jamescalumcampbell

At swimming practice (Hamilton Crescent School, relocated to Balshagray at the bottom of Broomhill Drive, Wednesday afternoons), I floundered up and down the pool and Mr Mennie barked, “Campbell, when are you are going to learn to swim?”  It was one of these occasions when the appropriate repartee only occurred to me later: “When are you going to teach me, sir?”  But then again, it was always dangerous to be precocious at school; you might get a clip round the ear.

Much later, at medical school in Edinburgh, I was studying along with some of my colleagues in the Royal Medical Society in its rooms across the quad from McEwan Hall, and above the Potterrow Bar.  A young consultant who was making a name for himself in the literary world called by to cut a swathe through our allegedly dull and studious lives.  I think he thought he was Somerset Maugham or Mikhail Bulgakov, but he was more like that grotesque James Thurber character in his laugh-out-loud piece Something to Say.  He said to me, “What are you going to be when you grow up, Campbell?”  On this occasion the apt riposte arrived on time: “A doctor.  What about you?”  He snorted and said to the company in general, “Here’s a man who knows exactly where he’s going, and nothing’s going to stop him!”  Actually he couldn’t have been more wrong.  I had no idea where I was going and, to paraphrase the late great George Harrison, if you have no idea where you are going, any road will take you there.

How do we choose our path in life?  As a kid, I think I would have been rather good at the pole vault.  I was a monkey on the rings and trapezes of Arlington Baths, swooping around over the pool to my heart’s content.  I have this fantasy of approaching Mr MacKay the PE teacher and saying, “I would like to learn to pole vault.”

“Pole vault.  Pole vault!  I’ll pole vault ye!”

(Pole faulting did not feature in the curriculum.)  But perhaps I am doing Mr MacKay an injustice, after the fashion of the driver who gets a flat tyre late one rainy night out in the boondocks.  He sees the light from a cottage in the distance, and plods his weary way in that direction, in the hope of borrowing a jack.  En route, soaked to the skin, he convinces himself he is going to suffer a frosty reception, and works himself into such a lather that when he knocks and the door is opened, he yells, “You can keep your f****** jack!”  For all I know, down at the playing fields in Scotstoun during “Games”, Mr Mackay might have produced the fibre glass pole.

But I don’t really regret not having tried the pole vault.  It strikes me that regret is a particularly redundant emotion, useless because it is incoherent.  If you no longer have the desire, what is the point in nursing the ambition?  And if you do have the desire, then, dammit, go for it.  Remember Tennyson’s Ulysses.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 

With this in mind, at the beginning to 2019 I started a beginner’s evening class in German.  It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time.  I always had the notion, listening to Mrs Merkel on the telly, that I nearly understood what she was saying.  German has a staccato quality quite unlike the syllable timed lenition and enjambment of French, and each subordinate clause is clearly punctuated both in speech and in print.  So I think it has an accessibility to the native English speaker.  I put it to an Austrian friend of mine that English was really a dialect of German but he reckoned that was going a bit far.

Anyway the German class is great fun.  It is so recreational to take up something entirely new.  Early days of course, but I do have a sense of the accessibility of the language.  One of the reasons I wanted to try was that I listen to a lot of German music, including lieder.  Listening to a Schubert song cycle and not knowing what is being said is like playing the viola at the back of the orchestra pit; you only get a partial, and distorted notion of what’s going on.  With this in mind, I listened to a performance of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde on Radio 3 on Friday night, and I followed the German text.  It was a Pentecostal moment.  What a revelation!  It was almost like the restoration of a missing faculty, like sight or hearing.  I thought, what on earth have I been doing for all these years, wandering around in a twilit world following the collapse of the tower of Babel?  Why didn’t I do this before?

I didn’t study German in school.  I did French and Latin, and, in my 6^th year, Spanish.  But I was never a linguist.  Indeed, looking back, I’m not sure we were ever educated to be linguists, merely to master some grammar and pass the exam.  When I started to learn French as a twelve year old I don’t think there was a single person in the class who had ever been abroad.  And there were precious few in the entire school who had come from Elsewhere, even from anywhere outside Glasgow, and even, come to think of it, from beyond the immediate precinct and catchment area of the school.  Of course it is more difficult for inhabitants of an island to master a foreign tongue, because of the lack of opportunity to speak the language in the real world.  I noticed when I lived in the antipodes that this was also true of New Zealanders, being so far removed from everywhere else.  New Zealanders are broadly as poor linguists as Brits, with some notable exceptions, usually people who have mastered Japanese or Mandarin.  The Dutch, by contrast, are fantastic linguists.  They need to be, in a country barely the size of Yorkshire, surrounded by the great European powers.  I remember a Dutch girl in New Zealand, Kate, who said, “I think I’ll learn Maori; it looks pretty easy.”  You see, there’s the difference.

There we were, in High School French class, struggling with the subjunctive.  “Il aurait fallu que nous assassinassions le Cardinal Richelieu.”  Or something.  But who cares?  Nobody talks like that.  Nobody uses the Past Historic, apart from General de Gaulle.  Learning a language is not an academic pursuit at all.  I was made sharply aware of this when as a doctor I had as a patient a teenage girl from Costa Rica, holidaying in Scotland.  My ‘O’-level Spanish was hardly up to it, so the patient’s friend, a local teenage girl, came in with her and acted as interpreter.  She had holidayed in Costa Rica and picked Spanish up.  She had sat at the feet of the patient’s grandmother, thumbing through a dictionary, saying, how do you say this; how do you say that?  She turned out to be a fantastic interpreter, and mind, the conversation, turning on symptomatology, became quite technical.  I told her afterwards that she had a great talent, and asked, might she be interested in pursuing a career using her Spanish?  Yes, she would like to, but she couldn’t see a way to do it because she had absolutely no school qualifications at all.

