jamescalumcampbell

Strangers & Brothers Volume 2, C. P. Snow (Macmillan 1972, Penguin 1984)

The Masters (1937)

The New Men (1939 – 47)

Homecomings (1938 – 51)

The Affair (1953 – 54)

I read these four C. P. Snow novels last week in quick succession.  I found them to be compelling, and the last of them, The Affair, unputdownable.  They are a part of a series of eleven novels concerning the life and times of one Lewis Eliot, born 1905 (the same year as Snow), trained as a lawyer, an academic and fellow of an unnamed Cambridge college, later a civil servant influential in the world of affairs, and the corridors of power.  Eliot is also an author.  These books clearly have a strong autobiographical element, for Snow himself was an academic and an advisor to government.  But he himself trained as a physicist.  He was something of a polymath, then, but he didn’t cast Lewis Eliot as a Renaissance Man.  Eliot is rather ignorant of science.  It is his brother, Martin, who is the scientist. 

The BBC dramatized Strangers & Brothers and I have a vague recollection of seeing snatches of it, the way you pick up on something on the TV as you pass through a room.  Shaughan Seymour played Lewis, and Cherie Lunghi Margaret Eliot. 

These books capture an age, now gone.  I find them in some ways reminiscent of the novels of Nevil Shute, born 1899, who trained at Oxford and became an aeronautical engineer.  Politically, Shute wrote from the right, Snow from the left.  Both are profoundly English, though Shute became disillusioned with the way he saw Great Britain moving after the Second World War, and took himself off to Australia.  For both, science is a constant preoccupation in their fiction.  They would each have instantly recognised the manners and mores of the world they both describe.     

Yet for all these books are of a period, I don’t believe Snow is dated.  He is concerned about politics, and the motivations, the psychological undercurrents, the ambitions, passions, and jealousies of men aspiring to high office.  And it is mostly men who bestride the corridors of power.  Women fulfil a prominent role, but the role is supportive, domestic and subsidiary.  That too is of its time.  But the way Snow delves into the minds of high flying academicians, scientists, politicians and civil servants, I find to be entirely convincing. 

The Masters concerns the canvassing for support for two Cambridge men vying to be the next Master of their college.  The incumbent is terminally ill, but his doctors have withheld this information from their patient.  (That, too, is of its time.  The idea of wheeling and dealing to fill the shoes of a man who does not know he is on the way out strikes us now as being positively macabre.)  The contest is close, the outcome never predictable until it comes about.  This study of internal academic politics is revisited in The Affair, in which another closely contested college matter hangs in the balance until the last page. 

The New Men are the scientists, and their struggle throughout the war is the attempt to build a fission bomb.  The next novel, Homecomings, covers broadly the same period, but is concerned with marriage, family, and childhood illness.  Interestingly, the fictions of The New Men and Homecomings hardly overlap.  These books hardly touch one another.  Is this a literary device, or do we really thus compartmentalise our lives?  I don’t recall reading another dynastic saga, a long chronological account, which separates areas of life off in this way.  Yet that too is of its time, a time when you might strive neither to bring your private life into work, nor to take your work home with you.   

In The Affair, a young research scientist is accused of faking his results, as a result of which he is stripped of his fellowship.  There is a minority opinion that this man has been unjustly treated.  Eliot is approached to champion his cause.  He is at first dismissive, but then, convinced of the man’s innocence, takes the case on.  It’s a bit reminiscent of the Dreyfus affair – one of the characters says as much.  The accused man, and his wife, are not sympathetic characters.  I won’t say whether Eliot manages to get his man off, but I don’t think it is a plot spoiler to say we never really find out if he, or anybody else in the matter, is innocent or guilty.  But, throughout the book, I found myself on tenterhooks to know.

I’ve always enjoyed reading C. P. Snow.  The ability to make you willingly turn the page has to be admired.  Of his non-fiction, I highly recommend Variety of Men (Macmillan, 1967).  Variety indeed – Rutherford, G. H. Hardy, H. G. Wells, Einstein, Lloyd George, Churchill, Robert Frost, Stalin, Dag Hammarskjöld – Snow had met most of them.  Also The Physicists (1981), a celebration of the giants of twentieth century science, which Snow wrote from memory. 

Of course, I must mention The Two Cultures, Snow’s Rede Lecture of 1959, in which he posited that scientists and artists didn’t understand one another and couldn’t communicate with one another.  Famously, the distinguished Cambridge literary critic F. R. Leavis took exception to this and set out to carry out a hatchet job, a demolition, not just of The Two Cultures, but of Snow himself.          

“Snow is, of course, a – no, I can’t say that; he isn’t; Snow thinks of himself as a novelist…  Snow not only hasn’t in him the beginnings of a novelist; he is utterly without a glimmer of what creative literature is, or why it matters.”     

I guess Dr Leavis didn’t care for Strangers & Brothers.  He called The Affair “that feeble exercise”.  But then, Dr Leavis had fairly restrictive ideas about what constituted a novel.  Hard Times apart, he didn’t think much of Dickens as a novelist.  Sometimes I think that the most compelling piece of evidence that Snow was right, that the faculty of science and the faculty of arts don’t impinge on one another, is F. R. Leavis’ Richmond Lecture of 1962, Two Cultures?  The Significance of C. P. Snow.  Could Dr Leavis conceivably have been something of a literary snob?  He would say that he saw through The Affair, but maybe he just didn’t get it.   

Red lips are not so red

  As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.

Greater Love

Wilfred Owen

There is a wonderful passage in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (Bloomsbury 1992) in which a series of Eastern winds are named, in a kind of half-elegiac, half-intoxicating prose poem: the aajej, the africo, the alm, the arifi, the bist roz (which buries villages in Afghanistan), the Ghibli, the haboob, the harmattan, the imbat, the khamsin, the datoo, and a secret desert wind whose name has been erased, and the nafhat, the mazzarifoullousen, the beshabar, the Samiel, the simoom, and the solano.  Herodotus wrote of the simoom, that one nation was so enraged by it, that they declared war on it, and marched an army out to confront the wind in the desert, only to be completely engulfed by a sand storm, and never seen again.   

I remember that when President Bush declared war on terror in 2001, this passage came unbidden to my mind.  The idea of choosing to wage war on “terror” seemed as nebulous as declaring war on a desert wind.  How would you ever know that such a war had come to an end, win or lose?  How indeed would you ever know that you had come to grips with the enemy?

