jamescalumcampbell

Glyndebourne came to the Royal Albert Hall last Wednesday with Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (semi-staged, sung in Italian, with English surtitles).  The opera also came, so I’m told, with a health warning, or rather, what is known as a “trigger warning”.  The Marriage of Figaro depicts unwanted sexual advances, and aggressive behaviour.  Don’t say you weren’t told.

Such premonitions can rouse feelings in the audience ranging from mild amusement, to unabashed hilarity; from irritability, to frank outrage.  It’s health and safety gone mad I tell you.  What a snowflake society!  But such warnings are not new.  For as long as I can remember, the BBC has advised that some programmes “may disturb those of a nervous disposition”.  Quatermass and the Pit. 

Still, perhaps the opera world has gone a little far on this occasion.  The Royal Opera House is warning the Tosca audience, not that Puccini’s opera depicts torture and execution, which it does, but that the interval bell, summoning people to their seats, is frightfully loud.  And apparently people can be threatened by the sound of applause.  It is suggested that clapping be replaced by silently holding one’s hands in the air and gyrating them, a procedure that would certainly scare the hell out of me. 

I’m not unduly exercised about trigger warnings.  I knew, and respected, somebody who would never listen to Mozart’s Cosi fan Tutti because the opera seems to encourage infidelity.  It never bothered me.  But then I can’t speak Italian.  But if the truth be told, when it comes to opera, I’m completely philistine.  The plots are frequently such a tangled web as to be unfollowable; and besides, they last for ever.  I really can’t see me going back to hear Götterdämmerung again.  I sat in agony in a very uncomfortable seat in the gods of Glasgow’s Kings Theatre for five hours.  Five hours!  Life’s too short.  Give me an orchestral concert every time.  Ninety minutes of music, with an interval. 

And I don’t really “get” recitative.  It’s the classical world’s version of rap.  It’s there to advance the convoluted plot, if you can be bothered.  I’d rather the cast just spoke the dialogue, as in Beethoven’s Fidelio.  Listening to recitative on the radio you can hear all these hackneyed modulations on the jangling harpsichord, against the background of thumps and bumps as people galumph about the stage.  I don’t think Ralph Vaughan Williams cared much for the harpsichord.  Didn’t he describe it as the sound of two skeletons copulating on a tin roof?  Or am I doing him a disservice?  But I shouldn’t be this dismissive.  Some opera I deeply admire.  Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle (tellingly, only in one act).  And I love Madame Butterfly, but I might hesitate to go to see it again.  It’s just too painful.  You see, it really needs to come with a trigger warning.  

I remember the late Sir Terry Wogan could be very dismissive of BBC announcements commencing, “If you have been affected by issues raised in this programme, you can seek advice and counselling by calling this number…”  But then Sir Terry was a national treasure and therefore could be as politically incorrect as he liked.  You might argue that issuing a trigger warning goes against the element of surprise that might be crucial to the impact of a play or a film.  Think of the notorious shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho.  The only advanced warning at the time was that the film was rated “X”, which meant it was horrific, or carnal, or both.  Psycho depicts a brutal murder made all the more horrific by the scything downbows of Bernard Herrmann’s string orchestra, sul ponticello, resembling the repeated stabbing actions of a knife attack.  What on earth would have been the reaction of the first audiences, who had no idea what was coming?  One can only imagine the voluble response of a community of people taking moments to digest and process what they had just seen, and then trying to settle down again.  Hitchcock must have anticipated such a reaction, because he allows time for the audience, with a series of silent shots focussing on Janet Leigh’s inert body on the shower floor, the bloodstained water trickling away.  It’s curiously beautiful.  A catharsis.

Something similar is evident in the Roman Polansky film of Macbeth.  Now there is a film that really ought to have come with a trigger warning.  It is a depiction of absolute evil, and when I recognised early on in the film that that was what it was going to be, I had to make up my mind whether to get up and leave, or stay the course.  I stayed the course.  I’m glad I did, because I think that I garnered some inkling of what Aristotle meant by “catharsis”, the purgation of pity and terror.  Towards the end there is a lightening of atmosphere, literally.  The outdoor sets acquire greater natural light. 

I wonder why the daily news doesn’t come with a trigger warning.  After all, especially these days, it’s pretty bad.  Granted we may be pre-warned about some particularly graphic piece of television footage of an act of violence, or its aftermath.  But the newsreader does not say, “You may not wish to hear about the overnight attacks in Kyiv, or the relentless bombing of Gaza City.” The facts are allowed to speak for themselves.  That is not to say they are not sometimes concealed, no doubt more often than we know, for political reasons.   

So I guess trigger warnings have a place.  But you may easily see how they could get out of hand, and lose potency.  Like crying “wolf”.  The second movement of Haydn’s Surprise Symphony contains a surprise.  You have been warned. 

A sociable week, just gone, with friends who have remained friends since the 60s.  Sometimes I have a feeling that time, the passage of time, is an illusion, and that in some sense I struggle to define, or articulate, everything is here and now.  Perhaps this is what T. S. Eliot was banging on about in Burnt Norton, the first of the Four Quartets, time being “eternally present”.  We dined together in Glasgow, we who have been making music together for more than half a century.  One of the party was off the next day to Ireland to visit family.  I raised a glass and said, “Calm seas and a prosperous voyage.  How long does it take?”  He shrugged.  “Couple of hours.”  Our host quipped, “I thought it was about 10 minutes.”  Musical joke.     

En passant, I popped into the Scottish Antiques Centre near where I live, and inevitably emerged with three books under my arm, vowing to move on three other books by leaving them in the village phone box which has become a book depository.  What did I get?

For Whom the Bell Tolls.  Not the original John Donne No man is an island.  Not Hemmingway’s Spanish Civil War novel.  But, as the subtitle says, “Light and Dark Verse by Martin Bell” (Icon Books, 2011).  That explains the somewhat unoriginal title.  It took me a while to figure out it was a play of words on the name Bell, the man in the white suit.  He was a BBC war correspondent, then an independent MP, and also, as the book reveals, something of a poet.  I think the poems are terribly good.  I suppose some people would describe the verse as doggerel, and perhaps the poet as poetaster, but I think there is a power here, characterised by a journalist’s plain speaking and lack of obscurity.  He uses all sorts of forms: “quatrains, couplets, a sonnet, a ballade, limericks and even a clerihew.”

Clerihew?

Chambers – a humorous poem that sums up the life and character of some notable person in two short couplets (started by E. Clerihew Bentley in his Biography for Beginners, 1905).

