jamescalumcampbell

Cobra, by James Calum Campbell (Impress, 2021)

What is the central premise in Cobra?

An international criminal organisation hijacks a British nuclear submarine, part of the Continuous At-Sea Deterrent (CASD), and extorts money from Her Majesty’s Government, under the threat of dropping a 200 kiloton hydrogen bomb on London.

Pretty grim stuff, then.

Yes and no.  It’s a “nuclear farce”.

You’re playing it for laughs?

Again, yes and no.  There exists an H-bomb literature that spills over into film.  In the film Failsafe, an American nuclear-armed bomber is despatched to Moscow as a result of a computer glitch.  The US president on that occasion was played by Henry Fonda, and the subject matter is deadly serious.  In Dr Strangelove, another US bomber is similarly despatched, this time on the orders of a rogue general who has gone mad.  The US president this time was played by Peter Sellers, who also played most of the other principal parts.  Sellers certainly played it for laughs, but perhaps the farcical elements make the impact of the film even more startling and sobering.  In Ian Fleming’s Thunderball, SPECTRE steals two hydrogen bombs and holds the western world to ransom.  You might say that that is also deadly serious, but there are strong elements of farce in Thunderball, not least in the duel that takes place at a Health Farm between two very tough men weakened by a diet of carrot juice, and weaponising the facility’s therapeutic equipment.  Thunderball started out as a screenplay collaboration between Ian Fleming and Kevin McClory, which was shelved.  When Fleming eventually published his novel, McClory successfully sued him in court because his contribution had not been recognised.  I guess that’s fair enough, but I can quite see why Fleming was so galled by the experience. Everything that is wonderful about Thunderball is pure Fleming. 

So what is different about Cobra?

In two words, Faslane, and Coulport.  Faslane is the naval base on the Clyde that is home to the UK’s CASD, and nearby Coulport is the repository for Trident’s nuclear armoury.  They happen to be on my doorstep.  Politically, in Scotland, the CASD is a highly contentious issue.  There is great tension between the government at Westminster, and the Scottish government at Holyrood.  Westminster wants to enhance and upgrade Trident, and increase the cap on the nuclear warhead stockpile by 40%, while Holyrood wants to scrap the whole thing.  That struck me as a scenario ripe for exploration.

So you studied Failsafe, Dr Strangelove, and Thunderball?

Not really.  I studied The Silent Deep, the Royal Navy Submarine Service since 1945, by Peter Hennessy & James Jinks (Allen Lane 2015).  That gave me insight into the Perisher Course that is a rite of passage for submariners, and, crucially, the “letter of last resort”, the Prime Minister’s instruction to the submariners in the event that the UK is incapacitated by a nuclear attack.  It occurred to me that in this day and age, dominated by managerial pseudoscience and a slavish devotion to Information Technology, a “glitch” of the sort dramatized in Cobra is all too likely to happen. 

Without risking a plot spoiler, can you say something about the structure of Cobra?

Certainly!  All of the odd numbered chapters take place in Cabinet Office Briefing Room A, and all of the even numbered chapters take place “in the field”.

Cobra has sent an agent into the field?

Not exactly.  He is a maverick, skiing off-piste.  His name is Crude.  Brent Crude.  I wanted to construct two narratives running in tandem, and apparently running independently of one another, except when, on perhaps two occasions, their paths cross.  The odd-numbered chapters consist of static talking heads, while the even-numbered chapters are faux-thriller.           

Brent Crude, Sugar Futures, Parsley Sage, Adverse Camber… Why did you give the principal characters such absurd names? 

I believe you might find that as you read on, you will stop noticing how absurd the names are.  But I wanted to emphasise the farcical nature of the world I was depicting because it seems to me the nature of our current political discourse is often deeply farcical.  There exists a tension between the pursuit of a political career and the responsibility to follow the dictates of your conscience.  What happens if your conscience tells you not to follow the dictates of the whip?  Well, you could resign.  The trouble is, you might have a wife, or a husband, and family, mouths to feed, school fees to pay and so on.  The result of this tension is that we hear a government minister on Any Questions or Question Time expounding a load of humbug which he, or she, and everybody else, knows to be essentially meaningless.  This is a very rich minefield for devotees of the absurd.  In fact, as Cobra progresses, the scenarios become more and more ridiculous until, in the end, Cobra disintegrates into a kind of incoherent word salad.    

What’s the worst of Cobra and what’s the best?

I have to apologise to you that the leader of Her Majesty’s opposition is so potty-mouthed.  I don’t much care for what the BBC call “strong” language, but which is actually “bad” language.  But I couldn’t think of another way of depicting the way people in public life, particularly women, are subjected to vile taunts. 

And best?  Well, I tried to orchestrate a crescendo of absurdity throughout the book.  So I particularly like Chapter 34, the last chapter.  Then there’s a postlude.  You might well consider that I’d gone over the top by then, and lost the plot.  You should have seen it before it got edited.                                                                          

Stop me if I’ve said this before…

The village shopkeeper, font of all human knowledge, asked me when my latest tome was coming out.

“Cobra?  It was released as an E-book on May 4^th…”

“Ah.  Star Wars Day.”

“Star Wars?”

“May the fourth be with you.”

Well, it was new to me.

“…and the real thing, the Gutenberg version, comes out today.”