Well, what does passing an exam tell you about somebody?  It tells you they are good at passing exams.  And the trick of passing exams is knowing how to avoid making mistakes.  But the essence of learning a language is to make thousands of mistakes.  The essence of learning a language is not to be careful, but to be bold.  Just go out there and blurt.  Nobody gives a damn.  Put yourself in the shoes of the person listening to your efforts.  You know what it is like when a foreign visitor asks you for directions in the street.  “Can you say please me where is castle?”  You don’t discourage, do you? You certainly wouldn’t mock.  You are glad to be of help.  You use your arms, and clear, simple language.  He says, “Mine English bad,” and you reply, “Better than my Latvian.”

I suppose the study of German might be for me a route into Wagner.  But here I confess, I don’t really “get” opera.  I remember one night Paul Merton saying of opera on Have I got News for You, “It never really caught on, did it?”  In Pretty Woman, Edward Lewis takes his Vivian by private jet up from LA to San Francisco to see the opera.  He tells her that if you aren’t truly an opera lover, you might learn to appreciate the art form, but it would never enter your soul.  I guess that’s me.  I’m okay with opera if I close my eyes and just listen to an aria.  But I can’t get past the idea that there is something preposterous about the whole package.  I just can’t suspend my disbelief, voluntarily or otherwise.  In the 1987 film of The Untouchables (which incidentally has a distinguished musical score), Al Capone occupies a box at the Opera and listens to some lachrymose Verdi lament – I seem to recall it was from Pagliacci, in which a clown is heartbroken to discover that his lover has been unfaithful, yet he still must put on the greasepaint and go out on stage and be funny.  It is the most pathetic thing.  Capone sits there, weeping.  Then one of his lackeys comes in to whisper in his ear that one of the Untouchables, an Irish cop played by Sean Connery, has been bumped off.  You see Capone’s tears turn to laughter.  His tears all along had been crocodilian.

But all operatic tears are crocodile tears.  I watched a programme on BBC 4 on Sunday night when Antonio Pappano talked about the Aria throughout the history of opera, discussing arias with some of the great opera singers of our day, and rehearsing with them.  The music was wonderful, as were the singers.  But I can’t take the libretti seriously.  And the acting is so hammy.  A few weeks ago I had reason in these annals to extol Michael Caine’s memoir Blowing the Bloody Doors Off.  It’s a book that some opera singers might do well to read.  In Rep, Sir Michael was rehearsing the part of a drunk man, and the director said to him, “Michael, what are you doing?”  “I’m acting a drunk.”  “But that’s my point.  I don’t want you to act a drunk.  I want you to be a drunk.  You are trying to act drunk, but what a drunk does is try to act sober.”

So who knows, maybe opera would work if the players remembered that “less is more”.  Hamlet tells the visiting troupe at Elsinore to “speak the speech trippingly”.  I have an idea Mozart also favoured a lightness of touch.  In Così Fan Tutte the men farewell the ladies and go off to the wars in music that would break your heart.  But of course it’s all tosh.  They are not going to war at all.  They are going to play an elaborate sex trick on their lovers.  I can’t think Mozart looked to Lorenzo da Ponte, his librettist, for psychological depth.  He probably read the stuff, burst out laughing, and said, “That’ll do.”

But who knows, once I’ve got a little more German under my belt, maybe I’ll become a regular attendee at Bayreuth, solemnly responding to the summons of the Wagner tubas.

Hier wird der Vorhang aufgezogen.

Volles Wogen der Wassertiefe.

 

 

 

 

This was the prequel to Misadventure.

I still get the flashbacks, the PTSD.  I haven’t worked in the department for over twenty years, though periodically I visit, twice in the last year, like a felon drawn back to the scene of the crime.  Sometimes I dream about the place; I grapple all night, amid a zone of chaos, with an intractable problem.  I remember hundreds of these nights.  We used to think that there must be a better way of doing this.  We joined forces with our colleagues across the Tasman, in the college in Melbourne, and organised.  We had a plan, and a vision, and I think that is why there was a period in the 90s when despite the pandemonium I used to wake with buoyancy and hope.

Shortly after midnight on Sunday, December 21^st., 1991, an invisible swirl of wind darted between the Manukau Heads, flashed across the Manukau Harbour, thundered briefly through South Auckland and vanished out into the Hauraki Gulf.  In its brief and violent passage across the built-up area east of the airport, tongues of the wind flicked down avenues with the venturi effect of tremendous acceleration between tall buildings, resulting in short-lived and chaotic street-tornadoes that cut a swathe of devastation almost before people had realised that the wind had picked up.  I worked on in the bowels of the emergency department, completely oblivious to this little local natural disturbance.

It was only a forearm flesh wound requiring a few sutures, but the patient had been kind enough to inform me that he was HIV positive, and I had taken him, not into one of the main theatres, but into Room 9, a small treatment room towards the back of the department, where I had set up a suture tray, then carefully gowned, and masked, and put on the heavy Perspex visor, then the sterile gloves.  A staff nurse looked in.  No, I didn’t need any help, but could she put screens over the door, and, no interruptions please.  I sat down and, carefully and methodically, cleaned and closed the wound, then applied tulle, an outer dressing and, finally, a sling.  I had closed out all the extraneous noises coming from the rest of the department, but I had heard the snarl of the ambulance siren, and was aware that something was taking place in Resus.  I carefully disposed of all sharps, then delivered the used suture tray and all the protective clothing into a large marked laundry bag which I closed up and deposited in its place at the back of the sluice.  I competed the paper-work, handed a copy to the patient, and bade him good evening.  I walked into Resus.

“Clear!”  Yolande applied the defibrillator paddles.  The patient gave an indifferent shrug, a 360 Joule shrug.

“Back in sinus!  Have we got an output?  Yes!”

I said accusingly, “You have resuscitated Mr Proudfoot.”

Mary Heenan said, “You haven’t resuscitated Mr Proudfoot?”

Mr Proudfoot, who was in the end stages of a severe cardiorespiratory illness, had requested that the next time he was admitted in cardiac arrest, he should be left in peace.  His cardiac consultant Dr Finlayson had even taken the trouble to come down to ED.  “The next time Mr Proudfoot dies,” he had said, “(and I choose my words carefully) – the next time Mr Proudfoot dies, he should not be resurrected.”

