jamescalumcampbell

I ran into my good friend Dr Alastair Cameron-Strange the other day in Edinburgh’s New Club and we stopped for a right good blether.  He told me about this strange dream he’d had.  It was a dream about his last day at work as an emergency physician, putatively thirty-five years hence.  “Actually, Jimmy, it was more of a nightmare” – and he described it at some length.  I’ve tried to reconstruct the narrative as best as my memory will allow.        

Midsummer’s Night saw the close of the last day in harness for Emeritus Professor Lord Cameron-Strange, of Trotternish and Te Paki, OM, CH.  As increasingly had become his custom, he had taken a stroll from his highland fastness to a remote copse – the magnificent carpet of bluebells had wilted by now – and the remains of an ancient broch of the Iron Age.  Here within the dilapidated rubble of the double stone walls he would sit; here he would forget for a time the cares of the world, count his blessings, and mutter a prayer of thankfulness for that which he had.  Ich habe genug.  Sometimes, if he forgot to switch off his mobile, he would get a call.

“Alastair where are you?”

“I am at broch.”

And his colleagues would know, save in dire emergency, not to disturb him.  Well, it was twenty minutes to midnight.  Surely they wouldn’t call him now.  He leaned back against the antiquated, mossy dyke, and glanced up at the green canopy over his head.  It was warm and close.  There was a sultry heaviness in the air.  From a distance, he imagined he heard a low rumble of thunder.  Soon there would be a deluge.  He glanced now at his phone – a new one, very smart – and he reflected on the events of this his last day, a day which had turned out be so unusual.

He had hoped to spend the morning in the emergency department at Little France, clearing his desk, prior to a convivial luncheon, courtesy of Boeringer Ingelheim, during which friends and colleagues, and perhaps a few enemies, would slap his back, say a few kind words,  and wish him, hopefully, a long and happy retirement.  But it was not to be.  He got the call from Whitehall, and after all, up until midnight he was still N-MASS, the National Medical Advisor to the Security Services.  He said, with frank irritation, “Can’t the next guy deal with it, whatever it is?  Can’t it wait?”

Apparently, it couldn’t wait.

Abject apologies to his colleagues, a wistful glance at the white table cloth, bedecked with finger-foods, sandwiches and sausage rolls, then another hair-raising ride on HS3, gazing morosely out at the green blur of Lincolnshire.  What did they want of him?  Probably nothing at all.  It would just be another manifestation of the profoundly British obsession with form and process.  The Ship of State was becalmed in the doldrums, and happy to be so.  It was only when the Ship of State felt herself to be under threat, that she could be seen to mobilise with frightening rapidity.

Three hours later he was in the committee room of the anonymous building off Storey’s Gate, staring resentfully at the other twelve members of the Witanagemot.  It occurred to him that none of the original members of this committee, as it was constituted when he had first been seconded, still sat.  He had seen them all out.  And he had never been a committee man.  Fancy that! 

Syrinx, in the chair, called the meeting to order.  “Professor!  Thank you for your prompt attendance.  Another chance for us to wish you well, now that you are hanging up the stethoscope.  We have had a long and fruitful association, have we not?”

“Roller coaster ride for us both I think.”

“How will you spend your time?”

“Lots of aviation, for as long as the eyesight and hearing hold out.”

“Where will you base yourself?”

“Waipapakauri.”

“Ah!  Of course.  Your southern bolthole.  Well I’m sure we all envy you that.”

“Syrinx.  You haven’t summoned me here just to give me another golden handshake.”

“Of course you are right.  We would like you to undertake one final task on behalf of HMG.  It is not an onerous task, and it certainly won’t be time-consuming.  Actually it’s largely ceremonial.  It will only take a second.  Literally.  A leap second.  You are aware that the masters of the universe are adding an extra second on at midnight?  Something to do with the music of the spheres.  Don’t ask me.  I did Greats at Oxford.  But I gather we need to keep the majestic clockwork in kilter.”

“I think I saw something in the papers.”

“Splendid!  Anyway, that is when we would like you to carry out the ceremony.”

“What ceremony?”

“First we must set the scene.  Serendip?”

The Permanent Undersecretary, a slim young man with aquiline features and rimless spectacles, cleared his throat and clasped his hands on the table.  He spoke fluently, without notes.

“So.  The world is facing a combination of challenges that increasingly look to be insurmountable.  We are all aware of them.  For at least forty years the international community has been cognisant of half a dozen disparate threats, and has done its best to combat them.  What we have perhaps been slow to recognise is the synergistic effects of these threats one upon another.  The entire threat to humanity is greater – logarithmically greater – than the sum of the parts.  All the indications are that we have reached a tipping point, un point d’appui if you will, beyond which further attempts to ameliorate a deteriorating situation are, frankly, futile.  This inescapable fact has been brought into sharp relief this morning by the news that the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ms Thunberg, has resigned.”  

“I’m very sorry to hear that.”

“It need hardly surprise you that the critical factor for her, inter alia, has been the sustained rise in average global temperatures by four degrees Celsius.  The opening up of Antarctica to mining and other industrial activity, combined with the exploitation of the North-West passage by shipping, has made it a mathematical certainty that the entire ice pack of Antarctica and Greenland will calve, migrate, and then melt, resulting in a global rise in sea level of approximately 100 metres.  The map of the world will be redrawn, and it will be unrecognisable.   

“This will of necessity lead to our next challenge – the mass migrations of peoples.  A generation ago we were concerned about attempts by, perhaps, one hundred people daily, to cross from North Africa and the Middle East to Europe.  We now face the prospect of hundreds of millions of people on the move in search of higher ground.  It is hardly surprising that there has been a hardening in attitude, even, or perhaps especially, in the liberal democracies of the west toward both economic migrants and seekers of asylum.  Barriers are going up.  Walls are being built.

“With the emphasis on defence and security, the attempt to rid the world of nuclear weapons has long been abandoned.  The nuclear club, which for a considerable period of time was an exclusive club of nine, now has fifty six members.  The nuclear stockpile has quadrupled, and the hardware has become more sophisticated, and deadlier.

“Now that the Amazonian rain forest has ceased to exist, the systematic extermination by Homo sapiens of every other species on the planet has caused crucial disruptions in the food chain which means that food security for even the wealthiest nations can no longer be guaranteed.  The oceans are acidic, and fish stocks are rapidly dwindling.

“The deficit loss in the phenomenon of photosynthesis has now become measurable.  The partial pressure of oxygen in the atmosphere at sea level has fallen below 150 mmHg, and the content of carbon dioxide has risen to 0.05%, which may sound low, but has resulted in a measurable increase in the respiratory rate for all of us. 

“The regular appearance of new viruses with which our immune systems cannot cope, and their equally regular and sometimes rampant evolution to combat our attempts to find effective vaccines, is an ever increasing threat.  In addition, bacteria have rediscovered the virulence they enjoyed during the middle ages, and there is no longer any antibiotic molecule on the market which does not encounter fierce resistance. 

“So… Syrinx, have I left anything out?”

“Serendip, you have left out the elephant in the room, the mastodon in the auditorium.”

“Being?”

“Overpopulation.  We have topped the twelve billion mark.  Gentlemen, we just cannot go on like this.  You see where this is going.  Professor?”