In fact, I’m waiting impatiently for twenty complimentary copies to arrive by courier.  Staring at a Kindle is all very well, but I need to caress my volumes.  Then I need to bite the bullet and do some marketing, which is something I’m not very good at.  It feels meretricious to walk into my local independent bookshop brandishing my tome, saying, “I am a local writer.  Please put lots of copies of this on your shelves, and organise a book signing event.”  But I’m going to brazen it out.  Some people think that self-effacement is more attractive than self-advertisement, but it’s not; it’s just easier. 

It’s a good week for publication.  In Cobra, a fiendish international criminal organisation hijacks a Trident submarine and extorts vast sums of money from the UK exchequer under threat of the annihilation of London.  Though it may not sound like it, Cobra is progressively a more and more absurd nuclear farce.  It’s topical, because the Holyrood election has just taken place.  Putting the question of political affiliations to one side for a moment, I was relieved that the complexion of the new parliament remains essentially unchanged, because that fits in well with my narrative.  And of course Trident, its proposed upgrade and expansion, remains a political hot potato.  I wonder if the subject will be raised if Mr Johnson succeeds in convening a “summit” (good Churchillian word) with the Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Ireland First Ministers.  Covid will ostensibly be top of the agenda, but I surmise the real agenda will be the hidden one, dominated by constitutional issues.  If Trident gets a look-in at all, it will be in “Any Other Competent Business”.  But it will be the elephant in the room.  You could imagine men and women of kind heart, good will, and good faith (even politicians) knocking their heads together and coming up with some compromise with respect to the complex interrelationships of the four nations, Europe, and the world.  But with Trident there is no conceivable compromise.  You either have it, or you don’t.  Mass destruction, like falling in love, getting pregnant, or dropping dead, is an all-or-nothing phenomenon.  You can’t inflict upon somebody a touch of annihilation.  Can I convince my local bookseller that this is a fitting subject for ribaldry?

Meanwhile, in England – not in Wales – the Labour Party has taken a drubbing.  It seems that political loyalties are no longer based on working class versus middle class, but rather on Brexit versus Remain.  The agony continues to reverberate.  Brexit is like phantom limb pain.  It occurs to me that all of these moderate Tory Remainers who were shunned and evicted from the corridors of power after the 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union, might well now look at the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, and wish that that particular result had gone the other way.  If the EU, despite the pre-vote grandstanding, had welcomed an independent Scotland (as is the current mood music), rUK – no longer Team GB – might have been less inclined to set sail alone upon the high seas, Scotland would have kept Sterling as her currency, and there would have been no hard borders at Gretna, or in the middle of the Irish Sea.  I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the old-style Tory grandees would have preferred such an arrangement to the current, highly uncertain situation.  But who can tell?  The “retrospectoscope” is a notoriously unreliable instrument.               

Meanwhile my Cobra complimentary copies are quietly haemorrhaging away in the direction of friends and loved ones.  A phone call from the Isle of Skye last night, and a signed copy pledged.  Another call from New Zealand (Covid-free, God bless them), another signed copy.  Copies also pledged to Glasgow and Aberdeen.  I must take care to save a copy for that mighty organ, The Herald.         

But where the devil are my copies?  Has the express courier suffered a puncture on the Shap?  Mr Postman, look and see, if there’s a letter in your bag for me…

Die Post bringt keinen Brief für dich.

O well.  They also serve who only stand and wait.                 

Monday April 26^th

With the relaxation in Scotland of Covid restrictions, I had a brisk walk with friends and revisited my local erratic, Samson’s Stone, and the adjacent Iron Age fort.  Thence we repaired to my local hostelry, The Lion & Unicorn (established 1635), for luncheon.  Hurrah!  Carrot and coriander soup, lasagne, and ice cream.  Delicious. 

Tuesday 

I had sent last week’s blog, Horizon, to the letters page of The Herald, and they kindly published me, verbatim and unedited, under the banner headline, “A blind obedience to IT is stifling the human interactions that really matter”.  I braced myself for ripostes and accusations that I was a Luddite.  Actually, I’m beginning to think the Luddites may have had a point.  They smashed the looms, but at least they didn’t damage the planet.  We on the other hand are turning the landscape into a gigantic landfill site full of the detritus of our dark satanic mills.  Maybe the Luddites were on the right side of history after all.  As C. P. Snow said of the scientists, “the future is in their bones”.  Dr Leavis thought that was a frightful cliché.      

Wednesday

9.56 am.  Oxford Astra Zeneca mark 2.  Went like clockwork.  In and out of the health centre under two minutes.  Last time I felt like death warmed up for about five days.  See how it goes.  Meanwhile I perused The Herald letters page for hostile rejoinders.  In fact, there were two letters of support, so I had no need to defend myself.  The Prime Minister, on the other hand, came under attack from Sir Keir Starmer; he seemed reluctant to tell us who paid for the wallpaper up front, and was affronted at being repeatedly asked.  Mr Blackford, flirting dangerously with unparliamentary language, asked Mr Johnson if he was a liar.  It occurred to me that that is the sort of question that Bertrand Russell might have spent a decade trying to get to the bottom of.  After all, if Mr Johnson had answered in the affirmative, and therefore was lying, what could that possibly mean?  You see the difficulty.  I think I would strongly advise any budding philosopher not to pursue such a line of inquiry. Let it go.  Don’t enter that dark labyrinth. 

Thursday

No vaccination side effects, yet.  To Perth, to stroll by the beautiful silvery Tay.  I live in a Stirlingshire village sometimes dubbed “the middle of everywhere” and it’s perfectly true.  Glasgow, Edinburgh, Perth, and Dundee are all less than an hour away.  I walk round their airts and pairts, like Edgar Allan Poe’s The Man of the Crowd, simulating a sense of belonging.     

