jamescalumcampbell

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.

In The President is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson (Century 2018, Arrow Books 2019), a malignant external agency plots to cripple the United States of America through a cyber-attack.  A computer virus will disable everything that is connected to the Internet.  The code word for this Armageddon is Dark Ages.  President Jon Duncan paints a grim picture of how a new Dark Age will unfold.  Everything with a power switch will be affected – washing machines, coffee makers, DVRs, digital cameras, thermostats, machine components, jet engines, elevators, grocery-store scanners, train and bus passes, televisions, phones, radios, traffic lights, credit card scanners, home alarm systems, laptops, heating systems, refrigeration, the water supply, the electricity grid, hospitals, planes, trains, cars, banks, law enforcement, currency…  This is the nightmare; the dystopia of connectivity.

Although this attack is levelled specifically against the USA, President Duncan realises it is going to affect the whole world.  So he asks for the help of the whole world to defeat the assailants, whoever they may be.  He arranges a summit meeting.  He invites the German Chancellor and the Israeli Prime Minister.  He even invites the Russians.  But not the Brits.  So much for the Special Relationship.  In fact, I don’t think the United Kingdom even has a cameo role in this thriller.  And remember it was an Oxford Rhodes Scholar, President Clinton, who wrote it.

Is it any good?  It has 128 chapters.  It is not so much a novel as a treatment for a movie that is two hours and eight minutes long.  (The manuals on how to write a screenplay remind you that a page of dialogue is a minute of screen time.)  The President is Missing is certainly cinematographic.  It has filmic clichés such as car chases and shoot-outs, the idea of an inner cabal containing a mole, and a race to find a computer password as a clock runs down.  A thriller can be a novel.  But this is not a novel, in the way that, say, Thunderball is a novel.  A novel needs to subvert its own clichés.  I wanted to know what President Duncan thought of the cyber world he was trying to protect.

I think it was around 3 pm Saturday (Eastern Standard Time, chapter 70 in the book) that I answered my phone and the recorded voice said, “Your bank account details have been compromised and £600 is about to be transferred to a foreign location.  For more details, press 1.”  I hung up and went back to chapter 70.  Scam phone calls and emails have become so commonplace that they no longer disturb my affect.  But Dark Ages are already with us.  We are ushering in a new Dark Age, as Winston might have said, in psalmody:

Made more sinister

And perhaps more protracted

By the lights

Of perverted

Science.

But you never hear a politician, in this or any other country, challenging the way in which cyber technology is taking over every aspect of our lives.  The juggernaut of an inevitable “progress” is not to be avoided.  And when the gremlins start to infiltrate the systems, what do you do?  You make the systems ever more sophisticated.  Thus you embark upon a cyber arms race.

But would it not be better for us to retain our primitive analogue skills?  In aviation, when the radio systems fail, you navigate by mental dead reckoning.  When the Direction Indictor fails, you learn to do compass turns, and build in the necessary lag time.  When the gyroscopes topple, you instrument-fly on a reduced panel.  If an engine fails, you feather the prop and fly on one engine.  If the other engine fails, you pick a paddock and carry out a forced landing.  You practise, over and over again.  You learn to land at night with the instrument panel shut down and the cockpit in darkness.  Yet, not once but twice, the poor pilots of the Boeing 737 Max were unable to override the computer systems and fly by the seat of their pants.  Neil Armstrong overrode the lunar module’s computer and flew visually.  I wonder if the United States would be able to put a man on the moon now.

In medicine, it’s easier.  Of course technology has transformed the diagnostic suite and the operating room.  But the consulting room really has very little use for digital technology.  Yet the purveyors of perverted science have infiltrated that sacred domain and continue to do so.

Alexa, what is chickenpox?

Gimme a break.

Do you remember Tonight, with Cliff Michelmore?  Cy Grant would sum up the week’s news in a calypso.  Here’s my calypso of the week:

Politically, it has been a week for getting up people’s noses.  First of all the Brexit Party turned its collective back on the European anthem.  This was obnoxious not because it showed disrespect to the European Parliament – no doubt the feeling is mutual – nor to Ludwig van Beethoven, who is after all beyond harm; but rather to the quintet of young musicians, who from what I could hear were playing very beautifully.

Alle Menschen werden Brüder…

Aye, right.