9/11, the destruction of the twin towers in New York, has been, to date, the defining event of this century.  Mr Blair apprehended its overriding importance, if not necessarily its significance.  Remember, “The kaleidoscope has been shaken…”  Everybody remembers what they were doing on 9/11.  Oddly enough, I was flying an aeroplane.  A Cherokee Warrior.  I landed on an airstrip just outside Glasgow and somebody in the Aero Club told me a plane had flown into a high rise block in New York City.  I just assumed it would be a light aircraft like a Cherokee Warrior, gone astray.  Then the other tower was struck and it became evident that something utterly extraordinary was happening.  I went home and saw the horrific pictures on TV.  I have extended family in New York.  One of them left his office block in Manhattan and didn’t stop running until he was over the Brooklyn Bridge.  Later I got a call from his mother to say my American cousins were all safe and well.  The next day at the Aero Club we had a visit from the slightly upmarket gumshoes of the Special Branch, anxious to find out if anybody had joined the club, in order to learn how to steer an aircraft, but not necessarily how to land it.  The following day we were all grounded.

Mr Blair crossed the Pond with extraordinary rapidity, to cement the Special Relationship and to reassure Dubya that we were standing “shoulder to shoulder”.  The President looked bemused.  How do you respond to an atrocity, when its perpetrators all died in its execution?  You go after the masterminds.  You do all in your power to prevent another attack.  You identify the terrorist cells and their training camps.  You posit that such activity must be at least tolerated, if not condoned, if not sponsored, by a hostile state.  Thus you declare war on terror and occupy Afghanistan.   

In 2003, Mr Blair persuaded Parliament to attack Iraq.  He told us that Saddam held weapons of mass destruction and he had the capability of deploying them and attacking us within the space of forty five minutes.  A delegation led by Hans Blix was carrying out a methodical search for Iraq’s putative WMDs but so far had turned up nothing.  Reports of the search were usually accompanied on the BBC news by television pictures of pieces of rusting ordnance lying in the desert.  They resembled the jetsam of decaying munitions I remember encountering quite commonly as a kid on west coast Scottish beaches, remnants, perhaps, of the huge munitions dump in the Irish Sea’s Beaufort Dyke.  My father warned me they might still be live and never to touch them.  The detritus in the deserts of Mesopotamia looked just as decrepit.  I don’t think the British public ever felt seriously under direct threat from Saddam.  Robin Cook, who had been demoted from Foreign Secretary to Leader of the House, was similarly not persuaded.  He could not support the invasion, resigned from the government, and delivered his very eloquent resignation speech from the back benches.  

Saddam’s statue was toppled with great rapidity, and the man himself discovered hiding out in a cellar, and apprehended.  President Bush declared “Mission accomplished!”  But it soon became evident there was no plan as to what to do next.  Iraq dissolved into anarchy and chaos.  The WMD were never found.  A large part of Mr Blair’s memoir, A Journey, is a justification, if not an apologia, of the decision to go to war.

One early morning on BBC Radio 4 a journalist suggested that the case for going to war had been “sexed up”.  All hell broke loose.  Mr Blair’s communications advisor gate-crashed Channel Four News and conducted an angry tirade with the presenter Jon Snow.  A subsequent enquiry found in favour of the government, and various BBC people, including the Director General, had to resign.   

Yet it is irrefutable that, even supposing the government were acting in good faith, the intelligence upon which the invasion went ahead was flawed.  The association of Iraq with 9/11 was very tenuous, but the invasion of Iraq was certainly strategically a part of the war on terror.   

Twenty years on from 9/11, the Taliban have once again, with remarkable rapidity, taken control of Afghanistan.  The sight of helicopters conveying US personnel from the embassy to the airport is reminiscent of the evacuation of Saigon in 1975, but Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said, “This is manifestly not Saigon.  We went into Afghanistan 20 years ago with one mission in mind, and that was to deal with the people who attacked us on 9/11, and that mission has been successful.”  So, once more, “Mission accomplished!”  I wonder if the mothers of the 453 British servicemen who died during the campaign will be convinced. 

At the dawn of this millennium, the Presidency of the United States depended on a hanging chad.  On the recount, Mr Bush took Florida, and the White House.  If it had fallen the other way, I wonder how Mr Gore would have responded to 9/11.  In the history of the world, has a powerful nation-state ever responded to an expression of hate with an expression of love?  No doubt any statesman who suggested we love our enemies would be ridiculed, persecuted, and reviled.  Yet I don’t think Our Lord was half so naïve as he sounds.  He knew perfectly well that it is well-nigh impossible to love your enemies, and he said as much, quite explicitly.  “Greater love hath no man than this, that he should lay down his life for his friends.”  So directing an act of love towards one’s enemy is more an act of pragmatism than of selflessness.  Love drives out hate.  It leaves hate with nowhere to go.                    

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has today published a report stating that global warming, undoubtedly due to human activity, is occurring even faster than anticipated, and its devastating consequences are even now with us.  COP26, scheduled to take place in Glasgow this November, is the last chance for the world to avert a total catastrophe.  Fancy that!  Armageddon turns out to be, of all places, Glasgow.  Glasgow is the last chance saloon for Planet Earth.  Who’d have thought it?  It might be hard, on the day, for the COP26 delegates to conjure the idea of an overheated planet.  Glasgow in November, can be dreich (good Scots word) not to say gruamach (even better Gaelic word).

I was in Glasgow, my home town, for lunch, yesterday.  It’s only a forty five minute drive from my Trossachs fastness on the edge of the Highland Boundary Fault Line.  Where the M80 merges with the M8 I was aware of a huge expanse of cumulonimbus – we call such clouds a “MacGregor” – towering like a gigantic black anvil over the city.  The heavens opened as I drove west along the Clydeside expressway past the Scottish Event Campus (SEC), formerly the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre (SECC), where COP26 will be held.  Even with the wipers going at full pelt, visibility was so poor that I wanted to pull over, but there was no place to stop, so I just had to slow down and brave the storm.  The Audis and BMWs (don’t get me started) hurtled on, lemming-like, into the opaque monsoon.  I thought of the poor people in Greece; they would have loved it.

There are two sides to Glasgow.  There is the down-at-heel, litter-strewn, alcoholic, drug-addicted Glasgow of poverty, hopelessness and despair, the Glasgow of Shuggie Bain, the east end enclaves where male average life expectancy is 54 years.  I can’t help thinking this is the Glasgow depicted in the city’s coat of arms with its associated enigmatic quatrain which, come to think of it, could hardly be more inappropriate in the fight to save the planet.  I quote it at the end of this piece.   

