jamescalumcampbell

“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.                   

On the evening of 22^nd November 1963 we had gone round to my Auntie Mhairi’s house on Marlborough Avenue and it was she who told me that President Kennedy had been shot.  By the time we got home later in the evening he was dead.  So.  Even a child remembers what he was doing that night. I didn’t suffer any personal anguish over the assassination of JFK but I did feel the community sense of deflation and disappointment.  He had been young and glamorous and charismatic.  In 1960 during the run-up to the presidential election a posse had swept round our playground and I remember being cornered and asked, “Who are you voting for?  Nixon or Kennedy?”  As if I were enfranchised.

It was a Catch-22 question that put you in a bind.  Nixon was the wrong answer because he was a weasel, not cool.  But Kennedy was the wrong answer because he was Catholic.  Yet how extraordinary that a US election should excite interest amongst a group of children in an obscure Glasgow playground. 

Over the next few days the television endlessly played and replayed the grainy black and white images of the long black open-top limo passing round the corner of Elm and Houston under the shadow of the Texas school book depository, of the momentary confusion, the look of incomprehension on the faces of the kerbside spectators, the hands clutching at the throat, and the lady in shocking pink (as the news magazines subsequently revealed), usually so poised, now crawling panic-stricken across the back of the limo – was she trying to help the secret serviceman  on board or was she just trying to get the hell out of there?  And later, at Andrews Air Force Base, beside the coffin draped in the stars and stripes, still in her bloodstained pink suit, she looked so lost and dejected.

School over the next few days was muffled in silence.  Everything seemed to come to a halt.  And I thought, “This is odd!”  Meanwhile, across the Pond, the craziness had not ceased, if anything had accelerated and intensified.  Some disaffected ex-marine had apparently fled the scene and tried to lose himself in the Dallas suburbs.  He had shot dead a policeman and tried to take refuge in a movie theatre where he was finally apprehended.  A couple of days later he himself was shot dead in the basement of a police station, and in full view of the TV cameras, by the owner of a nightclub who, for motive, professed “I did it for Jackie!”  Watching that footage, I got the impression that the policemen escorting Oswald knew he was a dead man walking.  Watch it for yourself and see if I am not right.  Look at that big guy in the white suit and the Stetson.  His frightened eyes are blinkered.  He knows something is about to happen.  He knows.  But I never warmed to the conspiracy theory.  I just thought America was bedlam, a madhouse, out of control. 

November 22^nd wasn’t exactly a slow news day.  Aldous Huxley died.  And C. S. Lewis.  Oh!  And the fab four released their second LP.  So for Christmas, I got With the Beatles.  Mum gave me the money to get it.  I bought it in Cuthbertson’s and hurried in the rain back along Sauchiehall Street to catch a bus at the Charing Cross end of Woodlands Road, all the time cherishing the record in the folds of my duffel coat, in case the rain turned the vinyl into a flower pot.  Then a bus emerged from the dark wet night and I prayed, “Let it be a 10 or a 10A” – but it was a 59.  O well.  I’d just have to get off at the top of Clarence Drive and do the school walk home for the millionth time. 

At home I was bitterly disappointed to find they’d sold me a dud.  The Beatles sounded like the Chipmunks.  I didn’t know that LPs played at 33.3 and not 45 rpm.  Once I’d figured it out, it was okay.

“It won’t be long yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah!”

Wonderful.

A box set sat cheek by jowl with the Beatles – Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem in the historic 1963 Decca recording with Pears, Fischer-Dieskau, and Vishnevskaya, the composer conducting.  I’d wanted it principally for the settings of Wilfred Owen.  In the sleeve notes William Plomer wrote a preface and I recognised his name.  He was Ian Fleming’s “gentle reader” at Jonathan Cape.  (The Bond book published in 1963 was OHMSS.  Bond first meets his wife-shortly-to-be when she overtakes him in a sports car with an impossibly glamorous name.  A Lancia Flaminia Zagato Spyder.) 

