jamescalumcampbell

The eminent statistician Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter OBE FRS was on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House on Sunday morning, helping to review the papers.  Prof Spiegelhalter is Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory of the University of Cambridge.  He is concerned with the use and misuse of statistical data in public discourse.  He looked at several reported scientific surveys (“a crop of rubbish”) with headline-grabbing results and reiterated the question, “Who commissioned the survey?”  He was making a point about bias.  One of the other panel members cut in with a throwaway comment to the effect, “Well we know that statistics are 99% made up”, to which Spiegelhalter replied, with more than a hint of sarcasm, “Well I’ve never heard that before!”  Paddy O’Connell in the chair told us that the professor pulled a weary face – useful to know when the media platform is radio.  It’s the old adage attributed to Mark Twain, “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics”, which is often interpreted as a description of a downward spiral of misinformation and disinformation.  But there is another way of interpreting the adage.  There are, on the one hand, lies and damned lies; and, on the other, there are statistics.  I venture to say that this is Prof Spiegelhalter’s message.  The fact is that in this age of fake news, data are under attack, not just because they may be false, but because they may be, accidentally or wilfully, misinterpreted.

It so happens that on Thursday evening I was in Glasgow University to hear the inaugural Bowman Lecture, in honour of a modest and eminent man, courtesy of the School of Mathematics and Statistics, given by the self-same Professor Spiegelhalter.  This public lecture was entitled Trust in Numbers.  The Prof is a skilled communicator and it was no surprise that the lecture was a sell-out.  It was also noticeable that the audience members filling the Sir Charles Wilson Hall were of all ages (I wish I could provide a graph here) including a substantial number of school students.  Given that statistics is sometimes considered a dry subject, this was heartening.

The professor is on a mission; and it is one of public education.  I have to say that I felt right at home listening to his lecture, not just because it was full of medicine (breast cancer, prostate cancer, processed meats and bowel cancer, safe alcohol consumption limits), but precisely because he was enthusiastically conveying a message, in much the way that I vividly recall the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine championing the Emergency Medicine cause during the 1980s and 1990s.  It is always a pleasure to hear somebody who feels passionately about some cause, particularly if they possess the great qualities of rhetoric – coherence, fluidity, responsiveness, and humour.

The difference in statistics between relative risk and absolute risk was colourfully depicted.  Some of the lurid Red Top banner headlines misconstruing then sensationalising a piece of medical research caused great hilarity within the hall.  I was interested in the professor’s view on the latest medical advice about alcohol consumption.  Over the years the “safe limit” has steadily declined.  28 units a week, then 21, then 14, for both male and female.  And then, zero.  No consumption is safe.  Actually, as that graph extrapolates to zero, the evidence becomes distinctly hazy.  Prof Spiegelhalter announced his intention to have a glass of wine after the lecture.  He said, “I’ve created a new statistical unit – ‘NND’.  Number needed to drink.”  He added, “The medics like that one.”  That is because we are familiar with “Number needed to treat”, that is, the idea of the number of patients needed to treat with Therapy A before a positive gain in a single individual is achieved.  (To this, parenthetically, might be added the much less researched notion of ‘number needed to harm’ – the number of patients needed to undergo Therapy A before someone experiences a significant unwanted effect.

I was very intrigued by his concept of “inoculation”.  This was a kind of pre-emptive strike.  Some piece of misinformation is doing the rounds and you disable it by saying, “Isn’t it awful that everybody thinks…” and you reproduce the false information, as if you are supplying the recipient with a little piece of toxic material in order to protect them from the full effect.

After the talk, there were questions from the floor.  One of them was whimsical (or maybe not):  “Would the public understanding of statistical data be enhanced if Eton were abolished?”

Mischievously, the Prof asked, “Is this being recorded?”  And then, tactfully, “I’m uncertain.”  This chimed, because he had spoken about uncertainty, and the importance of owning up to uncertainty.  Here, I was reminded of the antepenultimate episode of a BBC series nearly half a century old, The Ascent of Man, presented by another great scientific communicator, Jacob Bronowski.  To me, Episode 11, Knowledge or Certainty is a little masterpiece.  It starts with an exploration of the portrait of Stephan Borgrajewicz by Feliks Topolski – “Lines, possibly, of agony” – and ends at the crematorium at Auschwitz.  On the way, Bronowski discusses Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the idea that our failure to pin down, say, the exact position and the exact velocity of an electron is not due to the crudity of our instruments, but integral to the world of quantum mechanics.  Bronowski preferred to call this idea the Principle of Tolerance.  Of course, at the time these ideas were coming to fruition, the 1930s, tolerance was vanishing from Europe.

(Parenthetically, if you get a chance to see the Bronowski, you will notice the very limited use of “background” music.  I can recall the sparing use of a solo clarinet – is it from Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time? – composed, and first performed, in a concentration camp.  These days, televised scientific documentaries are rendered unwatchable, certainly unlistenable, by their incessant background of musical drivel.)

George Santayana told us to study the past in order to avoid repeating it.  But history never really repeats itself.  So while the 2020s will not be like the 1930s, they might be even worse, if we lose the urge to separate truth from falsehood, and we become ever less tolerant.  Yet Professor Spiegelhalter is a beacon of light.

So is Glasgow University.  How wonderful to be back in the hallowed cloisters of Gilmorehill.  I was back in these regions again on Saturday.  A medical student sought some career advice.  Why a millennial should choose somebody with my ramshackle CV to impart “wisdom” I can scarcely imagine.  I wouldn’t dream of telling anybody what to do.  Risky business!  But I hope I was a reasonably effective sounding board.  And I am quite sure I benefited more from the encounter than she did.