“Spell it out for me.”

“You must know that there is going to be a cull.”

“…”

“Professor.  You know, don’t you, that there is going to be a cull.”

“Yes.”

“The critical point to apprehend is that all of the crises enumerated, all of them, are man-made.  Therefore if we are to find a solution to the predicament in which we find ourselves, we must look to ourselves.  In short, gentlemen, we are the problem.  That is why we have taken the executive decision to diminish the human population of the world through an humane and beneficent agency, rather than passively sit back and await the inevitable carnage that must result from inertia and inactivity.  When the deed is done, the Prime Minister will address the nation from the podium outside No 10, and she will explain that difficult decisions have had to be taken.”

Alastair Cameron-Strange asked, “This cull, how is it to be brought about?” 

“Hmm.  Covid45 afforded us a great opportunity.  Here was a resurgence of the Black Death.  Who would not wish to be protected?  When a viable vaccine became available, who would not wish to avail himself of it?  The mass vaccination programme organised by the WHO and financed by some of the world’s great philanthropists brought about an uptake that far exceeded the projections of our scientific advisors.  It gave us the opportunity to implant CHERF into specified subclasses of the human organism.”

“CHERF?”

“Compound haptoglobin euthanasia receptor factor.  A switch, as it were, which, when activated, will bring about a peaceful and painless demise.”

“Specified subclasses?  You have preordained the cull population.  I wonder, what were your criteria?”

“We used an Australian points system.  Points for, points against.  We used SPLURGE.  It’s a very sophisticated algorithm.  What does the world need?  Esprit de corps.  Zealotry of the highest mould.  What must the world delete?  Feeblemindedness, lack of moral fibre.”

“How is CHERF activated?”

“There is an App.”

“Normally, I find invocation of the spectre of the Führer seldom to be helpful in contemporary public and political discourse, but I must say, Herr Hitler would have been proud of you.”

“Now look here, Professor, there’s no point in being sentimental about this.  If we don’t act now, we have to face the possibility that the planet will become such a toxic and inhospitable environment, that our species might not even survive this century.  We risk extinction.”

“How many people do you propose to cull?”

“1.2 billion.”

“10% of the population.”

“In the first tranche.”

“You envisage further tranches.”

“Computer models have indicated an optimal world population.”

“What is this optimum?”

“Again, 1.2 billion. “

“You intend to exterminate 90% of us.”

“I think exterminate is rather an emotive word.”

“It certainly is.  Why are you telling me this?”

“Because, Lord Cameron-Strange, you are to be afforded a rare and signal honour.  We wish you to activate the App.”

“I see.  Why me?”

“Because it is very important that politicians, and the military, be seen to be removed from the process.  The Cull is not an act of aggression.  On the contrary, the Cull is a public health initiative.  Its implementation must be seen to be firmly in the hands of the medics.  You, Lord Cameron-Strange, if I may make so bold, are now recognised – at least by those with access to the corridors of power – as the greatest medico on the planet.  Oh no – no false modesty, please.  It is simply a fact.  People will accept the necessity to carry this out, if it comes from you.”

“Have you run this by the legislatures of the world’s 209 states?”

“That has not been deemed necessary.  Of course the Security Council of the UN is fully apprised.  But the logistics of this undertaking have been largely taken on by Big Pharma and the Great Tech Giants.  They greatly value your input.”

“I am like the athlete who carries the Olympic flag.”

“Just so.”

“Or perhaps, who lights the eternal Olympic flame.”

“Even more apposite.”

“And how do I carry out this task?”

“Very simply.  Here is a mobile phone.”

It slithered across the mahogany board room table. 

“And here is a telephone number.”  Written on something resembling a credit card.  “You send a text to the number.  ‘Activate CHERF’.  And press ‘send’ precisely at midnight, which will be the inauguration of the leap second.  Simple!”

At this point, the thought processes of Alastair Cameron-Strange were moving rapidly.  Look squeamish, declare any scruples now, and I will never leave this building alive.  Buy time.

“I have a return train ticket this evening to Bella Caledonia.  May I perform this duty from home?”

“Actually we would prefer it.  Go up to Scotland by all means.  We would prefer this initiative not to emanate from London.  Too much colonial baggage.”

“I see.  Well, gentlemen, that seems clear enough.  Thank you for such a frank briefing.”

“That’s the spirit.  We knew we could count on you.  A long and happy retirement!”

And now, here he was, at broch.  It was 11.45, yet, despite the growing heaviness of the atmosphere, not yet completely dark.  There was another grumble of thunder, nearer this time. The torrential downpour could only be minutes away, and the leafy canopy overhanging the ancient Iron Age dwelling afforded scant shelter.  Still, he was glad to be here, at the end of the world. 

He took out his newly acquired phone.  Well, it was a phone, like any other phone.  Why not make a call?  He tapped in the number.

“Hi!”

“Caitlin.  Where are you?”

“KL.”

“Kuala Lumpur?”

“Yes Ally, that KL.”

“What are you doing there?”

“Lying on a beach.  But not for long.  Back to the airport this afternoon.  And back in London tomorrow.  The LSO beckons.  Where are you?”

“I am at broch.”

“You’re always at broch.”

“Caitlin listen to me.  Will you do something for me without asking me why?  Don’t fly to London.  Are you carrying your NZ passport?”    

“Always.”

“Get on the first plane to Auckland.  When you get there, hire a car and drive up to Ninety Mile Beach.  Don’t stop on the way.  Stay in the bach.  If you need to quarantine, the Whanau will keep you in supplies.  Got it?”

“Something’s come up, then?”

“I’ll explain.”

“Are you coming too?”

“As soon as I can.”

“When will that be?”

“Soon.”

“You’re not coming, are you?”

“Caitlin, I can’t explain.  But promise me you will do this thing.”

“I promise.”  That was the great thing about Caitlin.  She was every bit as crazy as ACS.

“Love you.”  He quit the call. 

Five minutes to midnight.  Alastair Cameron Strange carefully removed the SIM card from the mobile.  He dug a hole in the soft loam and buried it deep.  Then he sat back against the stones of the broch’s inner wall and watched as the digital display of the phone crept towards midnight. There was a loud crack of thunder directly overhead.  And the first few heavy drops of rain.  Impassively, he watched the clock.

Five four three two one

Precisely at midnight the pulse of lightning was as brief as the flash of a camera.  In that split second he saw them.  The bronzed, woded, men, women and children, half naked, in tattered scraps of animal skin, sat with him in a circle round the confines of the broch, watching, waiting.        

All Saints Day.  60 years ago today, at the Old Bailey, a jury of nine men and three women found Penguin Books not guilty of offences under the Obscene Publications Act.

I was covertly reading Lady C – the wives and servants edition – under my desk, when I became aware of the diminutive form, at my elbow, in the tired, faded blue pinstripe suit.  Wee Peem glanced at the Penguin on my lap, raised a quizzical eyebrow, and held out his hand.  I bit my lip and handed over the book, thinking, this is the end of the world as I know it.  I will be reported to the highest authority.  The headmaster will come on the blower and announce to the school that I am a filthy fellow.  I will be placed on some kind of register. 