The Beatles and Benjamin Britten!  I got teased for having eclectic tastes.  Pop-pickers thought Britten was poncy and classicists thought the Beatles were naff.  But then it became rather stylish to admire the Beatles from a classical point of view.  Yehudi Menuhin had a good word for them.  Symphony orchestras took to playing covers of McCartney-Lennon melodies, and I thought, “Now, that’s naff!”  It sounded so prim and straight-backed.  I imagined Peter Pears, with Britten at the piano, singing “It won’t be long yes yes yes yes yes yes!”  It would sound like Schubert.  I wondered what the Beatles would sound like singing “Anthem for Doomed Youth”.  But they would have more sense than to try.  They always had an uncanny knack of sensing what would work.  I had heard that in the Hamburg days when they were starting to throw songs together, McCartney had said to Lennon, “’ay John, John, I’ve joost written this songuh, called ‘Ah saw ‘er standin’ theh…”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.  Goes:

She were joost seventeen,

She were no beauty queen…”

“That’s f****** crap.”

Brian Matthew hosted Thank your Lucky Stars on the telly on Saturday and the Beatles, having sung From Me to You, closed the show with an encore, which was almost unprecedented.  It was Twist and Shout.  My father looked at them, with their hair over their collars, belting it out.  “That’s outrageous.” 

Alan Freeman did the Top 10 on the Light Programme on Sunday afternoons.

From a jack to a king!

From loneliness to a wedding ring

I played an ace and I won a queen

You made me king of your heart.

You could make a terrible mess of that song, live on stage.  Shuffle the deck and get all your suits and face cards mixed up.  It seemed to sit at No 2, like constipation, for a decade.  I had no time for Country & Western.  Jim Reeves singing I love you because let me entirely unmoved. 

And on Sunday night at 11, Brian Alldis did the whole Top 20 on Radio Luxembourg.  208 megacycles.  The Mersey Beat was all pervasive.  Gerry and the Pacemakers and Freddie and the Dreamers.  And The Searchers, singing Needles and Pinsugh!

But still she beginsugh…

I huddled under the bed clothes with my tiny transistor, illicitly, like a member of le maquis in occupied Europe tuning into BBC London.  I’d have to wait until midnight because the Beatles would be at No 1.  Every Monday morning I was utterly knackered.  The songs would be ringing in my ears.

“Hurtn’ meh!  Hurtn’ meh!”          

In the ongoing Salmond-Sturgeon stooshie, Mr Salmond says that Ms Sturgeon misled parliament and broke the ministerial code, and Ms Sturgeon says that Mr Salmond is a conspiracy theorist living in a fantasy world.  A friend of mine said the other day, one of them is lying.   

And I wondered about that.  Can this bourach be understood and interpreted in such a way that conflicting accounts can be reconciled?  The Salmond-Sturgeon débâcle reminds me of Arthur Miller’s 1953 play The Crucible, a dramatization of the Salem witch trials which took place in Massachusetts during 1692 – 93.  A group of young girls are caught dancing naked in the woods and it is assumed they are bewitched.  The girls start accusing various members of the community of being in league with the devil.  It’s a kind of collective hysteria born of nothing at all, that uncovers all sorts of hidden malice, and eventually leads to executions.  It’s an allegory.  Miller was really talking about the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s, and the activities of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities.  Miller himself appeared before the committee in 1956, and was found to be in contempt of Congress because he refused to name the names of individuals he had met at various left-leaning political meetings.       

The current impasse also reminded me of a book I’ve just finished reading – Ray Monk’s Inside the Centre, the Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Jonathan Cape, 2012).  Oppenheimer, the physicist who during the war ran the Manhattan Project leading to the construction of Little Boy and Fat Man, the plutonium and uranium atomic bombs that respectively destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also fell foul of the Committee on Un-American Activities.  He had left-leaning political views and associations with some Communist front organisations, although he was never a member of the Communist Party.  Oppenheimer had enemies, people who had a grudge.  So they suggested to the FBI he was a Soviet spy.  The Feds tapped his phone and followed him for years.  This culminated eventually in a security hearing that started on 12 April 1954 and went on for three and a half weeks.  As with any such inquiry, there was a ton of evidence and an excruciating mass of detail about who said what to whom, and when.

Oppenheimer did suggest to President Truman that it would be a good idea to share knowledge with Soviet Russia with respect to nuclear fission, and subsequently fusion.  He thought that some kind of international oversight of nuclear research might forestall a nuclear arms race.  President Truman said to his aides, get that son-of-a-bitch out of my Oval Office.  Or words to that effect.  The great Danish physicist Niels Bohr had gone to see Churchill with a similar idea, and Churchill had wanted to lock him up.     