 

Do you remember The Man from U.N.C.L.E.?

BBC 1 (I think), 8 pm Thursdays, after Top of the Pops.  Now then now then, guys an’ gals…  ‘Nuff said.  It was a one hour slot, in four “Acts”, presumably to accommodate the commercials in the US.

U.N.C.L.E. was the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement and its man was Napoleon Solo, played by Robert Vaughn.  Napoleon Solo – what a fantastic name!  I have a notion Ian Fleming coined it.  Solo had a colleague, a Russian named Illya Kuryakin, played by David McCallum.  McCallum is still with us and so far as I can see has changed very little.  He is Scottish but Illya’s speech had a flat, almost Asiatic quality difficult to place.  David McCallum’s father was a distinguished violinist, leader of the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Sir Thomas Beecham.  The LPO once provided the music for a movie in which Stewart Granger played Paganini.  Yehudi Menuhin provided the soundtrack and even auditioned for the part, an experience that he said he “didn’t disenjoy”.  For one particular scene, David McCallum senior lent his Strad to Granger.  Granger botched the scene and in a fit of temper smashed McCallum’s Strad to smithereens. McCallum, understandably, blanched.  Actually the whole thing was a gag.  Granger had substituted a cheap fiddle for the Strad.  If there is one thing I can’t stand, it’s a practical joker.

Solo and Kuryakin’s mentor was an Englishman named Alexander Waverly who week by week would set them a task to avert international anarchy and collapse.  He had a slurred delivery and a puzzled, bordering on demented, air.  “Gentlemen, time is of the utmost!”  Utmost what?

Vaughn played Solo’s role, I think, at an ironic remove, and largely for laughs.  Solo was irresistible to women.  As another woman succumbed, Illya remarked, with evident irritation, “Napoleon, can’t you ever turn it off?”  If Solo wished to communicate with Waverly he would talk to his cuff link:  “Open Channel D!”  U.N.C.L.E.  had a Nemesis with an absurd name:  Thrush.

McCallum and Vaughn made their names in the two great testosterone-fuelled movies of the 60s – The Magnificent Seven, and The Great Escape.  In The Magnificent Seven Vaughn played an ageing gunslinger who is losing his edge and, with it, his nerve.  He takes on a job, a forlorn task, at the behest of Yul Brynner, not for any high minded motive but because he’s barely surviving on a diet of beans, and needs employment.  (As a kid I remember thinking, that’s not so bad.  Pies and beans – my signature dish.)

In The Great Escape, McCallum played a naval officer (Fleet Air Arm?) incarcerated in Stalag Luft III, and struggling to get out.  The escapees are building three tunnels, Tom, Dick, and Harry.  There is a problem – where do you put all the dirt you have excavated from the burgeoning tunnels?  McCallum’s character comes up with the answer, and he presents it to Richard Attenborough’s Big X.  You conceal bags of dirt under your trousers and release them into Stalag Luft III’s compound when nobody is looking.  (Based on fact, at least according to the Paul Brickhill account.)

Well I don’t know about that.  If I had been a dragon on Dragon’s Den and somebody had brought such a proposal to me, I would have ridiculed it as preposterous.

“Let me get this straight.  You take the soil and put it into bags concealed under your trousers?”

“Yes.”

“Then you wander around the compound and when nobody’s looking, you pull a cord and the soil comes down over your shoes and you kick it into the dirt?”

“That’s it.”

“I’m out!”

But where is this walk down Amnesia Lane taking me?   Nowhere at all.  I’m just diverting myself, in an attempt to obliterate the memory of the first question on Friday evening on Radio 4’s Any Questions?

The programme came from St Mary’s Church in Chesham, Buckinghamshire.  Julian Worricker was in the chair and the panellists were Andrew Bowie, Conservative MP for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine, Baroness Shami Chakrabarti the Shadow Attorney-General, Dr Sarah Wollaston, formerly Conservative and now Liberal Democrat MP for Totnes, and Peter Hitchens, “Fulminator-in-Chief” (according to the chair) for the Mail on Sunday.

The first question was posed by one Sebastian Heath.  What do the panellists consider to be the likeliest outcome of a No Deal Brexit, and upon what evidence do they base their view?

Sarah Wollaston thought No Deal was going to be Apocalyptic.  So did Shami Chakrabarti, who had to take a moment to calm down even before she’d started.  Even Peter Hitchens, a secessionist, thought the leaked Yellowhammer document an underestimate of the impending devastation.  He wants compromise, and favours the Norway option.  Andrew Bowie, being in the unenviable position of having to support the government, dodged the question completely.  Of course Yellowhammer is a worst-case scenario.  And we are striving for a deal… but it is only right and proper… responsible government… bla bla bla.  It was absolutely pitiful.  There was an echo of derisive laughter from the audience.  I found myself yelling at the radio:  Answer the bloody question!

I did admire Julian Worricker’s chairmanship. He didn’t interrupt, although he did gently try to remind the panellists of what the question was.  There is mileage in letting a panellist spout humbug.  The audience is perfectly capable of detecting it, unaided.  I would have liked him to return to the questioner, Mr Heath, and ask him if he was satisfied with the answers he had heard.  I venture to think he would not have been impressed.

At school, our teachers taught us how to sit exams.  Read the question.  Answer the question as it is given, not as you would have it be.  Aeons ago, when I sat at the feet of Dr Hobsbaum at Glasgow University he would hurl work back at me and say, “It’s all assertion with no back-up, Campbell.  Were you drunk?”

Shami Chakrabarti said to Andrew Bowie, “I met you before the show.  You seem a nice guy, but some of these people in No 10 are complete head-bangers.”

Maybe.  But why?

