again, the English composer William Walton pre-empted any such production, in 1931, with his uncannily prescient oratorio Belshazzar’s Feast, its text drawn from Psalm 137, and Chapter 5 of the Book of Daniel.  For Babylon, read London Town, the City awash with laundered money. 

Babylon was a great city,

Her merchandise was of gold and silver,

Of precious stones, of pearls, of fine linen,

Of purple, silk and scarlet,

All manner vessels of ivory,

All manner vessels of precious wood,

Of brass, iron and marble,

Cinnamon, odours and ointments,

Of frankincense, wine and oil,

Fine flour, wheat and beasts,

Sheep, horses, chariots, slaves

And the souls of men… 

In Babylon

Belshazzar the King

Made a great feast,

Made a feast to a thousand of his lords,

And drank wine before the thousand…

And in that same hour, as they feasted

Came forth fingers of a man’s hand

And the King saw

The part of the hand that wrote.

And this was the writing that was written:

MENE, MENE, TEKEL UPHARSIN

THOU ART WEIGHED IN THE BALANCE

AND FOUND WANTING.

In that night was Belshazzar the King slain

Slain!

And his Kingdom divided. 

Rembrandt vividly depicted the eerie interruption to the king’s feast in oils, and Walton’s musical evocation at this point is as spine-chilling as it is blood-curdling.  The expression “the writing on the wall” derives from this tale, and has slipped into common usage, depicting a person who has indeed been found wanting, but often who fails to realise that the game is up.  “He can’t see the writing on the wall.” 

I watched the Prime Minister deliver his carefully crafted apologia last Wednesday before the commencement of Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons.  He must have known he was going to be in for a rough ride, and he was clearly trying to get on the front foot.  But he still had to endure a series of blistering attacks, and calls for his resignation, from every opposition party.  He sat with bowed head.  He had to be contrite.  He had to take full responsibility.  He had to apologise.  Above all he mustn’t be petulant.  He mustn’t pick a fight.  To use an expression of his, once applied to a putative UK response to Covid 19, he just had to take it on the chin. 

He duly apologised, but he did not do so unreservedly.  In particular, he did not admit that he, and others who had attended a drinks party in the Downing Street garden, had broken the law.  Instead, he used language that you often hear from entrepreneurs, CEOs and captains of industry whose business affairs turn out to be of a dubious, not to say shady nature.  “We fouled up.  In retrospect, we should have done things differently.”  This is not a confession of wrongdoing, but merely an expression of regret over bad optics.   

Watching his performance, I had the impression of somebody who, deep down, felt he had done nothing amiss, but that it was incumbent upon him that he eat a substantial plate of humble pie.  It is often said that Boris Johnson is a serial liar, but I don’t think his expression of regret on this occasion constituted a lie.  Rather it was a mode of expression that is peculiar to the political world.  Effectively, his statement could be summarised as, “There was a party at No. 10, and there was not a party at No. 10.”  If you send out 100 invitations to guests for drinks and nibbles in the Downing Street garden, then you have just organised a party.  If you slip out of your office for 25 minutes to thank colleagues for all their hard work, then you are looking after your colleagues during a difficult time.  Ergo, you apologise for the way things must appear, especially to people who, because they stuck to the rules, were denied the opportunity to say goodbye to dying loved ones; and you simultaneously explain how such an event was, in good faith, permitted.  This remarkable feat of mental gymnastics was denoted by George Orwell and his neologism, “doublethink”. 

It seems to me that the Prime Minister is not so much a liar, as an exponent of doublethink.  For example, when Allegra Stratton was caught on camera admitting to another social gathering having taken place at No. 10, Mr Johnson expressed outrage at such a revelation.  He declared himself to be as furious as everybody else that such an event had taken place.  Yet we now know that he had attended a similar event himself, therefore his outrage must be faux-outrage; or, he is angry, not because a party took place, but because Ms Stratton told us about it.  He was angry, and he was not angry.  In order to hold these two notions simultaneously in your head, you must be delusional.  You must inhabit either an alternative universe, or a lunatic asylum.                       