Friday

To Edinburgh, in glorious spring sunshine.  I parked by Fettes College off Ferry Road, the closest you can get to the city centre without paying exorbitant parking fees.  From there I walked through the New Town up to Princes Street Gardens, the Mound, then down through Canongate to Holyrood, pausing for refreshment in the Palace Café.  Then I walked round Arthur’s Seat.  What a beautiful city.  I am a Glaswegian who lived here for a decade, at the end of which time I was just beginning to break into Edinburgh Society.  Actually I was treated with the greatest kindness.  Nobody ever suggested to me that I would have had my tea.  To Blackwell’s bookshop.  Resisted the temptation to buy Jan Swafford’s new Mozart biography.  First I will have to create some shelf space.    

Saturday

A visitation from Aberdeen friends.  Back to the L & U.  Carrot and coriander (it’s terribly good), chicken and haggis in a whisky sauce, and a flat white coffee.  Then we had a walk round the local grimpen quag, Flanders Moss.  Fine views of the highland boundary fault line.  Got drookit, but ’twas good for the soul.

Sunday

International Dawn Chorus Day.  Another visitation, another lunch, a walk across the battlefield at Bannockburn, and a piano recital.  Grieg, in nostalgic mood.  Later, the only person in the country not to watch Line of Duty, I instead watched the final of BBC Young musician of the Year. A horn player, a percussionist, and an oboist.  They were magnificent, but I was unmoved.  Competition kills music.  The percussionist won.

Monday May 3^rd.   

My latest tome, Cobra, is being published tomorrow as an E-Book, and tomorrow week, as a real book, in print, on real paper.  Can’t wait – not so much for the electronic version as for the real thing.  I’m delighted with the cover design, courtesy of Cherie Chapman, and I’d thought to post it on this site but dear me, I can’t figure out how to do it.  I watched an on-line training video, and then tried to emulate the suggested steps, but to no avail.  Then I made my own vain attempts by trial and error, always fearful that, like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, I would get out of my depth and then completely lose control while the cyber systems ran wild.  Before I knew it, I would have posted a hundred and fifty million images of dubious provenance, irreversibly and in perpetuity, and I would forever be dubbed a troll, or a purveyor of bawdry, and a thoroughly filthy fellow.  So, recognising the onset of symptoms of ennui and despondency, I packed it in.  I have to admit it.  I’m a Luddite.                  

Two things strike me about the most widespread miscarriage of justice ever in the UK (“Calls for an inquiry into scandal that wrongly convicted PO staff”, The Herald, 24/4/21).  The first is its resemblance to last year’s exams fiasco when students’ futures were threatened with destruction by a computer algorithm.  Now, hundreds of postmasters’ lives have been ruined by another computer system, Horizon.  The common factor is a blind belief in the infallibility of digital technology. 

The second thing is the strangeness of a remark of the Court of Appeal, that the Post Office’s prosecution of the Horizon cases was “an affront to the conscience of the court”.  Affront?  An affront, according to Chambers, is an insult, an indignity.  Well, it was certainly an affront to the accused, some of whom went to prison, and one of whom committed suicide, but an affront to the court?  Why didn’t the Magistrates’ Courts and the Crown Courts just throw these prosecutions out?  It was because they, like the Post Office, believed Horizon.  If an inquiry finds against individuals in the Post Office, should it not also find against the courts?  I suspect any inquiry will come up with a fantastic number of recommendations, and then find a scapegoat.         

But what it will miss is the underlying pathology, which is this omnipresent and blind obedience to the graven image of Information Technology.  At heart, there is really only one lesson to be learned: that there is no such thing as “Artificial Intelligence”.  Smart phones are not smart; they are as thick as two short planks.  There is a notion, explored in the Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game, that if you can’t tell the difference between the intelligence of a machine and that of a human being, then there is no difference.  It’s based on the assumption, as explored by Ian McEwan in his novel Machines Like Me, that computing devices can resemble human beings.  In reality, the game works in the opposite direction.  The twenty first century is seeing a concerted effort, driven by the multinational conglomerates, to turn human beings into machines.  Of course the private schools invest heavily in IT, because they always follow the money.  They turn out formulaic individuals.  Hence we ensure that we are led by machines.  This is why programmes like Any Questions and Question Time have become so desperately bad.   

Computers have a place; you can’t run an MRI scanner without one.  But they should be kept well away from all the human interactions that really matter.  We must protect and preserve our humanity, and eschew the quantification of human souls.

Just after midday a week ago last Friday, I was sitting at home listening to BBC Radio 3 and Donald Macleod’s Composer of the Week, who on this occasion was Igor Stravinsky (1882 – 1971).  I love Stravinsky.  I have a framed picture of him on the wall above my piano.  I’m looking at it right now.  It is a head-and-shoulders charcoal sketch by Richard Butterworth, superimposed on the musical stave of a composer’s manuscript paper and, on closer inspection, it consists in its detail entirely of musical notation.  The portrait represents Stravinsky in his later years.  Oddly, he is wearing two pairs of glasses at once, one pair in situ and the other on his forehead, I suppose a kind of primitive bifocal arrangement, and I imagine him at rehearsal on the conductor’s rostrum, sometimes studying the score and sometimes communicating with the orchestra.  It’s quirky, and I think it would have made the composer, who said his music was for children and animals, and thought of it pictorially as akin to a map of the London Underground, smile.  Back to Radio 3.  This was the last programme of the week, entitled “Late Austerity”, in which Donald Macleod concentrated on Stravinsky’s last years. 