All assertion and no back-up.  I switched off.  Think I’ll go back to watching repeats of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.            

On Wednesday I had lunch in the Cuillin Hills Hotel, in Portree, with my cousin Rachel.  We had a drink, ordered, and enjoyed the relaxed ambience and the beautiful view over Portree Harbour towards Ben Tianavaig.  The lunch, which turned out to be delicious, was perhaps a little tardy.  I went up to the bar and said something along the lines of, “Excuse me, I hope you don’t mind me asking how our order is proceeding, but we are a little short of time…” etc etc.  The meal arrived a minute later.  Rachel said, “That certainly worked!  What on earth did you say?”

I replied that I had said, “Believe me I’m a mild mannered guy, but see that woman over there?  Trust me, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of her, when the crockery and cutlery start to fly around.”

Rachel laughed.

The following day I was in Ullapool.  It was a dreich day.  More, gruamach, as the Gael says.  But I didn’t mind.  I wanted to visit the Achiltibuie Peninsula on such a day.  I have written a novel, working title Speedbird, currently in the deep freeze.  A significant part of Speedbird takes place on the Achiltibuie Peninsula.  Now I’ve often visited, principally to go up Stac Pollaidh, but I’d never ventured further west.  The road that curves anticlockwise round the peninsula is a dead end.  In Speedbird, something bad happens at that dead end.  Being in the vicinity, I thought I’d better check it out.

It was an unnerving experience to discover that what I’d envisaged turned out to be remarkably accurate.  In the mist and rain, Stac Pollaidh itself was completely invisible.  I kept driving west and at Altandhu turned south.  In the mirk, there was no sign of the Summer Isles.  At Achiltibuie I stopped at the shop for a coffee.  The shopkeeper asked me what on earth I was doing down there on such a day.  “You won’t see anything.”

“No, but it’s atmospheric.”

“Atmospheric!  I think I’ll use that from now on.”

So for atmosphere, I listened on my CD player to a performance of Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, because that indeed conveys the atmosphere I would wish to create in Speedbird, and it is the atmosphere of the world beyond Achiltibuie.

At Horse Sound I descended to the beach and found Badenscallie burial ground, abeam the undulating contour of Horse Island, beautifully maintained, but deserted.  Further down the coast the scattering of houses dwindled and then petered out.  At Achduart the old school house was completely hidden in a copse of trees.  This was virtually the end of the road.

But not quite.  I could see the ribbon of tarmac ascending in the direction of Bon More Coigach.  Here at last I was on the very edge of the world.  I continued with extreme reluctance.  The fact is I was spooked.  I forced myself to the end of the road under a state of intense oppression and finally, with the roar in my ears of the watercourse coming off the mountain, I turned and got the hell out of there.

But I’m glad I went all the way to the end of the road.  Now I know how to bring Speedbird out of its deep freeze, and revive it.  Still, crossing back over the blighted moonscape of Assynt, it took some time to regain a sense of equanimity.  What a relief to make the long ascent past Morefield, over the brow of the hill, and to see once more the Caledonian MacBrayne steamer berthed alongside the twinkling lights of Ullapool Harbour.

Do you have a motto?

Not as such, answers pianist Stephen Hough in Rough Ideas, Reflections on Music and More (Faber & Faber, 2019), but he offers as “a precept shadowing my life”: Everything matters; nothing matters.

I can see how this self-evident paradox might be useful to a concert pianist, indeed to a performer of any kind.  When you study the score, when you practise at the keyboard, every note is significant, and you must research its individual meaning.  You deal in minutiae; you “sweat the small stuff”.  But when you finally walk out on stage in front of an audience, you have to let it all go, otherwise you will be paralysed amid a welter of detail.  You have to take a step back, and see the whole picture.  If you like, rehearsal is an act of differentiation down to infinitesimals; performance is an act of integration back to the whole.  (This last simile is mine; Mr Hough, despite being a polymath, flunked math.)

When I read his motto, I was reminded of something that the six times world snooker champion Steve Davis once said – and again it’s all about performance.  When you walk out into the Crucible Theatre to contest the world championship (and here I paraphrase from memory), you have to think that performing, and winning, means everything to you, and yet that it matters not one whit.  In other words, it’s all about relaxation, calmness, and serenity.  You have already done all the hard work during the thousands of hours of practice.  Now you must deliberately remove all that intricate knowledge from your frontal lobes and consign it to what we sometimes call “muscle memory”, but which our neurologists tell us is really “basal ganglia memory”.  You are on automatic pilot.  You are “in the zone”.  This allows your conscious mind to operate on a higher plane.

All well and good for Mr Davis and Mr Hough, but, having retired from the concert halls of Europe, Everything matters; nothing matters won’t do for me.  I fell to thinking, do I have a motto?  Actually I was asked this very question on a blog-site I think after the publication of Click, Double-Click, and I answered in an off-hand way, as if it were inconsequential, qua favourite colour, signature dish, Beatles or Dylan, and so on.  I chose the last line of the Desiderata – Strive to be happy.  Funnily enough, Stephen Hough doesn’t think striving to be happy is such a good idea.  It is better to strive for a higher purpose, and maybe you will be surprised by happiness along the way.  On the whole I think I accept that.  Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward.

So what to choose?  The old school motto?  Not the unofficial one – it wuznae me – but the real thing: Spero meliora.  I hope for better things.  The irony of Spero meliora only occurred to me after I’d left a school that rather resembled an open-plan state penitentiary.  It presupposes an existing state of disadvantage.  It is inherently crestfallen.  Hope, on this occasion, sounds more like fortitude.