Doublethink is crucial to political life, as it is currently conducted.  The Conservative Party is trying to decide what to do about the problem of Boris.  They have temporarily kicked the ball into the long grass by having a senior civil servant take time to establish the full facts.  But how long does it take to conclude that if you send a man with a suitcase round to the local off-licence, you are having a party?  Meanwhile the MPs have returned to their constituencies to consult the grass roots members as to whether Boris is an honourable, or a dishonourable man.   Yet everybody understands that a debate over moral rectitude is quite beside the point.  All that matters is whether Boris is an electoral asset, or an electoral liability.  Practitioners of doublethink hold these two concepts simultaneously in their minds.  There are four options open with respect to Boris: honourable asset; honourable liability; dishonourable asset; dishonourable liability.  He will not be discarded for dishonour; he will be discarded, ruthlessly, if he is perceived to be an electoral liability.  But the Backbench 1922 Committee will couch his dismissal in terms of the dishonour he has brought upon his office.  This is pure doublethink. 

I don’t anticipate that the Prime Minister will resign.  And I suspect that if he is dismissed, in Trumpian fashion he will not accept the decision.  That is because he cannot see the writing on the wall.  And similarly, the Conservative Party cannot see that public anger has turned into derision.  The Westminster Village cannot be taken seriously any more.  This is why Belshazzar’s Feast is so apposite.  No. 10 has become the setting for a phantasmagoric hallucination. 

The Tories might prop him up.  “Now is not the time”, they will say.  They won’t want the next PM to inherit such a nightmare.  But if they stall, I think the consequences will be far-reaching.  Take note of the last line quoted from the Book of Daniel. 

…and his kingdom divided. 

There was a fifth member of the panel on Any Questions at the weekend, a heckler outside Reading Minster trying to disrupt proceedings.  He was tolerated with evident good humour and Chairman Chris Mason even invited him to join the debate by phoning up Anita Anand on Saturday’s Any Answers.  I couldn’t hear what the heckler was saying, although he seemed to be using a pretty big megaphone, but I thought I recognised the voice.  I think he was the Remainer who used to disrupt the BBC newscaster on College Green night after night during the protracted Brexit debate.  So I guess he was protesting about the presence of Nigel Farage on the Any Questions panel.  A question arose relating to “The Colston Four”, the four defendants found not guilty of criminal damage, a jury verdict, despite the fact that they, and others, had clearly hauled Edward Colston’s statue off its plinth in Bristol, dragged it through the streets, and cast it into the harbour.  Some people think this verdict was bizarre.   

The SNP MP Joanna Cherry QC made the point that it was not the role of politicians to question the decisions of a jury whose members had sat throughout a case and heard all the evidence.  As a former prosecutor she had frequently been enraged by apparently perverse jury verdicts, but had never felt it was her role or her right to question them.  Nigel Farage took an opposing view.  The fact that Edward Colston had been a slave trader, ergo monster, was neither here nor there.  It might just as well have been a statue of Mahatma Gandhi that had been desecrated.  It was as if it were not the Colston Four, but Colston himself, who was on trial.  (When Mr Farage made this point I heard an echo of a similar remark once made by Bernard Levin who sat through the case of the Crown versus Penguin Books and the prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act for their publishing D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  It was as if it were not Penguin, or even Lawrence, who was on trial, but Connie Chatterley herself.)  Mr Farage thought this trial would have been unnecessary, if the police had done their job and stopped the mob from tearing down the statue in the first place.  Well, the poor constabulary are always getting it in the neck.  Either they pussy-foot around, or they are too heavy handed.  Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.  I remember seeing the footage of the toppling, the dragging, and the drowning of the Colston effigy and thinking there was something biblical about the scene.  The destruction of a graven image.  At least it was an inanimate object, and not a living being.  However, Mr Farage took a dim view, and told us to expect to see many more similar episodes of public disorder. 