But who knows, perhaps it will become a tradition, like standing in Messiah for the Hallelujah Chorus.  From now on, during any performance of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, when we reach the Ode to Joy the audience will stand up and about-face.

Then the Chinese got up our noses when their ambassador told us in no uncertain terms to stop butting into Hong Kong’s affairs.  He was almost immediately summoned to the Foreign Office.  Then we stopped an Iranian oil tanker in Gibraltar’s territorial waters apparently en route to Syria and in breach of EU sanctions.  (Strange place, Gibraltar.  Young men cruise around in open-top sports cars with sound systems blaring.  No surrender!  Gibraltar is like Belfast; she suffers from PTSD.)  So our ambassador in Teheran got the summons to be informed this was an act of piracy.  Of course Iran is in the news a lot these days.  Ever since President Trump pulled out of the nuclear deal the Iranians have been striving to refine weapons-grade uranium.  The UK doesn’t wish to fall out with Iran.  I find it odd that nobody ever mentions the fact that President Rouhani is an alumnus of Glasgow Caledonian University.  Maybe the Foreign Office doesn’t know, or doesn’t care.

Anyway, two unrelated incidents involve one former and one present British colony.  The Empire strikes back.

(Incidentally, all the pictures of Hong Kong in the news reminded me of the thrill of landing at the old Kai Tak airport, when at about four hundred feet you felt you could reach out and pluck the clothes drying on makeshift lines hanging from the high rise apartments.  In 1979 I passed through en route from Papua New Guinea to London, carrying as hand luggage a package containing a long bow with arrows made in the Highlands of Enga by the lepers at Yampu.  The Hong Kong douaniers inspected it and were terribly interested.  “Do you hunt?”  I tried to explain it was merely a memento.  Amazingly, they let it pass.  But the packaging had been ripped apart and the flight was about to go so I ended up boarding carrying a naked bow and a bundle of deadly arrows.  Try that, forty years on.)

Then the PM, and the two putative PMs-apparent headed north of the border to extol the Precious Union, thus managing to get up the noses of at least half the population of Scotland.  When Mr Hunt told an audience of Scottish Tory party members that, if and when Ms Sturgeon requested another Indyref, he would assume an air of “British” politeness and reply with an emphatic “No”, this appeared to go down well within the splendid confines of Perth Concert Hall; but Mr Hunt ought to remember that lots of other people were listening in.  They were saying, wait a minute!  Ms Sturgeon is our First Minister.  We elected her!

Then the former head of MI6 no doubt managed to get off-side with the whole senior political class when he informed us that really they weren’t of sufficiently high calibre; they just weren’t up to the job.  We are all having a collective nervous breakdown.   And finally the current British ambassador to the US told us (though he didn’t mean to tell all of us) that the current US administration is inept and incompetent and the White House dysfunctional.  Will he get a summons to the State Department?  I doubt it.  I rather think the POTUS couldn’t care less.  I did note that the Foreign Secretary disowned the ambassador’s opinions.  He said these opinions were personal and the holder was perfectly entitled to hold them, and that it was perfectly appropriate, indeed, essential, that he express them (in confidence).  I think this was Mr Hunt assuming an air of “British” politeness, while simultaneously hanging the ambassador out to dry.  It has been suggested that the next British ambassador to the US could be Nigel Farage.  I don’t think Mr Farage would turn his back on the Stars and Stripes.  Mr Hunt expressed full confidence in the president.  After all, if the UK is getting up the noses of Europe, we daren’t get off-side with the US, especially as we are already off-side with the Chinese, the Spanish, and the Argentinians.  (Not to mention the troublesome Scots.)

Who to insult next?  Perhaps Gary Lineker, that modestly paid BBC employee, will express astonishment that the participants of the recently concluded football World Cup, God bless them, could understand the off-side rule.

In between episodes five and six – the finale – of Stephen Poliakoff’s Summer of Rockets (BBC2, Wednesday) I read Cita Stelzer’s Working with Winston (Head of Zeus, 2019).  It’s not the first time I’ve remarked in this blog on how the concurrent exposure to two different works of art can create a kind of unexpected synergy in the way we appreciate them.  The Poliakoff is a drama set in England circa 1958, during the Cold War, and the Stelzer is an account of the careers of twelve remarkable people who undertook secretarial duties, or “took down”, for Winston Churchill.  Therefore, at least in time and place, there is a degree of overlap between the book and the television drama.  Indeed, Winston even has a cameo role in Summer of Rockets’ Episode 1, when the Russian-born, Jewish inventor Samuel Petrukhin fits him with a state-of-the-art hearing aid.