The first piece we heard was a setting of Dylan Thomas’s poem Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, sung on this occasion by the tenor Robert Tear.  Stravinsky and Dylan Thomas had met in 1953, and the composer wanted to collaborate with the poet, who would be his librettist for a new opera.  It was not to be.  Dylan Thomas died that same year, and Stravinsky was left to set this poem, as a requiem.

Halfway through the rendition, the music suddenly stopped, and there was a profound silence.  I thought, “There is a fault; do not adjust your set”.  But then a sombre voice announced the death of His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh.  The next music we heard was the National Anthem.  Normal service was not resumed.  Instead, there was blanket coverage of the passing of the duke, broadcast over every BBC station, including – I checked – Radio Scotland and even BBC Radio nan Gàidheal.  I remember thinking at the time that there was a slight irony in interrupting the Dylan Thomas, and indeed the whole of the rest of the programme.  I’ve just caught up with it on BBC Sounds.  There could hardly have been a more appropriate programme to broadcast on the occasion.  We proceeded to Movements for Piano and Orchestra, the final movement from the ballet Agon, and then a very beautiful anthem for unaccompanied chorus, a setting from T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding of The dove descending breaks the air.  Finally, we heard Canticum sacrum.  It occurs to me that if a BBC controller in command of the switches had had half an ear, he might have interrupted the programme to make a brief announcement, with a promise of further coverage pending, and then a recommendation that listeners return to the Stravinsky, whose music would now acquire an added level of significance. 

Stravinsky died in New York on April 6^th, 1971.  His body was flown to Venice.  There was a service in Santi Giovanni e Paolo on April 15^th, 1971.  Then the coffin was transported by gondola to the Isle of the Dead, San Michele.  I think his funeral service must have been in its way every bit as impressive as the duke’s, in the Chapel of St George’s at Windsor.  Oddly enough, I also have a picture of the Duke of Edinburgh, on my mantelpiece.  From Igor’s position above the piano, I now turn to my right and there is the duke, in the then City of Glasgow Police Headquarters in St Andrew’s Square, talking to my father.  The duke is examining a file in a buff folder.  On his left, my father, very smart in his Chief Superintendent’s uniform, a short ceremonial stick under his left arm, gloves in his left hand, is explaining something to him, while the Lord Provost, with his heavy ceremonial chain of office, is peering inquisitively at the file over my dad’s shoulder.  A clock on the wall says it is 10.40 (am – daylight coming through the window), and a calendar says it is the 22^nd, but I can’t make out the month or the year.  I’d guess it would be late sixties or early seventies.  We are in an office belonging to another era, with books and filing cabinets and nothing remotely digital.  A young police constable and a secretary are getting on with their work.  The press, with cameras, are at the back.  Even they look very smart.       

I remember my father was rather impressed by the duke.  He said he was well briefed, interested in everything, and he asked very astute questions.

I watched the duke’s funeral on television.  It is the fourth funeral I have attended remotely during this past year.  The slow procession of the funeral party, the sombre military band, the intermittent gun salvo, and the tolling of a bell.  Awe inspiring.

Not everybody’s cup of tea, of course.  But I confess I’m rather drawn to a bit of ceremony,    whether it surround a gondola passing under the Ponte del Cavallo, a water-hearse in the Rio dei Mendicanti, or a modified Land Rover within the precincts of Windsor Castle. 

I wonder why Stravinsky chose Venice as his resting place.  Perhaps it was because he believed something miraculous occurred to him there.  I think it was in the 1920s.  He had a piano recital to give, but he was disabled by an infected finger.  He prayed for a cure, went on stage, sat down at the piano, and removed the surgical dressing.  Lo and behold, his finger had healed.

Superstitious nonsense, I hear you say.  Smoke and mirrors, like all the regal pomp and circumstance of the past week, and the OTT blanket coverage of the BBC.  That’s okay.  You can switch off.  There’s always Classic FM.                       

Now that the Scottish Government has softened and attenuated the “Stay home” advice to “Stay local”, I printed out a map of my local authority area, Stirling, to delineate the limits of my new-found freedom.  I am very fortunate.  I live at the heart of an area roughly bounded by Crianlarich and Tyndrum in the north west, Killin in the north east, Stirling herself in the south east, and Strathblane in the south west.  This area contains a substantial portion of the National Park of Loch Lomond and the Trossachs.  It is an area of great natural beauty.  The Highland boundary fault line cuts a swathe through its middle, a series of mountain tops on higher ground stretching north east from Ben Lomond, Scotland’s most southerly Munro in the west, through the peaks of Stuc a’Chroin and Ben Vorlich, and onwards to Stonehaven just south of Aberdeen.  

So where to go?  I decided to take a drive to Inversnaid, on the east side of Loch Lomond.  Now this is a route I have frequently travelled, because when I was working as a doctor in General Practice, I frequently passed this way, to make a house call somewhere along the route, or, not infrequently, to go to the end of the road and visit a patient at Inversnaid Hotel.  A home visit to Inversnaid was from our practice a round trip of thirty two miles mostly on a winding, hilly, and frankly dangerous single track road, quite unsuitable for the touring coaches trying to squeeze past one another at the occasional passing place.  It would take two hours out of my day, lovely if I had the time, but not so welcome if I was busy.  A compensation was that the hotel would offer me sustenance on the house when I got there.  But there was seldom time, and I was usually preoccupied with the patients waiting for me to get back.