There was a long and electric silence.  The entire class held its breath.  Peem opened the book at random and thoughtfully read a paragraph.  He then intoned:

“…burning out the shames, the deepest, oldest shames, in the most secret places… the same on the Greek vases… the deep, organic shame…”

Peem closed the book, and handed it back.   

A silver lining to the Covid cloud – the cancellation of Halloween.  Actually it was such a foul night that I doubt if anybody would have gone tricking or treating even at the best of times.  (Earlier in the day I had walked up Dumyat at the western end of the Ochils and been nearly blown off my feet.  It certainly blew away a few cobwebs.)  And now, with any luck, Guy Fawkes will also turn out to be a damp squib.  I haven’t yet heard any whizz bangs in my neighbourhood. 

Then Remembrance Sunday promises to be a low-key affair.  And already the politicians and the scientists are united in glooming us up for a blue blue Christmas.  It’s all sheer balsam for the curmudgeon.  So long as there’s bread, never mind the circuses.  I suppose people will do their best to have some kind of virtual midwinter festival.  I’ve frequently heard it said that Covid has allowed the digital world to come into its own and show its worth.  But it seems to the curmudgeon in me that quite the opposite is true.  It is as if Mother Nature has said to us, “So you think it is better to exist virtually than to be living breathing flesh and blood in a living world?  So let it be…”  And then we were inflicted with a pestilence.  We are all castaways on our own arid desert island, of radius two metres, listening to our desert island discs, on Spotify. 

I was driving my car on Halloween when BBC Radio 4 announced the death of Sir Sean Connery.  I confess I had to pull over.  It’s not that long since I raised a glass to him, on his ninetieth birthday on August 25^th.  And now he is gone.  Unaccountably I recalled another sombre car radio announcement from forty years ago.  As a medical student in 1980 I was driving from Edinburgh through to Monklands Hospital in Lanarkshire (it was a paediatric attachment) and I paused in the Meadows to pick up my friend Thor.  As Thor got into the car the radio announced that John Lennon had been murdered.  Now why should I connect the quiet culmination of a long and rich life with the sudden and violent demise of a man of peace who, it seems increasingly to me, had an awful lot still to give to the world? 

The answer lies in the 1960s.  The fact is that the two great phenomena of popular culture in 1960s Britain were Bond, and the Beatles.  That in itself is strange.  Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, was born in 1908, and the Beatles were all born during the Second World War.  They were a generation apart.  Bond was really a creation of the 1950s.  It’s true that Bond books sold well from the start – Fleming wrote one a year – and each successive novel drew increased attention, to the extent that From Russia with Love was one of President Kennedy’s professed ten favourite books.  But it was really the Bond movie franchise that brought Fleming to the world’s attention, and brought his creation global fame.  And this started in 1962 with Dr No, starring Sean Connery.  Ian Fleming was initially dubious about the choice of Connery for the role, but he increasingly came to admire Connery’s interpretation.  He certainly admired the box office success.  It has always struck me that Fleming’s swiftly deteriorating health in the 1960s must have been all the more bitter for him, with the realisation that his literary creation was about to make him a phenomenally rich man.  

Dr No was released on the same day as Love Me Do.  There is nothing in the Bond canon that in any way presages or reflects the Beatles.  The only reference to British pop music comes in Thunderball when Bond takes a taxi ride from a young man who Bond imagines to be a beatnik who admires Tommy Steel.  Bond treats the young man with courtesy but there is no denying the sense of class distinction.  Bond, like his creator, was an old Etonian, albeit briefly.  I rather imagine that that taxi driver would turn out to be wild for the Beatles, but that the Beatles would largely pass James Bond by.  And now Bond 25 (or is it 26?  I confuse it with COP 26) is on ice.  Maybe it will end up going “straight to video”. 

President Trump has called Sean Connery “a great actor and an even greater man.”  He says Sir Sean helped him get planning permission for a “big development” in Scotland.  Something to do with golf, I think.  Trump, Connery, Fleming, Bond, Goldfinger.  All golfers.  Who knows where truth ends and fiction begins?  I wouldn’t like to make a confident prediction of the outcome of the US Presidential election, except to say there will be some kind of muddying of the waters, a hanging chad.    

Disparate thoughts on Margate sands.  “Only connect.”                                            

But my brother Esau is an hairy man –

But I, am a smooth man.

2^nd Kings, 1, 14.

Actually, it isn’t the first verse of the fourteenth chapter of the second book of Kings, except in the immortal Alan Bennett sketch in Beyond the Fringe, in which Bennett mocks the hackneyed tropes and cadences of an Anglican vicar.  I have the original LP, which might be something of a collector’s item, except that the vinyl (shellac?) is so scratched as to make it virtually unplayable.    

Anyway, for the record, I am an hairy man.  I grew my first beard as soon as I left school.  It took a fortnight.  It was the fortnight of the Glasgow Schools First Orchestra’s summer course.  Nobody seemed to mind that this increasingly disreputable-looking vagrant occupied a desk in the viola section.  I think I shaved it off on the eve of the concert performance (Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy Overture Romeo and Juliet, the Bruch G minor Violin Concerto, and Brahms 4). 

I grew it again in the summer following First MB at Edinburgh Med School.  I was staying in a croft in Benbecula on the Outer Hebrides, building a fence, helping the farmer next door to bury dead sheep, and walking Jet, our beloved family dog, along a vast and beautiful west coast beach.  Why would you bother to shave?  I was a composite of Charles Darwin, James Clerk-Maxwell, and Brahms.  I don’t wonder that eighteenth century gentlemen allowed their beards to burgeon so exuberantly.  Mind you, you would have thought the gentler sex might have objected.  Maybe this is why Brahms and Clara Schumann never got together.  “Johannes!  Last night’s dinner’s buried somewhere in there!  Wo ist deine Rasierklinge?”  I dare say Gillette, Wilkinson, et al, were yet to perfect an adequate blade.  Indeed, I can remember as a youth frequently shaving of a morning and then coming down to breakfast, my face a mosaic of bloodied Kleenex fragments.  The best a man can get.  Fortunately, blade technology has moved on.          

My Benbecula beard took me through medical school.  In these days, medical students were kept away from patients until they had absorbed, and regurgitated, a great splurge of factual material relating to the medical sciences.  Then we were awarded a BSc.  So it was perfectly possible for medical students only to find during the fourth year of the course that they didn’t actually like patients.  Most medical schools around the world now offer an “integrated” course in which students are exposed early on to the reality of clinical life, but I still have a notion that Edinburgh, conservative as she is, retains much of the old model.  As it happens, the medical faculty made some radical changes to the undergraduate curriculum while I was in the thick of it.  I wrote a piece for the Royal Medical Society rag, Res Medica, arguing that the changes were cosmetic and that nothing of significance had changed at all.  A sub-Dean took me aside and remarked, with apparent good humour, “Campbell, you will go far, so long as you don’t go too far.”  And as I was about to start pacing the wards, and looked like Rasputin, I was also gently prompted to shave the beard off.  I think I compromised and acquired an efficient beard trimmer such that, rather than Rasputin, I looked like an international terrorist.  I went off on my medical elective to Papua New Guinea and the beard flourished once more.  I have a picture of myself climbing up a Pandanus tree dressed only in shorts, looking so hirsute as to be, well, really quite at home in that environment. 