Recently a visitor to my home glanced at the small bust on the mantelpiece, and at the bookshelf of Churchilliana, and asked me, “Why do you admire Churchill?”  And I wondered, is it because he could turn a good phrase?  Is it more personal than that?  Is it because, but for him, I would have started to learn German a lot earlier than I did, and in a rather more uncomfortable school?

Sometimes I think of demoting him.  I say to myself, “It’s past, let it go, move on.”  He was a Victorian aristocrat, old-fashioned even as a young man.  He inhabited a different age.  I read a book like The Patient Assassin by Anita Anand (Simon & Schuster, 2019), which recounts in a very personal way the events that took place at Jallianwala Bagh, the walled garden in Amritsar, on 13 April 1919 (Ms Anand’s grandfather was there), and even though Churchill denounced this atrocity (frightfulness, he said, is not part of the British Pharmacopoeia), I still find myself thinking it is time to move on.  I could take his bust down and remove it with the books into the spare room, along with his portrait.  I could call it “The Churchill Room.”  I could say to my guest, “I’ve made up The Churchill Room for you.  Is that all right?”  And then something happens, and he stays in my living room.

I don’t suppose I’d have liked him much.  How would I have got on if I’d been summoned to “take down”?  (Only one of the twelve secretaries Stelzer describes was male, Patrick Kinna.)  The relationship Churchill had with the young ladies has been dramatized in the film Darkest Hour with Gary Oldman playing Churchill and Lily James playing the secretary.  The narrative of a young lady, initially nervous, intimidated, and bullied, sticking it out and eventually becoming devoted to her boss, is essentially the narrative of Stelzer’s book.  But is it true?  Personally I don’t think I could ever become devoted to anybody who bullied me.  If Churchill had called me a bloody fool for typing in single rather than double space, I like to think I’d have taken the paper from the typewriter, crumpled it into a ball, chucked it at him, said, “Why don’t you ‘take down’ your own bloody speech?” and stormed out.  And that would have been that.

But it was an entirely different world.  It was extremely class-ridden.  These young ladies, impeccably trained graduates of Mrs Hoster’s Employment Agency, no doubt walked the walk and talked the talk, but even they would have fallen short of the top drawer.  Churchill’s way of life, with huge teams of lackeys responding to his beck and call, now seems unimaginable.  Once asked whether he could cope with day-to-day life all on his own, he remarked, “I could boil an egg; I’ve seen it done.”  He seems to have been extraordinarily inconsiderate.  One of the young secretaries shared with her colleagues a joke, in which she imagined saying to Churchill, “Miss So-and-So has been in a serious accident.”  To which WSC replies, “Oh.  Will she be able to take down?”  The irony is that this very scenario came to pass.  The secretary informing Churchill of her colleague’s incapacity always regretted that, when asked if the injured lady could take down, she had not replied, “Well, it’s her ankle that’s injured so I suppose she could.”

Summer of Rockets simply reeks of class.  Samuel Petrukhin, the Russian émigré, wants to mix with the right people and turn himself into an English gentleman.  He would have his teenage daughter presented at court, come out, and attend all the balls of the season.  She herself can’t stand the idea.  Already she has moved into a different world.  But Petrukhin himself is also ahead of his time.  He is fascinated by gadgets, and has an inkling of the way they might take over the world.  When his young son takes ill with appendicitis and is rushed to the hospital as an emergency, none of the duty doctors can be located.  Petrukhin has already invented and is trying to market a new device, and he struggles to give it a name – bleep, bleeper, beeper, pager, staff locator…  He realises that hospitals would be an ideal environment in which his invention would be useful.  He himself never goes anywhere without his locator, sitting in his lapel pocket, much like a mobile phone now.  The military might also find a use for this new device.  And of course MI5.  It functions in the drama much as a talisman of the new age.