What had we done?  He had set his lands in order, made his will, paid all his bills, said goodbye to all his friends, kissed his family and told them he loved them, and made peace with his maker.  There was nothing to fear.  This was merely part of the progression of things – birth, childhood, education, career, marriage, children, domesticity, patriarchy, the twilight years and now, another physiological entity in its due place, demise.  Yet indeed there was something to fear.  The Health Service.

The Resus door opened and a trolley was pushed in.  An agitated, fit-looking young man.  “We need to double up,” said the staff nurse.  “Push Mr Proudfoot over there.”  The doors closed then immediately opened again.  Another trolley, bearing a screaming toddler, accompanied by two desperate parents.  “Near drowning.”  We were getting crowded.  I was looking at the agitated man.  He was dressed in Lycra, with the knee-length shorts of the cyclist, and a colourful top.  He stared wide-eyed at the ceiling.  Bizarrely, he was still cycling, still on his bike, peddling furiously.  I turned to the child.  Pink, well-perfused, alert, screaming robustly.  I asked the distraught parents what had happened, and at the same time I could hear the nurses trying to deal with Mr Proudfoot.  “There’s no room for him in resus.  We can’t monitor him in the corridor.”

I said, “Take him off the monitor.  No more shocks.”

“Right.”

The near-drowning child was in good condition.  It was a classic story.  They had moved house that evening.  The parents paused for a rest during the unpacking, and noticed the child was missing.  They found him, face down in the pool.  They must have found him immediately after he’d fallen in.  No hypoxia, no aspiration, no neurological damage.  Another minute and the story would have been very different.  The mother cried tears of vexation, anger, guilt, and overwhelming relief.  I knew they would never forget this night.  Twenty five years from now, at his son’s wedding, the father would make a light-hearted and witty speech about his son, embarrassing him with a few anecdotes of childhood.  He would touch with wistful levity on this fateful night.  There would be laughter from the wedding guests, and his bride would smile fondly over the notion that she had nearly been widowed a quarter century ago.  The best man would make a lewd and raucous speech.  Dave taking a header into the family pool when he was two.  What a joke.

But amid the laughter, the mother and father of the groom would cast a glance at one another, and hold one another’s gaze fractionally, and utter a silent prayer of gratitude that fate had looked down upon them, albeit indifferently, yet chosen to let the coin fall one way.

The cyclist was still peddling.  I laid a hand on his shoulder.  “Come on mate.  Off your bike.  Was there a triathlon today?”

Karen Jones nodded.  “Pukekohe.  2.4 km swim.  180 km bike ride.  And a marathon.”

“But it’s past midnight!”

“Yes.  There are still a few runners out.”

“What’s his temperature?”

“38.”

“Good enough.  Give him some intravenous fluids and see how he goes.  Come on, pal.  Climb down.  You’re in hospital.”

He grinned.  “Hospital.”  But he kept peddling.

The ambulance R/T squawked away.  A fight, in a hotel.  Gang-related.  There were knives, and somebody had a firearm.  The Armed Offenders Squad were in attendance.

Yolande tapped me on the shoulder.  “How do you reduce a dislocated jaw?”

“Glove up, put your thumbs on the lower molars, and your fingers behind the angles of the mandible.  Pull down, then rotate the jaw forward, then push it back.”

She rehearsed it in mid-air.  “Down, forwards, back.  Okay!  Got it!”  It is sometimes said that there is no such thing as a Teaching Hospital.  There are only Learning Hospitals.  We had accrued knowledge and experience by peddling and trafficking in information by word of mouth, the oral tradition.  Thus, the nightmarish, medieval, corrupt, exploitative, sleepless training: “See one, do one, teach one.”

Mary Heenan grabbed my elbow.  “Resus.  It’s a hanging matter.”

He was middle-aged, overweight, double-chinned, balding, and moustachioed.  He wore nothing but an expensive-looking silk dressing gown, and a silk cravat in the same pattern, claret-red with Chinese lettering in green.  The cravat had become a noose which the paramedics had loosened.  I   could see the constrictive erythematous abrasion all around the neck.  The patient’s nipples were skewered by hatpins.

“What on earth…”

“Watching blue movies.”

“The things we do.”

And unlike the near-drowned child, this man was very unwell.  Airway… breathing… circulation…  Eyes open to pain, localising pain, incomprehensible grunting.  He needed a rapid sequence induction.  Could he have a spinal injury?  Better assume so, protect the neck, and paralyse and intubate in the neutral anatomical position.

Yolande came back.  “No good.  I can’t get my thumbs into his mouth.  Would sedation help?”

“What?”

“The dislocated jaw.”

“Oh that.  Unusual if he doesn’t have an open mouth.  Are you sure of the diagnosis?”

It was my mistake.  I should have gone to see the patient at this point.  Yolande shrugged. “What else could it be?”

“I’ve seen a drug dystonic reaction mimicking a dislocated jaw.  Is he on something?  Did somebody slip him something in the pub?”

“I’m not sure.  I’ll check.”

Mary Heenan said, “I’ve got as cast iron a stomach as anybody.  I don’t mind blood, I don’t mind pus, or vomit, or even sputum, and I’ll take any amount of crap, but this is too much.”

“What is it, Mary?”

A sallow, unkempt man lay in Room 10.  There was a piece of tulle over a substantial lesion on the outer aspect of the left upper arm, held in a stout Gamgee.  Mary slipped on a pair of gloves.  “Ready?”  She took the dressing down.  The patient’s wound was seething.  Maggots.  Mary said, “I’m sorry, I can’t deal with this.”

“It’s okay.  Get somebody to put hydrogen peroxide on the wound and leave it for half an hour.  Then he can take a shower.”

Yolande was back.  “I don’t think it’s a dystonic reaction.  I still think it’s a dislocation.”

“Are you still dealing with that jaw?  Come on Yolande, we need you.  Send him to X-ray for tempero-mandibular joint views, open and closed.”