Bell’s clerihew has Tony Blair as its subject, and is not terribly complimentary.  Neither is the more substantial Principal Witness, on the same subject.  I think through his experience as an independent MP Martin Bell became thoroughly disillusioned with the mother of parliaments.  He was there during the expenses scandal.  Bell wrote his first poem when he was 19, and then not another one for more than 50 years.  This is what happens when you get absorbed in a profession.  Where does the time go? 

Talking of 50 years, on Saturday I went to a Golden Wedding luncheon in St Andrews, of some dear friends of mine.  Their wedding in Perth seems like yesterday.  I played my viola there while they signed the register.  Unaccompanied Bach.  I wonder now I had the nerve.  The golden anniversary was a sweet occasion.

I was playing my viola again yesterday in Polmont, with the Antonine Players, a string ensemble.  We are rehearsing for two concerts in September, in St. Michael’s Parish Church, Linlithgow, and again the following week in the Church of the Holy Rude in Stirling.  Mozart, Vivaldi, Rutter, Walton, and Skalkottas.  Like the golden wedding, here is another link with the past.  The Vivaldi Concerto in B minor for 4 violins was, as far as I remember, the first piece of music I ever took part in, as a public performance.  That’s well over 50 years ago.  The music is fantastic.       

Second book under the arm: Nevil Shute, The Rainbow and the Rose (Heinemann, 1958).  You know you have a problem when you start buying books you already own, and have read.  Stop me if I’ve told you this before.  I think I’ve already blogged about the occasion I picked up a paperback copy, from Toppings in Edinburgh, of this, the one book that was missing from my handsomely bound Edito-Service S. A., Geneva edition of the complete works.  But this one is a first edition, in good condition.  I’ve already moved the paperback on.

I’m fond of Shute.  Like Martin Bell, he had another profession, that of aeronautical engineer.  You can read all about it in his autobiography, Slide Rule.  The title says much.  He belonged to the pre-computer age, a different time captured so wistfully in his books.  I’m always interested to read fiction written by people with a hinterland.  John Buchan.  Ian Fleming.  They have life experience. 

Third book under the arm: Jane Wilhelmina Stirling (1804 – 1859), the first study of the life of Chopin’s pupil and friend, by Audrey Evelyn Bone (printed by Starrock Services, Chipstead, Surrey, 1960).  A signed, limited edition.  So interesting to read about Chopin’s time in Scotland, with descriptions of Chopin’s recitals in Glasgow and Edinburgh, respectively in Merchants’ Hall in Hutcheson Street, and in the Hopetoun Rooms, venues that still exist today.  The reviews from the Glasgow Herald, and The Scotsman, were, are, remarkably perceptive. 

Chopin enjoyed the hospitality of the Scottish aristocracy especially in and around Dunblane.  There is mention in the book of the Leighton Library, which houses some very old and very rare first editions.  I’ve never visited, but in Dunblane Cathedral yesterday I chatted with a Leighton curator, and have promised to drop by.

Also in the cathedral yesterday, Kevin the organist played as a prelude Modest Mussorgsky’s “Promenade” and “The Old Castle” from Pictures at an Exhibition; and then, as a postlude, of course, “The Great Gate of Kiev”.  It was no accident that that should have been played on the anniversary of the liberation of Ukraine from Soviet Russia in 1991.  Where has the time gone?  And what the devil has happened in the interim?  Mark Carney, the leader of the Western World, was present. 

But it does one good to avert one’s gaze from the constant Doomscroll.  I’ve had a very pleasant week, a week of fellowship.  As ever, I eschewed social media, totally.  You may say, a chronicle of small beer.  But better that than a kettle of stinking fish.    

On Saturday evening in the Royal Albert Hall, the Aurora Orchestra performed Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, as part of the BBC London Proms.

From memory.

A prodigious feat.

They’ve been doing it for some years now, and, if memory (sic) serves me right last year they even played The Rite of Spring by heart.  To date I’ve been a little sceptical about the whole enterprise.  I mean, like, what’s the point?  I thought of it as a parlour trick, a gimmick.  On Saturday the performance was preceded by “a musical and dramatic exploration” of the symphony.  I confess I gave it about a minute.  I would have much preferred a pre-concert talk to a dramatization, perhaps in the preferred format of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, of a dialogue between conductor and a member of the orchestra.  But the musical and dramatic exploration was too reminiscent for me of another Radio 3 programme, Words & Music, which each week explores a theme through the juxtaposition of music and the spoken word.  Next to the unadulterated music, the thespian luvvies always sound so hammy.  Anyway I switched off.  If I sound a little jaundiced put it down to Shostakovich 13, Babi Yar, which was performed the previous evening at the same venue.  Shostakovich 13 is a setting for bass solo, and orchestra, of words by the poet Yevtushenko.  Its first movement depicts the horror of the Nazi massacre of Jews during the Second World War in, of all places, Kyiv.  Even this late in Shostakovich’s career, the Soviet authorities tried to suppress the 13^th Symphony.  They wanted to depict Babi Yar as an atrocity inflicted upon the entire Russian people, rather than the Jews.  Several bass soloists were leaned on, and pressured not to take part, and who could play them?  At last one held his ground, as did the conductor.  You can read all about it in Time’s Echo, by Jeremy Eichler.  All of that might have been worth a pre-concert talk.    But maybe I’m Shostakovich-ed out.  Like Mahler, he has become the darling of the concert-going audience.  But I promised to switch on again after the interval and hear the fifth symphony.

I would say I know it well.  I first heard it in concert when, following the tragic fire in the St Andrew’s Hall, the beleaguered RSNO were playing in a run-down Glasgow cinema, the Gaiety, in the middle of a sea of mud that was the building site of the M8 which, for better or worse, cut a swathe through the heart of Glasgow.  So that must have been late 60s, early 70s, when Shostakovich was very much in the land of the living.  I remember, of course, the arresting opening, and the first movement’s serene melody’s first exposition in the first violins’ high register.  At the time, in the west, Shostakovich was far from the mainstream figure he was shortly to become.  But shortly afterwards I got the chance to play the symphony.  I recall we performed it in Glasgow University’s Bute Hall.  There is no better way of learning a piece of music, one might even say, by heart. 

In the event, I was greatly taken by the Aurora Orchestra’s performance on Saturday evening.  Maybe there’s something to this business of playing from memory after all.  Even with vast forces present, it sounded like chamber music.  An intense collaboration.