When I left, and went up to University, I inherited two mottoes, that of the Alma Mater, Via Veritas Vita, and, courtesy of the University Air Squadron, that of the RAF, Per Ardua ad Astra.  The latter is not unlike Spero meliora, if heartier and more energetic.  Scramble, chaps.   Via, Veritas, Vita clearly has Christian origins which, if forgotten, would render the motto characterless – any way, any truth, any life.

And I’ve always been puzzled by the jingle attached to the City of Glasgow Coat of Arms, that we were taught from the earliest age:

There’s the tree that never grew,

There’s the bird that never flew,

There’s the fish that never swam,

There’s the bell that never rang.

Just how desperate is that?

So what about something closer to home?  A clan motto?  Rob Roy’s is that of a man with a massive chip on his shoulder.  MacGregor, despite them!

Despite whom?  We may find a clue in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, when Alan Breck Stewart of Appin chances upon Robin Oig MacGregor of Balquidder, youngest son of Rob Roy.

“Mr Stewart, I am thinking,” said Robin.

“Troth, Mr MacGregor, it’s not a name to be ashamed of,” answered Alan.

“I did not know ye were in my country, sir,” says Robin.

“It sticks in my mind that I am in the country of my friends the MacLarens,” says Alan. 

It’s these pesky MacLarens, who insisted on taking precedence before the MacGregors in the church at Balquidder.  Their motto is Creag an Tuirc – the rock of the boar – a promontory high above the Kirk at Balquidder overlooking Loch Voil, and the rallying point for the clan.  In addition to the motto they have a Crest, a Coat of Arms, and I’m particularly fond of the Badge:

A mermaid proper, her tail part up ended Argent, holding in her dexter hand a spray of laurels paleways Vert and in her dexter hand a looking glass Proper, mounted Gules.

You can quite see why Ernst Stavro Blofeld fell for all this heraldry stuff in OHMSS.  On the whole it bored Bond stiff, although he was amused to learn his family motto was “The World is not Enough.”  It seems apposite.

But as the autumn leaves begin to fall, Michaelmas term is fast upon us.  (If you have spent any time at all in academia you never really lose the habit of thinking in terms.)  The start of the academic year is more of a fresh start than is January 1^st.  My father used to say, “Very important year, this.”  He said it every year so I guess every year was equally important.  Maybe he was right.  I used to draw up lists of resolutions, the longer the list, the more fantastical the resolutions.  Now I’ve gone quite the other way, not, I hope, because my horizons have narrowed, nor even because I’ve become more realistic, but rather because I want to focus.  I want to pare everything down.

So…

Motto of the year commencing…

I choose words from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ The Windhover.

Sheer plod makes plough down sillion

Shine.

For the purpose of the Coat of Arms, I might make it as brief as possible.  Sheer Plod is my motto.

Hang in there.

Paleways Vert!           

MONDAY

I see that Bond 25 finally has a title.  No Time to Die.  Surely a camel – a horse designed by a committee, and an unimaginative and terribly risk-averse one at that.  I would have preferred No Time to Diet, which would have fitted the premise that Bond is in retirement but needs to be recalled.  (M could have sent him back to that health farm in Thunderball, Shrublands, to limber up.)  Or better still, Time to Die, which would at least have had the distinction of being a quote from Ecclesiastes, and more à propos, for surely the time has come to lay 007 to rest.  Then no one need worry about Daniel Craig’s successor, and her creed, colour, or sexual orientation.

Ian Fleming never suffered from title-trouble.  Actually the franchise hasn’t exhausted the supply.  They have yet to use, from For Your Eyes Only, The Hildebrand Rarity, or Risico.  But, if the truth be told, Bond died in 1964 with his creator.  Anything after that wasn’t even a pale imitation.  Although Jonathan Cape had enough material to publish Octopussy in 1966, the Bond saga is really brought to an end with The Man with the Golden Gun.  It has as strong an opening as any other Bond book, but then Fleming’s health broke down, and he must have known, as he persevered to the end, that this would be Bond’s last outing.  So, in order to make it quite clear, he ends the book twice, in chapters entitled The WRAP-UP, and ENDIT.  He even awards Bond a gong!  (Of course Bond turns it down.)

Still, if I got the call from Ms Broccoli, for a treatment for Bond 26, it would be hard to resist.  I would put Bond in a care home, making inappropriate advances to the nursing staff.  He discovers Blofeld is a fellow patient.  After all, we don’t know whether Bond really killed him in You Only Live Twice.  They have a preliminary skirmish, probably over a game of Scrabble.  The final debacle is hand-to-hand mortal combat involving wheel chairs and catheter bags.  Only Thrice Time to Endit Another Day. 

TUESDAY

Last week’s blog was so short that I sent it into The Herald, who very kindly published it.  They edited it slightly, but in a sensitive way, so that I was not inclined to throw a Beethovenian tantrum.  The following day, as usual, I checked for rejoinders, bouquets and brickbats, and, none being forthcoming, my eyes drifted to “Impossipuzzles”.  They go something like this:  Geoffrey said, “Have you noticed that Erica’s telephone number is a palindrome?”   Simon smiled.  “Yes, and what’s more, its 11 digits correspond to her age, date of birth, and house number on Orchard Road.”

What was her address?

Lest you be tempted to delve into this morass, I beseech you, don’t.  I just made it up; it’s complete nonsense.  But even supposing it had a solution, I would still strongly advise you not to go there.  Whenever you come across a conundrum posed by somebody who smiles, let it go.  I had this nightmare: I was present at the end of the world.  I saw the Doomsday Machine before me and made acquaintance with its hellish machinations.  (007 actually found himself in this predicament at the end of Goldfinger – the film, not the book.)  Three minutes before Time Zero, I still had the opportunity to avert Total Eclipse.  The keypad of deactivation was at my fingertips.  But I needed help.  What was the PIN number?  Fortunately Simon was at my side.