So it was nice to make this journey without the pressure of a professional commitment.  To think that, for twelve years, this stunning landscape was my office!  The Lake of Menteith, the only lake in Scotland (on whose shores, if I remember my Scott, a murderous act of brutality was committed under the auspices of Mrs Robin Roy MacGregor), Loch Ard, Loch Chon, and Loch Arklet.  This route cuts through the wooded area of Queen Elizabeth Forest Park, but between Loch Chon and Loch Arklet the landscape becomes bleaker, wilder, and more savage.  This is the landscape that so attracted Queen Victoria when she made her trip to nearby Stronachlacher on Loch Katrine, another port of call for the doctor on his rounds.  Close to Stronachlacher there is a T junction.  I turned left and headed along the north bank of loch Arklet, and finally down a steep slope to the east bank of Loch Lomond, and Inversnaid. 

With the pandemic, the hotel is currently closed.  The pier on the loch was deserted.  I took a brief walk south down the West Highland Way in the direction of Rowardennan, passing the waterfall that so impressed Gerard Manley Hopkins.

This darksome burn, horseback brown,

His rollrock highroad roaring down…

Some hikers with American accents asked me for directions.  I didn’t meet anybody else. 

Then I took a turn down to Stronachlacher and the pier on Loch Katrine, deserted.  The tea room was closed.  Fortunately I’d brought a flask of coffee.  The views down the loch were stunning.

It was good to be off duty, but I couldn’t forget all the memories of past visits.  I have a poor memory for names (doctors call it “nominal aphasia”) but all through my journey I found myself passing houses I’d once entered, and identifying them by the pathology within – acute appendicitis, myocardial infarction, respiratory failure, terminal metastatic disease…  The visit I remember best of all was one I made on the last night I ever spent on call.  It was something of a sting in the tail.  I got the call at 2 am and of course it was to Inversnaid Hotel, the furthest reaches of our bailiwick.  I drove 25 miles taking the greatest care not to drive off a cliff into the loch.  The patient was suffering from an acute asthmatic attack and he was quite ill.  I gave him oxygen, nebulised salbutamol, and intravenous hydrocortisone.  Then I reached for the phone to summon an ambulance, but the patient refused point blank to go to hospital, saying he preferred to take his chances.  So what could I do?  I stayed with him for a couple of hours and gave him two more nebulisers.  Then at dawn, I had some breakfast courtesy of the hotel.  Then back outside, the cold air to wake me up, once more in the company of Hopkins.

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and of wildness?  Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

I made a final check on my patient.  Reassured by now that he was going to survive, I said goodbye, and drove back east along the loch sides, to go to work.                                           

“Dad?”

  “Mm?” 

  “Now that I’m in Secondary School, I think I should wear longs.”

  Silence. 

  “Dad?”

  “Lad?”

  “I think I should change from shorts to longs.”

  He smiled briefly, dismissively.  “Presently.”

  I persisted.  “How presently?”

  He folded his newspaper.  “When you begin to show signs of becoming a man.”

  “What signs?”

  “You will recognise them soon enough.  Don’t be in too much of a hurry to get out of shorts.  You will regret it in later life.  These lads from Marr College who trounced you at rugby last Saturday, they were all in shorts.”

  It was perfectly true.  They weren’t allowed to go into longs until fourth year.  They appeared off the bus in their shorts and we mocked and jeered and they said nothing and proceeded to beat us 96 – 0.

  My father mused, “I wore shorts every day for a year when I was stationed in Accra.”

  “It was 100 degrees in the shade!” 

  But I could see I was getting nowhere.   

  It only takes seven minutes to walk from Broomhill to Hyndland.  Marlborough Avenue, Churchill Drive (the Blenheimesque nomenclature apposite on the morn of a conflict), over the railway and into the dazzling russet tenement canyons of red sandstone.  Taxi, the school bully, a paranoiac psychopath, was lurking at the school entrance.

  “You lookin’ at me, Jim?”

  “Nope.”

  “Aye you were.”

  “Really I wasn’t.”

  “You was lookin’ at me.”  He took out his chib, a door hinge, and made a few mystic passes. 

  “I can assure you…”

  Behind me, on Airlie Street, I thought I heard a cock crow.  I had a notion one day I would have to confront Taxi, and I dreaded it.  I was yet to realise that the only thing in life to dread was one’s own failure to rise to a challenge.  When you stopped being challenged, then you would know that life was done with you, would pass you by unmolested, eating your McCallum in your cloth cap at the Silver Slipper, or the Cosy Neuk. 

  I asked my father what to do about the Taxi problem.

  “I’d punch him on the nose!”

  Yet he was an elder of the Kirk, and Our Lord taught us to turn the other cheek, and to forgive seventy times seven times.  Wasn’t there a contradiction there?

  Dad listened patiently.  He said, “Forgiveness is not the same as passivity.  Were we supposed to sit idly by while the Germans bombed our cities?  You forgive, but first you must survive, and you must take care of your friends and loved ones.  Forgive, but do not forget.”