The city’s motto is “Let Glasgow flourish” but the better known strap line is “Glasgow’s miles better”.  It is evident this has the alternative meaning “Glasgow smiles better”, reflecting Glaswegians’ reputation for being warm-hearted and generous of spirit.  But less evident to all save the locals is the true meaning of the tag: “Glasgow’s miles better than Edinburgh”, reflecting Edinburgh’s “You’ll have had your tea” attitude.  Whether these stereotypical characterisations have any evidence base I couldn’t say.         

My school motto (in Glasgow’s west end) was “Spero meliora”.  I hope for better things.  We were trained from the earliest age to look at the world from a position of disadvantage.  If any ambition was to be nurtured, it was the ambition to get out. 

The down-at-heel side of Glasgow is decrepit, untended, and overgrown with weeds.  There is a close association in Glasgow between dilapidation, and fire-raising (no arsonists, note, north of the border, only fire-raisers – just as there are no Scottish burglars, only house-breakers).  An unoccupied sport’s club pavilion of some antiquity in Glasgow’s Victoria Park recently went up in flames, and has now been demolished.  It occupied a position quite close to another decrepit pavilion that has been shut for years, housing the Fossil Grove.  These remarkable eleven Lepidodendron tree stump remnants have been there for 325 million years.  Maybe I shouldn’t tempt fate, but it would not surprise me if the building in which they now shelter went up in a puff of smoke.  Two of the most tragic fires in Glasgow’s history have resulted in the destruction of the St Andrew’s Hall (a discarded cigarette butt after a boxing match in 1962), and of The Mack, Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s striking School of Art (cause unknown).  It took thirty years for the city fathers to replace St Andrew’s Hall.  At the time, they were too busy ripping up the rail tracks and the tram tracks and replacing them with huge motorways and fly-overs to accommodate the great god of the automobile.  From our present vantage point that seems short-sighted.  As for the Mack, nobody knows if the Mack will be restored or replaced.    It was wrecked by fire, not once, but twice, in 2014 and 2018.  Now once is unfortunate; twice is carelessness.    

Yet, on the other hand, Glasgow is a city of tremendous character.  Glasgow can look terrific.  This is why Hollywood chooses to shoot blockbusters here, shutting of St Vincent Street and turning it into downtown Philadelphia.  Glasgow’s west end is very stylish.  Glasgow University campus is stunning.      In so many ways, the Glasgow of today is a far better place than it was when I was a boy.  Indeed the better side to Glasgow is evident in the environs of the SEC.  When I was a youngster, an evening stroll down here by the Clyde would have been tantamount to an act of suicide.  Now, a favourite walk of mine is down by the river, crossing to the north and south banks by the suspension bridge, the Squinty Bridge, the Millennium Bridge, Bell’s Bridge, passing the Hydro, the Armadillo, BBC Scotland, the Science Museum, the Transport Museum, and the Tall Ship.  I would recommend such a stroll to the COP26 delegates, though I don’t expect to see President Biden walking over the Squinty Bridge any time soon.  But you never know.

The SEC is a good conference centre.  Recently the Royal College of General Practitioners has held its annual conference in a three year cycle in Liverpool, Harrogate, and Glasgow.  Whenever the RCGP conference came to Glasgow I was aware that local issues were given some prominence.  Why is Glasgow such an unhealthy place?  Is there an unknown malign “Glasgow factor”?  Yet despite this worthy attention, I was always aware that the RCGP conference was being masterminded by 30 Euston Square.  The RCGP meeting in Glasgow is like the Lloyd George Cabinet of 1921 held in Inverness.  Quirky.  COP26 in Glasgow might be similarly quirky.  It is to be noted that the masterminding of COP26 is primarily a reserved and not a devolved matter.  When the First Minister suggested she have some involvement in Glasgow in November, did not the Prime Minister pass some remark concerning “that bloody wee Jimmy Krankie woman”, and that she would have a role in COP26 “over my f****** dead body”?  One of the more admirable characteristics of our Prime Minister is that occasionally he tells you exactly what he thinks, and hang the consequences.  This can be insightful.   

Once you are cocooned in the bubble of a conference, I don’t suppose it much matters where in the world you are.  I don’t imagine Team GB, inside the Olympic Stadium, were particularly aware they were in Tokyo, and the Japanese authorities went to great lengths to keep the population well away from the games.  I expect COP26 will be similarly cocooned.  (The Olympics, incidentally, have ended on a sombre anniversary which has passed unnoticed by the media.  The atomic bomb was detonated over Nagasaki on August 9^th, 1945.)

You can never predict what will happen at a conference.  I had a ring side seat for the G7 held at Gleneagles in 2005, because I was doing some work for a pre-hospital care educational body headquartered nearby, tutoring ambulance personnel and paramedics.  The great unexpected event coming out of left field on that occasion was not President Nixon falling off his bike, but, of course, the 7/7 attack in London.  Mr Blair had to make a hasty exit and fly home.  So we may plan for Armageddon and draw up the battle lines in Glasgow, only to find that the conflict is taking place elsewhere.  The first rule of engagement is this: be present at the battle.   

Which side of Glasgow will be reflected in any agreement arising from COP26?  An ambitious worldwide accord, and hope, or a breakdown in talks, and despair?  If the former, then “Let Glasgow flourish” can become the motto for the world; if the latter, then that enigmatic quatrain associated with the Glasgow coat of arms can become the world’s epitaph:

 This is the tree that never grew

This is the bird that never flew

This is the fish that never swam

This is the bell that never rang.

There is a recurring story that appears in The Herald with dismal regularity.  It relates to “A & E waiting times” in Scottish hospitals.  If the numbers quoted vary each time this story comes up, the variations are not statistically significant; so the story is always essentially the same.  X% of patients were “not seen” within four hours.  The opposition parties at Holyrood make a tremendous fuss, saying that the statistics demonstrate conclusively that the government is destroying the NHS, and that therefore the Health Minister must “consider his position”.  They don’t really expect the Health Minister to resign, and they are not as aghast at the statistics as they purport to be; their outrage is faux-outrage.  They are merely doing what opposition political parties do – chipping away at the government in an attempt to topple it.  Whether or not they have a better idea as to how the NHS should be run is open to question, and indeed hardly seems to matter.