For graduating MB ChB, I decided to shave.  One evening I announced to the occupants of the Royal Medical Society library that I was retiring to the rest room to carry out the act.  When I returned, clean-shaven, everybody screamed and clutched their throat as if they’d been confronted by a monster – perhaps they were – and collapsed to the floor. 

I can’t quite remember when the beard returned, but it was certainly there for the fifteen years, give or take, I spent in the Antipodes.  I was bearded during the 11 years I spent in Middlemore Hospital Emergency Department, South Auckland.  Incidentally, there is currently a move afoot to rename the Emergency Department Te Tari Rongoaa Ohorere.

The Place of Sudden Medicine.

Isn’t that beautiful?

One morning, I woke up and realised I needed to go home.  I was Senior Lecturer in Emergency Medicine in the University of Auckland Medical School, I had a circle of good friends, I loved to fly light aircraft out of Ardmore just south of Auckland, and I lived in Devonport on Auckland’s beautiful north shore.  Why would I want to give any of that up?  I didn’t know why then, and I don’t know why now. 

But now here’s the thing.  I flew from Auckland to London via Singapore.  I stopped off at the Sheraton Towers, 39 Scott Road, Singapore, and I shaved my beard off.  The man who left Scott Road was unrecognisable – a reincarnation of Doctor Who.  I can dress it up as a kind of compulsion for reinvention, but I know it is symbolic of something that is at heart destructive.  For some reason, the idea of building a coherent life has been utterly alien to me. 

The beard has not since reappeared.  And yet I can sense it is just there.  Personally, I blame Covid.  Every morning I get up and go to my local shop for the newspapers.  I wear a mask, so, no need to shave.  By the same token, nobody can cross my door, so why bother to vacuum?  Standards are slipping.  And for sure, the hirsutism threatens to be ever more rampant.  Why is it that there is no effective and viable nasal hair trimmer on the market?  The ears get ever hairier.  Interestingly enough, aside from the assignation of male gender, the hairy ear is the only other piece of genetic information the Y chromosome carries.  What is that all about? 

And the stubble is getting ever stubblier.  Stubble encroaches so close to one’s mouth that I dread I will soon need to shave my lips.   Then there are the malars – the cheek bones.     

I’m turning into a werewolf.        

In A Tale of Two Cities, when, in 1789, the world was going to hell in a hand cart – or a tumbril – Lucy Manette’s father grew distractible, turned his back on the world, and returned to his cobbler’s last.  Having just finished David Attenborough’s sobering A Life on Our Planet (Witness Books, 2020), simultaneous with Ian McEwan’s dystopian novella The Cockroach (Jonathan Cape, 2019) a barely disguised critique of the current Westminster government cast as a Kafkaesque Die Verwandlung in reverse, I fear we are once again living in interesting times, and feel inclined to turn to my own version of the cobbler’s last, crosswords.  I am like King Lear, unable to perceive or prevent an impending tragedy, saying to Cordelia,

So we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too –

Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out…

I will be like a prisoner in a concentration camp who gives up bartering to survive, and starts to smoke his own cigarettes. 

Atop Ben Gullipen, on a day of great stillness, the Trossachs were radiant in their golden autumn livery.  I said to my companion, Harpoonata Venture (not her real name), from New York, “Let me pose you a ‘found’ clue.”

“What is a ‘found’ clue?”

“It is a clue that is discovered rather than invented.  Normally the cruciverbalist has the solution and composes a clue.  In the case of a ‘found’ clue, the clue already exists, and the cruciverbalist, like the puzzle solver, must seek the solution to it.”

“I’m not sure I follow, but go ahead.”

“Short back and sides, and a little off the top (8).”

“Bouffant.”

“Nope.”

“Crew cut.”

“Not enough letters.  Incidentally, the crew cut was what wrecked Elvis’ career.  The draft was Delilah to his Samson.  By the time he touched down at Prestwick, on his way back from Germany, Beatlemania was just round the corner, and he was yesterday’s man.”     

“Semi-crew.”

“Not semi-crew.  You won’t remember the ‘semi crew and friction’.  You came out of the barber’s looking as if you’d seen a ghost, or suffered an electric shock.”

 “Mullet.”

“Mullet is the antithesis to a short back and sides.”

“Beehive.”

“Get off the hair-do theme and think laterally.”

“’Hair-do’?  Is that what you have when you get a new ‘outfit’?  I give in.”

“Pinnacle.”

“What?”

“Pinnacle.  You see, ‘top’ is the definition.  ‘Short back’ is pin.  A short is a dram, or a nip.  Nip back is pin.  NACL is ‘sides’.”

“Why?”

“Sides as in teams.  National Australian Cricket League.”

“Oh, come on!”

“Oh yes.  The Big Bash League.  The Adelaide Strikers, Brisbane Heat, Hobart Hurricanes, Melbourne Renegades, Perth Scorchers, Sydney Sixers…”

“These household names.”

“And to finish, ‘a little off the’ is e.  Ergo, Pinnacle.”

“That’s really terrible.  Your pinnacle is inaccessible.  Do you lie awake at night dreaming this stuff up?”

“Better than contemplating the fact that Homo sapiens is systematically exterminating every other species on the planet.”

“Deliberately?”

“I think the word was ‘systematically’.  Mr Johnson and Monsieur Barnier carry on squabbling – or worse, have given up squabbling – about fish, while the fish are suffocating under a trillion tonnes of plastic.  Talk about rearranging the deckchairs.  I saw Greta on the telly the other night.  She looked really tired.  She said, ‘I should be at school.  I shouldn’t have to be doing this stuff.’  If Greta gives up, we’re all doomed.”

“If Greta gives up, and starts doing crossword puzzles like you?  I don’t think Sir David has given up.  I seem to recall the subtitle to his books is, ‘My witness statement and a vision for the future.’”

“True.  He thinks biodiversity is key.  We must rewild the planet.”

“There you go.  Get rewilding.  Take heart.  After all, Jacinda has just won a landslide.  Aren’t the colors (sic) of the Fall stunning?” 

Autumn is the most poignant of the seasons.  It makes me think of Kurt Weill singing “Sing low”, accompanying himself on the piano.  Everything ends, too soon!  Or his September Song.  September… November…  Or of Eva Cassidy singing Autumn Leaves.  There is a vulnerability in her voice which seems – albeit with hindsight – to be an intimation of mortality.  Feuilles Mortes.  Debussy’s second prelude from the second book.  Or Robert Donat reciting Keats’ Ode to Autumn.  That note of wistfulness in his voice –

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.                 

Last Tuesday, a strange encounter.  As I was walking through a retail park in a city near where I live a car pulled up beside me.  I just assumed the driver wanted directions.  He said, “Can you help please?  I from Sorrento.  I fly into Manchester this morning.  I hire this car.”  (He actually showed me the documentation of the hire contract.)  “I drive up to visit my surgeon, Mr MacDonald.  He replace my hip.  I have for him this gift.”  He gestured to a substantial package on the back seat of the car.  “But I discover Mr MacDonald has retired to Portugal.  I see you are of his height and build.  Will you please accept this gift?”