  The next Saturday morning I was training down at Scotstoun Showgrounds with my friend Iain.  Tall for his age, tanned, lithe, sporty, popular, he could outrun me.  But he was conserving his energy for a cross-country race that afternoon, so we merely jogged round the track.  Afterwards his father picked us up in the car on Danes Drive and we headed along Victoria Park Drive North and he dropped me off on Crow Road.  A white Volkswagen, like the one parked by the zebra crossing on the Abbey Road sleeve.  I remember it, clear as day.  I wished Iain Good Luck in the Race.

  On Monday morning a classmate, Arthur, met me as I walked on to the Old Building playground.

  “You heard about Iain?”

  “No.”

  “He died.”

  It had happened on the race.  He had collapsed.  Nobody knew why.  Something to do with his heart.   I was suffused with grief, and loss, but mostly with fear.  It tolls for thee.  Timor mortis conturbat me.  It was the first time I had been touched by a death.  When I was wee, I was walking down Byres Road with my Auntie Mhairi and we came across the bloodied corpse of a cyclist whose wheel had jammed in the tram rails just before a tram had run him over.  A distraught woman screamed for a blanket to cover the body.  But this event touched me not.  I was cocooned in the absolute warmth and safety of my family’s love.  I knew I was immortal. 

  There’s the difference.  When Iain died, I suddenly understood I had been mistaken.  Until then, I had thought of life as a pageant.  School, university, career, love, marriage, dynasty, friends, community, hobbies, interests, travel…  But hadn’t it been the same for Iain?  Life wasn’t a procession after all.  I might walk under a bus.  Anything could happen!  It wasn’t even in the lap of the gods.  That was the really scary thing.  God didn’t have a clue what was going to happen next.  Not a clue.

  I walked towards the Old Building entrance in a state of high emotion.  Taxi and his snide jeering carping minions were lounging around the steps, cat-calling, hissing, spitting.  I was level with him when the gob of phlegm landed on my sleeve.

  I lashed out.

  It was unpremeditated.  The back of my right hand smacked him square on the nose.  Neither he nor I expected it.  How was he to know that I was bereft, morbidly active, and up for anything?  We fell on the playground’s dusty asphalt like a pair of fighting dogs, a welter of flying limbs, kicking, punching.   I felt no pain.  I would throttle him, impervious to the blows he was raining down on my temples.  The boys around us surrendered themselves to the blood lust of the mob, shimmering like a hideous amoeba as we pitched and rolled.

  “Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!”

  Abruptly the crowd scattered.  We were hauled apart.  It was Eggo (Classics), tall, slim, and aristocratic, looking distastefully down his aquiline nose.   I was gratified to notice that Taxi’s nose was bleeding.  He was marched off in the direction of the New Building and I was taken indoors and reprimanded, but not unkindly, and only in a formal way.  I felt released, carefree.  The purgation of pity and terror.  

  A long time afterwards, a news item, barely a column inch hidden deep within the inner pages of The Herald reported a natural catastrophe somewhere in Africa.  A lake had belched in the night and silently spilled a million tons of carbon dioxide down upon a slumbering village a thousand feet below.  The entire village, men, women, children, domestic animals, and livestock had been asphyxiated.  As I read the report, I had a strange olfactory reminiscence of the playground at Hyndland, of blood, dust, and asphalt, and I realised that Arthur’s announcement to me of Iain’s death had been the moment when I had ceased to believe that God took any active interest in the micromanagement of the planet.  Yet oddly enough I didn’t hold it against Him.  He was wringing His hands in dismay just as much as we were.  I became convinced no deus ex machina would solve my petty problems and preoccupations for me.  Yet paradoxically, was it not propitious that Taxi’s nose should have presented itself, there and then, to be bloodied?  It really was an Amazing Grace.

  Next day, with Dad’s blessing, I turned up at school in a pair of cavalry twills, a donkey jacket, and a peaked John Lennon cap.  My style was nothing if not eclectic.          

In Enid Blyton’s Adventure series, Jack Trent was a bird watcher.  A twitcher.  As a kid, for all that I identified with Jack, ornithology struck me as an odd preoccupation.  I hadn’t the least interest.  Not even in shooting them.  Sometimes my gun-obsessed cousins would take pot shots with an air-gun at sparrows on chimney pots.  But I never got involved.  I had read The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.  The birds fluttered about my head and I never noticed them nor did they, as far as I know, pay much attention to me.  Hitchcock had just made a movie based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier about birds attacking human beings, and while I sensed there was a rich vein of horror to be mined there, I didn’t feel much threatened.  I lacked the avian phobia.  I was indifferent.  So I crawled about the face of the earth and the fowl of the air swanned around above and, like the white man in a town like Alice and the black fella down on the dry Todd river bed, we led disconnected lives in parallel universes.  Descendants of the dinosaurs, they’d been around up there for a lot longer than us.  You couldn’t miss the obvious truth that they were so much better adapted to the environment than we were. They probably looked down their beaks at Homo sapiens, looked down at our absurd trafficking and thought, “Flash in the pan.  Evolutionary cul-de-sac.  Bad tempered Parliaments always doing one another in, and look at the bloody mess they’re making of the planet.  They’ll soon be gone in a great mushroom puff of smoke and good riddance!”

It was odd how little we had to do with birds.  Almost every other species on the planet we exploited in one way or another, hunting them to extinction, polluting and destroying their habitat, eating their flesh and wearing their pelts, making violin  strings out of their guts and piano keys out of their tusks.  We didn’t give much consideration to our fishy cousins.  Look at the crap we poured into the seas.  We had unilaterally declared the oceans to be our rubbish tip.  Out of sight out of mind.