It was my mistake again.  I should have recognised a request for help, and gone to take a look.  Instead, I looked into Theatre 1.  Lawrence was suturing to music.  Mozart.  I thought, great!  I’m running round like a headless chook, Yolande’s fixated on a jaw, and Lawrence is listening to Mozart.  Meanwhile outside in the ambulance bay in a gale force wind the ambulances were disgorging.  I spent an hour darting between the broken wrists and ankles, the dislocated shoulders, falls, assaults, crashes, collapses, and the stigmata of hitherto undescribed states.  Suddenly the department was full of big heavy tattooed men in black leather jackets.

“Mary, I don’t want to alarm you, but I’ve just seen an emblem belonging to the Power, and a tatt belonging to the Mob, and when they run into one another, there’ll be hell to pay.  Get the police.”

“They’re on their way.”

The first of the stabbings from the hotel fracas arrived.  “Tension pneumothorax.  Drain, please.  No – skip the X-ray.  Where are Lawrence and Yolande?  Get them in here.  Next!”

“Doctor to Resus 3!”  A girl of 16, unconscious, unresponsive.  The attending staff nurse held up the empty pill bottle.  “Barbiturates.”

“Really?  How old-fashioned.  How long ago?”

“Twelve hours estimated.”  That was really bad news.  Another crash induction.  Yolande came in.  “What’s that?”

“Barbiturates.”  I turned down the right lower eye lid.  “See that?  See the conjunctival oedema.  That’s ‘the tear that never falls’.”

Karen Jones and Mary Heenan came in together.  “That was ambulance control.  Big crash at Ramarama.  Car versus car versus truck.  Six patients, status 3.

Well, just keep working away.  It could be worse.  It could be an earthquake, or a volcanic eruption, or a nuclear holocaust.  I said, “I think it’s time to declare a state of ‘Acopia’.  We’ve run out of hands.  Send for reinforcements.  Are the orthopods scrubbed?”  And Yolande was still messing around with a jaw.

“I got the TMJ views.  Pity I can’t interpret them.”  I took the films and held them up to the light.

“Normal.  See, this is open, this is closed.  See the condyle of the mandible riding forward on the temporal bone.  It’s within normal limits.”

“Well if it’s not dislocated, I don’t know what we’ve got.”

I did what I should have done two hours before.  “Take me to him.  Let’s carry out a quick Grand Round, before the next wave arrives.”

They all lay around, like the wounded on a battlefield, drunks, stabbing victims, overdoses, asthmatics, dislocations and fractures, and the man with the maggots.  I counted six policemen.  The leather jackets had receded into the background.  I looked into Theatre 1.  It was empty.  Completely empty.  The portable CD player and speakers had vanished.

Yolande found her patient.  She swept the curtain of the cubicle aside.  “Here.”

I felt myself blanch.  “He’s got tetanus.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“How did you know it was tetanus?”

At 4.30 am I was tempted to drink a cup of tea with Mary Heenan before turning in.  I shrugged, recalling the peculiar quality of the trismus, the rictus, the risus sardonicus.  “I’m lucky.  I’ve seen two cases of full-blown tetanus before, in Papua New Guinea.  They both looked just like that guy.”  I could still remember the nervousness of the wait on the postage-stamp air strip perched on a mountain top at Maramuni; the cackle of the wind through the Pandanus trees, the monotonous buzzing of the flies in the afternoon sun, and the hot stench of the red-brown New Guinean earth.   

“Well,” said Mary, “I’m impressed.”  I swaggered off to bed.  Pride cometh before a fall.

I climbed into the sleeping bag on the floor of my office.  Light filtered through the chinks in the curtains.  I shivered and felt vaguely sick.  It was horrible, going to bed at dawn.  We had a debate one night in the Edinburgh Royal Hospital for Sick Children – “Sick Chicks” – about whether it was better to go to bed for one hour, or stay up all night.  The definitive answer was supplied by a Shetland girl who spoke with a beautiful, sing-song, almost Nordic accent.  “Go to bed and get rid of the ankle oedema.”  And what was that desperately poignant thing a prisoner in Auschwitz had said?  “How do I get rid of my oedema?  I weep it away.”

I slept.

In the exhausted, hospital semi-sleep snatched after the false dawn, one dreamed vividly.  These dreams were intense and could be remarkably coherent.  They were a combination of the rational and the surreal.  They could be monodelusional.  Somewhere, lurking within the confines of the dream, would be a stark anomaly.  This morning, my dream was all of a piece.  I entered in on it fully furnished with the prior information to make sense of it.  Dr Da Silva was a research haematologist, middle-aged, of mysterious mulatto-creole origin.  He was carrying out research under the auspices of, and with the aid of a substantial grant from a wealthy Japanese pharmaceutical company.  He was researching the oxygen-carrying capacity of various synthetic molecules.  In particular he was looking for a molecule which, while it mimicked the oxygen dissociation curve of adult human haemoglobin, was neither carcinogenic, nor allergenic, nor teratogenic; in addition, it had to be stable in plasma, and had to have certain properties of pliability, fragility, and viscosity.  In short, Dr Da Silva was trying to make artificial blood.  We were interested in Dr Da Silva’s project because we were always running short of blood.  Our patients were always running short of blood.

Dr Da Silva’s research was far advanced.  Results from experiments with an animal model were proving extremely promising.  But he had run into problems with the Medical Ethics Committee.  Meanwhile the Japanese stock market was unusually edgy, and Da Silva’s sponsors, though polite as always, were fidgeting.  They needed a break-through.  Desperate times demand desperate measures.

That was my dream’s back-story.  Where did it come from?  I have no idea.

I was standing in Resus tinkering with a Hamilton blood-warmer when Dr Da Silva floated silently in.  I looked up, and gasped.

“Dr Da Silva!  What has happened to you?”

Dr Da Silva gave me a ghostly grin, raised a white hand in a salute as from a great distance, and floated on.  I followed him through the department.

“Dr Da Silva!  Wait!”

As he passed down the corridor, two nurses standing together in earnest conversation looked up, gasped, and I saw one of them put a hand up to her mouth.  They separated to let him pass.