This issue came up again in The Herald last week and as usual I spluttered into my cornflakes before writing the following letter, which they published the following day:  

Sir,

 I write to beg The Herald to stop referring to the time patients spend in the emergency department (ED) as a “waiting” time, or a time “to be seen” (“A & E targets record third worst week on record”, Herald, July 28).  These expressions are inaccurate, sloppy, and misleading.  The patient’s initial point of contact on entering the emergency department is, or should be, with the triage nurse, and triage, or rapid assessment of a patient’s emergency status is, or should be, immediate.  Most emergency departments then assign a time within which the patient must be seen by the emergency physician.  This might only be a few seconds, but in any case, all true emergency patients will be assessed within “the golden hour”. 

The medical consultation comprises history, examination, investigation, diagnosis, treatment, and disposition.  To describe this as a “waiting” process is quite wrong.  Of course there can be delays to disposition, notably access block to the ward, but this is beyond the control of the ED. 

A patient on the waiting list for a hip replacement might wait, truly wait, for years.  This rather puts the ED “time to disposition” (my preferred terminology) in perspective, and shows up the absurdity of turning ED “performance” into a political football.  It suits opposition politicians to talk about “waiting times” and “time to be seen”.  Annie Wells for the Scottish Conservatives said, “Over a fifth of patients are not seen within the SNP’s target time of four hours”, and Jackie Baillie for Scottish Labour said, “A & E waiting times are spiralling further and further out of control”.  Either they are ill-informed, or sleekit. 

Emergency physicians are not interested in the four hour rule.  Instead, they try to ensure the patients in the department are in a safe environment, and they do their best for the patient in front of them, however long it takes.  Politicians should stop trying to micromanage an environment they don’t necessarily understand.  They would be better to visit the ED staff, not to tell them what to do, but to ask them, “What do you need?”

Yours sincerely…

I was published verbatim, or nearly so.  They took out the word “sloppy”.  That’s fine; at least they kept “sleekit”, an expressive Scots word meaning sly, or cunning. 

Health Ministers come and go.  South of the border, there was Mr (now Baron) Lansley, then there was Mr Hunt, then Mr Hancock, and now Mr Javid.  I heard Mr Lansley speak a couple of times at the annual conference of the Royal College of General Practitioners.  It was all about “GP commissioning” but I was only listening with half an ear, since health is devolved.  The GPs were suspicious of the government of the time and thought they were trying to privatise the NHS by stealth.  Mr Hunt, I recall, got offside with the junior hospital doctors by trying to impose a contract on them, thus driving them to go on strike.  He got offside with the consultants by suggesting hospitals were dangerous places at the weekend.  Mr Hancock definitely got offside with me when he suggested that GP consultations should be, by default, online.  And already, Mr Javid has got offside with the public by telling them, with respect to Covid vaccination, not to “cower”.  Health Ministers, by and large, don’t know a great deal about medicine.  But why should they?  Baron Lansley studied politics, and Mr Javid politics and economics, both at Exeter, Mr Hunt and Mr Hancock both studied PPE at Oxford.  If I were a Health Secretary with a background like that, I don’t think I would wish to tell doctors and nurses how to do their job.  Instead, I hope I would represent them in Cabinet in order to get them a bigger budget, then I would hand it over to the professionals and tell them to get on with it.      

You can’t understand medicine until you practise it.  I started my first medical house job, in wards 29 and 30, Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, forty years ago yesterday.  I’m still trying to figure it out.                                     

Ever since I heard Her Majesty announce to her Lords and Commoners that her Government was intent on “levelling up” society, I have been puzzling over this bizarre utterance.  The Queen is expert (nearly always) at keeping her opinions to herself.  But I couldn’t help feeling that the total lack of expression with which she read this announcement held within itself an encrypted message: if my dearly beloved husband were only here, he would raise his eyes to the ceiling.

“Levelling up” seems to have taken over from “social mobility”.  All the political parties bought into social mobility.  The idea is that society affords everybody an equal opportunity to make use of whatever talents and abilities they possess, no matter how lowly the station from whence they start.  It was not always thus.  James Mason’s last film, The Shooting Party, is a depiction of life in upper class England on the eve of the First World War.  While the toffs are slaughtering pheasants on a weekend shoot, Mason’s character, a landed gent, notices that a young lad, one of the beaters and the son of a gillie, is a very talented artist.  He looks at one of his sketches and says, “You have it to the life!”  He then suggests to the boy’s father that he will pay his son through college so he can further his talent.  The boy’s father says, “No thank you, sir.  I don’t want him to get ideas above his station.”  Mason does not argue the point, albeit with evident regret. 

The Great War changed all that.  But there remains a problem with the idea of social mobility.  If you think it propitious that people should strive to be upwardly mobile, then by implication you endorse the class system.  A miner might wish that his son does not have to go down the pit, and may strive that he have a better life, but he might not wish that the colliery be closed down.

I suspect that the pandemic has altered our collective view of social values.  What are the occupations that really matter?  Who have we not been able to do without?  Farmers, nurses, carers, grave diggers, and refuse collectors.  (This list is not exhaustive.)  We need people to undertake tasks that have heretofore been deemed “lowly”.  Did not Our Lord demonstrate this when he washed the disciples’ feet?  The reason why our politicians have replaced “social mobility” by “levelling up” is that they have belatedly realised that it would be a disaster if all our refuse collectors became hedge fund managers.

Of course “levelling up” has been politicised.  It is really a Tory idea.  We want to level up, they say, while the Labour Party want to level down.  The Labour Party points out that “levelling up” is a scam, because it has no relationship with reality.  The gap between rich and poor is ever wider, families are reliant on food banks, and even people in employment are officially in poverty because they are on ill-paid zero hours contracts.  It is clearly absurd to think that the Tories want to turn a state comprehensive school in the east end of Glasgow into Eton.  Is “levelling up” mere lip-service?  Is it a sop?  If it actually exists, even in embryonic form, you might expect people from “humble” origins to have aspired to positions of power and influence.  I undertook a review of the make-up of the current British Cabinet. 

The Cabinet currently has 23 members, including the Prime Minister.  For the most part they have come from prosperous affluent backgrounds.  The majority were educated in private schools.  Most went to university, a couple to Agricultural College, and one to Sandhurst.  Twelve went to Oxford or Cambridge.  While “up”, they read most commonly the humanities, economics qua PPE (politics, philosophy, and economics) or a similar course, history, and law.  Only two read a science, one physics and one chemistry.  I don’t see too many glass ceilings being broken.  Boris: Eton, Balliol Oxford (Classics); Rishi: Winchester, Lincoln Oxford (PPE), Kwasi: Eton, Trinity Cambridge (Classics and History), Jacob (non-cabinet minister who attends cabinet): Eton, Trinity Oxford (History) and so on. 