When Oppenheimer was in charge of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies he was interviewed by the newsman Ed Murrow (so wonderfully played by David Strathairn in the film Good Night and Good Luck).  You can catch some of the interview on U-tube, where you get a sense of Oppenheimer’s courtliness.  Murrow himself had a run-in with the Committee on Un-American Activities, and perhaps that explains the rapport between the two men that is evident on film; either that, or they got along because they were both chain smokers.

The Feds never managed to nail Oppenheimer, or pin anything on him.  Yet he was a suspect, and that was enough.  His security clearance was withdrawn.    

Nowadays we are not so worried about “reds under the bed”.  (Mind you, having listened to Bill Browder yesterday on Radio 3’s Private Passions, perhaps we should be.  Mr Browder, an American-born British citizen, and onetime hedge fund manager in Moscow, is a fierce critic of Mr Putin, and he was instrumental in forging the Magnitsky Act which has frozen the foreign assets of the oligarchs of several corrupt regimes.  He says that London is the money laundering capital of the world.  Mr Browder likes to keep a high profile because he is sure if he fades into obscurity his enemies will bump him off.  This reminded me of Smersh.  They never forget.  Didn’t Ian Fleming tell us as much?  They always get you in the end.  This is by the by.)  

Anyway, if you wanted to destroy a reputation now, it’s unlikely you would accuse somebody of being a communist.  You might suggest they were a sexual predator.  You might not have to prove it.  Enough already, just to create suspicion.  No smoke without fire.      

In the case of the Right Honourable Alex Salmond, the most crucial fact to bear in mind is that the accused was found not guilty of criminal charges of sexual assault.  It is suggested that persons within the SNP High Command conspired against him.  But why would they wish to do such a thing?  One possible answer is that Mr Salmond found himself in the same situation as Dr Oppenheimer; he was faced with a charge which in the current Zeitgeist is so toxic that, because mud sticks, he was going to be a political liability.  You might surmise that the party chose to distance itself from him, or you might go further and surmise that they hung him out to dry.  If you found yourself in the Kafkaesque situation initially of being charged with misconduct, but denied the right to interview witnesses or collate evidence, might you find it difficult to distinguish between a botch and a conspiracy?  Indeed the distinction would seem to be somewhat academic. 

During the course of an interrogation that lasted half a lifetime, J. Robert Oppenheimer was found on one occasion to have told a lie.  It came back to haunt him.  As the saying goes, Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.  False in one thing, false in everything.  If you are found to lie once, then your entire evidence is no longer credible.  Ms Sturgeon, herself a lawyer, and due to appear before a Parliamentary committee on Wednesday, will be well aware of this Latin tag.      

I’ve recently grown fond of BBC Radio 4’s Sunday morning offering between 8 and 9 am.  If I tune in a little early, I catch the BBC Radio 4 appeal, a weather forecast, tweet of the day (birdsong, not social media trolls) and a quick and usually ribald plug from Paddy O’Connell for Broadcasting House at 9, prior to the news and review of the papers.  This week’s appeal was for a charity called Feedback, which finances the harvesting of fruit and veg which one well-known supermarket chain describes as “wonky”.  Cream cauliflower (as opposed to pristine white cauliflower) for example, is left to rot in the fields because the farmers can’t sell it to the supermarkets.  When I lived in New Zealand I had a friend who grew kiwi fruit.  He could only forward the most unblemished specimens for export.  The Kiwis themselves were happy to eat the wonky stuff, or make kiwi fruit wine, God bless them.  Apparently in the UK we waste millions of tons of crop because it doesn’t look right.  Disgraceful.      

After the news comes morning service, yesterday from Glasgow, and on the first Sunday of Lent, a very thoughtful discourse on temptation, and Jesus’s three encounters with it during his forty days in the wilderness.  Temptation is very subtle.  It only asks you to make a small compromise.  By a strange coincidence, the name of the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer came up, coincidental, because I’m currently reading Ray Monk’s Inside the Centre, the Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Jonathan Cape, 2012).  Oppie (Opje, as the Dutch called him) directed the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project, the construction of the atomic bomb, at Los Alamos in New Mexico during the war.  He was lured by the sweetness of an enormous scientific challenge, theoretical and practical.  After Trinity, the first successful detonation, he famously quoted the Bhagavad Gita.  Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.          