“Doctor!  You are so pale!”

He was, in fact, deathly white.  Yet still ostensibly Caribbean.  He looked like something out of Voodoo.  A zombie.

I followed him down the medical corridor, a few steps behind, and to his right.  I noticed he placed his steps with exaggerated care, careful not to bump into anything.  I imagine even minor trauma might have been a concern.  He could not be sure how his molecule would affect the clotting factors, the cascade mechanism.  Outside Physiotherapy, the Professor of Medicine was talking to his secretary, a well-dressed middle-aged lady, holding a pair of ornate horn-rimmed spectacles several inches in front of her eyes, squinting at a file.  As Da Silva passed, she looked up, uttered a soft, strangled scream, and dropped the file.

Dr Da Silva reached the end of the medical corridor.  I had the impression that, all the way along, his feet had not actually made contact with the floor.  He put a hand gingerly on the door handle at the end of the corridor and turned to stare at me with his sickening, bloodless smile.  “Do you think I should risk going outside?”

I thought, why not?  After all, being dead already, a zombie cannot be killed.  I said, “Dr Da Silva, are you all right?”

“Perfectly.”

But I had the notion that when Dr Da Silva had performed the exchange transfusion on himself, he had lost his soul.  Perhaps there were functions that the red calls performed, vital neuropsychiatric functions, about which our physiologists knew nothing.

Dr Da Silva passed through the door and floated across the car park.  A 1962 Hillman Minx, making its way from Occupational Health to the main hospital thoroughfare, seemed to become momentarily confused, meandered over the kerb, and slumped gently against an empty dustbin.  My eyes flickered at this minor diversion.  When I next looked, Dr Da Silva had vanished.

My locator sounded.  “Beep… beep… beep…”  I switched it off and turned to walk back down the medical corridor.

“Beep… beep… beep…”

I opened my eyes.  The room was full of pale grey light.  I reached for the phone, dropped it, retrieved it, and spoke into the ear-piece, inverted the phone, and spoke again.

“Whassis?”

“Are you awake?”

“Was mah?”

“We need you to do an arm block.”

“Fetch Dr Da Silva.”

“You there?”

“Car hit a dustbin…”

“Doctor!  Get up!  Both feet on the ground!”  Was not this how they came for you, in the middle of the night, to disappear you into the Gulag?

I pulled myself up.  “What is it?”

“Can you put in an arm block for a broken wrist?”

“Get Lawrence or Yolande to do it.”

“They’re not credentialed.”

“Get them to do an ischaemic block, a Biers’ block.”

“Come on doctor.  You know we’ve banned them in the department.”

“Oh Hell.”  I got up and staggered across to the nurses’ station in the acute assessment area, in rumpled theatre blues.   I couldn’t get Da Silva out of my head.  He’d seemed so real.  I could not begin to fathom how I’d dreamed him up.  Did he exist?  If so, who was he?  Had I invented him?  If so, who was I?

“Where’s the wrist?”

“In there.”  The staff nurse pointed.  “Here’s the x-ray.”

I gave it a cursory glance.  “It’s broke, that’s for sure.”  I checked the label.  The X-ray belonged to a certain Mr Wilson.  Resus room 3.  A placid, bald-headed gentleman sat by his bedside.

“Morning sir.”

“Good morning doctor.”  He was disgustingly cheerful.

“Which is the sore wrist?”

He may have paused uncertainly for an instant before answering, but then he lifted his right arm.

“I’ve been asked to pop the arm off to sleep.  Then I believe the orthopaedic surgeons will be looking after you.”

“You’re the boss.”

I even got him to sign the consent form.

I put the X-ray of the fractured wrist up on the viewing box, drew 40 mls of 1% prilocaine with adrenaline into a 50 ml syringe, and attached it to a 45 degree bevelled needle via an anaesthetic extension set.  I invited the patient to lie supine on a trolley, and he complied.  I brought his right arm into abduction and full external rotation at the shoulder such that the hand and wrist were lying behind his head.  I found the axillary pulse in the right axilla, and injected into the surrounding sheath of the neurovascular bundle.

“Feel a tingling?”

“Slight, in the fingers…”

“Hand’s going numb…”

“Good.”  I injected the entire content of the syringe.

“Okay?”

“Good as gold.”

I glanced again at the X-ray.  It was a Colles’ fracture, quite severely displaced, comminuted, and foreshortened.  Funny how the wrist clinically hadn’t looked so bad!  I peered at the X-ray.  I felt an insidious gnawing emptiness create itself in the pit of my stomach.  There was a large letter “L” superimposed in the top left corner of the X-ray plate.  It was an X-ray of a left wrist.  If I felt angry at Mr Wilson, it was only because I felt twice as angry with myself.   But how could he lie there and let me anaesthetise the wrong limb?  Did he think we were performing some esoteric therapeutic manoeuvre at a remote site?  What did he think I was?  An iridologist?  Only one thing for it.  It’s always the same in medicine.  If you make a mistake, own up.

“I’m terribly sorry.  I’ve numbed the wrong arm, Mr Wilson.”

I bit my lip.  He nodded comfortingly at me, and said, without rancour, “I’m not Mr Wilson.”

“Beep… beep… beep…”

This time I woke up in a cold sweat.

“Fellow citizens,” said President Lincoln at Gettysburg, “We cannot escape History.”

You feel it as you take the ferry from the west coast of Scotland, cross the Irish Sea, and proceed slowly up the long inlet of Belfast Lough.  You feel something remarkably similar when you cross out of Spain from La Linea on to the Rock of Gibraltar.  There is a cemetery at the foot of the rock full of the dead from Trafalgar.  You had thought that the past was a distant foreign land only alluded to in textbooks.  But the rock remains a citadel and a fortress, littered with ancient redoubts and buttresses.  Union flags are scrawled on pavements.  No surrender!  It’s here, it’s now.