It’s not without its risks.  I suppose jeopardy must partly be the attraction for the audience.  A high-wire act.  I once attended a piano recital in the Perth Concert Hall given by Mitsuko Uchida.  She played the last three Beethoven Sonatas, Op. 109, 110, and 111, not only from memory – de rigueur in the case of a concert pianist – but also as a single entity, without interruption.  That has become another gimmick in the concert world, the amalgamation of disparate pieces.  I’ve heard Sibelius 7 follow Sibelius 6 without a break, and I’ve with increasing frequency being hearing works by different composers being run together, for example Berg’s 3 pieces running straight into Webern’s 6 – a car crash if ever there was one.  So when Madame Uchida presented Ops 109 – 111 as a single piece, I held my breath.  The last time I’d heard her play, in the same concert hall, she had again performed Beethoven, the Sonata in A Op. 101, and then the next sonata in the catalogue, the towering Sonata in B flat, für das Hammerclavier, Op. 106.  During the last movement of the Op. 101, there was a power cut.  Mitsuko Uchida carried on playing in the pitch dark.  But when it came to the fugue, she had to stop.  She said in a characteristically Japanese whisper, “I cannot play the fugue in the dark.”

So she might have suspected that gremlins were lurking in Perth.  Sure enough, during the last movement of the Op. 110 – another fugue – she had a memory lapse.  It was as if she had taken a wrong track in a dense forest, and she was trying to improvise a way back.  Even, perhaps especially, for a listener, it was a remarkably discomfiting and unnerving experience.  She had to stop.  So I’m always happy to see music stands on the concert stage, even if they are only there for an emergency.   

The hoopla surrounding Shostakovich 5, no doubt a cause for dramatization, concerns the extremely negative reaction by Stalin to the “formalist” fourth.  Shostakovich had to produce “a Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism” otherwise he could expect the nocturnal knock on the door from the KGB.  He kept a suitcase packed ready for the occasion.  So the prevailing wisdom is that Shostakovich was indeed performing a high wire act, by producing a work which would satisfy the authorities, while simultaneously driving its real meaning underground.  Is the apparent triumph of the symphony’s close ironic?  Nowadays its rendition is much slower, and more strident, certainly than it was when I first heard it in the Gaiety Theatre.  I suspect the idea that the mood of celebration is fake, is probably true.  Shostakovich’s music is often sardonic.  Perhaps it shares something with the pre-war Berlin cabaret music of Kurt Weill, a sense that all is not well, that all is not as it would appear.  We hear it again in the music of Alfred Schnittke.  A solo violin gives a beautiful rendition of Stille Nacht, ending on a grotesque dissonance.  If Shostakovich’s music sounds as if it was composed in a lunatic asylum, it’s probably because in essence it was. 

I wonder what Shostakovich would have made of the Alaska Summit, last week, and of the Oval Office meeting that is about to take place, as I write, today.  At least President Zelenskyy has support from several European leaders this time, but I’m not sure how the meetings will be structured, or whether Zelenskyy will need to brave the lions’ den alone, before the others join him.  Moreover, I see J. D. Vance has just finished his holiday in Ayrshire and left Scotland, flying out of Prestwick on Air Force 2.  So it’s conceivable we could have a re-run of that frightful interview earlier in the year.  When Stalin died in 1953 – on the same day as Prokofiev – Shostakovich must have breathed a sigh of relief.  You can hear it in the last movement of the tenth symphony.  Now he might say, “Here we go again.”  I wonder if Mr Putin admires Shostakovich.

My favourite Shostakovich Symphony is his last, the 15^th.  It is full of quotations, ironies, quirks, and, like the viola sonata, a sense of finality, even of impending death.  The metronomic use of percussion at its close is mesmerising.  The clocks are ticking.           

Up with the lark on Sunday morning to drive 120 miles to Aberdeen for lunch.  A 240 mile round trip for lunch may appear excessive, but I can assure you the tapas was quite, quite non-pareil.

The roads between Stirling and Aberdeen are good.  It’s about the only substantial trip you can make in Scotland on roads that are “dualled”.  Barring the unforeseen, it’s a two hour trip for me door-to-door, if taken non-stop, without causing offence to the average speed cameras.  If however you hang a left at Perth and head for Inverness, the road intermittently narrows.  The proposed dualling of the A9, politically, has become a festering sore, reminiscent of the traffic light at Pulpit Rock, Loch Lomond-side, which held up the northbound traffic out of Glasgow for about half a century.  Fortunately at Perth I hung a right, and proceeded in the direction of Dundee.  Admittedly the road narrowed to a single lane due to roadworks, but it was still too early for the traffic to have built up.  I whiled away the time listening to BBC Radio 4.  The Sunday morning service came from Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh.  The festival is in full swing.  I was in Edinburgh a few days ago and I don’t think I have ever seen the Royal Mile so mobbed.  But escape from the Old Town and cross the Meadows, and you would never know there was a festival on.

Morning service took me to Dundee and was shortly followed by Broadcasting House.  I caught up with the news.  Listening to the news is a bit like virtual “Black Tourism”, or “Doomscrolling”.  I can only take it in small doses.  So President Putin is going to meet President Trump in Alaska.  That surprised me.  Maybe somebody will take out a citizen’s arrest on President Putin, though I doubt it.  Perhaps Putin will say to Trump, “You know, Donald – may I call you Donald? – Alaska used to belong to us.  Coming here, I see and feel the remarkable similarities with Kamchatka.  It really falls within our sphere of influence.  It is, after all, quite separate from the rest of the United States.  So we are going to take it back.  That may shock you, but you need to understand it within the wider historical context.  You on the other hand should feel free to take Canada.  We wouldn’t interfere with that.  And Greenland?  I’m not sure.  Perhaps we could make a deal.”

That may sound absurd, but I would guess it’s pretty much how things will go, except that the territory at issue will be Ukraine.  The two Big Men will carve the place up.  There will be swaps and exchanges – it’s very complicated.  Meanwhile President Zelenskyy, who has skin in the game, has not, at least at time of writing, been invited.  The Great Powers have been drawing lines on the map like this for centuries.  When Foreign Secretary Balfour drew up his Declaration in 1917, I don’t think he consulted much with the Arabs.  And look where we are now.