Politicians are very vulnerable to temptation.  The party is tempted by the lure of power, and the individual is tempted by the lure of personal advancement.  It can be a dirty business.

There’s a tremendous stooshie going on in Scottish politics just now.  Actually there are several overlapping stooshies: did the SNP High Command conspire against Alex Salmond?  Is Nicola Sturgeon’s daily Covid briefing a party political broadcast?  Can you select your gender as an act of will, irrespective of your chromosomal endowment?  Is it a crime to express hatred of a minority group in the privacy of your own home?     

People say the SNP is tearing itself apart.  On the other hand, when the SNP were once renowned for self-discipline and unity of purpose, they were accused of turning Scotland into a “one party state”.  I’m suspicious of parties that do not tolerate internal dissent.  It seems to me that the most absurd element of party politics is “the whip”.  I could never have been a politician.  If the chief whip had ordered me to vote against my conscience and produced his lash I would have told him what he could do with it, then cheerfully resigned and given up the Ministerial Mondeo.  I was never a committee man.   

Of course I say that, but what if I had mouths to feed at home?  Lady Campbell would say, “We have to keep the children at private school to give them the best possible start in life.  This precious principle of yours only affects 0.01% of the population.  For God’s sake, take the whip.” 

The logical outcome of abjuring the idea of the whip is to abjure the idea of the party.  That might be a dangerously naïve stance to take.  It’s what totalitarian governments do; they hasten through an Enabling Act – necessary for the national crisis in which we find ourselves – and outlaw every other party save their own.  The trade unions get banned at the same time.  So no.  We mustn’t ban parties.  If you want to get anything done, you need to organise.     

But sometimes I grow weary of the political Big Beast who emerges from Parliament to do a piece to camera in which he espouses some dogmatic party line which he clearly knows is humbug.  And he does it with a straight face.  Radio and television programmes like Any Questions and Question Time are unutterably tedious because faceless party apparatchiks score points off one another and rarely say anything surprising or original.  No wonder the populace loses faith in the political class.  The whole charade casts doubt on the integrity of embarking upon a political career.  Maybe it would be better if we encouraged “ordinary” people like refuse collectors and doctors, shop assistants and teachers, posties and scientists, to take a sabbatical and stand for election.  Just for a single parliament.  Every vote would be a conscience vote, cast without any ambition for a second term.   

Pie in the sky?  Maybe.  Maybe it’s too much to ask that every MP, or MSP, be an independent, but at least we should ask that each one of them be a man or woman (am I being binary?) of independent mind.  We should retain a healthy distrust of factionalism.  It is not merely that we as individuals needs to reach across the aisle; we need to abolish the aisle, and commingle.  When you compromise your principles for the greater good of the party, you lose something of your own unique individuality.  What shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?                      

In these strange and troubled times, I have the great good fortune to live in a rural location and at the heart of a farming community.  I can purchase top quality local produce at my village store.  The farmers tell me that the pandemic has altered their lifestyle not one whit.  I already knew this, because I see them working in the fields every day.  They get up before dawn and milk the cows.  They alter their routine only according to the weather, and how much daylight there is.  Sometimes as I drive home I get stuck behind a slow moving tractor, and I follow on patiently, sending the farmer a telepathic expression of my gratitude that he is putting bread on my table.  I live in the beating heart of Scotland.     

Our refuse collectors are extremely reliable.  Our pick-up day is Saturday.  I have four bins, grey, brown, green, and blue, plus a blue box.  Grey for landfill, brown for garden and food waste, green for paper and cardboard, blue for cans and plastics, and a blue box for glass.  I try to put as little as possible into landfill.  And I worry about the plastics.  How much of it is recycled, how much put into landfill, and how much sent off to some distant land and some dubious mode of disposition?  The idea of sending garbage abroad seems very odd to me.  Should we not be responsible for our own detritus?