As slogans go, I think “social mobility” is more honest than “levelling up”.  The Tories have a profound distaste for the idea of amorphous mediocrity.  On the other hand, British High Society is reasonably open to people who wish to join the club, so long as they are prepared to abide by the club rules.  But, in terms of the dispensation of slices of cake, “levelling up” is in defiance of the laws of thermodynamics.  You can’t conjure wealth out of thin air.  If you really are going to go even some way to redistribute wealth, there’s only one way to level, and that is down.  That fact may be unpalatable, but at least it’s on the level.       

Parked at the supermarket last week for a quick shop (in, oot, nae hingin’ aboot), and on returning to my vehicle, could not help noticing it had suffered a prolapse (I think diagnostically in medical terms).  Something was “hanging down” at the front, off-side.  I thought it might be a foreign body, but alas, it was integral.  I phoned the garage, and struggled to describe the pathological appearance.

“Sounds like the under-tray, sir.  Can you bring it in tomorrow morning?  8.15 all right?”

“Perfect.  Should be a quick fix.  Just a loose screw.”

Ha!

I got there in plenty of time, handed the keys over, and went for a walk.  I always experience a sense of liberation when I relinquish the automobile and become a pedestrian.  The tempo of life necessarily slows down.  I cut a swathe across an industrial estate in the direction of the city centre, noticing the way those of us on foot (I already felt a sense of moral superiority over the motorist) sometimes eschew the pavement and take a more direct route that has forged a path across the grass expanses and through the hedgerows.  The birdsong never ceased.  I enjoyed the sensation of walking the still quiet streets of Stirling waking up.  Commuters paused at newspaper racks and coffee shops.  I nodded and said hello to them, like Crocodile Dundee on New York’s Fifth Avenue.

I left the city centre and walked south west, parallel to the railway line, and into unfamiliar territory.  It occurred to me that if I kept going, rather than turn back, I would sooner or later come to a bridge that would let me cross the railway and thus afford me a round trip.  So it turned out.  There was a rather handsome footbridge, with extensive ramps for cyclists, as well as pedestrian stairways.  I crossed over and found myself in a quiet country lane surrounded by green fields populated by contented cows chewing the cud and apparently enjoying the sunshine.

Still no word from the garage, so I extended my walk through a wooded area in the direction of Bannockburn, coming eventually to Ladywell Park, a very beautiful area of grassland in an extensive hollow on the edge of the town.  Ahead of me was a remarkable structure, a bridge across the burn, carrying the town’s main thoroughfare, a double arch, the lower arch inverted so as to form an apparent wide circle in the centre of the bridge’s superstructure.  It was very eye-catching.  It turned out to be a creation of the great engineer Thomas Telford, erected in 1819.  When I saw it I was reminded of a recent brief report in The Herald, announcing that the footbridge above Callander crossing the Bracklinn Falls, which had been swept away in a violent storm a decade ago, and was replaced by an apparently robust and sturdy structure, has now been deemed unsafe and irreparable, and is to be demolished and once more replaced.  Yet I fancy Mr Telford’s bridge will still arouse admiration a millennium from now. 

At this point the garage phoned me to gloom me up.  The car was up on the ramp.  The under-tray was beyond repair and needed to be replaced.  Moreover, the mechanic had spotted a bust coil spring.  Well, when I stopped to think about it, it all made sense.  I recently hit a pot hole in Glasgow’s Clydeside Express.  It was a real boneshaker.  A warning exclamation mark illuminated on my dashboard.  I suppose that must have accounted for both the tray and the spring.  Actually I confess, I hit that pothole three times.  Now once is unfortunate, twice careless; three times it’s sheer crass stupidity. 

Repair-wise, a substantial three figure sum was mentioned.  Must needs I suppose. 

By now the day was very hot and I hadn’t brought a hat.  I went back through the lovely Balquidderock Wood and into town, popped into Waterstones and, in order to pass the time, bought Andrew Gimson’s book on the US Presidents.  I grabbed a coffee, found a snuggery, and settled down to read.  Often I read history books from back to front, starting with the familiar and receding into the past and to the unfamiliar.  This book I read in contrary motion, darting from front to back to front.  Washington, Trump, Adams, Obama, Jefferson, Dubya… after the fashion of constructing a bridge from each side of a river, hoping to meet up somewhere in the middle.  Grover Cleveland, or thereabouts.    

The garage phoned.  A glitch.  Something unforeseen.  I was dazzled by technicalities.  The graunching stanchion hook failed to meld with the tamping gurney.  Or words to that effect.  Bottom line, work would roll on to the next day.  All well and good, but I had a pressing appointment next morning.  Could I please have a courtesy car?  They were all lent out.  All right, so can I hire a car?  Yes.  I went in.

It occurred to me that, since the defaulting graunching stanchion hook was really their responsibility, the hired car really ought to be afforded courtesy status.  But, having carried out various medico-mechanical procedures myself, which haven’t always gone exactly to plan, I cut them some slack, and hired the car.  Did I have my driver’s licence?  Yes.  Did I have some sort of DVLA attestation of fitness?  No.  That’s okay, we can do it on online.  Did I have corroboration of my address?  No.  But you must surely have something on your phone.  I can assure you, I have nothing on my phone.  At this stage, the assistant looked at me with profound suspicion, and started to speak more slowly, and more loudly, and with a kind of overlay of faux-kindliness, as if I had suddenly been categorised as elderly, infirm, and demented.  She presented the problem to a higher authority.  The higher authority looked at me, and said, “You a Volvo customer?” and gave her the nod.  I said thank you, and drove home in my Renault Clio.  Blue tooth technology.  All sorts of bells and whistles that I couldn’t interpret.  I might have been in the cockpit of an Airbus A380.  Running the gauntlet of the A811, I found the steering to be a little light. 