Mrs May features heavily in February 3^rd’s Sunday Telegraph (Page 1: “May: I’ll fight for Britain in Brussels”.  And on page 19 she writes to us personally (“I’m going to battle for Britain in Brussels”).  The phrase “Battle for Britain” resonates of course.  Earlier in the week, one of the last of The Few died.  It was announced on the BBC, and then we heard the voice of Winston: “Never in the field of human conflict…”  Nothing is accidental.

Basically, Mrs May wants to renegotiate the Irish “backstop” which now appears to be the main impediment frustrating a UK/EU deal.

I was about to write, “Well, good luck with that.”  But that is not a constructive way to speak.  I really do wish her all the luck in the world.  But all the luck in the world cannot change the unalterable fact that when the UK leaves the EU, there will be a border between the Irish Republic, and Northern Ireland.  From this perspective, it now seems incredible that in 2016, politicians on both the Remain and the Leave side did not draw our attention to this fact.  It just shows you – all these patricians nurtured to lead are just as fallible as the rest of us.

So now they are scrabbling to find some means to square the circle – to take the UK out of the EU while simultaneously maintaining the island of Ireland at least as some kind of economic entity.

I’m not sure that Westminster has the credentials to step up to this problem.  I remember during the troubles John Major commenting on the latest Belfast bombing: “Imagine if this sort of thing were going on in Surrey…”  As a comment it was well meant but it merely served to emphasise the point that Belfast is not Surrey.

I have this notion that our ruling class does not really appreciate the cultural rifts that exist within the regions of the British Isles.  Of course England with its disproportionately huge population (and also its very remarkable history) dominates the nations of the UK.  The other nations tend to be depicted in the mass media in rather cartoonish fashion.  The Scots occupy a Celtic twilight full of whisky and heather and doomed romanticism.  The Welsh are all black-faced coal miners with wonderful tenor voices.  The Irish are whimsical and funny and fey.  It seems inconceivable that peoples so obviously lacking (didn’t an Australian call the Welsh “the village idiots of rugby”?) should want to control their own destiny.

So over the course of the next few weeks we are going to witness Westminster’s attempt to solve the problem of the backstop.  Where to begin?

I wish to make a constructive, if rather unusual, suggestion.

Begin with the second movement to the First Symphony of Arnold Bax.

If I am besotted with the music of Arnold Bax (1883 – 1953), I think it is because he is the only great classical composer whose music might be described as “Celtic”.  Born in London, he early showed signs of remarkable technical music facility manifest in his ability to sight-read complex orchestral scores at the piano.  But in addition, he had a profound creative instinct.  He led what some people would describe as a Bohemian life which took him to Russia, and crucially, to Ireland.  He lived in Dublin, learned the Irish language, and wrote literature under the name of Dermot O’Byrne.

He had a huge compositional output.  He wrote seven symphonies between 1921 and 1939.  I would love to tell you all about them but I really need to tell you about the slow movement to the first symphony, and I mustn’t get side-tracked.

Well, let’s be side-tracked for a moment.  All seven symphonies have three movements.  They are composed, and wonderfully orchestrated, for a very large orchestra.  He was very fond of the device of the epilogue – a quiet and contemplative close to a symphony following its climactic apotheosis.  Epilogues feature in Symphonies 2, 3 (perhaps most notably), 6, and 7.  The epilogue to the second symphony states to the listener quite clearly, “This is not the end; this is merely a pause on a very long journey.”  By contrast, the epilogue to the seventh and last symphony states, in a manner rather subdued but so poignant, “Symphonically, this is everything I have to say.”

He used to come up to Morar, by Mallaig in the Scottish north-west, in the winter, to score his symphonies.  He stayed at the Morar Station Hotel.  I have stayed there a couple of times, on a pilgrimage.  There is no blue plaque.

Who are the great English symphonists?  Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Bax, and Walton.  Yet Bax is almost never heard.  He was knighted, he was Master of the King’s Music, and he is almost never heard.  Why is that?  Is it possible that his political sympathies have relevance?

It is often said that the second movement of Bax’s First Symphony, which is very dark – I’d go so far as to say it is the most sombre piece of music I know – mourns the loss of Bax’s friends in the First World War.  It may be so, but it is more.  I am convinced it is a commemoration of the friends he lost in the 1916 Easter uprising, and, more, it is a graphic and overpowering depiction of an execution.  You cannot hear it without thinking of Yeats’ poem Easter 1916.

And what if excess of love

Bewildered them till they died?

I write it out in verse –

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.                                                                      

Somebody tried to use my credit card last week, twice.  I learned about it when the fraud squad of a well-known financial institution left a message on my mobile asking me to call them urgently.  They left a number.  Well, I thought, you say you’re the fraud squad but you could be anybody.  So I phoned a different number, the one embossed on my credit card, and asked to be put through to the fraud squad.  This was clearly an unusual route to go down and I had to negotiate so many menus and make so many digital choices that it all melded from the absurd to the farcical to the surreal to the fantastical.  But I eventually got there.  Only to be met by a robotic voice.  Did I recognise the following four transactions?  If so, say “Yes”, if not, press 1 to speak to a human being.  I recognised two out of four.  I pressed 1.

My circuitous route was prompted by another telephonic experience I had a few months ago when a representative of the self-same institution, a financial adviser, called me on my mobile and asked if it was a convenient time to conduct a consultation about my financial affairs.  I must have been in an unusually benign mood that day because I said yes.  “Superb.”  (You’d think he’d just won the lottery.)  “Just a few security questions before we begin.  Is that okay?”  Fine.  “Perfect.”  (If you want to recreate his voice, think of the voice of Martin Patience, the (actually superb) BBC foreign correspondent who reports from some of the world’s most troubled regions.  It is a particular West of Scotland voice, that of a man who might go to rugby practice at Hughenden in the west end of Glasgow on a Thursday night and have a few jars with the guys.)

“Now you must understand that we will never ask you for your passwords in full, so I’m only going to ask you…”  You know the sort of thing.  What is the second letter of your mother’s maiden name?  What is the ninth letter of your password?  I supplied the info.  And then we got on with it.  It was a perfectly amicable conversation.  I won’t say it was productive, as I had no agenda.  But he seemed a nice enough guy.  We chatted about this and that.