Talking of foreign secretaries, David Lammy has been entertaining J. D. Vance, et famille, at his grace and favour pile, Chevening, in the Cotswolds.  There’s even a rumour that J. D. may come up here, specifically to Ayrshire, though not to Trump Turnberry.  Maybe the President talked up “Scahtland” to the Vice-President.  I wish him a happy holiday, but I can’t forget that dreadful audience endured by Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, when he was berated for not expressing sufficient gratitude, and was told his opinion was worthless.  “You don’t have the cards.”  Now they’re doing it again, by cutting Zelenskyy out of the Alaska talks.  That is why, it seems to me, the talks will break down, and President Trump will need to wait a little longer before receiving his Nobel Peace Prize.

But enough doomscrolling!  I stopped at Foinavon, north of Dundee, for coffee and a glance at the Sunday Times.  They are featuring extracts from Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir Frankly.  I’ve said it before: one word titles are all the rage.  Radio 4’s recent series about the HS2 scandal (infinitely worse that the dualling of the A9 scandal) was entitled Derailed, and even as I write, there’s a programme on about tourism in the Persian Gulf – Engulfed.  The people who make up one word titles don’t seem to realise that they have become a cliché.  With respect to Frankly, somebody wrote into the Herald the other day and said, “Frankly, I don’t give a damn.”  A cheap jibe.  Of course, the jibes on social media are infinitely worse.  No wonder Kate Forbes is not standing for re-election in Holyrood next year.

On to Aberdeen.  My Satnav took me to a high speed charger to top up for the return journey.  The Granite City was sparkling in the sunlight.  I sat outside, had another coffee, and did the Sunday Times crossword.  It’s a very good crossword.  Inventive.

To lunch with dear friends.  Truly scrumptious.

Here let us feast, and to the feast be join’d

Discourse, the sweeter banquet of the mind;

Before I knew it 5 pm was fast approaching.  So I hit the road and took the journey in reverse.  Safe home by 7.15, despite a bit of gridlock between Dundee and Perth, but I listened to Pick of the Week.  Len Pennie the Scottish poet (see poyums) was wandering around the Edinburgh Festival and picking highlights.  An eclectic selection!  It was very nice to hear Scots vernacular on Radio 4.  People still make assumptions about intelligence based on accent.  I’ve been reading Born to Rule, the Making and Remaking of the British Elite, by two professors of sociology, Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman (the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2024).  Has the British elite changed its character over the years?  The book examines over 125,000 entries in that great historical directory, then and now, of people in the UK who have “made it” – Who’s Who.  They also looked at the changing tastes of people appearing on Desert Island Discs.  Whether such academic approaches in the world of sociology are sound, I wouldn’t know.  With respect to the education of the elite, The prevalence of the Clarendon Schools, particularly Britain’s nine most elite schools – Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Merchant Taylors’, St Paul’s, Rugby, Shrewsbury, Westminster, and Winchester – thence on to Oxbridge, persists.

Believe it or not, I’ve been in Who’s Who.  Not the UK one, but in New Zealand.  Whether or not it still exists I have no idea.  My stint in the RAF Volunteer Reserve, courtesy of UGSAS, the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde Air Squadron, was listed as “military service” – much to my father’s amusement.  Back here, I’m not sure how represented Scots men and women are in Who’s Who.  Perhaps we should have a separate edition – Wha’s Wha.

Gordonstoun, the exclusive school in Moray (the king is an alumnus), has just bought 17 brand new Steinway pianos.  They don’t come cheap.  A Steinway concert grand takes over a year to build and may cost well in excess of £100,000.  I dare say the pianos purchased by Gordonstoun will not all be nine feet long, and surely the school got a discount and a good deal for a job lot.  But still, they must have cost a pretty penny, at a time when many state schools are struggling to afford books, jotters, and a lick of paint.  I gather Gordonstoun is off-loading all its old pianos onto neighbouring schools – the trickle down effect. 

It all serves to bolster the idea that music, classical music, is for the prosperous.  You only need to look at the ads in the current BBC Proms brochure.  Winchester Cathedral (be a chorister), Alleyn’s, City of London School for Girls, Wellington College, The King’s School Canterbury, Knightsbridge School, Westminster Abbey Choristerships, Brighton College, The Pilgrims’ School, Dulwich College, City of London School, Merchant Taylors’ School, Rugby…  Young talent can be nurtured by EFG Private Banking, and, at the other end of life, world-class, personal healthcare can be offered by King Edward VII’s Hospital, Marylebone.  It’s all there in the brochure.  But mainly the ads are for schools.  You can read the same thing north of the border. Periodically, The Herald publishes a series of ads for private schools in Scotland, featuring pictures of young people in a state-of-the-art laboratory, wearing safety spectacles, engrossed in a scientific experiment; or out in the rugby field (the playing fields are enormous), learning team spirit and esprit de corps; and most of all in the school orchestra.  First and second violins, violas, celli, basses, harp, flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, trumpets, trombones, and percussion (this sounds like an outline to Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra) all represented.  Something for everyone, and another chance to learn, literally, how to act in concert, while forming lifelong friendships and enthusiasms.  Without doubt these ads are effective.  Even the tone-deaf parent will recognise networking (that which Jane Austen termed “useful connection”) when they see it, if not hear it.      

I don’t knock it.  But I’m sorry that classical music seems to be becoming more exclusive.  It wasn’t always thus.  There was, for example, a golden age in Glasgow when music tuition was free to everyone.  I was handed a viola, and received lessons from a brilliant player in the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.  I attended summer schools, free.  There were three Glasgow Schools’ orchestras, as well as ensembles for brass, wind, and jazz.  When I left school and went to university I had the enormous privilege of becoming the viola tutor in the Glasgow Schools Third Orchestra.  Some of the young people who came through went on to have very distinguished musical careers.  Much of this has gone.  Instruments and tuition are no longer free, therefore beyond the reach of many.  I guess with austerity, when the city fathers told us we all had to tighten our belts, music was the first thing to go.  It was, so it was said, a luxury, an adjunct.  Nowadays a young person is much more likely to be handed a tablet, than a violin.  A violin is very nice, but it’s not “value added”.  It won’t “create wealth”.  Of course the private schools know this is not so.  They make music an integral part of the school ethos.   

But it can be remarkable how the musically gifted will find a way, no matter the disadvantages of their starting point.  A couple of weeks ago I attended a recital in Dunblane Cathedral, the inaugural concert of the newly established Three Rivers Festival, given by the extraordinary young Scottish pianist Ethan Loch.  He played a varied romantic programme of Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, Debussy, as well as a suite of his own (he composes) which I found rather reminiscent of Rachmaninoff.  When he plays, he himself sounds a bit like Rachmaninoff the pianist.  His encore was an improvisation.