Irrespective of whether or not Colston was a rotter, was his statue any good?  I mean, was it a work of art?  People have been minded for decades now to remove all the statues from Glasgow’s George Square.  You might say that George Square, at the heart of the second city of Empire, is the absolute epicentre of the worldwide trade in tobacco, cotton, sugar, slavery, abuse, dominion, and exploitation, all celebrated in the statuary of various historical worthies.  Yet the only popular demonstration against any of it is the placing of a traffic cone on the head of the Duke of Wellington, in nearby Royal Exchange Square. The only reason I can think of, that George Square remains unmolested, is that Her Majesty’s Sculptor in Ordinary, Alexander Stoddart, wrote a detailed account of the artistic merits of each George Square statue, one by one, in a blistering attack against Philistinism, second only in its eloquence and effectiveness to Mr Stoddart’s equally scathing letter to The Herald, at the time of the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, condemning the intention to demolish the Red Road flats as a coup de théâtre during the games’ opening ceremony.  It never happened.   

What a blessing we live in a part of the world where you can debate these issues freely, stand outside a public hall with a megaphone, voice an opinion uncensored on air, and, should you become rash and hot-headed, be faced with a policeman who does not pull a gun on you, but says in a conciliatory tone, “Now just calm down, sir.”  And, if needs must, one can expect to have a fair trial before a jury of one’s peers.  I would feel a lot safer attending a demo in George Square than in Tiananmen Square.  But we shouldn’t take it for granted.  If HMG were minded to send the tanks to George Square, it wouldn’t be the first time.             

Every New Year’s Day I have the same telephone conversation with a family member, who asks me if my name is on the New Year’s Honours List, and I reply that a palace equerry has sounded me out, but I have humbly declined.  It’s just a running gag.  Perhaps I’ll be offered a gong for this weekly blog, now entering its eighth year.  “For services to anecdotage.”  Stop me if I’ve told you this before…

I read that retiring 007 Daniel Craig has been made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George, the same honour, stated The Herald, conferred upon James Bond.  I thought, “Is that right?  Didn’t he turn it down?”  I consulted The Man with the Golden Gun, and its final chapter, ENDIT, to discover that Bond did have a CMG, and it was the offer a knighthood, the KCMG, that he declined.  His secretary Mary Goodnight was very angry with him, but he ordered her to send an encrypted reply to M, with the words, “AYE AM A SCOTTISH PEASANT AND EYE WILL ALWAYS FEEL AT HOME BEING A SCOTTISH PEASANT.” 

Incidentally it was such a pleasure to reread ENDIT.  The Man with the Golden Gun was published in 1965, but Ian Fleming never saw it between covers, the dust jacket with artwork by the ever inventive Richard Chopping, depicting the golden gun, bullets, the mandibular carapace of a sea creature, and insects, all contributing to an atmosphere of decay.  Fleming died in 1964 at the age of 56.  He had been a lifelong smoker of sixty sticks of cigarette a day, and he was a cardiac cripple.  By all accounts his last days were very miserable.  How could he, in such circumstances, have written something as sunny as this?  Although Jonathan Cape had sufficient material to publish Octopussy and The Living Daylights in 1966, chronologically, ENDIT is really Bond’s last appearance.

Speaking as a Scottish peasant, I see the attraction in turning down an honour.  It’s the lure of being a maverick. The man of independent mind.  Maybe the offer of a conferment is akin to the Mafia shouting you a slap-up meal in a restaurant.  Once you accept, you are in their pocket.  There is, after all, no such thing as a free lunch.  And maybe everybody has their price.  You might turn your nose up at a British Empire Medal, but how about an Order of Merit?  Companion of Honour?  I see that Tony Blair is to become a Knight of the Garter, but, at time of writing this, a petition against such a bestowal has passed 300,000 signatures.  Iraq hangs round Mr Blair’s neck, like an albatross.  I did sign a petition against the Iraq war back in 2003, but, re the Garter, I can’t say I’m exercised one way or the other.  One thing I feel the Establishment should never do, having bestowed an honour upon somebody, is to take it away again because the recipient has in some way blotted his copybook.  This happened to Fred Goodwin, chief executive of RBS, after the 2008 financial crash.  The Establishment invite you into the fold when your star is on the rise.  Blot your copybook, and they will drop you like hot coals.  You will be cancelled, and “disappeared”.  It’s like rewriting history.  That man is not a knight.  He was never a knight.  Thus the Establishment closes ranks and protects itself.