(Parenthetically, the bleep did become a talisman for the doctor.  There were three status symbols – the white coat, the stethoscope, and the bleep, and I can still recall a sense of pride when first pacing the wards with all three.  But I soon came to realise that the bleep was as much a curse as a blessing.  It went off so often that you could never get anything done because you were always off somewhere to find a telephone.  I remember asking a staff nurse to hold my bleep – essentially to be my secretary, to “take down” – so that I could see the patients.  But she was reluctant.  What if there were a cardiac arrest?  The arrest bleep in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary was low-pitched, slow tempo, and sinister.  I ran into an old colleague last year who admitted that whenever he heard a faint echo of that sound his heart still missed a beat.)

I’ve loved the atmosphere of the Poliakoff world ever since I first saw Shooting the Past. In some ways his dramas are rather old fashioned, like a speech of Winston Churchill.  They can begin, and meander, rather hesitantly.  The tempo is quite slow.  Scenes are set and characters drawn.  There is attention to detail, an aesthetic of beauty, and a literary self-consciousness.  Plots and subplots can be diverted down unusual avenues with many twists and turns.  What is Summer of Rockets all about?  It depicts a world full of secrets, in which nothing is quite as it seems, and nobody (with the possible exception of Samuel’s young son Sasha) tells the truth.  Who to trust?  The British establishment?  The military?  MI5?  The mysterious Lord Arthur Wallington, so masterfully played by Timothy Spall?  In the end, Petrukhin puts his trust in Hannah, his wayward daughter.

Poliakoff has his critics.  Again like Churchill, he can be regarded as passé.  Yet Summer of Rockets was full of contemporary resonances.  More or less concurrent with the showing of the final episode, Mr Putin announced that the values of liberal democracy are obsolete.  His remarks didn’t seem to cause much of a stir; they almost passed unnoticed. People nodded sagely in agreement.

So I glanced up at Winston, on his central point on my mantelpiece, and decided he had better stay.

Matt Hancock, secretary of state for health and social care, has published a report, The future of healthcare: our vision for digital, data and technology in health and care.  This sets out plans for a fully digitised NHS.  The paper record is gone, history.  Data will be cloud-based, many consultations will be virtual, and internet connectivity will be high speed.  Matt Hancock wants to make the NHS a world leader in digital tech innovation.   “NHSX” – “a specialist bridge between the worlds of healthcare and technology” – is due to be launched next month.

The reaction of the Royal College of General Practitioners to the proposed initiatives has been, I would say, lukewarm.  Fix the basics first, is the broad message.  What is the point of having your head in the clouds if the computer keeps crashing and it can’t even print out a prescription?

I read about this in Insight, a quarterly publication for members of MDDUS, the Medical and Dental Defence Union Scotland, quarter 2, 2019.  In the same issue I also read about a new British Medical Association survey which has found that eight out of ten doctors are at substantial risk of burnout.  The BMA surveyed 4,300 doctors and found that more than a quarter of them had received previous, formal diagnoses of mental conditions, and four out of ten said they were suffering from psychological or emotional distress which affected their work, training or study.

I wonder if Mr Hancock is familiar with the biochemical concept of the “rate-limiting step”.  You have a series of biochemical reactions – say the Embden-Mayerhoff Pathway that converts glucose to pyruvate, prior to its conversion and insertion as Acetyl-CoA into another pathway, the Krebs Cycle, critical in energy production.  All of the reactions take place at a certain rate.  In any such sequence there is a specific reaction that will be slower than any of the others.  The entire process can only function at the speed of its slowest component.  We had to learn these pathways by heart at Med School.  They are very beautiful entities, but to be honest, intimate knowledge of them doesn’t have much direct application to clinical practice…

…except in one way.  Things they don’t tell you at Med School: in the emergency department I became aware of the fact that the processing of a patient through the system is usually governed by a rate-limiting step.  It pays to identify, early on, what that step might be, and set it in motion.  For example, if you realise the patient will need a specific investigation that will take time, order the investigation early.  Don’t wait until you’ve done everything else because you will waste time.  The rate-limiting step will dictate the shortest possible length of time within which your patient can be managed.

Consider now the current waiting times experienced by patients in the community.  It is well recognised that many patients requesting a GP appointment may have to wait for a fortnight before they are seen.  Imagine they have a neurological problem necessitating referral to an NHS neurology out-patients clinic.  It is well recognised that they may need to wait for six months, or even a year.