And the disadvantage of his starting point?  Ethan Loch has been blind from birth.  His achievement defies comprehension.  How could he possibly have learned these pieces?  Well, he learned them first, by listening to them.  He is the ultimate exemplar of somebody who plays “by ear”.  But even putting an impediment aside, his performance was remarkable.

He didn’t play a Steinway.  It was a Bösendorfer.  Other brands are available.                                 

Mr. Netanyahu tends to express anger when journalists suggest to him that the Israeli Defence Force is not appropriately exercising a duty of care over the two million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip.  Apologists for the Israeli Government come on to the Today Programme, or PM, on BBC Radio 4, to suggest that plenty of aid is entering Gaza, but that the United Nations are failing to distribute it, but rather allowing Hamas to steal it.  Such assertions are in stark contrast to the eye witness accounts of aid workers on the ground, from such highly respected organisations as Médecins Sans Frontières, or Save the Children.  In any case, representatives of the Israeli government indulge in a spot of whataboutery.  What about Dresden?  What about Stalin’s appropriation of Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War?  The West tended to blame all of that on Hitler.  I have a notion that invocation of the spectre of the Führer is seldom helpful in the promulgation of any topical geopolitical argument.

The trouble is, Israel does not allow international journalists access to Gaza.  It’s a war zone, too dangerous.  Heaven forfend they are not allowed entry in case they report the truth.  Of course, Gaza is not really a war zone in the conventional sense, war being a state of hostility between two (or more) states.  Rather, this might be described as a “war on terror”, George W. Bush’s expression that led to Afghanistan, and Iraq.  Israel wishes to destroy Hamas.  Any collateral damage is unfortunate. 

But here is another piece of whataboutery.  Throughout the Troubles, the IRA used violence as a tool in pursuit of the goal of a united Ireland.  They never carried out a single act as atrocious – at least in terms of scale – as that of Hamas’ attack, murder, and abduction of Israelis on October 7^th 2023.  On the other hand, they did attempt to wipe out the entire British government by detonating a bomb in the Grand Hotel in Brighton during the 1984 Tory Conference.  On February 7^th, 1991, they fired three mortar rounds at 10 Downing Street, in an attempt to assassinate John Major and his Cabinet.  Brutal acts were carried out on both sides.  Remember Bloody Sunday in 1972.  26 unarmed protestors were shot in the Bogside, Derry.    

But what the British government did not do was indiscriminately bomb Catholic enclaves in Belfast. 

In its reportage, Mrs Thatcher insisted the BBC use an actor to dub the words of Gerry Adams, so as to deny him “the oxygen of publicity”.  At one time, subsequent political developments would have seemed inconceivable: the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the rapport between Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, Her Majesty shaking hands with Mr McGuinness, visiting the Republic and addressing the Irish President in Irish Gaelic. 

It is said that the pictures of dehydrated, emaciated, starving children on our television screens have shamed the Israeli government into calling a temporary ceasefire and opening up the borders to aid.  What they have also done has highlighted the pusillanimous nature of our international institutions.  There has been much hand-wringing, but little by way of positive action.  Surely it is possible for the free world to avert a human catastrophe.  Where there’s a will there’s a way.  Remember the Berlin Airlift.  But we seem to have lost our capacity for concerted action, both at home and abroad. 

It seems to me that the United Nations needs a radical makeover.  Its centre of power is based on the way of the world as it was in 1945.  Now, the permanent Security Council comprises the USA, Britain, France, Russia, and China.  It is no coincidence that these are all nuclear powers.  Might is right.  Yet they are in a minority.  Of over 200 nation states, only nine have the bomb.  People who feel themselves to be powerful inevitably develop a sense of entitlement; they tend to throw their weight about.  Look at President Trump.  He thinks it’s okay to touch down on Scottish soil, alight from Airforce One, and lecture us on our wind farms, and immigration policy.  It would be like Keir Starmer going into the Oval Office and telling Trump to fix the US gun laws by cancelling the Second Amendment, then re-establishing the Gulf of Mexico.  I think he would be told to mind his own bleeding business.

Blessed are the peacemakers.  There is a lot of talk just now about NATO members increasing their defence budgets to 3%, and ultimately 5%, of GDP.  The Government is glooming us up seemingly for the imminent prospect of war.  We are to be on a “pre-war” footing.  The trouble with such prophecies is that they tend to be self-fulfilling.  Might it not be better to put all that sovereign wealth into the creation – or rather further development, for it already exists – of a United Nations peacekeeping force?  This would involve, to an extent, the voluntary relinquishing of a degree of sovereignty to an international body, such as it would have the power to identify a world crisis that has become intolerable, and do something about it.         

A month or two ago, whilst dining in the Lion & Unicorn, a friend of mine, who happens to be a dietitian, asked me if I were losing weight and, if so, was I doing it accidentally or deliberately?  I said yes, and assured her that it was quite deliberate; I was not, as far as I knew, suffering from a wasting disease, knock on wood.  My diet, if it can be called that, commenced last September when I was in Krakow.  It was hardly a punishing regimen.  I would take a substantial cooked breakfast in the hotel in the morning, and then walk it off with extensive treks around the Vistula, punctuated by boarding a tethered vessel for a beer, out on deck in the sunlight.  I had started at 76 kg, and it was my ambition to reach 70 kg (12 stone to 11 stone in old money), the weight I was when I was 21 years old.  As I am about 6 feet tall, this represents a drop in Body Mass Index (BMI) from about 23.5 to 21.6.  (My computer gives 22.7 and 20.9, but I think it’s including a factor for ethnicity.)  The BMI is one’s weight in kilograms divided by the square of one’s height in metres.  A BMI between 20 and 25 is regarded as normal.  If above 25, you are overweight; above 30, obese; above 40, morbidly obese.   It’s said the BMI is somewhat old hat; better simply to put a tape measure about one’s girth.

Anyway, this week I achieved target.  I was rather helped by the fact that for the past week I have had a stinking cold.  I lost my appetite, as well as my sense of smell, and taste.  Covid, you ask?  Well, I wondered too.  But the SARS-CoV-2 Antigen Rapid Test was negative.  Appetite suppression is a well-known strategy for achieving weight loss, and many therapies, both medical and surgical, are based upon it.  But I’m not sure whether Big Pharma has turned its baleful eye in the direction of the suppression of the sense of taste.  For the avoidance of any doubt, I’m not advocating the adoption of such a strategy.  What if the sense of taste never came back?  Litigation would ensue.   