Simon smiled.  “Funny you should ask that.  It’s Sarah’s age multiplied by the quotient of the reciprocal of Petra and Oscar’s birthdays, squared.”

I spent the last three minutes available to the Universe, throttling Simon.

WEDNESDAY

In the local village shop I amassed an armful of soaps, Domestos, Brillo soap pads, all-purpose cloths, and black rubbish bags, and offloaded them on the shop counter with the remark, “Declaration of Intent.”

“Decoration of a tent?” asked the lady behind me, wife of an army officer, terribly well-spoken.

“Indeed.  Actually it’s a yurt.”  I felt this awful whimsical compulsion coming over me, like one of these insufferably destructive James Thurber characters.  But the shopkeeper, a kind man, saved the day.  “Send three and fourpence, we’re going to a dance.”

“What?”

“Send reinforcements, we’re going to advance.  Chinese whispers.”

“Ah.”

THURSDAY

Talking of Chinese whispers, I just caught the end of a segment of Radio 4’s Inside Science and I jaloused a panel of judges were discussing how they had settled on a shortlist of books in a literary-scientific competition.  One of them said, “Well, if I’m not hooked by Page 3, forget it!”  Isn’t that typical of the modern world?  I wonder how Walter Scott would have fared nowadays if he’d had to submit Old Mortality to the Bond 25 Camel Committee.  What would they have made of the erudition, the verbosity, and the exuberant high farce of Scott’s opening chapters?

“Who’s this guy Jedidiah Cleishbotham?”

“My alter ego.”

“Is he value-added?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“He’s got to go.  Dump Cleishbotham.  Where’s that Phoebe woman when you need her?  Pace, Walter.  It’s all about pace.”

FRIDAY

Far-fetched?  Donald Trump wants to buy Greenland.  That’s the sort of thing one of these megalomaniac Bond villains would aspire to.  Then, when he is frustrated, he takes the hump.  M says to 007, “James, I’d like you to take a turn up to Bluie West One.  Something strange is going on.”  Bond surveys the dossier, raises an eyebrow, and echoes Miss Elizabeth Bennet’s remark in Pride & Prejudice to her father, re Mr Collins.

“Can this man be sensible?”

Curious to get a taste of the Countess of Dumbarton’s guest editorship of Vogue, I picked up the September edition in Tesco.  Leafing through it was a bit like wandering through Duty Free at an international airport.  The Countess in her editorial more or less apologises for all the ads.  Comes with the territory, says HRH.  The mag features 15 powerful and influential women; there’s a spot for a 16th but it is empty – presumably the Countess being modest.  Actually if you look at the empty silver rectangle you see a reflection of yourself so maybe this serves as a challenge and a dare.

I have to confess I only recognised three of the women represented – Greta Thunberg, Jacinda Ardern, and Jane Fonda.  It’s worthwhile checking out “Cover Looks” on page 51.

First row, from left: Adut Akech wears jacket, £1,950. Poloneck, £890.  Trousers, £650.  All Celine by Hedi Slimane.

Gemma Chan wears tuxedo shirt, £1,700, Ralph Lauren collection.

Greta Thunberg wears T-shirt, and hoodie, her own.

Actually, that is really all you need to know.

In Part 1 of Gulliver’s Travels, A Voyage to Lilliput, Gulliver describes the ongoing war between the two mighty empires of Lilliput and Blefuscu.

It began upon the following Occasion.  It is allowed on all hands, that the primitive way of breaking Eggs before we eat them, was upon the larger End: but his present Majesty’s Grandfather, while he was a Boy, going to eat an Egg, and breaking it according to the ancient Practice, happened to cut one of his Fingers.  Whereupon the Emperor his Father published an Edict, commanding all his Subjects, upon great Penalties, to break the smaller End of their Eggs.  The People so highly resented this Law, that our Histories tell us there have been six Rebellions raised on that account; wherein one Emperor lost his Life, and another his Crown.  These civil Commotions were constantly fomented by the Monarchs of Blefuscu; and when they were quelled, the Exiles always fled for Refuge to that Empire.  It is computed, that eleven thousand Persons have, at several times, suffered Death, rather than submit to break their Eggs at the smaller End.  Many hundred large Volumes have been published upon this Controversy: but the Books of the Big-Endians have long been forbidden, and the whole Party rendered incapable by Law of holding Employments.  During the Course of these Troubles, the Emperors of Blefuscu did frequently expostulate by their Ambassadors, accusing us of making a Schism in Religion, by offending against a fundamental Doctrine of our great Prophet Lustrog, in the fifty-fourth Chapter of the Blundecral (which is their Alcoran).  This, however is thought to be a mere Strain upon the Text: For the Words are these: That all true Believers shall break their Eggs at the convenient End: and which is the convenient End, seems, in my humble Opinion, to be left to every Man’s Conscience, or at least in the power of the chief Magistrate to determine.   

It is said that the controversy between the Little-Endians and the Big-Endians represents that between the Reformed Church, and Roman Catholicism, and that Lilliput and Blefuscu represent, respectively, Britain and France.  But great satire has a universal and timeless application, and for as long as men and women adopt causes, take sides, and get hot under the collar, there will be Little-Endians and Big-Endians.  Perhaps politicians should be advised to keep a copy of the above extract from Gulliver on their desk, and then when they feel disposed to draw “red lines” over some issue, consider whether the issue in question is so important after all.