Anyway… next morning I jumped into the Renault to attend my urgent appointment.  Small problem, I couldn’t find reverse.  All I needed to do was to “push back” (as the aviators say at the terminal gate) to avoid taking out my neighbour’s fence.  I consulted the car manual, to no avail.  Ever since the bells and whistles took over, the paperwork has become less and less helpful.  I actually released the handbrake and attempted to “push back” manually.  But the car was on a slope and I couldn’t do it.  I phoned and cancelled, or at least, ever hopeful, postponed my appointment.  Then I telephoned the garage, hoping not to be answered by the lady who already thought I was an idiot, to explain my problem.  It turned out I needed to elevate an invisible flange lurking under the gearshift’s knob.  Totally counterintuitive, I can assure you, even if, once explained, it was ludicrously simple.  I attended my rescheduled appointment. 

Then, long story short, the garage phoned and my car was ready.  I duly went in.

“How was the Renault?”

“Okay, once I’d figured out how to reverse.”

He laughed.  “Ah, so that was you!”

“Actually I found the steering a bit light.”  I was reminded of Matt Damon’s line in one of these Bourne Identity-Supremacy-Ultimatum-Legacy films, just before he takes, for a hair-raising drive, the Mini of the lovely Franka Potente.  Something like, “I thought the tyres were a bit squelchy.” So I’m glad to have the Volvo back.  At least I know where to find reverse.  Ovlov.

Mr McEnroe, immortalised by a remark accusing a tennis umpire of levity (chalk, after all, flew up), has received some stick for feeling bad for Emma Raducanu, who had to retire from her fourth round match at Wimbledon, with apparent breathing difficulties.  Well, in the days before the conciliation and arbitration of Hawk-Eye, McEnroe probably got most of his line calls right.  He knows a lot about tennis, and no doubt he knows a lot about what is going on in a tennis player’s mind.  But in any case, he’s not a doctor, so he can hardly be held to account for expressing a lay albeit quasi-medical opinion.  He might as easily have expressed sympathy for somebody having an asthma attack as a panic attack.  It is McEnroe’s critics, rather than the man himself, who seem to assume that hyperventilation, rather than bronchoconstriction, betrays a lack of moral fibre.    

But it just shows you; spot diagnosis, even from a ring side seat, is fraught with hazard.  Doctors have got into terrible trouble for making remote spot diagnoses.  They have phoned the police, convinced that the child they saw on telly must have suffered a “non-accidental injury”.  Type 2 Salter-Harris fracture of the distal radius, officer.  Battered child.  Can’t be anything else.  Pathognomonic.  The police, blinded by science, make the arrest.  But it is the doctor who ends up in court. 

“Pathognomonic” is one of these fancy pieces of medical terminology cobbled together from a dead language, in this case, ancient Greek pathognomonikos (from patho(s), condition, affection, + gnomon, gen. gnomonos discerner, indicator, from (gi)gno(skein) to recognise, perceive), thus, specific and characteristic of a particular disease or condition.  If you elicit the clinical sign, the diagnosis is secure.  Full stop.

Personally, I don’t believe in “pathognomonic”.  Life is never that cut and dried. 

Of all clinical presentations, dyspnoea (there we go again: Latin dyspnoea, from Greek dyspnoia – shortness of breath, laboured or difficult breathing) is perhaps the most hazardous, because a misdiagnosis can have dire, even tragic consequences.  Dyspnoea is a symptom rather than a sign.  It is the patient’s subjective sensation of breathlessness.  The clinical signs associated with it might be a rapid rate of breathing, or short, ineffectual respirations from a baseline of hyperinflation, or evidence of hypoxia – the patient is not transferring oxygen from lungs to blood, and turns blue. 

On the other hand, the patient’s dyspnoea might be “functional”.  It has no underlying pathological cause.  The patient is “just hyperventilating”.  Get them to breathe into a brown paper bag.

Next to making remote diagnoses on the television, deployment of the brown paper bag (why does it have to be brown?) is an even more hazardous undertaking.  Before you make a spot diagnosis of anxiety, better exclude life-threatening pathologies.  After all, people experiencing an asthma attack tend to be pretty anxious.  I remember seeing a 12 year old girl in the emergency department who was “just hyperventilating”.  Her irate mother told her to pull herself together.  Then she told me to tell her daughter to pull herself together.  When she realised that I was taking her daughter seriously, she made up her mind to leave the emergency department and take her daughter home.  I had to think of something creative, and quickly.  I negotiated to carry out a single blood test.  I measured the girl’s arterial blood gases.  It turned out she had DKA (diabetic ketoacidosis).  First time presentation.  For the benefit of any docs – bicarbonate of 3, pH of 6.85.  She was desperately trying to blow off carbon dioxide in an effort to make her milieu intérieur less acidic.  She wouldn’t have survived the night.  A little intravenous fluid (well, quite a lot of intravenous fluid) and a little insulin, and she was fine. 

Of course it can work the other way.  One night the ambulance paramedics radioed ahead that they were bringing in a young lady with severe asthma.  A resus team was assembled and as the young lady was wheeled, gasping, into Resus, the team pounced with oxygen, nebulisers, iv drips and steroids.  I happened to be in the room at the time, and I said to the team leader, “She doesn’t have asthma.”  And indeed as it turned out, she was “just hyperventilating”.  So you can’t win.  Moral of the tale: it doesn’t matter how dire your emergency appears to be, there is always time to pause, and take one long, comprehensive look.  The so-called “endofthebedogram”.

The team leader said to me, “How did you know?”  I said, “I don’t know.  But I’ve spent the last decade in this room treating people with asthma.”  It made me reflect.  What are we doctors doing when we say we have “a gut instinct” about something?  I came to the conclusion we are actually practising triage.  We look at the patient and we say, “Airway… breathing… circulation… neurological disability… exposure and environment…” over and over again.  It’s the long, comprehensive look.

On rereading the above, it sounds to me to be nauseatingly self-serving, and I certainly don’t mean it to be.  I always thought of myself as an average doc, a plodder, who tried to make up for a modest endowment of skill by sheer hard work, close attention to detail, and conscientiousness.  But the episode of the hyperventilating girl who did not have asthma was important to me, because it brought home to me the enormous diagnostic power in acute medicine, of sheer experience.

Mr Hancock, before he retired hurt as Health Secretary, wanted all the GPs to do all their work online, like John McEnroe diagnosing Emma Raducanu from the commentary box.  Perhaps if I had seen my two patients on Zoom I’d have given the first a brown paper bag and the second a ton of oxygen, salbutamol and hydrocortisone.   But why would you want to distance yourself from your patient?  As Ian Fleming once remarked, Nothing propinks like propinquity.  But let’s see now whether Mr Javid is minded to follow in Mr Hancock’s footsteps.             