“Whoa!”  I held up my hand.  “You don’t need to do that!  But I wish you well.”

Without demur, he said, “Okay”, and drove on, for all I know, to search for somebody else of similar height and build.

What was that?

The following day, I was at the check-out in Sainsbury’s.  The young lady ahead of me, very attractive, if I may say so, despite, or perhaps because of, the mask (and may I indeed any longer say so? – I have no idea), was conducting a very substantial shop.  At the end of the transaction she turned to me and said, “Do you want my Nectar points?”

“What?”

“Put them on your card if you like.  I don’t have a card.  Never bother with that stuff.”

“Whoa!”  I held up my hand.  “You don’t need to do that!”

“It’s a £200 shop.”

“So why not get a Nectar card?”   We chatted amiably, and after she had gone I said to the check-out girl (the French say “la beepeuse”) “That’s the best offer I’ve had all day.”

“You should have taken it.”

It’s funny.  When I was teaching medical students and junior doctors in New Zealand, I always advised them to take advantage of the opportunity to be a Good Samaritan.  I have lost count of the number of times, as a passenger on an airline, I heard the announcement over the public address system, “Is there a doctor on board?”  I always owned up.  The opportunities were immense.  I don’t mean that if you helped out, they would give you a take-your-pick option out of Duty Free, and bump you up to First Class, or even, pre 9/11, up to the cockpit (though all of that was invariably true), but it was chiefly the chance to enter somebody’s life in a very unusual, indeed a unique way, and also for a time to experience something of the fellowship of the aircrew and cabin crew.  Magical.  Of course there was an element of risk.  If you volunteered, you were taking on a duty of care.  If it all went pear-shaped, well, you did your best, but you still might have a case to answer.  Still, in the final SWOT analysis, if you ask me, the opportunities outweighed the threats.  And as the beautiful Keet from Leyden once said to me, “What is life without chances?”  I can only think of one occasion when I didn’t immediately respond to the call.  I was at Auckland International Airport, seeing off a friend very dear to me.  We had ten minutes.  Of course the call would come just then.  Is there a doctor in the house?  I said, “For once, somebody else can go.”  So we had our ten minutes and then she passed through into International Departures.  But the call came again, and this time I responded.  Thus I too was conducted through International Departures to the very flight my dear friend was boarding, practised the medicine, and had a chance to say goodbye once more.      

When we think of the parable of the Good Samaritan, we ask ourselves whether we would be that Samaritan, who helped, or the Priest or the Levite, who passed by on the other side.  Why don’t we ask ourselves if we would be the man half-dead in the gutter?  Even when you’re down and out, it takes a certain grace to accept help.  Why should I feel lofty about delivering aid, and deeply suspicious about an offer of largesse?  Somebody hands me a gift and I think, “This is odd!  What’s the hidden agenda?  What’s the scam?”   

I’m not sure.  Being a little out of practice, I’m not even sure I would so readily rush to the aid of the patient in distress, fearful I would do more harm than good.  I was walking round the Milngavie Reservoir just north of Glasgow today and I saw a very overweight middle-aged man running with his dog up a steep grassy slope, and I thought, “Please don’t collapse!”  He didn’t. 

But still I think, never turn your back on an opportunity.  As that late great octogenarian John Lennon once said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”                       

David Hume devotes a chapter of An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding to miracles.  It is hardly surprising that he is sceptical; he doesn’t believe a miracle has ever occurred.  He lays out an argument in support of this.

His argument is very modern.  It rests on the idea of probability.  If somebody informs you that he has witnessed a miracle, say the resurrection of a dead person, is it more likely that such a miracle has occurred, or that the narrator has either been deceived, or is trying to deceive you?  You might say that Hume is a Doubting Thomas.  Thomas needed to see the thing for himself.  He could have been a role model for enlightened man, in his championship of Doubt as a mainstay of scientific enquiry.   

Hume defines a miracle as “a violation of the laws of nature”, and further, as “a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent”.  These are all-encompassing definitions which no doubt suit Hume’s purpose, although it seems to me that the definition of a miracle should be narrower.  A miracle has to be an intervention that is benign, at least to somebody.  When Uri Geller exerts some mysterious force to bend spoons, we may say he performs magic, but even supposing we thought the magic was in some sense “real”, we would stop short of calling it a miracle.  When the Deity elects to submerge the Egyptian army in the Red Sea, this is an act of providence for the Israelites.  If nobody benefited, we would hesitate to call such an act a miracle, but rather an outburst of bad temper. 

Miracles, such as they are recorded, appear to be rare events.  Of course, Hume would say vanishingly rare.  Hume draws attention to the fact that they seem to belong to history, and do not occur in the present day.  They also seem to occur in remote locations.  Right enough, occasionally one hears reports of teenage girls performing prodigious feats in some remote village in the Andes.  The Roman Catholic Church despatches a team of cardinals to investigate.  Most of us put this sort of thing down to some kind of collective hysteria, no doubt because we have all read our Hume and are therefore enlightened. 

But here is a thought experiment.  Imagine you inhabit a tiny and obscure corner of the universe in which miracles are, in fact, quite commonplace.  They happen all the time.  Would you recognise them as miracles?  Say that you incur an injury; several injuries if you like.  A mechanical breakdown.  We will exemplify this by analogy.  As you park your car on the street outside your house one evening, you note you are running on empty, and a dashboard hazard light warns you the car is low on oil.  On leaving the car you note the front nearside bumper has been stoved in, there’s a gash in the paint work, and you have two flat tyres.  Drat!  Yet sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.  You will phone the garage in the morning.

Next day, you go out to find a panel beater must have been at work in the night for the bumper is whole, paintwork restored, tyres inflated.  The fuel tank is replenished and the dipstick shows a superabundance of oil.  The windscreen has been washed for good measure.  So what do you do?  You just shrug, get into the car, and drive off.  You don’t think twice about it because it happens all the time.

Mind you, sooner or later there will be a terminal event.  Even a Volvo doesn’t last for ever.  But look what happens.  You get up one morning to find the old decrepit jalopy has gone and has been replaced by a spanking gorgeous brand new model. 

But this is all perfectly commonplace.  The laws of physics are the same everywhere, and we are made of stardust, and the universe is so unimaginably vast that something like this must be going on elsewhere.  So we train our telescopes on deep space in the search for self-repairing and self-generating Volvos, but we can’t seem to find any.  The universe is certainly a fascinating and indeed a very frightening place, but it has to be said nothing out there is remotely as interesting as that which takes place in our own obscure corner.  If there is love or laughter or sympathy or poignancy out there, such instances of these remain remarkably coy.    

Hume has another name for a miracle: a “prodigy”.  We tend to use the word for a particular sort of miracle – a person whose gift is so spectacular that it seems to us to be God-given.  It is beyond comprehension, miraculous.  Mozart was a prodigy.  I wonder if Hume got the chance to hear some of his music.  Maybe Hume was just looking for miracles in the wrong place.  The Jupiter Symphony makes any stunt like turning water into wine rather tawdry.