I don’t remember there being so much plastic around when I was a kid.  There were brown paper bags for fruit and veg, and grease-proof paper for meat and dairy products.  You could go into a confectioner and order a quarter pound of sweets which would be taken from a large glass container, measured on the scales, and put into a small paper poke.  There was hardly any pre-packaging.  You would ask for a quarter pound of butter, or cheese, and it would be cut from a huge slab, using a wire contraption resembling a garrotte, and then wrapped in paper.  There were no plastic bottles.  Milk came in glass bottles.  A pint would contain about three inches of thick cream at the top.  Bottled water was unheard of.  Now the supermarket shelves are crammed with commodities wrapped in plastic.  The packaging gives you data on the nutritional content and sell-by date of the produce, but does not tell you how to dispose of the wrapping. 

My local general practice is four miles away.  It’s very good.  They asked me to attend last Wednesday, at 11.06, for my first Covid vac.  In the event I got the jag at 11.03.  I was treated with kindness and courtesy and there were no glitches. 

Farmers, refuse collectors, and carers.  One of the thing this pandemic is teaching us, or should be teaching us, is what our priorities are.  Isn’t it extraordinary that the people upon whom we most rely for our very existence are often the people who are the least rewarded?  That should tell us something.

A little under a year ago, I seem to recall that the Prime Minister floated the idea that we avoid any form of societal lockdown and simply “take it on the chin”.  “Herd immunity” by attrition might be the way forward.  It was a callous thing to say and he got a lot of stick for it.  I dare say he was only thinking out loud, after the fashion of President Trump wondering if we should all swallow disinfectant.  I actually followed the presidential advice, though I admit my choice of disinfectant was only the best Islay single malt. 

But what if the world had decided to “take it on the chin”?  Where would we be?  How many would be dead by now?  100,000,000?  How much herd immunity would have been acquired?  Would it have protected us from the Kent variant, the South African variant, etc?  Nobody knows.  It occurred to me, in one of my darker moments, that Mother Nature has grown weary of us and our mission to rape, pillage and despoil her, and to exterminate every other one of her species.  She has decided to bump us off.  Who can blame her?

With this in mind, I did what I usually do when feeling apocalyptic, and reread Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death.  I may have mentioned The Masque in this blog before, yet it is the quintessential story of our time, and therefore it deserves to be read and reread.  While the country is ravaged by the plague that is the Red Death, Prince Prospero, “happy and dauntless and sagacious”, holds a banquet for a thousand friends in his castellated abbey, cut off from the rest of the world and in defiance of the contagion.  There are seven apartments decorated and illuminated, from east to west, in lurid blue, purple, green, orange, white, violet, and, lastly, black.  The light illuminating the last apartment is scarlet.  At its westernmost side there is a clock, dolefully tolling the hour, periodically interrupting the masked revellers (it’s a bad taste fancy-dress party), the buffoons and improvisatori, the orchestra, and the dancing.  It is a doomsday clock.

One guest has dressed in particularly bad taste.  He is first noticed just as the ebony clock in the seventh apartment strikes midnight.  He is a mocked-up victim of the Red Death.  Prince Prospero is outraged and unmasks the guest by having his habiliments removed, only to find the disguise to be “untenanted by any tangible form”.  The Red Death had come like a thief in the night.  “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”

I suppose every time we are confronted by a threat of this magnitude, we are inclined to interpret it in apocalyptic terms, as the Writing on the Wall.  Thou hast been weighed in the balance, and found wanting.  Yet surely the overarching existential question of our time, is how we can preserve and protect the only planet known to harbour life, and its fragile ecosystem of which we are – for the moment – a part. 

Yet some people are champing at the bit to “get back to normal”.  HS2.  Third runway at Heathrow.  New coal mine in Cumbria.

Buffoons and improvisatori. 

Read the following sentence carefully:

Isn’t it time to abandon independence and concentrate much poorer and undermine our ability to improve society in the ways that the of Scotland people really want?

This was the final sentence in a letter which appeared on The Herald’s letter page on February 4^th.  It was written by a Labour Councillor and it concerned a report from the London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance, stating that Scottish Independence would leave Scots £2,800 a year worse off. 

Naturally I wrote to The Herald.

“Clearly, somewhere along the line between Councillor Gallagher’s pen and the printing press, Messrs Cut & Paste have fallen out…”

I wasn’t published.  That’s okay.  Sometimes I get published, sometimes not, and when I write, I cannot second-guess the outcome.  It no longer bothers me.  I am beyond harm.  But I’m still intrigued to know what happened.  Did Councillor Gallagher really write that?  If not, where, and how, did the words gets jumbled?  Did he fail to run a spell check? 