The Orwell Essays, A Selection of Prize-Winning Journalism

Brian Sewell

(Quartet, 2013)

“Waspish, indiscreet, comical and utterly outrageous”.  Unable to resist the lure of the Sunday Express crit on the back cover, I handed my £10.80 to Madame Waterstone (£12 minus 10% for being a member of the Society of Authors, God bless them), took the tome home, and devoured it in an afternoon.  Some books are like this – page-turners, easy to read, compulsive, unputdownable; others are quite the opposite – difficult to grasp, only digestible in small portions that need to be chewed over, easily set aside, and difficult to pick up again.  And that does not necessarily mean that the former are all good and the latter all bad; neither does it mean that the former are all trite and the latter all profound.  It more likely has something to do with a writing style being simpatico to an individual.  You the reader might not agree with what the writer is saying, but in some sense you both speak the same language.

I knew very little about Brian Sewell, who died in 2015, beyond the fact that he was an art critic with a voice so posh that he was parodied on BBC comedy programmes like Dead Ringers.  I could not help reading his essays and hearing them in the cadences of his precisely articulated, received, cut glass pronunciation.  You might say that his deliberately antiquated voice was in itself a representation of his often reactionary views. It was certainly their ideal vehicle.  In an essay entitled Febyuree (whose mispronunciation he profoundly regrets), he bemoans the fact that BBC announcers and newsreaders have the accents of “far provincial slums”.  By “far”, I presume he means far from London.  He talks of “the mean whine of the South-East”, “the ugly, adenoidal thickness of the Liverpudlian”, “the ugly brogues of Birmingham and Bradford.”  Of Radio 4, Ian McMIllan and Simon Armitage are “poor speakers laden with dreary northern tones”.  It is significant, I think, that he makes no reference to the accents of Glasgow, Belfast, or Cardiff.  That is because his outlook is not British, it is profoundly English. 

All of this, of course, goes against the grain of what Mr Sewell denotes as “political correctitude”.  But it’s all small beer compared with some of the issues he takes on.  Perhaps the most “utterly outrageous” of his essays is Goneril, Regan, and Lady Macbeth, an attack on womanhood’s (alleged) attitudes to abortion, animal experimentation by cosmetic companies, and the fur industry, which makes John Knox’s The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women seem a paradigm of feminist enlightenment.  Sewell’s essay first appeared on 18/11/97; I doubt if any newspaper would have printed it now. 

I think it would be fair to say that Brian Sewell delighted to surprise, by going against the populist grain.  He has an apologia pro Enoch Powell; the return of the Elgin Marbles to Athens would be a “cultural disaster”; fox hunting (perhaps rather surprisingly for a man clearly passionately concerned about animal welfare) should be left alone.     

It would be easy to assert that Brian Sewell, both in what he said and in the manner that he said it, was a snob.   Yet this would not be a fair accusation.  The essence of the snob is not that he cherishes an ideal of excellence, but that he cherishes his own membership of a persistently exclusive club.  In Education, he describes his doorstep encounter with an uneducated young street hawker who asks for help to get a job on the newspaper for whom Mr Sewell wrote.  Sewell did not dismiss him.  He said, “Write me a letter telling me everything about yourself…”  To be honest, that’s more than I would have done.  I would have told him to write to the editor.

Mr Sewell is caustic about Mr Blair, who he thought confused mendicants with criminals.  I don’t think he would have thought much of Blair’s “education education education” trope.  I dread to think what he would have made of Her Majesty being compelled, in her most recent speech in the Palace of Westminster, to use the expression “levelling up”.       

I didn’t agree with everything, or even much, that Mr Sewell had to say.  But that did not stop me from relishing the book, the style, the precision of language, the constant surprise of the unexpected.  I was much reminded of Bernard Levin’s journalism, his ability to take something on head-on, his clarity of thought, and his passion. 

But the main attraction in The Orwell Essays lies in their fearlessness.  Mr Sewell was not afraid to express views which now, twenty years on, would probably have had him “cancelled”.  Of course we can read expressions of views that are obnoxious, on social media, any day of the week.  But nowadays the Fourth Estate and the mainstream body politic avoid controversy like the plague.  That is why BBC programmes like Any Questions and Question Time have become so unutterably bland.  The Cancel Culture thrives on Fear.  Everybody keeps their head under the parapet.  We need more people like Brian Sewell to say, with good manners, clarity and distinction, exactly what they think.                                   

“Death and Taxes” was the title of this blog a fortnight ago, when I was bemoaning the difficulties of extracting a certain piece of information from a certain financial institution in New Zealand.  I’m no further forward.  Having registered for internet banking, I found that I was unable to get into the system because I didn’t have a “NetGuard Card”.  I phoned them up.  I answered a string of security questions to satisfy them that I am who I say I am.  And did I want to register for voice recognition so I wouldn’t need to answer the questions next time?  No thank you.  Anyway, they verified that they’ve sent me the card.  That was two weeks ago.  It hasn’t arrived.

New Zealand often finds herself in the vanguard of human progress.  Were not NZ women enfranchised in 1895?  Now, they have held a referendum which has supported the legalisation of assisted dying.  That makes me think we will follow suit.  Last week the MSP Liam McArthur introduced the Assisted Dying (Scotland) Bill to Holyrood.  Two correspondents to The Herald wrote movingly about the “bad deaths” of their loved ones, which they had been compelled to witness, under the headline banner Why I pray Holyrood will back assisted dying bill.   Who would not feel compassion for the suffering of these patients, and the agony of their loved ones?  Death is not the worst thing that can happen to any of us, and I am sure if my life were excruciating, or terrifying, or unremittingly miserable, I would want it to stop.  The Viennese psychiatrist Viktor Frankl tells us otherwise in his book Yes to life in Spite of Everything (Rider, 2020) but he was entitled to hold that view.  I haven’t been to Auschwitz.    

The trouble arises when you try to define in law the conditions under which you might legally assist a patient to commit suicide.  Apparently the Assisted Dying (Scotland) Bill is supported by 86% of the Scottish public, but how many of us have read the Bill?  I searched for it on line and I can’t find it.  You would have thought something this critically important would be easy to track down.  I do however have before me the Assisted Suicide (Scotland) Bill, introduced by the late Margo MacDonald on 13/11/13.  I was present when Ms MacDonald presented its content at an annual conference of the Royal College of General Practitioners, shortly before her own death. 