Consider now the contribution of Mr Hancock’s “super-fast broadband” towards shortening the duration of the rate-limiting step.  It is evident that digital technology’s potential to ameliorate the inertia of the NHS is negligible.

We have to remind ourselves, constantly, of what Medicine is.  What does Medicine attempt to achieve, and what are its procedures?  What, if you will, is the Embden-Meyerhoff pathway of the medical consultation?

It never varies.  I should say, it should never be allowed to vary.  The patient meets the doctor in an environment that is quiet, secure, and confidential.  The rituals of courtesy are observed.  Then the doctor asks the patient what the problem is, and then he sits still and listens intently.  Under no circumstances should he emulate the interviewing techniques of Andrew Marr or Fiona Bruce or Jonathan Dimbleby or Emily Maitlis.  He must be completely quiet, and receptive, so that he steps into the patient’s shoes. For a moment, he becomes the patient.  This act of empathy, the taking of the medical history, very often turns out to be the consultation’s rate-limiting step.  It is always, without exception, its most important component.  It has got nothing to do with a computer, a smart phone, a manager, or a Health Secretary.

Medicine is an intensely human activity.  The medical consultation, with the medical history at its core, is the essence of what any medical practitioner with direct patient contact does.  Get the medical consultation right, and all else will follow.  I should translate this into practical, workaday terms.  A full-time GP should offer something like 20 to 25 consultations per day (fifteen minute appointments) to a maximum of 100 consultations a week.  Down south, the RCGP needs to tell that to Mr Hancock.

To give you an idea of how desperate they are down south, last night I got an emailed job offer from a GP recruiting agency for a locum (5 day working week) for the month of July on the south coast.  Remuneration: £27,650.

I said no.

Dominic Raab wants to prorogue Parliament.

Prorogue?

Isn’t it funny how these obscure words turn up all of a sudden, and everybody starts to use them as if they are in common currency and familiar to everybody?  Mr Blair resiled, and continues to resile, nothing.

Chambers: prorogue v.t. to prolong (obs.): to keep from exertion (Shak.): to discontinue the meetings of for a time without dissolving. – v.t. prorogate to prorogue: to extend by agreement, in order to make a particular action competent (Scots law). – n. prorogation.  (L. prorogare, -atum – pro, forward, rogare, to ask.)

Incidentally, while leafing through Chambers to find prorogue, I got side-tracked, as you do, and came across phratry (a social division of a people, often exogamous) and then phrontistery (a thinking place).  Aldous Huxley used to impress dinner guests with the breadth of his conversational topics, until they realised he had been browsing Encyclopaedia Britannica.  But I digress.  The phratry should be outraged that Mr Raab dare prorogue the phrontistery.

Boris, being a Classics scholar, would presumably be familiar with the etymology of such words.  He has a reputation for cleverness.  His absence from the Channel 4 debate on Sunday night might indeed be put down to cleverness rather than reticence.  With respect to the tenancy at No 10, everybody seems to think Boris is a shoo-in.  I’m not so sure.  You only need to look at the other occasions over the past 80 years when the Tories have replaced their leader, either as Prime Minister or Leader of the Opposition.  The crown seldom, if ever, falls to the front runner.  Even the appointment of Theresa May herself in 2016 surprised many of her colleagues.  Mr Cameron resigned because with respect to Brexit he’d backed the wrong horse.  But then so had Mrs May, albeit in a lukewarm fashion.  So her succession didn’t really make any sense.  Events have shown that to be so.

Then in 2005 the front runner had been David Davis, but he lost the contest on the basis of a single lacklustre speech to the party conference, while a young and relatively unknown David Cameron, speaking without notes, was confident and smooth and articulate.

Then in 1990 the frontrunner had been the colourful, mace-wielding Michael Heseltine, but he lost to John Major, a son of music hall performers, who had a meteoric rise through the Foreign Office and No 11.

After Edward Heath lost the two elections of 1974, the Tories looked around for a suitable successor.  Margaret Thatcher was widely seen as a stalking horse who would wound Mr Heath before somebody else moved in for the kill.  But to everybody’s astonishment she beat Heath in the first round.  And back in 1965 when Heath himself assumed the mantle, it was not he, but Reginald Maudling who had led the opinion polls.

