jamescalumcampbell

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.      

Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart (Picador, 2020).

I received a copy of Shuggie Bain as a Christmas present, and I was particularly interested to read a first novel, set in Glasgow, written by a Glaswegian, that has won the 2020 Booker Prize.  “A novel of rare and lasting beauty”, said The Observer.  “A heartbreaking novel… both beautiful and brutal…  Tough, tender and beautifully sad”, said The Times.  There were further endorsements from the Booker Prize judges, and the New Statesman.  Already knowing that Shuggie Bain was all about Glasgow, addiction, and despair, I wondered about that.  Was this adulation from the middle classes a reflection of some kind of voyeurism?  Could a hedge fund manager from the City of London, or a teacher of creative writing at Yale, or even a privately-schooled lawyer residing in Glasgow G12, sitting in his conservatory perhaps reading one of these reviews while sipping a hazelnut latte, possibly empathise with the people in this book?  Would they not read it rather as an anthropologist might study a hitherto unknown tribe newly discovered in the Amazon?  These people would be entirely alien.  The Literati would read about them and discuss their way of life amongst themselves.  Isn’t that remarkable?  

But at the end of the day, I’m sure Shuggie Bain won the Booker because it really is a powerful and vivid depiction of the lives of people trapped in the cycle of poverty, addiction, and despair.  It’s a familiar scenario, and no doubt something similar could be encountered in any city in the world.  Of course Glasgow’s urban landscape, the wretched climate, and the dialect, all have their unique personality, but a reader in New York, or LA, or Sydney, or Auckland, will recognise the ubiquity of urban destitution, and the Glasgow “patter” will be no barrier; quite the contrary. 

The principal character in the book is not Shuggie, whose childhood life we follow for about a decade, but Shuggie’s mother Agnes, whose alcoholism is a kind of wrecking ball destroying everything it encounters.  The narrative is not entirely bleak.  Agnes has her better days.  There is Glasgow humour, but it is beyond dark; it is black.  I found myself caring for Agnes.  Was she going to get better?  Who knows, maybe she would have a kind of “Shawshank Redemption” and escape her prison.  I wanted her to, but I was always anxious for her, and I had a notion that everybody who cared for her would eventually up and leave.  In the end, does she stop drinking, or does she succumb, and lose everything and everybody?  I won’t say.  But I don’t think a spoiler alert is needed if I go so far as to say the last section of the book is cathartic.  I did indeed experience a kind of purgation of pity and terror.              

Shuggie Bain is beautifully written.  I was particularly struck by the originality of Douglas Stuart’s imagery.  Startling metaphysical juxtapositions.  I wonder why this Booker Prize winner has not received more fanfare in Scotland.  I suspect it might be because it is such a painful read.  Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, from Irvine in Ayrshire, herself a bibliophile, called it “A searing, brutal and deeply moving account of poverty, addiction, and childhood trauma”.  Searing and brutal, you may ask, like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, or Hardy’s Jude the Obscure?  Yes, all of that.  But, for me, much more.  You see, I come from Glasgow.  So when I first opened the book I thought to myself, I’m not sure I want to go through with this.  But I braced myself and I read it with an intense sense of familiarity and the sharp shock of recognition.  What a book to choose to read during lockdown!  I was depressed to my boots for about three days. 

Coincidentally, it came to light last week that in 2019 there were 1,264 drug-related deaths in Scotland.  This is the highest rate in Europe.  Nicola Sturgeon has called it a “national disgrace”.  Glasgow is the epicentre of this.  There is a district in Glasgow, just to the east of Glasgow Green, where the average life expectancy of a male is 54 years.  There is a hypothesis that there exists an unknown “Glasgow Factor” that contributes to the appalling morbidity and mortality statistics.  Perhaps it is multifactorial.  Maybe Shuggie Bain is a description of the Glasgow Factor.