When I was an emergency physician, I lost count of the number of times the paramedics would bring in a survivor from a road crash.  They would be white-faced at what they had witnessed.  “You should see the wreckage.  Carnage!  Honestly doc, it’s a miracle anybody got out of there alive!”

Maybe it was. 

From time to time I get a phone call in the evening from a charming young lady who is an undergraduate of Edinburgh University.  As soon as she asks me if I have fond memories of my own time at the university, I know that she has called me up on behalf of the Alma Mater, to be quite frank, in order to beg.  I’m not at all sure that I approve of the university recruiting undergraduates to devote an evening to the acquisition of funds in order to swell her coffers.  “Not at all sure” I say?  Confound the circumlocution of the litotes tradition.  I think it’s meretricious and grotesque. 

But I don’t say this to the young lady.  At least I haven’t, thus far.  After all, why shoot the messenger?  In fact I usually cough up.  Mind you I baulked last time when she asked me for my credit card details.  I said, “Well that’s not going to work, is it?  With respect, I don’t actually know that you are who you say you are.”  Telephone scams are growing increasingly sophisticated.  I asked her to arrange for the university to write to me by Royal Mail, and I promised to send a cheque by return.  And that is how the transaction was concluded.

However, next time she phones, I’m going to decline to contribute, and I’m going to ask her to tell her supervisors that when the university decided to change the name of the David Hume Tower to “40 George Square”, I decided to divert my charitable giving to another university of which I am an alumnus, the University of Glasgow.

Ouch.

I couldn’t believe it. I actually went into Edinburgh and to the building in question, and sure enough, the plaque by the door read “40 George Square”.  I took a photograph.  Le Bon David has been cancelled.  He has been “disappeared”.  The David Hume Tower is like the character Syme in Orwell’s 1984.  The David Hume Tower no longer exists.  The David Hume Tower has never existed.

The building itself, it has to be said, is something of a carbuncle.  The old George Square must have been beautiful before the high rise monstrosities went up.  Bernard Levin writes scathingly about this in Conducted Tour (Jonathan Cape, 1981).  The BBC commissioned him to tour the great music festivals of the world and describe them.  The Edinburgh Festival is covered in the chapter “The Ghost in George Square”.  Levin went to the Edinburgh Festival at least twenty times from its inception in 1947.  In that year, when he was a teenager, he stayed in George Square.  He writes of this time with great nostalgia.  Edinburgh was his favourite city in the world.  But he is not uncritical.  (There goes that litotes again.  He is critical, dammit.) 

Three sides of the square have been torn down, their eighteenth-century handsomeness being replaced by huge blocks of such brutal and lifeless architectural nastiness that even London… can scarcely match them…  Why are universities such abominable barbarians?

I wonder what Bernard Levin – a journalist never shy to express an opinion with passion – would have made of the cancellation of David Hume?   

It’s not the first time David Hume has been snubbed by the university.  He was denied the Professorship in Moral Philosophy, chiefly because his scepticism, particularly with respect to religion, was held to be outrageous.  No doubt he accepted the rejection with a calm mind.  Ever since his Treatise of Human Nature “fell dead-born from the press”, he endured a lifetime of disappointments, but chose to retain a happy disposition and to plough his own intellectual furrow.  Nowadays, along with Immanuel Kant, he is regarded as one of the two great philosophers of the eighteenth century.  But it just so happens that he passed a remark which in his own time would scarcely have raised an eyebrow, to the effect that he considered one race of men to be intellectually superior to another.  Ergo, he is a monster.

We look back on bygone ages and recognise that our ancestors had blind spots.  When our descendants look back upon us, what will be ours? 

We live in the age of the Pharisee.  I recall that Our Lord, who had plenty of time for corrupt tax collectors, prostitutes, and murderers, had no time at all for Pharisees.

It crossed my mind to do a bit of cancellation myself.  Whom to disappear?  Edinburgh University?  Pharisees generally?  No.  I’m going to take a leaf out of David Hume’s book.  I read in today’s newspaper that the hashtag RIPJKRowling is cancelling Ms Rowling, so far as I can see, because she denoted people who menstruate as “women”.  Much of this sort of persecution – most of it – takes place on social media.  Actually Hume got the same – a barrage of hostile criticism.  He simply ignored it.  He never replied.  That’s what to do.  Cancel social media.  Just log off.                   

All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. 

Leo Tolstoy

You may recognise the urbane, world-weary tone, the ennui that is on the edge of cynicism.  This is the opening sentence to Anna Karenina.

But you know, it’s quite untrue; in fact it is the direct opposite to the truth.  Happy people enjoy and share their own unique happiness.  It is misery that is the great leveller.

I must share with you an example of the uniqueness of happiness.  I had dinner with some very dear friends of mine last week, in Inverleith, by the Edinburgh Botanical Garden.  Gerald Lamont used to be a very serious-minded medical student with a sombre view of human nature (we used to call him Jeremiah Lamentations), but then he had the great good fortune to marry the gorgeous Egyptologist Maggie (like Jerry and Margo from the ancient BBC sitcom The Good Life) and, as somebody said about Paroles (or was it Bertram?) in Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well, he was “dismissed to happiness”.  Now he can walk from his house past Fettes College to the Western General in fifteen minutes, tend the sick and needy, and return home, reliably, to domestic bliss.  Gerry and Maggie have two daughters of great charm and vivacity, Elizabeth and Barbara.  Elizabeth is a medical student and Barbara is still at school.  Barbara is a harpist.  Barbara will break many hearts.  I resist the temptation to advise her not to follow in her sister’s footsteps.  Medicine is a noble calling, but if you are born blessed with an artistic talent, is it not a sin to neglect it?  But I keep my mouth shut.  None of my business. 

Who else was there?  Three waifs from the musical world (and is there anything more waif-like, these days, than the inhabitants of the musical world?), Josephine, flute, Marcus, hautbois, and Philip, bassoon.   Party of eight.  We dined right royally, and moved from the dining room to the living room for coffee.  Barbara said, “Let’s play Blurbs!”

“Blurbs?”

“It’s our invented game.  We need to patent it.”

“Just one rubber, Barbara,” warned her mother.

Rubber of Blurbs?

“Dr Campbell might not be as enthusiastic as you.”

“That’s all right.  He can be Browser.”

Browser?  I said, “What do I need to do?”

“Imagine you go into a bookshop.  Waterstones or Blackwell’s.  You are looking for a piece of fiction, hot off the press.  You search for a title that catches the eye, and you take the book off the shelf and read the blurb.  All you need to do is supply the title, and the rest of us supply the blurb.  We can have three teams of two.  We compose a blurb to fit the title.  Team members alternate, clause by clause, to supply the blurb.  At the end, you will have browsed three books.  The winning team is the one whose blurb is on the cover of the book you choose to buy.  Dad can be adjudicator.”

“Strict rules of Blurbs?” said Gerry.

“Definitely.  Proper names can be stand-alone, clauses may be principal or subordinate, adjectival phrases are permitted.”

I said, “I’ll pick it up as I go along.”

“If I’m the ref,” said father, “Elizabeth and Barbara cannot be on the same team.  They’re too good.  Lizzie you go with Jo, Barbara with Marcus, Mags with Philip.  All set?  I warn you, James, you’d better make your titles imaginative.”