Weight loss, or, for that matter, weight gain, is all about thermodynamics.  The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed.  It is a conservation principle.  Your weight will reflect the amount of energy you absorb, that is, your calorific intake, and the amount you burn, simply by living and breathing (the basal metabolic rate), and by exercise.  If you eat more and exercise less, you will gain weight, and if you eat less and exercise more, you will lose it.  No sophisticated dietary theory can gainsay that fact.

But I dare not be smug.  I wouldn’t underestimate for a moment the severe challenges that people who are morbidly obese face, especially when they grapple with their problem.  I’m not, I hope, “fat-ist”.  The most crass and tasteless fat-ist remark ever passed must be, “There was never a fat person came out of Belsen!”  The implication is that the ideal spa for the overweight would be a concentration camp.  (They seem to be all the rage, these days.)  We are much more inclined to accept that eating disorders resulting in BMIs well under 20 are deeply mysterious, and intractable.  They certainly can’t be solved by telling a young lady (or a young gentleman for that matter) to pull herself together and go and eat a Big Mac.  By the same token we should, at least, afford courtesy and compassion to the obese.

Still, I’m a little impatient with our political masters who are trumpeting weight reduction injections as The Next Big Thing.  I’m told half the green benches are occupied by people who take them.  They spend all day in the chamber, in committee rooms, or tearooms, glued to their smart phones and tablets, and they wonder why they are overweight. 

The relationship between thermodynamics and the diet industry is somewhat akin to the relationship between thermodynamics and the dismal science of economics.  In both spheres, we ignore the stark realties of thermodynamics at our peril.  I am convinced that the great crashes in economics that have occurred over the years, the South Sea Bubble, the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression, and more recently the crash of 2008, have resulted from a wilful denial of the laws of thermodynamics.  You imagine that you can create something out of nothing.  Plain Vanilla operations are supplanted by “exotic derivatives”.  You might imagine we would be chastened by the 2008 crash, but on the contrary our denial of the basic laws has moved on to a further level of sophistication.  Now, it seems to me, we are in defiance of the Second Law.  Let me explain.

For as long as natural philosophy and engineering have existed as sciences, cranks have been submitting designs to patent offices, of engines that self-propel indefinitely.  Of course none of them work.  Einstein thought that the Second Law – there is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine – was the most basic law in all physics, and the one least likely to be overturned.  In fact, to date, the Second Law has underpinned not only all the sciences, inorganic and organic, it has provided the foundation for all of our human communities and societies.  The ancient professions are all founded on the Second Law.  We have doctors and nurses because our bodies are falling to bits; we have criminal lawyers because we are corrupt; we have the clergy (at least, thus far) as our souls are mired in iniquity; we have educators because our minds are disordered, of not blank.  Even, perhaps especially, the trades are founded on the second law.  We have roofers and plumbers and joiners because, by the natural order of things, things fall apart.

But look what’s happened.  Many of our institutions, banks, insurance companies, retail outlets, haver attempted to become fully automated.  They are set up as perpetual motion machines.  Every human conundrum can be reduced to a series of drop-down menus, and every human solution can be produced by an algorithm.  The cranks who choose to defy the Second Law have even invaded medicine.  The doctor in your pocket.  Heaven help us.  This is why we spend our lives on the telephone, pressing the key pad and working our way laboriously through the menus; or on hold, listening to Pachelbel’s Canon.  Meanwhile the Fat (sic) Cats who have set up this Dystopia, are lying on the beach, like Alan Rickman’s character in Die Hard, earning 20%.

Life’s not like that.  Every human conundrum is unique.

I’ve always been interested in the Laws of Thermodynamics.  There are actually four of tem – 0, 1, 2, and 3.  It was James Clerk Maxwell who realised, retrospectively, that the notion, largely taken as read, that if say, a thermometer recorded the same temperature in system A and system B, then systems A and B had the same temperature, was actually an a posteriori rather than an a priori proposition.  It had to be proved.  This became the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics.    

The Third Law states that a temperature of absolute zero (0 K or -273 degrees C) can never be achieved, as such a condition of absolute stasis would allow us precisely to measure a particle’s position and velocity, in defiance of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. 

I have this fanciful notion that when populist political leaders measure the world, and pin it down, call it as it is, apparently say what everybody is thinking, and do so  through their own dogmatic lens, they defy Laws 0 and 3.  Bit of a stretcher, I grant.  Enough already.  I’m going for a walk.                    

Letter from America

1946 – 2004

Alistair Cooke

(Allen Lane, 2004)

Wes Streeting, the health secretary for England, has accused – yes I think that’s the right word – accused, Scotland’s First Minister of being “an analogue man in a digital world”.  Apparently he is not up to speed with “the doctor in your pocket”.  He says everybody needs the App.  You can make appointments, both in general practice and in hospital out-patients’.  But wait a minute.  Couldn’t you always do that, simply by making a phone call? 

I was delighted to hear that Mr Swinney is an analogue man.  We must hold on to all that ancient knowledge, skill, and wisdom.  You never know when you may have need of it.       

I thought of the analogue man when I I picked up this bulky tome, Letter from America, (504 pages) in a second hand book shop, and I was pleased to work my way through an anthology covering six decades of American history.  I remember the broadcasts very well, delivered in that urbane, rather patrician mid-Atlantic accent.  It’s extraordinary to think that Alistair Cooke was still broadcasting in his 96^th year.  Terry Wogan, always one for recognising the moment to fold the tent and bow out, thought he should have quit while he was ahead, but I can’t say I detected any diminution in his journalistic powers, and indeed the book backs that up.  The last essay, The Democrats’ Growing Confidence (February 20^th, 2004) is looking forward to the presidential election of that year.  “George Bush,” said John Kerry, “must be driven from the White House, and I’m the man to do it.”  Well, as we know, despite being very well qualified for the presidential role, he never made it.  Al Gore, another well qualified presidential candidate, never made it in 2000.  He missed out by a hanging chad.  Alistair Cooke saw that coming.  Al Gore was very earnest, and very environmentally sound.  He was more adept at giving a lecture than in whipping up enthusiasm at a rally of the faithful.  By contrast, George W. Bush was a guy the American voter wanted to have a beer with.