Had Jonathan Swift been alive today, I wonder what he would have made of the current political situation in these islands?  I imagine, quite a lot.  As a Dubliner he would certainly have had something to say about the Irish Backstop, whose historic origins would have been perfectly familiar to him.  And he would have had something to say about the two distinct schisms that now divide, and threaten to obliterate, the principal political parties at Westminster.  He would have recognised, in the current Phoney War that exists while Parliament is in recess, a rich source of absurdity and farce.  I think he would have subjected the entire House to sustained and merciless ridicule.

I was not long resident in the Island’s principal Metropolis, a great, sprawling, and I think once magnificent Centre of Commerce, when I was afforded the signal Honour of attending a Convocation of the Representatives of the People.  This took place in a rococo Palace of considerable Splendour, perched on the edge of the River, and, on closer Inspection, evidently in dire Peril of collapsing therein.  The Parliament assembled in a drab and narrow oblong Hallway within the Bowels of the crumbling Edifice, of Dimensions fit to accommodate some three hundred Persons, though twice that Number had assembled to hear the Monarch’s principal Minister give account of governmental Affairs.  The Press of the Assembly, the incessant Noise, and much hither-and-thither toing-and-froing lent the Occasion a fretful, febrile and indeed fetid Atmosphere.  Anon, became it apparent to me that the Questions asked of the Minister were hardly Interrogatives at all, but merely Fillips, or Snares, designed to exalt and uphold, or to undermine and to trip, the Monarch’s Government.  Indeed, the Answers to all Questions put, were already known to all in Attendance, such that the Convocation represented less a Meeting of Minds, as an Elaborate Gavotte.  All the Assembly seemed preoccupied with Manners, the traditional Niceties of arcane Procedure, and the inhalation of Snuff.  I attempted at one Moment to apprehend the Argument of the Principal Minister, on some Point relating to Trade with Foreign Empires.  “If a Chinaman,” said he, “wishes to sell me a Ping-Pong Ball for a Ducat…”

“Wiff Waff!” brayed the Phalanx of Members behind him.

“…What Business is it of our Friends across the Channel?”

At this Moment the Uproar became so intense that the Officer-in-Charge was incapable of making himself heard.  As to the Value of Ping-Pong I have no Opinion, for I have no Education in the Dismal Science.

I had an odd experience while doing The Herald crossword his morning.  The clue was “Actress’s brief farewell (7)”.  The solution is Swanson.  (Gloria Swanson.)  A farewell is a swansong so lose the g to make the farewell brief: Swanson.  The odd thing was that I didn’t solve the clue through pursuing this, or any other, process of logic, and I didn’t have any letters already on the grid to help me; it was a blank canvas.  I read the clue, and for no reason I can think of, I thought, “What was the name of that Hollywood actress Joe Kennedy (JFK’s father) had an affair with?”  I was about to dismiss the thought, but past experience has taught me that when an apparently aberrant notion comes into your mind, it often pays to follow it up.  So I took a moment to remember, and there she was: Swanson.

Isn’t that odd?

I’ve had a lot of luck over the years with crosswords.  Up in Perth a couple of months ago to hear the RSNO present a ridiculously rich smorgasbord of lollipops and seasoned roasted chestnuts, I paused at the entrance to the concert hall to have converse with a gentleman, down on his luck, who was calling out, “Who will be my third buyer of The Big Issue tonight?”  I obliged, handed over £2.50, and left him to it.  “Who will be my fourth buyer of The Big Issue tonight?”  So I did The Big Issue prize crossword – one and only time – sent it off, and won the revised thirteenth edition of Chambers Dictionary, which is a handsome volume and heaps better than the Chambers 21^st Century Dictionary which announced itself on the dust jacket as a “Punchy, good-looking trend-setter.”

“Punchy, good-looking trend-setter”?  I ask you.  The sharp suits have even infiltrated the dusty offices of the scriveners and proctors of 1901 Edinburgh.  I offloaded that particular volume to the charity shop.

A month before The Big Issue, I did The Herald’s mammoth “Clootie” which, like currants in a clootie dumpling, intersperses clueless anagrams following a topical Scottish theme.  Prize: £50 token.  I stuck with the dictionary theme and got Collins German Dictionary.  Sehr gut.

And just before that I’d popped into the local village shop to get my morning paper.  Unaccountably, The Heralds had not been delivered, so more or less at random I took The Financial Times.  I sent off the crossword – one and only time – and won How to Sound Really Clever by Hubert van den Bergh (Bloomsbury 2013), the ideal prize for a smart-arse.  I’ve also won a Bloomsbury Concise English, and three Oxford English Dictionaries.  I’ve acquired, and passed on, at least six Bloomsbury Good Word Guides.  When I was a medical student I sent off The Scotsman Saturday crossword under the name of my then girl friend who had gone up to the north-west for a week.  The following Saturday she was coming home and reading The Scotsman on the train.  “Oh look!  Somebody with my name has won the crossword!”

You’d think I’d be sated by now, but I’m on a roll.  Yesterday I sent off The Herald’s “Wee Stinker”.  The prize is a “Wee Stinker” T-shirt (S, M, L or XL?  I chose L) + a £50 token.  I used to have a pint in Curlers on Glasgow’s Byres Rd with a guy who over the years had won ten Wee Stinker T-shirts.  Only last week somebody on The Herald’s letters page was complaining they were too embarrassed to wear a T-shirt announcing their Wee Stinker status.  They tried wearing it at night but it was too hot.  But what would you do with ten Wee Stinker T-shirts?  Over dinner in the Lion & Unicorn on Saturday I heard a dear friend’s friend has just bought a grand mansion in Edinburgh with nine bathrooms.  I said, “What’s the use of nine bathrooms if you’ve only got one a…?” but I was silenced.