I suppose it was easy enough for Bond to turn the K down.  He was, after all, a loner, only responsible to himself.  I imagine most people getting the call from the palace will be under immense pressure from loved ones.  One’s wife might say, “Of course you must accept, if only for the children.  Think of their schooling.  They need useful acquaintance, in order to get ahead.”  Yada yada yada.   

Personally I would be frightened that accepting a position somewhere amid the multi-layered Imperial echelons would make pomposity unavoidable.  I would become one of these dreadful medical elder statesmen you encounter at international conferences.  After the keynote address in the first plenary session, the chairman says, “There’s just time for a few questions from the floor.  Approach the microphone and please be brief.”

“Sir Bulvers Bagshot-Clutterbug, Emeritus Professor of comparative neural networking, Gonville and Caius, with a special interest in the adaptive value of the relentless proliferation of preening and self-aggrandisement.  I greatly enjoyed your talk, doctor, and felt it gave more than adequate emphasis to the precise points I would have wished highlighted and underlined.  I have three observations to make, a recommendation, and, arising from these, if I may, a question perhaps of a provocative nature…”

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz                                

Alas, the annual ceremony of lessons and carols due to take place in Glasgow the Sunday before Christmas was cancelled, due to Covid, and consequently the Archinto Strad (copy thereof, D. M. Sanderson, Glasgow, 1965) stayed in its case.  I had to be content with the vicarious experience, from King’s College Cambridge.

1.  Once in Royal David’s City…

I understand that the treble given the nod to sing unaccompanied to a congregation of a billion or so doesn’t know he’s got the gig until the downbeat happens.  That strikes me as a completely nightmarish scenario.  But then I don’t have the temperament.  Anyway, since the viola has been silent, let me continue with this offering of my personal nine:

•  A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens

In my annual revisitation to this hardy perennial, it only occurred to me this time round that the novella has “staves”, rather than chapters, because, of course, it is a carol.  I suppose the reason why it remains so popular is that it reflects something we all do at this time of year.  We look back to the past, we “consider our position” in the present, and, looking to the future, we guess, and fear.  I find myself identifying more and more with Ebenezer Scrooge.  Not that, if I may say so, I was ever a skinflint.  Indeed, on a couple of occasions in my life, if I haven’t exactly sold all I had and given the money to the poor, I have at least spectacularly chucked everything over and started again from scratch.  I’m not proud of it.  Self-destruction can pose as largesse.  And miserliness is not the only way of being parsimonious. 

•  Winterreise

A performance of Schubert’s great song cycle was supposed to be on BBC4 on Christmas night.  I switched on in high expectation.  Blow me, if they didn’t announce, “in a change to our schedule…” that the Berlin Phil was going to play film scores by John Williams.  No explanation; no promise to reschedule.  I bet you somebody in management said, well, we can’t possibly put on something as lugubrious as Winterreise on Christmas night.  Let’s do Star Wars. 

•  Ode to Freedom

It’s the last track on the latest offering from Abba, after forty years’ silence.  It sounds like Tchaikovsky.  I like it, but I gave away the CD to my local hospice charity shop, along with Adele’s Thirty.  Now that’s lugubrious.  To be loved?  Such anguish.  Billy Connolly tells a story about crying as a child because he was always being berated by his elders.  He was reproducing the yodelling, snivelling cry of an urchin on stage, when he actually started to cry, for real.  He got too close.  Never sing louder than lovely.  I gave the charity shop a few tomes.  Christopher Hitchens’ Hitch 22, and the autobiography (signed by the author) of Brian Cox, the actor, not the physicist.  I enjoyed them but I’m not going to read them again.  So I handed them on, with a few others.  It’s a good exercise.  I’m a bibliophile, but not to the extent of Barry Humphries, whose library apparently contains 50,000 volumes.  Hearing that on Christmas morning, I didn’t feel so bad about my own stacked shelves.   

•  Journey of the Magi

I got this very amusing Christmas card.  It depicts three wise men astride camels, gazing up at a shining star.  The sender had appended the note, “They don’t look very refractory to me.”  This is an allusion to T. S. Eliot’s poem, full of wonderful images.  I, too, am full of regret over silken girls bringing sherbet. 