Some of the essays stand out by virtue of their historic importance – Vietnam, the assassination of JFK, and his brother Bobby, the attempted assassination of President Reagan, Watergate, 9/11…  The essay on the death of Bobby Kennedy (A Bad Night in Los Angeles, 9^th June 1968) is remarkable for the fact that, very unusually, Cooke, himself more a commentator than a roving reporter, was actually there, at the Ambassador Hotel in Wilshire Boulevard, when the sordid event took place.  The on-the-scene account crackles with energy; he could have been a thriller writer. 

Many of the essays are apolitical, and clearly no subject matter is off-limits.  Golf, jazz, the New England fall, Fred Astaire, Chaplin…  He has an insatiable curiosity for people and places.

Well, he couldn’t go on for ever.  And there is something fitting about his bowing out in the first years of the twenty first century.  The fact is, he was describing a way of life, and a culture, that no longer exists.  He was in fact an analogue man, beginning to be aware of the digital age.  He couldn’t have fully known about the enormous effects social media platforms would have on his own profession, although he was clearly aware that there was something afoot.  He had started noticing that the younger generation, intelligent, vivacious people, were not reading books.  Where were they getting their information from?  Online.  But was it peer reviewed? 

I had another nostalgic encounter with the analogue world last week.  I visited the National Museum of Flight at East Fortune and admired the Vulcan, Harrier Jump Jet, Jaguar, Lightning, Comet, 707.  And a Spitfire; I couldn’t see a Hurricane.  But the jewel in the crown was Concorde.  A magnificent feat of engineering, and a thing of great beauty.  Yet clearly space was at a premium.  The cabin is somewhat cramped.  Still, you only had to endure it for about three hours, crossing the Atlantic from London to New York.  And the cockpit is decidedly analogue.  Lots of dials, but no computer screens.  It bespeaks a heroic age, of David Frost commuting to NY twice a week, of the Queen sitting in her favourite seat, 1A, of the great and the good quaffing champagne and flying so high that they can detect the curvature of the earth.  Concorde consumed an enormous amount of aviation fuel, particularly when deploying afterburners to accelerate to Mach 1, and then Mach 2.  I don’t think one’s “carbon foot print” seemed to be such an issue at the time.  New Yorkers just complained about the racket.  It took some time before the US allowed Concorde into its airspace.  They grumbled about noise pollution.  But some people thought they were just jealous of the UK’s and France’s mastery of supersonic flight. 

If Alistair Cooke could fly from London to New York now, would he recognise the country he was landing in?  There is one remarkably prescient statement in Letter from America, from about 40 years ago.  He passed a few remarks about a young up-and-coming New York property tycoon, one Donald Trump.  Apparently he was buying up anything and everything.  Why not, said Cooke, all of America? 

This is an important week for anniversaries, or, more appositely, memorials.  This coming Friday 13^th, for example, commemorates the massacre at Srebrenica thirty years ago, in 1995.  Closer to home, today, July 7^th commemorates the twentieth anniversary of an act of terror in London that came to be known as “7/7”.  Four suicide bombers killed 52 people, and injured many hundred others, on three tube trains and a bus.  “7/7” of course is copy-cat for 9/11, while conveniently dodging the cultural issue of whether the day precedes the month, or vice versa. 

7/7 occurred during a meeting of the G8 at Gleneagles in Perthshire.  I remember it very well because at the time I was doing some work for an organisation that offered teaching and training in pre-hospital care, chiefly to ambulance officers and paramedics.  We were headquartered in Aberuthven (pronounced Ab’ruthven) next door to Auchterarder, whose “lang street” led to the lush golf courses surrounding Gleneagles Hotel.  At the time I was preparing a course for paramedics to be held at the Scottish Ambulance College at Barony Castle, Eddleston, Peebles, but a colleague had been preoccupied for months making contingency plans in the event that the inevitable protests and demonstrations surrounding a G8 summit would result in unrest and, potentially, violence, with resultant injury.  The major hospitals within an hour’s blue-light ambulance trip would be on alert for a potential “major incident”.  Security was very tight.  An enormous fence not dissimilar to that encountered at the perimeter of a concentration camp was constructed round the grounds of the hotel, and even the bona fide attendees of the summit had to muster at Blackford, five miles south of the venue, to be bussed in.    

Well, in the event, there was a major incident, but it took place 450 miles away, in London.  Tony Blair upped sticks and left in a hurry.  The only untoward event occurring at Gleneagles was President Bush falling off his bike, without significant injury, during an early morning ride.  The best laid schemes.  As it turned out, it was our London colleagues in the Headquarters of the British Medical Association at Tavistock Square who found themselves in the midst of a major incident, when a bus was blown up in neighbouring Woburn Place.  I had attended several meetings at BMA House, and could picture the scene vividly. 

The incidents on the bus, and on the London underground, involving the detonation of improvised explosives made out of hydrogen peroxide, were terrorist acts.  Of course, it is a cliché to reiterate the trope that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.  Churchill ordered the wartime SOE to “set Europe ablaze”.  Mrs Thatcher, who thought the African National Congress was a terrorist organisation, had General Pinochet round for afternoon tea. 

So what exactly is terrorism?  I think I first came across the word “terrorist” in a children’s book featuring one Robert Delight Corrigan, by R. B. Maddock.  Corrigan was the son of the owner of a rubber plantation in Malaya at the time of the “emergency”.  In a series of books which as a child I devoured, he kept various wily oriental gangsters in check.  All these books have vanished without trace.  Corrigan has been cancelled.

Terrorists blow up public places, like the shop in The Untouchables Capone has destroyed because the shopkeeper won’t pay up the protection money.  The collateral damage, the death of a child, was unfortunate; or like the Saigon bar in Good morning, Vietnam, from which Adrian Cronauer is rescued because the brother, himself a terrorist, of the beautiful woman Cronauer fancies, happens to like him. 

Terrorism (Chambers) n an organised system of violence and intimidation, esp for political ends; the state of fear and submission caused by this.    

Terrorist (Bloomsbury) a person who uses violence, especially bombing, kidnapping, and assassination, to intimidate others, often for political purposes. 

The Terror (Oxford) the period of the French Revolution between mid-1793 and July 1794 when the ruling Jacobin faction, dominated by Robespierre, ruthlessly executed anyone considered a threat to their regime. 

I include the reference to the guillotine because acts of violence that slip back into history tend to become sanitised, even sentimentalised.  As Milan Kundera says in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “There is an infinite difference between a Robespierre who occurs only once in history and a Robespierre who eternally returns, chopping off French heads.”  The best way to keep the terror of The Terror fresh in the mind is to read Albert Camus’ Reflections on the Guillotine.   