(Incidentally, I remember during her presentation, an English general practitioner seated on my left whispered to me, “She’s not very bright, is she?”  I think he was basing his assessment not on what Margo MacDonald had to say, but on the manner in which she said it, that is, in the unapologetically rough and heavily industrial accent of the West of Scotland.  I assured him that Ms MacDonald was, on the contrary, very bright.)

Her Bill allowed for anybody of sound mind, over the age of 16, who considers their quality of life to be unacceptable because of an illness that is terminal or life-shortening, to be helped to die.  I have lost count of the number of afternoons I have spent with patients, some of them aged 16, trying to persuade them that life after all was worth the candle.  How much easier it would have been to say, “Now, are you sure you’ve thought this through?”, and then produce the requisite forms.  The trouble is, everybody is terminally ill, and nobody is quite of sound mind.  Who am I to judge somebody else’s quality of life? 

It seems to me that the attempt to define what constitutes a life not worth living is beyond the capacity of the law, not because our law-makers aren’t clever enough, but because no number of legal safeguards can anticipate the vicissitudes of each of our own unique lives.  It’s a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle applied to our quotidian experience; life just isn’t like that.  Paradoxically, the full force of the law might even obliterate the wriggle room in which doctors already move to relieve suffering.  Rather than creating the blunt instrument of a new law, I would simply highlight a change in emphasis, and the necessity not to pursue medical interventions that are futile, by changing the word “need’st” in Arthur Hugh Clough’s famous The Latest Decalogue to “must”.  Hence:

Thou shalt not kill, yet must not strive

Officiously to keep alive.  

Talking of death, I was saddened to read in The Sunday Herald that the Herald columnist Fidelma Cook has passed away.   She had metastatic lung cancer.  She was 71.  At the age of 56 she had moved from Glasgow’s west end to the south of France and in 2006, she began writing a weekly column which appeared every Saturday, about her new life there.  She wrote very vividly about the sights, and sounds, and scents, of La France Profonde.  She could be very critical of the British expat community in France.  She was devastated when Brexit happened, and she frankly despised the current government in Westminster.

When her condition was diagnosed, she did not shy away from charting its progress, and even when she became very ill she continued to send in her weekly column.  I can only remember one week when another journalist had to stand in for her.  She was very admiring of the standard of medical care in France (her GP aside).  In fact, her latest scans had showed no further disease progression, she rallied, and in her most recent columns she was able to turn her attention away from her illness.  Her last column on Saturday, There will always be an England.  Oh, and flags – lots of flags (I say last, but who knows – maybe The Herald has more) was typically feisty.  I will miss her column.                 

If you happen to live in a bijou cottage, as I do, it is imperative that you become as expert in the art of stowage as the captain of a submarine, the more so if you are a bibliophile, as I am, otherwise, like a sufferer of Diogenes Syndrome, you will disappear under a welter of paper.  So you learn to use the space.  If you must store stuff in boxes, then box clever.  But it is not enough to move things around.  That is merely to rearrange the Titanic’s deck chairs.  You have to cast stuff overboard, or at least in the direction of the charity shops.  You must let go.  So periodically I declutter.

I underwent this cathartic experience during the week just gone.  I found myself looking at ancient photographs and letters from people with whom I have long lost touch.  It made me a trifle maudlin; I think the psychiatrists would say I was “dysthymic”.  If the experience was a tad discombobulating, I can’t say it was unpleasant.  On the contrary I was reminded of episodes in my life that were extremely rich and rewarding.  But I hardly knew it at the time.  The thing about looking back to the past is that all the angst you may have experienced there and then is expunged.  It’s all done and dusted so, at least as far as the past is concerned, you are beyond harm.  You just see a record of the good times.  Why didn’t I know how lucky I was?

I am a worrier.  I am Claudio, a young gentleman in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.  In Act 3 Scene 1, Vincentio, the Duke of Vienna counsels him:

Happy thou art not,

For what thou hast not, still thou striv’st to get,

And what thou hast, forget’st…

Thou hast not youth nor age,

But as it were an after dinner’s sleep

Dreaming on both…

So one is a passive observer of one’s own progress through life.  But it seems to me now that the trick of life is to live in the present.  The past is immutable and the future, invisible, has yet no existence.  So live now.  Carpe diem.  Temperamentally, I was never any good at this.  I remember when I was a child I would say to myself, “If only such-and-such were not the case, I would be perfectly happy.”  Such-and-such might be a tiresome chore, classmate, social obligation, or some nameless dread I’ve long since forgotten.  Winston once said that of all the things he worried about, most of them didn’t happen!  True enough.  I have a notion that if some worry of my younger self had been magically spirited away, I would just have found another.  So the worry itself was not the real issue, it was just a kind of “objective correlative” for a state of mind that was fundamentally angst-ridden.  I think on the whole my pals thought I was relentlessly upbeat and irritatingly cheerful, yet it was all a front.  I was at heart a melancholic.  The soundtrack to my life was the second movement of Arthur Honegger’s Second Symphony.  If you listen to it you will doubtless sympathise and say to me, “You poor sod.”

I used to think that if I had to do it all again, I wouldn’t make such a pig’s breakfast of it.  Now I’m not so sure.  I would wake up in the untarnished tenement of my younger manifestation only to find the angst still present.  The Duke again:

Thou art not certain,

For thy complexion shifts to strange effects

After the moon.

Plus ça change.  But one thing I would do differently.  I wish I’d known that I didn’t have to take on the whole world on my own.  I would ask my mentors to teach me life skills.  Of course that could well have backfired.  I don’t suppose my mentors were living in the present any more than I was.  Their whole motive and purpose was to forge our cohort into something utilitarian for the future.  So keep a stiff upper lip, Campbell, and get on with your Latin declensions and your trigonometry.

It has become fashionable to talk about inner turmoil, in terms of “mental health”.  Royals of the younger generation do so, unlike their senior counterparts.  I’m not at all sure that it is always – or even commonly – useful to think that unhappiness is pathological, that you must have a disease because you feel anxious or fretful.  Shakespeare clearly thinks it’s the norm, the human condition.  A generation ago people sought solace in the church, through song, meditation, prayers of intercession, and benediction.  Nowadays, people visit their therapist. 

But it has been good to declutter.  I may still be trudging my way through the slow movement of Honegger 2, yet, just once in that movement – this is so characteristic of Honegger – we experience a moment of the rarest magic.  It is transitory.  Almost immediately, the melancholy returns.  Yet, unmistakably, for that moment, the sun came out.