Actually they made a clerical error with last week’s Wee Stinker grid (the punchy, good-looking trend-setters must be in charge) so the prize rolls over and is £100.  I posted it on Sunday morning in Sir Andy Murray’s golden letter box on my way to Dunblane Cathedral, so I feel I’m bound to win.  Incidentally a couple of weeks ago a parked car’s handbrake apparently failed and the car rolled into the golden letter box and uprooted it.  The box was repaired and replaced, the locals said, quicker than the Royal Mail can deliver a first-class letter.  For a few days the butcher’s shop opposite was selling “Golden letter-box sausage rolls, at knock-down prices”.

Anyway I took my acquisitive cruciverbalist’s smug complacency into Dunblane Cathedral where, in line with the lectionary, the rich were getting it in the neck.  Psalm 49.  And then the parable of the rich man who has so much grain he doesn’t know what to do with it.  So he knocks his barns down and builds even bigger barns so he can accommodate all his stuff.  What an idiot, or, as the authorised version puts it, “Thou fool…”  In my extended family we use “Barns, barns” as a short hand for berating one another if we seem preoccupied with the accumulation of junk.  I don’t think I’m particularly acquisitive – or if I am, I’ve made a hell of a mess of any pursuit of material wealth.  The only thing I have a tendency to hoard is books.  It crossed my mind to give them all away to the Andrew Carnegie Library in Dunfermline which is a favourite haunt of mine (the great man did after all pay me through Med School), but a family member counselled me not to do anything rash so I sit here, surrounded by tomes.  I have my books!  It’s like that Simon and Garfunkel song.  I am a rock.  I am an island.  Anaesthetic and dry-eyed.

But to return for a moment to Ms Swanson, it just shows you we don’t have the first inkling how the human mind works.  I watched a captivating programme on BBC 4 the other night all about Game Theory.  Two people, a middle-aged man and a young women, were playing “Share or Steal”.  They would simultaneously show one another an icon bearing the word “Share” or “Steal”.  It’s a kind of simplified version of “Scissors cut Paper”.  If they both showed “Share” they would share a very substantial sum of prize money.  If they both showed “Steal” they would both walk away with nothing.  If one showed “Share” and one showed “Steal”, the stealer would take all.  They had a protracted negotiation during which the middle-aged man persuaded a very vulnerable young woman that he would do the right thing by her.  So he showed “Share” and of course she showed “Steal”.  I wish I could describe the look on her face at the denouement.  Quite chilling – but of course completely riveting telly.

Then in the next game one of the contenders appeared to have found a solution to the apparently insoluble recurring question of Game Theory – “What’s the other guy gonna do?”  He said, “Irrespective of what you say or do, I’m going to show ‘Steal’.  But I promise to share the prize money with you.”  What’s the other guy gonna do?  If he shows “Steal”, they both walk away with nothing.  His only chance of winning is to show “Share”.  It looks foolproof.

But is it?  Some people are just bloody-minded by nature.  They might reply, “I’m going to show ‘Steal’ because I no longer care about the money.  I only want to take you down a peg or two.  But if you show contrition, and show ‘Share’, I will share with you.

The trouble with Game Theory is that it relies on people thinking and behaving logically.  Fat chance.  If you want to win a crossword prize, listen to what your unconscious is trying to tell you.

Apropos the Smiths’… (10)

…outburst, take note!  (11, 4)

It’s summertime, and everybody’s on the move.  I seem to recall that in one of his lesser-known novels – Kangaroo maybe – D. H. Lawrence was extremely dismissive of the whole idea of being a tourist.  He loved the idea of travel but he thought of tourism as a kind of hallucination of travel, an indulgence of the well-to-do who would foray abroad and then return home to bore their friends with photographs of famous locations such as Venice or Florence.  But only this week a lady on the radio announced with great sadness that she was ending her love affair with Florence, simply because it is now crammed with tourists.  You might call it the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Tourism: the tourists’ voyeurism disturbs the location.  Look at that extraordinary picture of the hundreds of tourist-climbers queuing to negotiate Hillary’s Step en route to knocking Everest off their bucket-list.  What would Sir Ed have made of it?  But you don’t need to go abroad to witness this phenomenon.  Last Tuesday I walked the seven hills of Edinburgh and three of them – Castle, Calton, and Arthur’s Seat, were mobbed.  I heard every language under the sun.  The Isle of Skye is overrun with visitors to the Fairy Pools, the Old Man of Storr, and the Quairang.  They’ve run out of parking lots and toilet facilities.  My mum was from Skye (actually the island of Soay); I’ve been going to Skye all my life, and for the most part it has been utterly deserted.  Then the extraordinary, Tolkienesque escarpments of Trotternish were discovered as a film location, and the hotels hiked their prices up to £400 a night.  Last time I was in Skye it was to attend a funeral, and I couldn’t get any accommodation on the island, so ended up staying on the mainland, near the Mallaig – Armadale ferry at the Station Hotel in Morar, where Sir Arnold Bax wintered to score his symphonies (the tourists don’t know that, and wouldn’t care anyway).  On the mainland, the far north has become another tourist trap.  A single track road has turned into the Indianapolis 500.  In Shetland (my friend the Viking tells me) enormous cruise liners are anchored off Sumburgh.

My own preference is to get off the beaten track.  But here I encounter a difficulty.  If I extol the virtues of unknown locations, will I thus contribute to the pollution of their pristine environment?  Well, not having 2.4 million followers (as far as I know), I’ll take a chance.  Proceed north-west out of Glasgow.  The Loch Lomond road will be jammed solid so at first it’s not very promising, but stick with it, and when you turn left at Tarbet the traffic will begin to thin.  You skirt the edge of Loch Long at Arrochar, pass the Cobbler on your right, and make the long ascent to the Rest and Be Thankful.  Down the other side, you might be on the way to Oban, but instead, turn left and head for Loch Fyne, and you will have the world to yourself.