•  In the Bleak Midwinter

It’s a classy carol, with words by Christina Georgina Rossetti, and music by Gustav Theodore von Holst, to give him his Sunday-go-to-meeting name.  Mind, you need to keep the tune, Cranham, moving.  If it crawls along it becomes disorientated, like a walker with hypothermia straying off course and finally dying of exposure.  I’m not sure about the lines

Snow had fallen, snow on snow,

Snow – on – snow…  

Is this not called the fallacy of imitative form?  You depict lots of snow by piling on the snow.  It is like a concrete poem

                        Snu        

              Snu

                                          Snu

Snu

If I’d been Rossetti’s editor I might have said, “Too much snow, Chrissie.  How about…  Snow had fallen, don’t ye know, on the bleak ice floe…”  Rossetti might have acquiesced out of sheer exhaustion.  Such is the torture of being edited.  You compromise, and end up with something slightly worse.   

Of course, snow is pronounced something like sniouw, that is, with a diphthong.  North of the border, it is just straight snow the way The Proclaimers would say it.  Choirmasters have this exercise whereby we hapless Scots are cajoled to attempt to imitate BBC RP.  Roses grow on Moses’ nose.  Riouwses griouw on Miouwses niouws.  On the whole I’d rather hear it from The Proclaimers.  The snow would sound bitterly cold.

•  The God Equation by Michio Kaku (Allen Lane, 2021)

I got this as a Christmas gift.  Michio Kaku has taken up the quest for the Grand Unified Theory, the theory of everything.  Well, it stumped Einstein, so good luck with that.  Apparently the God equation might only be an inch and a half long.  Personally, ah ha’e ma doots.  Haven’t we been here before, around the end of the nineteenth century?  Then along came Einstein, Planck, at al.  I’m not sure that the discovery of the God equation would be propitious for the world, or efficacious to anybody in it.  There would be nothing left to explore.  No more equations to find.  The world would end, not with a big bang, or even a big crunch, but a whimper.  We would die of ennui. 

•  The Holiday

It has become a Yuletide war horse, much as The White Tower once was, and then The Magnificent Seven, and The Great Escape.  Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet, both attempting to escape disastrous relationships, do a transatlantic house swap and run, respectively, into Jude Law, and Jack Black, in a series of “meets cute”.    And also Eli Wallach.  It is nice to see that that ruthless bandit who couldn’t figure out why men like the Magnificent Seven would bother about a bunch of peasants in their stinking pueblos, should mellow into a kindly elderly gent tottering around on a zimmer frame. 

•  Little Gidding

Got a phone call from New Zealand on Christmas night.  Apparently it was unbearably hot in Auckland on Christmas Day.  I think I could have borne it quite well.  I thought of my own dawn walk round Flanders Moss on Christmas morning, in a biting wind, when I had the world to myself.  And I remembered these lines from Eliot’s Four Quartets:

Where is the summer, the unimaginable

Zero summer?

Thursday was one of these magical winter days in the heart of L’Écosse Profonde, mild, dry, and misty, with everything bathed in a supernatural glow.  We walked to my local erratic, and its nearby Iron Age fort, thence to dinner in Tigh Mor, a gothic Schloss brooding over the shores of Loch Achray.  My tech-savvy friends enlightened me with respect to what3words, a kind of unique postcode for any three metre square postage stamp on the planet.  Apparently there are 57 trillion of them.  Is that right?  Well let’s see now.  The surface area of the globe is 4.Pi.r squared.  The radius of the earth is about 6,378 kilometres, so the earth’s surface area is somewhere upwards of 500 trillion square metres, which in turn can be divided into upwards of 55 trillion patches of 3 metres squared.  So we appear to be in the right ball park. 

What3words has been translated into 47 languages.  The English version uses 40,000 words, and covers sea as well as land.  Quite why you would want to pinpoint a moveable feast such as the rolling waves with such accuracy I’m not sure.  Maybe to place a buoy above the wreck of the Titanic?  Slurs this shark, incidentally, is the big slug black door to No. 10 Downing Street, Westminster, London SW1A 2AA.  Apposite.  A shark is a shyster and to slur your words, arguably, is to obfuscate.  White man speaks with forked tongue.