On the other hand, maybe the Councillor was being unusually candid.  Some people believe that the reason why Scottish Labour has been almost obliterated as a political force is that they became complacent in the stability of their once dominant hegemony and were content to keep their constituency in a state of docile subservience.  Sir Sean Connery once said, “Labour is fossilised.”  (Actually, he said, “Labour ish foshilijed.”)  Like it or not, the Councillor was urging the Scots to embrace small-mindedness, poverty of ambition, and fear, in the way a waif or street urchin might cling to a decrepit rag doll for comfort.       

On February 5^th, when I was checking to see that I was not going to appear in print, I did notice there were a couple of letters written in response to Councillor Gallagher.  The contentious issue was whether or not the LSE report was valid.  Nobody mentioned his remarkable sentence.  Nor did The Herald see fit to offer an explanation as to how this bizarre utterance had come about.  What does this tell us?  Presumably it tells us that nobody noticed, or nobody cared, or both.    

This all seems to me to be symptomatic of some worrying trends in modern communication.  Messages are transmitted, and received, in broad brush strokes.  There is no attention to detail.  We are content to get the broad drift, to hear “where people are coming from”.  In politics, once we have identified the camp to which a correspondent belongs, we stop listening, either because we know we are in agreement, or we are in disagreement.  The possibility of a change of mind is hardly considered.  Lip service is paid to “nuance” in argument, but appreciation of nuance requires attention to detail, and that takes effort, in both the exposition and the apprehension of a case, political or otherwise.  Assertion is not enough; it must be backed up by argument. 

But questions and answers in contemporary communication are off-the-peg and not bespoke.  You encounter this phenomenon if you get in touch with a business enterprise or corporation with a specific query.  You are likely to be in communication with an automaton, and if the question you ask, and its answer, is not pre-packaged as a “FAQ”, your question will be ignored.  We are supposed to be “connected” as never before; all these lines of communication – from email to texting to SMS to WhatsApp to Snapchat and a million other platforms I’ve never heard of.  Such trafficking of information.  Yet do these services facilitate a meeting of minds?  Sometimes I feel like a pilot talking to the control tower:

“Golf Echo Charlie Kilo Oscar inbound request re-join instructions.”

“Oh Hi James, gorgeous day going forward.  It’s the gift that keeps on giving.  Please touch base any time.  Best!”  

People talk in clichés.  Lord Falconer described the pandemic as “the gift that keeps on giving” for the legal profession.  Did he mean Covid was a subject of professional interest, or a cash cow?  Or did he just thoughtlessly pull a cliché off the shelf?  Maybe he heard Craig Revel Horwood use it.  But fancy describing a virus that has by now killed 112,000 people in the UK as a “gift”.  (It reminded me of a remark passed by one Jo Moore, on 11/9/01: “A good day to bury bad news.”)  People seem to be content to speak in soundbites virtually devoid of meaning.   Messages on Twitter can be particularly puerile.  Politicians really ought to shut down their Twitter accounts.  Their posts can be full of cant and mawkish sentimentality.  “Truly sorry to hear of the passing of X.  So sad.” 

Talking in cliché is a consequence of restricting yourself solely to dialogue with those of like mind.  If you only converse with those in your own tribe, you don’t need to think of something new to say, because you have no desire to have somebody else see the world in a different light.  You abandon the effort to “reach across the aisle”, and all you ever hear is the reverberation within your own echo chamber.  Then somebody, like Councillor Gallagher, says something quite extraordinary, and nobody notices.        

When the Prime Minister made his sojourn to Scotland last week (former First Minister Henry McLeish called it a “safari”), he inevitably commented on the possibility, or otherwise, of a second Scottish Independence referendum.  Some people think the sole purpose of the visit was to make such comment.  He said that wishing for a second referendum was like not caring what you eat, so long as you eat it with a spoon.

Aside from the spoon remark, Mr Johnson visited troops setting up a vaccination centre in Glasgow’s Castlemilk, and he went to Livingston to visit a pharmaceutical company preparing a new Covid vaccine.  The current First Minister was “not ecstatic” about the PM’s trip.  She might have reiterated the words often seen on billboards during the war: “Is your journey really necessary?”  In Castlemilk, the PM touched elbows with a soldier.  I am puzzled by this social nicety.  You can’t touch elbows and stay two metres apart.