It was only later that it occurred to me, in a slow-witted way, that while he had taken pains to establish my identity, I had not taken pains to establish his.  Maybe he was a scammer who had just hacked his way into my account, and was now about to clear it with a series of extravagant purchases.  With that thought on mind, I went on line and researched him.  (Fortunately I had remembered his name.)  Yes, he was a financial adviser with said financial institution.  But I could hardly be reassured.  My caller might have borrowed this particular identity just as, I feared, he was about to borrow mine.

So I contacted said financial institution by another route, and ascertained that he was, insofar as I could tell, who he had said he was.

But I was far from reassured.  I think at this point my worry about the situation had slightly altered focus.  I was less concerned by the idea that I had been scammed, and more concerned by the idea that I might have been scammed.  I was ashamed by the idea that I might have been gullible. I should have said to the guy, “Well you say that’s who you are, but how do I know?”  Maybe I should have been armed with a series of security questions to ask him.

So I phoned said financial institution back and said that I thought their modus operandi was suboptimal. No, not suboptimal, dammit: inadequate.  I was advised that if I had that concern, the next time I was contacted, I should hang up and re-contact the institution by a number I knew to be valid.  This advice was delivered as if, so to say, if you want to be that pernickety, here is a solution that might suit you.  There wasn’t a recognition that the fault might not lie in my paranoia, but in their complacency.

Anyway, to return to last week, we established that two of my credit card transactions were valid, and two were bogus.  My credit card was cancelled and a replacement with a new number sent to me.

Small beer, I hear you say.  And indeed, I wasn’t that much exercised myself.  Scams on the telephone and on the internet have become commonplace.  But I think we have to put this sort of episode into a wider picture.  I venture to suggest that if we think cyber-crime is bad now, we ain’t seen nothing yet.  There are obvious reasons why cyber-crime is bound to expand.  The criminal doesn’t need to visit the scene of the crime.  He can be on another continent and he doesn’t need to rise from his armchair.  He won’t leave his fingerprints or his DNA.  If somebody gets on his trail, he can shut himself down.  He can, essentially, cease to exist.  He can reincarnate himself as another persona.  He can be a thief, or a slanderer, or a stalker; he can drive people to suicide.

And yet our society is besotted with the digital world.  In every walk of life, politics, social services, education, health, law and order, vast sums of money are spent on sophisticated computer systems which often prove unfit for purpose.  They frequently break down or, worse, malfunction as if out of control in the hands of a sorcerer’s apprentice.  The systems are not secure.  They are easily compromised.  They are porous.  Confidentiality can never be guaranteed.  They are vulnerable to hostile and malignant imported malware.  I think of my own field, medicine.  I have a suspicion that in medicine, the devotion to IT comes in inverse proportion to the appreciation of the invaluable commodity that is human kindness.  Of course computerised technology has a place.  You can’t run a CT or an MRI scanner without it.  And yet it so easy for people to forget that far and away the most powerful tool in medicine is the kindly and experienced doctor, or nurse, who closes out the mad clamour of the world, sits down in a safe sanctuary with the patient, asks: what is it that is troubling you? – and then listens.

Robots can’t do that.

In the 2016 referendum we placed Parliament in a double bind.  Half the electorate said, “Keep us in the EU and we will love you”, and the other half said, “Take us out of the EU and we will love you.”  (I say half and half: a 52 – 48 majority in favour of leaving is barely statistically significant.)  In psychiatry, the double bind was first described by Bateson and his colleagues in the 1950s.  A subject was given two conflicting commands by somebody in a position of authority, and was denied the freedom to articulate that the dilemma was impossible to solve.  To be in a double bind is to suffer extreme anxiety.  It was thought that prolonged exposure to a double bind might be a potential cause of schizophrenia.  In that sense, we may conclude that the House of Commons, collectively, has gone mad.

Mrs May is repeatedly subjected to the double bind.  Last week her government suffered the worst defeat in parliamentary history, and then almost immediately she was reassured by the House in a vote of confidence.  This is like a parent saying “I love you” to a child, while administering corporal punishment.  Mr Corbyn told her to take “no deal” off the table, while the right wing of her party told her to keep “no deal” on the table.  But the EU has told her that her deal is the only deal available, and the House has told her that the only deal available is off the table.

Santayana taught us that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.  Has Westminster been schizophrenic before?

For his preface to Volume 2 of his Autobiography, Bertrand Russell chose The Defiled Sanctuary, by William Blake:

I saw a chapel all of gold

That none did dare to enter in,

And many weeping stood without,

Weeping, mourning, worshipping.

 

I saw a serpent rise between

The white pillars of the door,

And he forced and forced and forced

Till down the golden hinges tore:

 

And along the pavement sweet,

Set with pearls and rubies bright,

All his shining length he drew, –

Till upon the altar white

 

Vomited his poison out

On the bread and on the wine.

So I turned into a sty,

And laid me down among the swine.   

Volume 2 of Russell’s Autobiography starts on the eve of the First World War.  Russell thought of himself as a Faustian figure, for whom Mephistopheles was represented by the Great War.  He thought that Britain’s declaration of war on Germany was an act of collective madness.  He saw the war as a descent into barbarism.  He would have fits of black despair.  He had visions of London as a place of unreality – its inhabitants hallucinations – in which bridges would collapse and sink, and the whole city vanish.  He told T. S. Eliot about it, and Eliot put it into The Waste Land.  Russell’s apocalyptic vision reminds me of the atmosphere of more than one television drama by Nigel Neale – reaching an apotheosis in the sixth episode of Quatarmass and the Pit – in which all the characters, including the protagonists, become mesmerised by a force of evil, and are on the brink of losing their humanity.  The descent into barbarism was experienced by people who were not in charge of their own psyche.  To say that the First World War was “caused” by Prussian aggression or an upset in the European Balance of Power is a bit like saying that the tragedy of Macbeth, Macbeth’s destruction, was “caused” by his vaulting ambition.  Russell realised that the impulse to war had to be understood in psychoanalytical terms.  We go to war, apparently, because it is in our nature so to do.  It is sometimes said the outbreak of the Great War was governed solely by railway timetables – a flippant remark no doubt, yet it carries the sense that events developed a momentum of their own, and people were powerless to influence them.