The occupant of slurs this shark has had a terrible week, not so much because of the Owen Paterson debacle, the loss of a seemingly safe seat in North Shropshire, the drip feed of allegations about illicit gatherings, and the resignation of Lord Frost, but rather because, with all that going on, not one single Tory has come out strongly in support of the PM.  Three strikes and you’re out.  Blimey, with friends like these… Is the PM a dead man walking?  I have a notion he won’t go quietly.  On the contrary, he will throw an enormous tantrum.  The pantomime villain will show his true colours.    

But Parliament is in recess.   I have spent the week catching up with old friends, enjoying Christmas lunch in my local, meandering deep into the Trossachs, and eschewing the political columns in favour of the crossword.  I suppose it is a symptom of the fretfulness of this time of year, that I started to analyse slurs this shark from the point of view of the cruciverbalist.  Is slurs this shark the solution to a crossword clue?

Lass Ruth shirks revolving door (5,4,5). 

I took the trouble to look up the code for various famous, or notorious locations.  The grassy knoll in Dallas – kings battle whips.  Edinburgh Royal Infirmary Emergency Department: healthier second truth. (I’m not happy with a second truth.  There is only one truth.  An alternative truth cannot be healthy.)  The White House – sulk held raves.  You might imagine the three words might reflect something of the character of the location but I don’t think so:  indent applause cartoonist – Auschwitz.     

Coming across these various location descriptors reminded me of a simple memory test still in wide use in medicine.  You ask the patient to remember a name and address and then ask him to recall it after ten minutes.  I’ve lost track of the number of times I asked a patient to remember:

Angus McIntyre

17, The Meadows

Edinburgh

…only to forget all about it until the patient would remind me: “Aren’t you going to ask me that address?”  I always strongly resisted the temptation to make things difficult for my patient:

Sir Garscube Crichton-Delaney Brocklehurst, OM, CH

Flat 17B

2477 Amerigo Vespucci Boulevard

Addis Ababa

Now I find that this ancient test for incipient dementia might take a modern twist to fit the digital age, and we might find ourselves asking patients to remember just three words, conjured out of mid-air. 

Egregious inchoate desuetude.

Grandiloquent smooching barracuda.

It is quite difficult – try it yourself – to make up a three word combination, even if you think your choice of word is entirely random, and not conjure some sort of sensible image.  A grandiloquent smooching barracuda, for example, has a certain camp quality.  We are hard wired to search for meaning on exposure to any sensory stimulus.  If you shut yourself in a dark room and then switch on a pinpoint light source and look at it – this is a reproducible physiological experiment – you will find that it starts to move around.  It’s not that it’s actually moving; but your brain is juggling with it, as if trying to view it from different angles, to figure out what on earth it might be.  Listen repeatedly to a piece of severely uncompromising twelve note serial music, and your brain will try to understand it in terms of tonality.  You might suppose that you could devise three words entirely devoid of meaning by avoiding any syntactical relationship between the words:             

Harlequin exiguous deride

What do you do?  Your brain turns it upside down: deride exiguous harlequin.  It is the second movement of the Debussy cello sonata. 

The worrying thing is, if you conjure three ridiculous words out of thin air and present them to what3words, the system will actually give you a postal address.  I suppose they just find the closest fit.  I hope to high heaven the Royal Mail don’t decide to take on what3words.  The scope for its abuse would be limitless.  A new breed of troll might be tempted to cast toxic messages at random to innocent and unsuspecting victims.  I always remember thinking I might drop a line to Sir Garscube and Lady Crichton-Delaney Brocklehurst at their home in Addis Ababa.  After all, if the address were carefully reproduced on the envelope, the appropriate stamp appended, and the stamp duly franked, the letter would be sure to reach its destination.  Lady Brocklehurst would glance at the letter with a flutter of apprehension.  “Garscube, there’s a letter for you from home.  I don’t recognise the hand writing.”  Sir Garscube had been a civil servant, in Intelligence.  He had been too close to the opposition and had had to leave in a hurry.  Is it possible after all these years, thought Lady Brocklehurst, that they had tracked them down?