Although the author denies that Shuggie Bain is autobiographical, he does admit he was very much writing from personal experience.  Douglas Stuart left Glasgow and went to the Royal College of Art in London.  Then he moved to New York.  He got out.

Does Shuggie get out?  You must read the book.  But brace yourself.        

Put my back out this week.  I gotta tell ya – my back is my Achilles heel.

How I did it was quite ridiculous.  I happened to read a letter in The Herald stating that “antidisestablishmentarianism”, 27 letters long, is the longest word in the English language.  “No it’s not!” I cried out loud. “It’s floccinaucinihilipilification!”  (28 letters).  And promptly wrote a Mr Know-it-all rejoinder to the paper.  I did make mention of “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” (34 letters) just to pre-empt any “Dr Campbell needs to wake up and smell the coffee” retorts.  It didn’t work.  The word thrown in my face was pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis (45 letters).  This is the sort of mindless banter we descend into for entertainment during lockdown.

I wish I hadn’t embarked on this wild goose chase.  I happen to have the Oxford English Dictionary, a vast tome and the last word in English usage, encapsulated in a single volume of considerable dimension and weight, which requires a magnifying glass to read (unless, as the daughter of a friend of mine demonstrated, you are 18 years old).  It was while I was manipulating this unwieldy volume that something in the lumbar region went twang.  Since then I’ve been wandering around like a half-clasped knife.

I did make a self-diagnosis – always a risky undertaking.  This was what we call a “mechanical back”.  Nothing to worry about.  All will be well.  I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve experienced an episode like this.  I associate it with poor posture and overuse of the computer.  I experienced many such episodes during my career as a GP but I always managed to drag myself out of bed (supposing it took an hour) and crawl into work.  Our physiotherapist would glance at me and say, “It’s gone out again, hasn’t it?” and she would give me an instant treatment which was balsam, at least for as long as it lasted. 

In hospital, the orthopaedic surgeons hated getting patients with acute back pain referred from the emergency department, because, by and large, they weren’t going to investigate them or operate on them, but merely give them tender loving care.  They would end up blocking a bed.  Now you might say TLC is not part of the orthopaedic remit.  I couldn’t possibly comment.

But I was always very careful with patients with back pain, both in the emergency department and in general practice.  I would go over them with a fine tooth comb, looking out for the dreaded cauda equina syndrome, the missed diagnosis that appears with bleak and monotonous regularity in the pages of the medical defence journals.  99% of the patients had mechanical back pain.  I would lie prone on the surgery floor and demonstrate the exercises aimed at restoring the lumbar lordosis.  Physician, heal thyself.

I have a notion that we doctors don’t really understand back pain.  After all, if we did, we might be better at fixing it.  It’s a bit like dyspepsia.  We used to think we knew what caused gastric and duodenal ulcers, and we performed heroic procedures like vagotomies and pyloroplasties and Billroth 1 and 2 partial gastrectomies.  Then, remarkably recently, an Australian physician showed that the causative agent was Helicobacter pylori and all you really needed was a week’s course of antibiotic.  Now if John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir, had lived in the antibiotic age, he wouldn’t have had to endure a lifetime of tummy ache.  Then again, we wouldn’t have had his creation, the American magnate policing the world on a diet of white fish boiled in milk, John Scantlebury Blenkiron.

But to return to pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis (an occupational lung disease, I presume, of volcanologists), it occurred to me to prolong the excruciating newspaper correspondence by coining a biochemical formula of the sort that can be more or less endless, like 2,3,dihyrdopolybenzoicethyleneglycolicorthopentocyclopentanobisblablabla….ene.  Or again, a German loan word.  The Germans have this great capacity for conjoining and amassing syllables.  They do it with numbers.  5,723,927 is fünf Millionen siebenhundertdreiundzwanzigtausendneunhundertsiebenundzwanzig.  Pithy.  But in the end, I let it go, maintained a dignified silence, shut down the computer, and went for a walk, which turned out to be far more therapeutic.