Barbara sat on the carpet in the full Lotus position, rocking gently to and fro.  “Begin.”

“The Piano-Tuner of Punta del Este.”

“Great title!”

“Lizzie and Jo.”

It was so rapid fire that I have difficulty reconstructing the narrative.  But I will do my best. 

“Just another casual murder at the bottom of the world…

“…random, senseless, and in some ways inept…

“…yet there were clues…

“…subtle, barely visible…

“…barely, audible…

“…barely tactile…

“…yet taken together…

“…adding towards a sum greater than the parts…

“…for somebody who could join the dots…

“…and that somebody just might be…

“Mike Fist.”

There was a round of applause.

“Mike Fist?  Is he the piano tuner?  I was looking for a manual on how to look after my Bluthner.  These tuners have become so expensive!” 

“Well, if the book’s not what you expected, you don’t need to buy it.  Next up!”

“How many rickshaws are in Milton Keynes?”

“Niente,” volunteered Maggie. 

“Mags and Philip.”

“Before you begin,” I said, “I’d better warn you I never buy a book whose title has been concocted by somebody sticking a pin at random into a dictionary.”

“Then give us another title,” said Philip, in a bass voice, melodious as a bassoon.

“A Load of Old Codswallop.”

“I think I’ve read that.”

“Really?  All right, I’ll keep it brief.  Junk.”

“When Pippa Graz-Brise-Norton told her friends…

“…she was going to circumnavigate the globe solo in a Singaporean fishing boat…

“…they did their best to commit her to the local psychiatric facility…

“…yet she persevered…

“…Changi to Raffles in 256 days…

“…in aid of Dysmorphic Discombobulation Syndrome (DDS)…

“…a condition with devastating effects…

“…whose reality she passionately champions…

“…despite the obduracy of the medical profession…

“…and whose sinister psychological sequelae…

“…finally drives Pippa to render a confession…

“…of astonishing candour, and generosity of heart.”

I said, “Blimey!”

“Next up.  Barbara and Marcus.”

“Story’s Endit, Pal.”

“He was lying in a gutter on St Vincent Street…”

I said, “Hang on, this sounds awfully like Punta del Este transported to 55 degrees north.  Can we start again?”

“’Kay.”

I said, mischievously, e con malicia, “The Blurb”.

“K. walked into the bookshop and chose a book at random…

“…entitled The Blurb.

“He read the blurb.

“It occurred to K. that if the substance of the book was itself a blurb…

“…then it must refer to another blurb…

“…presumably in another tome, which, in turn…

“…must allude to a further blurb, and that therefore…

“…K. was in a hall of mirrors that vanished off to infinity.  So…

“…should K. venture further into the shop?”

“Solipsistic nightmare,” I remarked.  “Wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole.  I’m going for The Piano Tuner of Tierra del Fuego.”

“Punta del Este,” said Barbara.  “But that’s just cliché.”

“So I’ll buy the cliché.  Congratulations to Lizzie and Jo.”

That night I slept heavily.

The following day I found myself on Princes Street and paused before a bookshop I had not previously noticed.  Blandings.  It was a substantial property on several storeys, and the curvaceous, rather Dickensian windows made up of multiple small panes revealed an attractive display of the latest publications.  I ventured inside.  Where to begin?

The titles of the previous evening remained vivid in my memory.  The blurbs had been so eloquently rendered that I had to believe they had some reality beyond will-o’-the-wisp imagination.  I approached the young lady at the checkout.

“Yes?”

Why is it that booksellers, like librarians, seem to resent us, their clients?  Is it that they suspect we are all mendicants come in, briefly, to escape the elements?

“I’m looking for a book entitled The Piano Tuner of Punta del Este.”

“Who is the author?”

“I don’t know.”

“Publisher?”

“I don’t know.  I’m sorry.  It’s a title I heard last night at my book club.”

She typed rapidly and frowned at the computer screen.  “Can’t see it on the system.  I’ve got How to keep your clavier well-tempered.  A piano tuner’s guide.”

“That’s not it.  Could you try another one?  Junk.  I think it’s a kind of travelogue and inspirational self-help book.”

“Author and publisher?”

“Sorry.”

“I’ve got Junk: How to Declutter.”

“No.  Would you mind trying one last one?”

She looked at me, wondering if I had some weird personality disorder and relished playing bizarre practical jokes on total strangers.  I remembered a sketch by “The Two Ronnies”, when Mr Barker wound up Mr Corbett in a hardware store.  I said, “The Blurb.”

She sighed.  “Author?”

Then I had an inspiration.  I remembered ‘K’.  “Franz Kafka.”

“Publisher?”

“Everyman.”

Sher typed rapidly.  “Here it is.  Der Klappentext.  Berlin: Verlag Die Schmiede, 1927.  We’ve got it in store.  You’ll find it downstairs.  In the basement.”

I was completely thunderstruck.  “Thank you very much.”  I glanced at the wide staircase with its elegant dark wood balustrade.  I turned for the exit, and Princes Street.  I became aware that the other occupants of the shop had formed a phalanx between me and the door.  I was reminded of the final scene in Maeterlinck’s Pélleas et Melisande.  It was then that I realised that the other occupants of the shop were not fellow browsers, but were all employees.  I was the only customer.  A gentleman in a frock coat with a hideous smile and very bad teeth said to me, “My name is Moser.  I am the manager of Blandings.  You must descend to retrieve your book.”

“I’ve changed my mind.  I wish to leave.”

“That is not possible.”

“Are you telling me that you forbid it?”

“Not at all.  I am telling you that for the man in the street, the man, now, in Princes Street, there is no such shop as Blandings.  Blandings, Dr Campbell, has been created solely for you, and now that you have come into its precinct, no further customer can enter, since Blandings no longer exists for him, just as Princes Street no longer exists, for you.”              

For some years now I’ve been resisting the pressure to acquire a smart meter to monitor my electricity usage.  Won’t one form of electronic surveillance just lead to another?  It’s a snoopers’ charter I tell you!  But I finally succumbed to the persuasiveness of the electricity board – “Dr Campbell, traditional meter reading is being phased out.  Your smart meter is ready to be fitted.  Please choose one of the following times at your convenience…”  

I have to say they were very good.  They came on time and the whole thing only took about half an hour.  It has been salutary to monitor my energy usage.  It is reassuring to wake in the morning, glance at the monitor, and see the dial at zero, despite the fact that the fridge, the broadband hub, and the phone are all ticking away.  I put on a few lights and the usage goes up to tuppence an hour.  I sing a ditty from Mary Poppins – “Tuppence, tuppence, tuppence an hour.”  Then I put the kettle on.  Good grief! 

The fact is, the smart meter has turned me into a miser.  I sit, like Scrooge, in a greatcoat and three jumpers, with the lights out.  And I don’t have gas.  Now electricity, per kilowatt hour, is about six times as expensive as gas.  How can that be?  A friend of mine has her own personal windmill and sells electricity to the national grid.  She watches the vanes go round and says, “Kerching, kerching.”  Yet I’m glad I don’t have gas.  I think we should leave the fossil fuels under the seabed.  Spend a bit more and save the planet.  It’s only money.  On Saturday evening I allowed myself the luxury of watching The Last Night of the Proms.  Two hours of music for a groat.    