So my question is, does the recent break-in to RAF Brize Norton, with its wanton act of vandalism perpetrated upon two aircraft, constitute an act of terrorism?  Did it, for example involve physical violence against a person, or kidnapping, or assassination?  Did it intimidate anybody to the extent of evoking a sense of terror?

I don’t suggest for a moment that it was not an act of criminality.  I don’t know how much damage is caused by spraying red paint into a jet engine, but I have heard the repairs could cost millions of pounds.  The damage to the state could be considerable.  Mr Putin will certainly note the ease with which one can break into the RAF’s largest airfield.  Those responsible for its security will be embarrassed, to say the least. 

But is this terrorism?  Or is it more akin to the actions of Extinction Rebellion when, for example, they disrupted traffic on the M25?  (Of course, the authorities took a pretty dim view of that, too.)  You could even argue that the Brize Norton activists did the RAF a favour by pointing out the inadequacy – indeed – of their counterterrorism measures.

But I can see why the government has rushed through, with extraordinary rapidity, legislation to proscribe an organisation in the way that they have.  It fits into a prevailing attitude, that we are moving, have already moved, on to a pre-war footing.  Under these circumstances, an attack upon the armed services is a very serious matter.  Like Malaya, we have moved into a state of “emergency”.  In an emergency, the government assumes widespread, sweeping powers.  In an emergency, it becomes possible to govern, not with finesse, with nuance, but with broad brushstrokes.  Hence “Palestine Action” is conflated with “Maniacs Murder Cult” and the “Russian Imperial Movement”.

I’ve visited Brize Norton.  I was down in Oxfordshire, at RAF Abingdon, with the University Air Squadron.  Some of us went over to Brize for the day and I remember a lovely flight in a glider, as well as a lovely chat with the Wing Commander’s daughter.  These were the days.  But back at Abingdon I remember there was heightened security because something – I can’t remember what – had happened.  It was in the early 1970s and it might have had something to do with Northern Ireland. We were all to be on the highest alert, wear uniform at all times on the airfield, carry ID, and if stopped by a member of the RAF regiment, do exactly as were told.  Apparently these guys were very trigger happy. 

Plus ça change.                            

On BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme this morning, Nick Robinson announced that the line judges at Wimbledon have all been made redundant, to be replaced by machines.  With less than ten minutes yet to run, as I write, before Wimbledon starts, I will stick my neck out and predict that this will not go well.  I presume that the men in blazers at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club have concluded that machines perform the task of line judging more accurately and reliably than do we fallible human beings.  But I bet there will be glitches, followed by ructions.  One can point out to a machine, just as to a person, that chalk flew up, and that therefore the machine cannot be taken seriously.  There will be no recourse to Hawk-Eye, because the whole court of arbitration has essentially been taken over by a kind of Cyclops, a Super-Hawk-Eye.  Presumably, in the event of a dispute, overtures will be made to the umpire, seated at the net in the lofty chair; but has it not become inevitable, given our current love affair with Artificial Intelligence, that the umpire itself will become a robot? 

If the aggrieved player insists on picking a fight with the umpire, there remains a final arbitrator and conciliator, a kind of Supreme Court of the Court – the referee.  The referee has traditionally been virtually invisible, only making occasional visits to the court, usually to have a chin wag with the umpire, to talk about the weather.  By a logical extension, the referee too will be a robot, trundling across the grass, like one of these automatic lawn mowers, down to the net.

This is not going to make good television, robots discussing whether or not the ball just nicked the line.  Look at these VAR replays in football and rugby union.  They get played and replayed and viewed from a variety of angles, and still the ref cannot make up his mind.  I suppose the robots will agonise less, because at heart they don’t really care, just as the algorithms assigning school pupils grades during the pandemic didn’t care, not to mention the Horizon computer system with respect to sub-postmasters and mistresses.  We seem to have an absurdly blind faith in the reliability of our technology, despite the fact that our computers keep crashing, our driverless cars will insist on turning right when we ask them to turn left, and our latest space rocket suffers a “rapid unscheduled disassembly” shortly after take-off. 

Then there’s the possibility of a cyber-attack.  What better target, for those wishing to mock, ridicule, and ultimately damage British prestige, than the Jewel in the Crown that is Wimbledon?  The hackers might just be teenage nerds out for a laugh; or they might be ransom malware people out for profit; or they might be foreign antagonists out to cripple our so-called “soft power”.  Errant calls could be so fantastical as to move from the absurd to the surreal; not just line calls, but “let” calls, foot faults, and code violations.  Racquets will be smashed in frustration.  When it starts raining, the Centre Court roof will jam.  Then the hackers’ attention will shift from the courts to Henman Hill, or Murray Mound, or Raducanu Redoubt – whatever it is now called.  The Pimm’s Number One will be spiked, and the strawberries and cream addled.  Ken McCallum and Blaise Metreweli (five and six, respectively), had better get on to it. 

But what on earth is the point of it all?  It’s only two or four guys, or gals, or both, knocking a ball across a net.  It’s just a game.  You may jalouse that I haven’t had a game of tennis since – as it so happens – 1987.  I’m as likely to go to Wimbledon as to Glastonbury.  I’m not knocking it.  Some dear friends of mine are avid enthusiasts and are in SW19 even as I write.  But it does seem to me, not unlike Glastonbury, to have become somewhat overblown.  The great and the good like to be seen in the Royal Box, just as they like to trudge around Worthy Farm, in green designer wellies, in the mud.  That which was once edgy, is now Establishment.  Glastonbury is also in the news this morning because somebody said something intemperate about the Israeli Defence Force.  I thought it was Bob Dylan, but it turns out it was Bob Vylan.  Shows you what I know.  I advanced the opinion in my local shop this morning that they actually said, “Deaf to the IDF”.  That’s how they talk down there, you know, today’s yoof.  But I was shot down in flames.  The Government seems to be highly critical of the BBC for broadcasting the group’s set live.  But then, the Government have always got it in for the BBC.  They always want to keep them in a cowed state.  Whether or not another controversial group, Kneecap, are glad that attention has been diverted from them, I couldn’t say.

But, you may jalouse again, I’m not that exercised.  I don’t care for rap.  That’s just my personal view.  I shouldn’t knock it.  I know for many it is culturally important, and I dare say you could argue that rap is a form of recitative.  I wish rap fans all the luck in the world.  But it’s not my cuppa tea.  It’s even worse than Punk.

God Save the Queen.