Now I read The Herald letters column and look out for the daily political diatribes from a well-known corpus of correspondents, guaranteed to make me splutter into my cornflakes.  The world is awash with anger.  Then my back starts aching again.  Maybe lumbago isn’t mechanical at all.  Maybe it’s all in the mind. 

It doesn’t do to splutter into one’s cornflakes.  Far better to read in an open-minded state of calm.  You never know; somebody might write so persuasively as to make one change one’s mind.  “I beseech you in the bowels of Christ,” said Oliver Cromwell, “consider that you might be wrong.”  But if not, and you are compelled to write back, better to do so respectfully, than to carp and snipe.  I saw a letter from a Diehard Remainer taunting the Brexiteers about the stinking fish on the lorries at Dover.  “Brexit going well?”

Ha!  That’s antidisestablishmentarianism’s floccinaucinihilipilification.

Time for another walk.          

There is something positively biblical about the last days of the Trump presidency.  I imagine him, holed up in the Oval Office, the phones silent, sensing his power slipping away as even his staunchest allies seek to distance themselves from him.  Looking out on to Pennsylvania Avenue perhaps he can see the bare-chested men with big beards and Davie Crocket hats, touting enormous semi-automatic weapons, but he can’t reach them as his Twitter account has been suspended, permanently.  On this side of the pond, prominent establishment people who once fawned over him now openly condemn him.  He is yesterday’s man.  Now they court Mr Biden.

I wonder if Mr Trump seriously believes that he won the election.  I think so.  If you believe, not that the truth is out there, that is, that the truth is an external reality which your own sense of self cannot bend to your own will and wish-fulfilment; but if you believe that that which you desire to be so must ipso facto be the case, then you believe that you hold within you the power to define the truth.  Toddlers believe they can bend the universe according to their own will, until they bruise themselves on inanimate objects, and discover there are other beings in the universe who operate according to a different agenda.  “The terrible twos” is the expression of rage which marks the realisation that the toddler is not, after all, omnipotent.  Mr Trump’s refusal to attend Mr Biden’s inauguration is childish and petulant, the toddler’s expression of rage.        

Perhaps delusion goes hand in hand with enormous power.  Is this why King Canute enthroned himself on the beach and ordered the tide to stop coming in?  I have a notion that the members of any exclusive establishment or élite are to some extent deluded.  They begin to believe in their own sense of entitlement.  They can shape the world according to their own will.  Make America great again.  Over here, we will make the UK “world beaters” by wishing it to be so.  Mr Gove passed that infamous remark casting doubt on the value of experts.  Why let hard facts get in the way of a good narrative? 

I believe one of the chief reasons why New Zealand did so well in eradicating Covid-19 was that New Zealand society does not have an élite.  The New Zealand parliament does not have a second chamber, an upper house.  There is no establishment.  When Jacinda Ardern closed the border last March and locked the place down, everybody complied because everybody knew they belonged to a community.  Of course the economy was going to take a hit, but New Zealanders are extremely self-reliant people and they were never going to starve.  (I heard Ian Blackford, leader of the SNP at Westminster, on Any Questions on Friday, say that the number of food parcels being handed out by food banks in South Skye and Lochalsh had increased from 25 per month in January to 180 per week in December.)  But in their reaction to Covid, the Kiwis were nimble.  There was none of the obscurity and obfuscation so beloved of la crème de la crème.  “Well, yes, we might try that of course, but it’s going to be very, very difficult…”   

No doubt 2020 was difficult in NZ.  During the pandemic, Ms Ardern owned up to a sense of Impostor Syndrome.  But then she cast it aside and thought, “Just get on with it.”  Élites are not very good at just getting on with it.  They are too bogged down in their own vested self-interests. 

Meanwhile the Trump presidency – unless the 25^th Amendment is invoked – has 9 days to run.  One thing we have learned in the last four years is that Mr Trump is a very unpredictable man.  I have a notion that he has one last trick up his sleeve, un coup de théâtre to unveil.  I wonder what it’s going to be.