I have been worrying over the spoon simile all week.  What could the PM possibly have meant?  What do the blind table d’hôte, and the choice of cutlery, signify?  Wondering if the analogy were some hackneyed cliché that has heretofore escaped my notice, I consulted the Millennium Edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable.  I looked up “spoon”.  Apparently a spoon is a simpleton, particularly one who is “spoony” in an amorous or sentimental way.  Perhaps Mr Johnson was implying that the Scots are sentimental about a culture, and nationhood, that no longer exists, if it ever existed at all, save on the lid of a shortbread tin, and that, left to their own devices, the Scots would open the tin, find it empty, and so they would have nothing to eat. 

On the other hand, you can be born – perhaps like Mr Johnson – with a silver spoon in your mouth.  This refers to the tradition of godparents gifting a silver spoon to a new-born child.  But there’s no point in having a silver spoon, if there’s nothing to eat.

There are various types of spoon.  There is the runcible spoon, and there is the wooden spoon.

They dined on mince and slices of quince

Which they ate with a runcible spoon.

The Owl and the Pussycat, Edward Lear (1871).

I gather from Chambers that quince is a globose, or pear-shaped fruit of the tree Cydonia oblonga, akin to the Japanese quince, Chaenomeles japonica, and somewhat different from Bengal quince, the bael-fruit of the tree Aegle marmelos.  Quince apparently makes good marmalade.  I have never knowingly tasted it.  “Runcible” is a nonsense word, but Chambers ventures to suggest a runcible spoon might be a sharp-edged, broad-pronged pickle fork.  But how useful would such an instrument be in the consumption of mince and quince? 

Then there is the wooden spoon – a booby prize, originally for the student who came last in the Cambridge mathematical tripos.  How cruel is that?  I sincerely hope the recipients ate their mince and quince with it, with pride.  The great Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy thought the competitive tripos system of cramming set back Cambridge mathematics by 150 years. 

Then there is the spoonerism, or metathesis.  One ludicrous juxtaposition comes to mind: pungent shafts of wit.  Mr Johnson has a reputation for passing remarks which some people find hilarious, others, deeply offensive.

Does any of this bring us any nearer to understanding Mr Johnson’s strange simile?  I think we must conclude that in this case the spoon assumes a kind of talismanic significance beyond its mundane utility, rather like the Stone of Scone, which is nothing more than a slab of rock; but because the Scottish monarchs were crowned upon it, it acquired mystic significance by virtue of what the Antiques Roadshow experts call “provenance”.  It was removed to Westminster, much as – some would say – the Elgin Marbles were removed to the British Museum.  (The stone plays a cameo role in a remarkable – almost Shakespearian – scene in the film The King’s Speech.)  Then in the early 50s an intrepid quartet of Scottish undergraduates removed it from Westminster Abbey and brought it home.  Currently (so far as we know) it is in Edinburgh Castle.  I have seen it, but I have also seen a replica in Scone Castle so who knows?  Maybe there are scores of stone slabs all over the British Isles claiming its identity.  “I’m Spartacus!”  Where were we?  Ah yes, the Spoon of Scone.  This runcible might also be compared with the Scottish Crown jewels, or Honours of Scotland.  After the Treaty of Union of 1707, the Scottish crown, sword of state and sceptre were seen as potent symbols of Scottish independence, and accordingly they were “disappeared”.  Sir Walter Scott was instrumental in rediscovering them, sequestered in a strongbox behind the locked doors of the Crown Room in Edinburgh Castle, where they are now on display, the oldest crown jewels in Europe.     

Mr Johnson’s spoon, it seems to me, is a kind of lampoon of a symbol of Scottish nationhood, which sentimental and gullible Scots will fall for, irrespective of the hard economic realities that will, or will not, put bread on the table.  When Oliver Twist, desperate with hunger after the pitifully inadequate serving of gruel, rose from his place and advanced to his master to ask for more, he had a basin and a spoon in his hand. 

I believe the spoon comment is Mr Johnson’s initial salvo marking his resolve to campaign for the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party in the run-up to the Holyrood elections in May.  Whether his involvement will be welcomed by the party, whether his participation will be efficacious or detrimental to his cause, remains to be seen. 

But watch out for more spoonerisms.