It occurs to me that its 125^th outing, on Saturday, really was The Last Night of the Proms.  Nothing lasts for ever.

It was a lovely concert, if, for obvious reasons, ill-attended.  The BBC Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Dalia Stasevska, and they were joined by South African soprano Golda Schutz, who sang the aria Deh vieni, non tardar from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, Richard Strauss’ Morgen!, Night Waltz; ‘The Glamorous Life’ from Stephen Sondheim’s A little night Music, and, from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, You’ll Never Walk Alone.  Magnificent voice.

Lisa Batiashuli was due to play Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending but unfortunately she was indisposed.  The remarkable Nicola Benedetti stepped in at short notice.  She has previously played The Lark at a Prom, and indeed she has previously played (Max Bruch) on the last night, so she was right at home.  Wonderful. 

I greatly enjoyed the modern short pieces – Andrea Tarrodi’s Solus, and Errollyn Wallen’s Jerusalem – over clouded hills, a BBC commission and world premiere, whose dissident take on a cherished anthem perhaps served as a reminder that, on this night, everything could not be as it once was.  There was a truncated whistle stop tour of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.  The piper playing outside Dundee’s V & A with the backdrop of the Tay Bridge was extraordinarily good.    

So we moved on to the area of controversy – whether or not to celebrate Britain’s imperialist past.  Actually the controversy appeared to evaporate.  Thomas Arne’s Rule Britannia was given an “authentic” rendition by the BBC singers, which turned it into a museum piece.  Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No 1 was similarly pared down, and Parry’s Jerusalem was in its composer’s original form, with organ accompaniment.  Benjamin Britten’s version of the National Anthem is always arresting.  Auld Lang Syne was not sung.  Maybe the absence of an audience made it impossible. 

Splendid concert, spoiled by some naff production.  I could understand cutting to a scene from Wiltshire during The Lark, but the Old Man of Storr?  Nothing could be less evocative of Skye’s wild Trotternish silhouette, and the terrifying buttresses of the Quairang, than RVW in his most pastoral mood.  Maybe the stark recognition of that grinding, forced juxtaposition is the reason why Saturday night might have been the last hurrah.  I just can’t see 6,000 souls in September 2021 packing the Royal Albert Hall to the rafters and waving Union flags.  As I write, Westminster is about to debate whether or not Her Majesty’s Government should break the law in a specific and limited way.  Sir John Major and Tony Blair, in the Sunday Times, urged Parliament to defeat the government.  Good luck with that.

There are some things you can’t do in a specific and limited way, like falling in love, falling pregnant, committing murder, succumbing to Botulinum toxin.  (“I’ve got a touch of Botulism!”)  Also, there are some circles you cannot square.  Actually there are no circles you can square.  Try as you might, you can’t leave the European Union and then pretend that a border isn’t going to be created, somewhere.  I have an idea that Mr Blair might be able to say once more, “The kaleidoscope has been shaken.”  Where will we all be a year from now?  So many imponderables: constitutional issues, Brexit, global warming, pollution, mass migration of peoples, mass species extinction, Covid.  I can’t see the BBC resuming “normal service”.  The Last Night of the Proms was certainly different this year.  Next year, if it exists at all, I think it will be unrecognisable.   

Gotta Get Theroux This

My Life and Strange Times in Television, Louis Theroux (Macmillan 2019)

How obtuse of me not to get that “Theroux” meant “through”; I had imagined some American TV producer with an appetite for the bizarre picking up a strange artefact relating to some obscure mid-west religious sect, and thinking of Louis.  But then the penny dropped, and as I read on, I actually began to say to myself, “Gotta get through this” – because I found it a tough read. 

Not tough like Proust.  Gotta Get Theroux This was readable and interesting.  I think it was just the subject matter that got me down.  Maybe I just didn’t want to be around weird people for that length of time, but there must have been something compelling me to read on, just as something must have nudged me last night to watch Louis Theroux: Life on the Edge (Sunday, 9 pm BBC 2).

I am intrigued by the Theroux brand, and product.  Looking at that wide eyed, dead pan expression of his on the cover of his book, you can see why he is sometimes described as “faux naïve”.  On telly last night he interviewed a man who went into a trance, and was possessed by an extra-terrestrial who proceeded to address us in a voice with a somewhat electronic timbre.  Louis’ expression remained dead pan.  Is that the point?  Is he laughing at the people who invite him, with his film crew, into their homes?  And if we laugh along, is not that a kind of voyeurism?     

Oddly enough, I am reminded of a TV presenter from a previous generation who also had a fascination for the bizarre, particularly among the rich and famous – Alan Whicker.  He had a similar knack of using his charm to gain the confidence of the interviewee.  He could also live life on the edge; didn’t he once interview Papa Doc?  Alan Whicker became something of a cult figure.  Cult figures inevitably begin to parody themselves.  The glitzy lives lived within gorgeous palaces by the eye-wateringly rich were all described in slickly crafted journalese delivered with a characteristic nasal whine.  Monty Python cloned multiple Alan Whickers slouching around with microphones, doing a piece to camera in the same nasal whine. 

But I’m inclined to think there is nothing “faux” about the Theroux persona.  And I don’t think he’s taking the mickey.  Of course he is aware that he is exploring strange worlds, and that many of his interviewees will come across, frankly, as crazy.  He must also be aware that should tensions arise, should the interviewee suspect that he is being observed critically, this can make for compulsive viewing.  Yet Louis is clearly interested in his subjects, insatiably curious about their world view, open-minded, and, initially at least, non-judgmental.  That is why he is able to delve so deeply into other people’s lives.  It can be no surprise that much of his work has been in the United States, not just because the US is home of the weird – “only in America” is the accepted trope – but because there is a tradition of openness and hospitality that would be welcoming and generous to the courteous young man from England.  Of course it could all turn on a dime; if they decide you are not what you appear… well, that’s what introduces a certain tension to these documentaries. 

It is sometimes said that the last thing any reporter should do, is to become part of the story.  That Louis Theroux has ignored that dictum is perhaps the defining element of his originality.  The edges get blurred.  Sometimes he is a mix of a doctor, a pastor, and a social worker.  There is an episode in which he follows the life of an alcoholic who continually seeks detox, defaults, and scarpers.  Louis stuck with him.  Well, he was making a TV programme.  But he was also doing something else.  He steps voluntarily into people’s shoes.  That comes at a cost.  And perhaps that is why Gotta Get Theroux This is such a difficult read.  Surely his most famous – infamous – subject, was Jimmy Savile.

Savile haunts the book.  Louis keeps returning to him, as one might palpate an abscess to see if it remains excruciating.  Was he fooled?  Did he get it all wrong?  Is he consumed with guilt because he rather liked Jimmy? 

Heavy stuff.  I think my copy of Gotta Get Theroux This is heading for the charity shop.  Yet no doubt the next time Louis has a chat with some Nazis armed to the teeth and ready to inaugurate the new world order, I will eavesdrop for a while.  It’s as well somebody’s keeping tabs on what’s going on out there, and that that somebody should remain sane.  I don’t know how he does it.