I’m holding my breath.         

On Hogmanay in my local shop I was asked, “How are you bringing in the New Year?”

“Quietly.  A game of Scrabble, Horlicks, and bed by 9.30.”  In the event, I stayed up for the Bells, flicking between Jools Holland’s Hootenanny and Susan Calman’s show on BBC 1.  Sir Tom Jones is remarkable, as are Amy Macdonald and Hannah Rarity.  Hannah did not murder Auld Lang Syne.

Thence to bed.

At dawn on New Year’s Day I walked the two miles from my village to Flanders Moss, a nature reserve of great beauty, and tranquillity.  Me, the sheep, and the horses, we had the world to ourselves.  A beautiful winter’s morning.  There was a near full moon in the north-west, and I saw the sun rise over the Carron Hills in the south-east.  (Next time I saw the moon, in the evening, it was an enormous bright golden sphere rising in the east.)

Back home, I tuned in to the New Year’s Day concert from the Musikverein in Vienna.  Riccardo Muti was conducting the Vienna Philharmonic, before an empty hall.  That orchestra seems to be able to play the Viennese Waltz as nobody else can.  Before the traditional encore of The Blue Danube, Maestro Muti gave a speech, in English, reminding our world leaders of the healing power of music and the importance of nurturing culture.  Of his colleagues, he said, “We give flowers, not… things that kill people.”  Maestro Muti is in his eightieth year, though to see him you would hardly believe it.  When I was an LSO groupie I recall one of their first violinists saying to me, “Muti!  Bastard!  Absolute martinet!”  The spectre of Toscanini was summoned.  Yehudi Menuhin records in his memoirs that he rehearsed with Toscanini in his apartment at the Hotel Astor on Times Square, New York.  During the rehearsal, the phone rang – three times.  On the third ring, Toscanini rose from the piano, not to answer the phone but to disconnect it by heaving the electrical fitment off the wall in a tangle of wires, bits of wood, plaster, and dust.  This the sort of thing you can do if you are a Maestro.  

Well, I think Maestro Muti must have mellowed; his message was beautiful.  For the gig, he was put up in Vienna’s old Imperial Hotel which abuts the Musikverein.  He, and a handful of business men, had the place to themselves.  Muti said he felt like the hero in his own apocalyptic disaster movie. 

In Scotland, Saturday January 2^nd was a sombre day, being the 50^th anniversary of the Ibrox disaster.  2/1/71 was also a Saturday, and the traditional New Year Old Firm match took place at Rangers’ home ground.  It was by all reports a dull match played in dull and bitterly cold conditions.  It only came to life in the last two minutes, when Celtic scored, and then Rangers equalised more or less on the final whistle.  One all.  In high spirits but in good humour, a crowd of 80,000 dispersed. 

There was a crush on Stairway 13, a stairway at the north-east corner of the stadium leading down to Cairnlea Drive and thence to Copland Road, the nearest subway station, and in the space of just a few minutes 66 souls suffered death by asphyxiation or suffocation.  An early theory was that the excitement of the late goals had caused the departing crowd to turn back, but this theory was later discredited.  The event only took place after the final whistle had blown.

As with so many sombre events, the assassination of JFK, the murder of John Lennon, I remember where I was at the time.  I had been at Arlington Baths, and I had got on a bus on Woodlands Road, heading west – so a 10, a 10A, or a 59.  Somebody on the bus told me a major disaster was unfolding at Ibrox.  My father, being a policeman, was on duty at the ground.  It is a mark of my teenage zero emotional intelligence that I don’t recall thinking that this event would probably be the worst thing my father would ever have to deal with in his career.  I wish I’d had the gumption to express to him my sympathy and to offer what modicum of support I could.  But I guess I was just living on another planet. 

Die Wiener Philharmoniker, und ich, wünschen Ihnen… Prosit Neujahr!!!