Sir Alec Douglas-Home might well be seen as the archetypal unexpected Tory successor.  The charismatic front runner in 1963 was Quintin Hogg.  But the Tories had been rocked by the Profumo scandal and no doubt felt they needed somebody entirely dependable, Establishment, and colourless.

Harold MacMillan succeeded Anthony Eden in 1957.  The front runner this time was Rab Butler.  And although Eden himself had long been the heir apparent to Churchill, it might be argued that he was past it even before he finally reached No 10.  The night Winston gave a farewell dinner to the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at No 10 in 1955, he apparently said to a private secretary, “I don’t believe Anthony can do it.”  Eden’s tenure was short.  He was destroyed by ill luck, ill health, and Suez.

Churchill’s own succession in May 1940 was greeted by a large part of the Conservative Party with dismay.  The great man himself writes most eloquently, at the end of Volume 1 of his 6 volume History of the Second Word War, The Gathering Storm, of the famous occasion he and Lord Halifax met with Chamberlain to decide whom the King should send for.  But, as Nicholas Shakespeare has pointed out in Six Minutes in May (Harvill Secker 2017) WSC’s account may not be entirely accurate.  The subtitle to that book is “How Churchill Unexpectedly Became Prime Minister.”

A couple of years ago somebody asked Boris if he’d like to be PM and he replied in his bluff way that if the ball happened to squirt out of the back of the scrum in his direction he might be minded to pick it up.   I think such imagery speaks volumes.  Understatement, the Oxbridge litotes tradition, is alive and well.  Success must be effortless, or at least must appear to be effortless.  Boris does not cast himself as one of the pack.  That would be vulgar, altogether too plebeian.  Besides, he’s probably afraid – he certainly should be – of the forensic debating ability of Rory Stewart, and he must be hoping like hell that Stewart gets knocked out in the next round.  They say the premiership is Boris’s to lose.  Perhaps this is why he is walking on egg shells.  The weight of history since the Second World War suggests that to be handed the position of front runner in the race for No 10 is to be handed a poisoned chalice.  Maybe Boris has studied his history and taken George Santayana’s advice to heart, that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

The Germans, as ever, have a good word for it.  Vergangenheitsbewältigung.

Coming to terms with the past.

A pub quiz question:  Who was the first Briton ever to address the US Congress?

Winston Churchill?  Well, that would be a reasonable guess.  Harry S. Truman described him as “a real Limey.  He made a very good speech, and then we all walked around and shook his hand.”   In his address, the person in question expressed the belief that the future of civilisation lay principally in the hands of the English-speaking peoples.  Now that was one of Winston’s themes.  He took great pains to forge a trans-Atlantic alliance.  If anybody, it was he who invented the “Special Relationship”.  Only this week, President Trump described the Special Relationship as “the greatest alliance the world has ever known.”  Of course Winston, half American himself, knew that there was an element of humbug in all this.  Lend-Lease, the relinquishment of imperial naval bases in return for a fleet of obsolete destroyers, was like getting blood out of a stone.  In the film Darkest Hour there is a recreation of a trans-Atlantic telephone call between Churchill and Roosevelt, in which the President, hobbled by a suspicious and isolationist Congress, gives the PM the bad news that he can’t supply the UK with matériel.  “But we’ve paid for it!” protested the PM, “with the money we borrowed from you…”

It looks like the UK is making that transatlantic call again, cap in hand.  It’s going to be a great deal.  Fantastic deal, believe me.  Everything is on the table.  Including the NHS.  And a lot more besides.  But President Trump is the world’s greatest ad-libber.  He just makes it up as he goes along.  Somebody whispered in his ear that the NHS was not on the table, so five minutes later, it came off again.  Inconsistency never appears to trouble the President.  He used to be critical of the MMR vaccine, and then when measles returned to the US with a vengeance, he told all the moms to make sure their children got the shots.  I could imagine Andrew Marr playing him a whole reel of film in which he expressed dubious opinions he subsequently reneged on.  Mr Marr did something like this with Nigel Farage.  It tends to lead to an unseemly playground spat.  “But you said…”  “No I didn’t.”  “Did.”  “Didn’t.”  Mr Trump would look Mr Marr in the eye and tell him it was all fake news.