Proceed further into this magical territory.  Pass through St Catherines on the way to Strachur.  Chopin stayed here, with Jane Stirling (the tourists don’t know that, and wouldn’t care anyway).  Now hang a right and skirt the loch before leaving it to take the long defile through Glendaruel.  You are heading for Colintraive but before you get there, turn right.  Now you are here.  The Cowal Peninsula.  Argyle’s secret coast.

Beguiling Argyll.

Shh!  Dinny tell ony buddy.                                    

We’ve all had a bit of a loonie week.  I have this idea for a comedy sketch.  The scene is Mission Control, Houston, the date, July 20^th, 1969.  The lunar module is on its final descent.  The atmosphere is thick with tension.  Somebody said you could smell the fear.  Yet these young whizz kids, crouched in deep concentration over their consoles, have been buoyed by the pep-talk they received that morning from the Flight Director, the man with the crew cut and the white waistcoat, Gene Kranz.  “We came into this room as a team, and we will go out as a team!”

But now he needs a Sit-Rep.  Are the computer systems flagging up any problems?  Is there any indication to abort the mission?  Or are the astronauts clear to land?  Kranz interrogates the principal players in his team, rapid fire.

Cap-Com!

Go!

Fido!

Go!

Retro!

Go!   

Inco!

Go!

Telmu!

Go!

Guido!

Go!

Surgeon!

…

Surgeon?

A pause.

Whazzat?

Are we go, Surgeon?

Aw haud on a sec, Jim…

Surgeon is fumbling with his machine.  Surgeon is played by Ford Kiernan, the Scottish actor who plays Jack Jarvis in Chewin’ the Fat and Still Game.  You take one look at him and you just know he is the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I know Kiernan could play this role because I seem to remember him in a sketch where he found himself on a football pitch with a group of highly skilled footballers.  The ball fell at his feet out on the wing and he was required to cross it in to the box.  He eyed the ball and then the goal and then the ball, all the while prancing around performing various redundant balletic movements, extravagant arm gestures indicating his intentions.  But he was basically two left feet.  The football sketch and the astronaut sketch are one and the same.  That Jack should be in that situation is ridiculous.  Painfully ridiculous.  We laugh at it because we recognise an archetype.  It’s the recurring nightmare of turning up at school or college or at work in your pyjamas.  There is no more cringe-worthy situation than to find yourself an impostor among experts.

It’s well recognised that quite a lot of people who occupy high-profile positions of power and responsibility harbour a deep sense of humility and unworthiness.  This is known as Impostor Syndrome.  They look at themselves and ask, am I really up to the task?

Back at Houston, even if you did know what you were doing, it would take some nerve to abort the mission.  But I suppose the responsibility would not rest with you, but with Kranz.  You would merely be flagging up a potential problem.  After all, the on-board computer flagged up a 1202 and Kranz said it was okay.  Then it flagged up a 1201 and that was okay too.  But suppose the Surgeon had told him one of the astronauts had developed a tachyarrhythmia?  That might be outside Kranz’s field of expertise.  He might say, “Does it matter?  Is it critical?  Your call, doc!”

What a nightmare.  You definitely wouldn’t want Jack at the console, faffing about.  “Aw, go on yersel’, Jeannie!”

The Apollo astronauts for the most part seem to have shared a deep sense of humility.  They were all overawed by the sight of our beautiful blue planet.  I was intrigued to hear Apollo 8’s Frank Borman say that, once they’d gone round the moon a couple of times, they’d seen enough.  By far the most interesting sight in the night sky was an earthrise.  During a broadcast to planet earth on Christmas Eve the astronauts famously read the Genesis creation myth from the Bible.  This notion of seeing the earth from space and realising that it is a planet, perhaps unique, to be cherished, seems to have been the prevailing take-home message from all the Apollo astronauts, not least those of Apollo 11.  Funnily enough this week I read Greta Thunberg’s Nobody is too small make a difference (Penguin 2019).  Ms Thunberg’s plea for the health and safety of the planet is even more powerful than that of the astronauts.  There’s a steady flow of correspondence to The Herald expressing polarised views about the necessity versus the futility of striving for zero carbon emissions.  What’s the point, when China is burning all that coal?  What difference does it make what I do, when the whole world is hell-bent on doing something else?

Well, Ms Thunberg tells us the answer.  Nobody is too small to make a difference.  There is a story of a black American serviceman posted to Scotland in the fifties.  He was on a bus in Glasgow with his wife and a Glaswegian got up to offer his wife a seat.  She said, “Back home, nobody ever gives up their seat to a black person.”  The Glaswegian replied, “In Glasgow, we give up our seat to a lady.”  (For all I know, this might nowadays land the gentleman in deep trouble but let’s not go there.)   Anyway, the serviceman and his wife eventually went home, to Montgomery Alabama, where they happened to recount their Glaswegian episode, to Rosa Parks.  So you just never know how your actions are going to resonate.  The world needs gifted people who think they are impostors, precisely because it is run by impostors who think they are gifted.

As for Ms Thunberg, I think she’s completely remarkable.  She reminds me of Joan of Arc.  She’d be about the same age.  I used to think Jeanne d’Arc was a French myth, but now I’m not so sure.  People like that come along, about once every millennium.

For the rest of us, we must just hope we aren’t Ford Kiernan’s Jack Jarvis, struggling at the computer console.  We may have insight into our own frailty, but take little reassurance from that.  Just because you suffer from Impostor Syndrome doesn’t mean you aren’t a real fake.