Yet somehow the birds escaped our clutches.  Maybe the explanation was quite simple.  They were out of reach.  And indeed, the ones who had foresworn their birthright, shrivelled their wings and become earthbound, became poultry for Christmas.  The big fat ones for whom flight had become a major hassle, the pheasants and the grouse, were similarly endangered.  It wasn’t my idea of sport, to have a beater frighten a rotund partridge out of the heather, rising laboriously to ten feet with much beating of unexercised wings, only to be blasted at point blank range by a shot gun.  The outcome seemed as inevitable and as cruel as a bullfight.  Worse.  At least the matador ran some personal risk.  But I despised the shooting party.  Wouldn’t it be great if the game birds could form a flight, a squadron, a veritable Luftwaffe and dive-bomb these chinless tweeded twits in their heathery lairs?  But they lacked the gimlet eye, and the vice-like grip of the talon.  Not the Falconidae, and only that power to clutch, of the weasel-coot, merganser, and smew.        

I was never entirely convinced by Blyton’s Kiki, the parrot on Jack Trent’s shoulder with the unbelievably wide vocabulary.  Sure, you could train a dog to do amazing things.  Look at Shadow the Sheepdog.  But a bird?  The human-bird interaction seemed a bit far-fetched.  Sure, homing pigeons were used in espionage.  But weren’t we merely taking advantage of some hard-wired migratory instinct?  Did the carrier pigeon have any clue about the content of that little aluminium canister attached to its hind claw?  I think not.  A dog might creditably be awarded a gong for bravery.  Any St Bernard who finds me on the hill with a bottle of brandy round its neck will get a pat from me!  But giving a Dicken to a pigeon?  Absurd.  As James Thurber said, there is nothing Alas about a pigeon on the grass.  I had an instinct that, when I would soon outgrow Blyton’s Adventure Octology, the first signal of my disillusionment would be a mounting sense of irritation at Kiki’s impersonation of an express train going through a tunnel.  That which first seemed hilarious would become frankly unbearable.  It would be like falling out of love.  The very quirks and foibles that first attracted you would be the self-same tics and mannerisms that finally drove you to distraction.  My attitude would be precisely that of Blyton’s villains.  ”I’ll wring that bird’s neck.”

I put it to my friend George that I didn’t much care for birds.  We were sitting in the Windsor Café on Clarence Drive.  I was gorging myself on an American Cream Soda iced drink and a double nugget.  He, always ahead, was drinking a black coffee and smoking a tipped single.  He was more at home at the corner of Ashton Road and University Avenue, at the Papingo, Coffee and Jazz.  He had put 3d in the juke box and Livin’ Doll: was playing.  George looked at me incredulously.  Then realisation dawned, and an apparent sense of relief.  “Oh!  The feathered variety.”

Birds, chicks.  Maybe girls had avian qualities.  Maybe that was why the slang stuck.  I didn’t like to think of them as being so unobtainable, so above our heads, so despising of us, and so much belonging to a parallel universe, and yet still able to send droppings down upon is. On the whole I didn’t think they were like that.  Maybe the Notre Dame girls.  Their school was only five minutes away.  Go out of the Windsor and up to the top of Clarence and do a left-right on to Prince Albert Road and in few minutes the substantial sandstone building will be on your left.  A lot of the girls walked that route, in their Caramac-brown uniforms.  I would as soon have started a conversation with one of them as address a Martian.  That was part of the tragedy of this most factionalised of cities, rift by more than the Clyde. 

It was a terrible affront to cage a bird.  And we incarcerated the most colourful of them.  Fancy having that phenomenal power within your make-up, the power of flight, and being shut up.  The mysterious thing was that, after a while, the bird in the gilded cage didn’t seem to mind.  You opened the cage door and it never budged from its perch, stayed within coo-wee of its birdie trapeze and a pathetic little bauble round which its life now centred, like a television set.  God help it if you set it free in the wild.  A few street-wise pigeons would get stuck in and all that would be left would be few yellow feathers in the sodden, littered Glasgow gutter.

Some guys incarcerated their birds like that, and they were often the most beautiful ones too.  Cliff was crooning about one of them on the juke box.  Something about confinement in a trunk, to prevent her abduction by some big hunk.  Sure enough some of them, when the cage was opened, stayed put, shrank back, cowed, clipped, and flightless.

But not all.  They sat there demure enough for a while, swinging idly on the trapeze, lulling their keeper into a false sense of security.  He got slack.  Turned his back one day on the open cage door.

And the bird had flown.    

Antonio Vivaldi, a man for all seasons, knew that spring, summer, autumn, and winter are all enchanting in their own way.  But spring is my favourite.  The season of hope.  We have just crossed the vernal equinox, and next week the clocks leap forward.  Another winter survived!  The daffodils are out.  Here in the heart of Scotland, we have had a week of fine weather. 

There is an erratic, a huge boulder, that sits precariously near the top of a hill at Bochastle, west of Callander.  I believe it was deposited there when the ice receded about 10,000 years ago.  An alternative theory is that some giants were having a shot putt competition on nearby Ben Ledi, and this was the winning throw.  Hence the boulder is named Samson’s Stone. 

I occasionally visit.  It is a beautiful round walk from Callander, west via the old railway line, south west via the stone and on to the Iron Age Dunmore Fort, and east again by a forestry track back to Callander.  Communing with Samson’s Stone is a bit like communing with the ancient Picts at my local broch.  There is a sense of timelessness, and for a moment one’s petty cares recede.