But is it really appropriate to compare a putative 2020 UK-US trade deal to a Lend-Lease agreement in 1940?  Surely we were in a much greater pickle 80 years ago.  And it was a completely different world.  We have grown blasé about the prosperity and the creature comforts we now enjoy.  The first Briton to address Congress also anticipated the modern world with uncanny prescience:

Broad highways crowded with automobiles threaded the remotest lands, and overhead great air-liners carried week-end tourists to the wilds of Africa and Asia…  The globe… was full of pleasure-cities where people could escape the rigour of their own climate and enjoy perpetual holiday.

In such a world everyone would have leisure… Everybody would be comfortable, but since there could be no great demand for intellectual exertion everybody would be also slightly idiotic.          

Incidentally, I thought Mr Trump spoke very well in Portsmouth.  He read President Roosevelt’s prayer on the eve of D-Day most eloquently.  And Mrs May was even more impressive.  She read a love letter from a soldier to his wife.  You might not associate prayer with the President, just as you might not associate the expression of strong emotion with the PM.  Maybe they were both able to convey something powerful precisely because the emotion was not theirs, but belonged to somebody else.

I thought it strange that the Russians were not invited to the D-Day commemorations.  Mr Lavrov evidently thought so too, although Mr Putin said he was busy enough, and not at all put out.  Considering the appalling price Russia paid on the Eastern Front, and considering also that the principal powers of the Grand Alliance were Britain, the USA, and Russia, it does seem a strange omission.  Of course it can’t be accidental, and must have everything to do with the current strained relationship between east and west.  Who knows what is going on in the higher diplomatic echelons?  But is it not better to seek détente and reconciliation when you have the chance?  Is it not, in fact, better to jaw-jaw than to war-war?

That first Brit to address Congress evidently thought so.  Himself ostensibly apolitical (that rules Winston out), he moved in the highest political circles in the 1930s.  He had the ear, and the confidence, of both Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald on one side of the Pond, and on the other, of President Roosevelt.  He could see that Europe was heading for catastrophe and he looked for a way out.  He brokered with President Roosevelt the idea of a summit, involving the United States and the great European powers, including the Fascist dictators.  President Roosevelt would chair the summit, which could be held in some neutral venue such as Geneva.  President Roosevelt was key.  He was really the One Big Man in the Show.

That’s the sort of rather archaic description Richard Hannay gives to Constantine Karolides, the Greek Premier in The Thirty-Nine Steps.  Which rather gives the game away.  The first Briton to address Congress was John Buchan, when, as Lord Tweedsmuir, he was Governor-General of Canada.  I learned this from the new biography by his granddaughter, Ursula Buchan, Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps (Bloomsbury, 2019).  The summit never happened.  As described in Janet Adam Smith’s earlier biography (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1965), John Buchan suggested it to the then British PM, Nevil Chamberlain, but Chamberlain dismissed the idea without even telling his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, and instead went off to Berchtesgaden to deal directly with Herr Hitler himself.

On the 6^th February 1940, John Buchan suffered an intracranial event from which he did not recover.  He died on 11^th February.  If he had survived, his Canadian term of office would have come to an end in September of that year.  The Canadians had wanted him to stay on, but his granddaughter thinks he might have had his eye on the post of ambassador to the US.  He was not to know that in May 1940 Chamberlain would be succeeded by Churchill, and that the man he might have considered likely to become PM, Lord Halifax, would eventually become the ambassador in Washington.  Buchan seems to have been rather wary of Winston, as a close friend of Baldwin might well have been, but he was certainly not alone in that.  He was not to know that in 1940 Winston would have his finest hour, far less that that they were both presiding, unwittingly, over the dissolution of the British Empire.

I much enjoyed Ursula Buchan’s book, and its evocation of a world I recognised, but which no longer exists.  I wonder who the next Briton to address Congress will be.  Boris?  Andrea?  What will they say?  I don’t think they should echo Buchan’s remark about the civilising pre-eminence of the English-speaking peoples.  It would be good, on the other hand, if they followed Buchan’s footsteps, headed ‘Down North’, and addressed the Québécois in French.  Yesterday, after all, was Pentecost.  Crack cocaine aside, who is surrounded by a mighty wind, touched with tongues of flame?  Who, in fact, is the One Big Man (or Woman) in the Show?

It’s not looking good.