I was up there yesterday.  It’s a massive irregular rock, maybe 10 feet tall by 12 feet long by 8 feet wide.  The extraordinary thing is how little of the rock is in contact with the ground.  It’s on a slope, and looks precarious.  It really ought not to be there.  It seems to defy the laws of physics.  You could imagine giving it a push and watching it trundle five hundred feet down the hill, cross the A821 like a bouncing bomb, taking out power lines and frightening the horses, then crossing the Eas Gobhain River to demolish the hamlet at Gartchonzie.  And yet it has sat there, immoveable, for thousands of years.

I descended the south-west side of the hill and then ascended the neighbouring hill to Dunmore Fort.  It is a rough path but some kind soul has waymarked it with a series of canes each bearing a small coloured flag.  Atop this is the remnant of the Iron Age fort.  I’d never noticed the remnants before, until yesterday my fellow hiker pointed out the three tiers of parapets and trenches formed in a perfect semicircle on the west side.  The east side is precipitate and no doubt would have been easier to defend.  I’d never noticed these fortifications before.  I am the world’s most unobservant man.  As Holmes said to Watson, “You see, but you do not observe.” 

There is a wonderful 360 view from here.  North-west, Ben Ledi, south, Ben Gullipen, and between them, beautiful Loch Venachar.  Further west, Achray Forest and the Trossachs.  To the east, Dumyat hill at the west end of the Ochils, and the iconic silhouette of the Wallace Monument.  To the north east, Callander nestling under the crags is in a very favoured position.  I imagine there has been a settlement here ever since Samson’s stone got deposited.  Between Callander and the fort, you can see (if you are observant enough) more ancient remnants, this time of the Roman Fort just to the north of the old railway line.  Maybe the locals atop Dunmore Fort looked down at the Romans and thought, “Now who are these guys?  Maybe we should push that big boulder down on top of them.  It looks pretty shoogly from here.” 

I don’t suppose we’ve changed much over the years, except in our increased capacity for doing harm.  From Dunmore Fort, looking west, you can’t quite see Faslane and Coulport on the Clyde.  But they are there.  They lie just below the horizon.  I gather that the government in Westminster wish to increase the cap on nuclear warheads from 180 to a total of 260.  And the top brass of the military have been touring the television studios to gloom us up about “lethal harms”.  Apparently the possibility of a chemical, biological, or nuclear attack sometime in the next thirty years is very high.

I think if I’d been in Dunmore Fort all these years ago, and we were debating whether to push the erratic down upon the invading colonists, I might have said, “I dunno.  Maybe we should try and get along with these chaps.  Perhaps we could trade.  Their plumbing arrangements seem to be jolly good.”   

COBRA: A Nuclear Farce

Well, my next tome is done and dusted, I think.  I had a teleconference a week ago with my gentle reader at Impress, now under the canopy of Untold Publishing, and it was a great relief to me that he didn’t want to suggest any radical structural revisions.  It was also a great relief to me that Cobra made him laugh out loud.  It is after all supposed to be a farce, if a rather dark one.  The last thing I want to do is to bomb.  As stand-up comics like Bob Monkhouse used to say, “I’ve often died in Glasgow.”  You just never know.  I could be like that guy in Good Morning Vietnam who sits in for Robin Williams’ Adrian Cronauer and is absolutely appalling.  The only thing worse than writing a comic scene that is not funny is writing a sex scene that is supposed to be erotic but is funny.  Isn’t there an annual literary booby prize for just that?  I’m breaking out into a cold sweat.

My editor had some suggestions about expanding a few themes.  But the bulk of the editing came in the form of marginalia, suggestions about a word here and a word there, and clarification sought when something seemed obscure.  I have spent an intense week working my way back through the manuscript.  I’m exhausted!  It was a good week to choose because the weather was foul.  I just got on with it.

I’m not sure that I’m very good at this type of negotiation.  I have to admit that I am not a team player.  But I also have to remind myself that I’m not Beethoven.  Don’t change a note!  Nor am I Beethoven’s contemporary, Sir Walter Scott.  (Incidentally, last year was the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, and this year is that of Sir Walter.  It has come with much less fanfare.  Now Scott did have disagreements with his publisher.  Interestingly, in the new and scholarly Edinburgh edition of the Waverley novels, the editors have gone back to Scott’s original manuscripts and tried faithfully to reproduce them.  I have a notion that Scott’s star will rise again.  He is always contemporary.  And he can be very funny.)

So I don’t want Cobra to turn into a camel, a horse designed by a committee.  But on the other hand I don’t wish to be pig-headed.  So I have done my best to take on board all advice, to evaluate it, and make adjustments accordingly.  The trick is to take an idea, to recast it in one’s own mould, to work it to advantage, and hence to make a virtue of necessity.  And don’t sweat the small stuff.  If my editor has changed a word and said in the margin, “OK?” – largely I’ve replied, “OK.”  Just occasionally, I’ve stuck to my guns. 

And now on this Ides of March the weather has turned fair and I emerge from my purdah, like an alcoholic who, having been on a massive bender, gets sober again and moves about the world with a sense of new discovery and of wonder.    

My publisher has suggested that with a fair wind, Cobra might come out in early May.  This would be fortuitous, because the Holyrood elections are on May 6^th, and this would lend Cobra a certain topicality.  Faslane, and Coulport.  They never go away.  At least, not yet.