We see something similar happening in the thirties, and in the run-up to World War Two.  Between 1936 and 1939 Churchill wrote a series of fortnightly letters which appeared in book form in 1939 (Step by Step, Oldhams Press Ltd 1939).  In the second of these, Stop it Now! (April 3^rd 1936) he pleaded with the European powers to come together under the auspices of the League of Nations to curtail Nazi aggression.  “Stop it!  Stop it!!  Stop it now!!!  NOW is the appointed time.”  Churchill lamented the fact that people seemed incapable of seeing an approaching agony, and taking effective measures to prevent it.  Rather, they were “amused from day to day by headlines and from night to night by cinemas.”  Again, there is a sense that people are living in a trance.

If The Defiled Sanctuary is the poem that defines the world just before the Great War, then surely in respect of the eve of the Second World War we must look to Yeats:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.   

And now?  Our problem now is not that we are about to make the wrong decision and go down the wrong path, but that we are not even able to articulate the nature of our predicament.  One possible reaction to finding oneself in a double bind is to switch off.  I find myself listening to the news and the wall-to-wall Brexit coverage with a degree of detachment, the way King Lear wanted to sit and listen to the court news with Cordelia when he was withdrawing from life –

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

But then, Lear went mad.

What poem should we choose to reflect our life and times?  Well, it’s Burns season.  What about To a Mouse?       

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,

In proving foresight may be vain:

The best-laid schemes o mice an men

Gang aft agley,

An lea’e us nought but grief an pain,

For promis’d joy!

 

Still thou art blest, compar’d wi me!

The present only toucheth thee:

But och!  I backward cast my e’e,

On prospects drear!

An forward, tho I canna see,

I guess an fear!  

 

 

 

 

 

 

I said to Big Jobs, “Can you get hold of some Kina Lillet for me?”

Big Jobs frowned.  “What the hell’s that?”  I said truthfully, “I don’t know.  I think it might be some kind of Italian vermouth.  Gin and It.  It’s part of a cocktail called a Vesper.”  Big Jobs raised his eyebrows enquiringly.  I had memorised the recipe.  “Three measures of Gordons, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet.”

“Crikey.  Sounds a bit posh.  I don’t think they’ll have it in Agnews.  Leave it with me.”

It was like asking the Scrounger in Stalag Luft III for a crow bar.

*

What is the trick of life?

I had been watching her for weeks, walking dreamily along the open-air corridors of the New Building, always en route to a class.  She wore her school uniform with elegance and distinction.  Sometimes she carried her schoolbag in front of her, like a child.  Her perfect deportment emphasised her tallness.  She had long dark brown hair which sometimes she tied up but more often was free.  Her name was Jennifer Marsden.  She was two years ahead of me in the school.  That alone made my worship of her, if touching and sentimental, futile and pointless.  How could I possibly ache for someone I had never spoken to and only occasionally caught sight of from a distance?  How come she could do this ethereal walk-the-corridor-between-classes thing?  I was sure she could come and go as she pleased.  Nobody would ever tell her off.  It would have been an affront.

And I only ever saw her in the corridor. I fantasised that one day I would walk right up to her and without preamble ask her out.  I would say something like this: “Hello.  It’s Jennifer isn’t it?  I’m James.  I’m in 3AB.  I know this is very sudden, but do you want to come and see the Beatles in Greens Playhouse?”

Impossible.

And yet…

And then one day suddenly and without warning I rounded a corner on the first floor corridor and there she was coming in the other direction doing the holding-the-baby thing this time with a big pile of books and papers and precisely as I walked by and essayed a watery smile the pile of books and papers went everywhere and I had about two seconds to make up my  mind and as I swithered and as she knelt to retrieve her stuff I had passed her and then a class door opened and a teacher emerged and got down to help her and as I walked on I could hear them talking and laughing and I could feel a great taut chilled fist gripping  my heart.

I said to myself, “Never mind.  Next time…”

But I knew there would never be a next time.  Oh yes, I might by good grace have another chance but it would never be that chance.  That particular amalgamation of circumstance, with its unique atmosphere and flavour and poignancy, was lost, irretrievably lost.  That was why my heart was so icy.  I remembered these famous lines from Julius Caesar:

There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

I began to realise why people said Shakespeare had said the definitive word on every human circumstance.  I has missed the tide!  Shallows!  Miseries!  Evermore.  The thing about a window of opportunity is that it is temporal and fleeting.  You have to recognise it, evaluate it, and seize it, all within the space of a split second.

Gone!  Yet Hope returns.  You say to yourself, okay, you blew it, big time.  You stuffed up.  There’s no denying it.  You can’t undo it and you can’t attenuate its effect.  All you can do is forgive yourself; and give yourself another chance.  The trick is to recognise the opportunity when it arises.  Of course the hard bit is that the next opportunity will not look remotely like the last one, the one you missed.  All you can do is keep an open heart and stay alive to opportunity.

*

 

“I’ve got the stuff,” said Big Jobs, speaking in flat tones with the expression of a ventriloquist, barely enunciating though clenched teeth like the Duke of Edinburgh.  “Found it in a place on Woodlands Road.”  He might well have.  Pub land.  The Three in One.  The Halt.  The Arlington.  “5s 6p.  There’s no hurry.  Got your bag?”  I nodded.  The Kina Lillet was passed over in one smooth motion.  It was Friday afternoon break.  He said, “Going to-night?”  There was a party on Banavie Road.  I nodded.  “I’ll bring some along.  You can try it.”

He looked dubious.  “Think I’ll stick with the Pally Ally.  Maybe just a taste.”

Back home, I was in luck.  Mum was out at the shops.  I had the place to myself.  I’d decided to make the Vespers up rather than take all the ingredients with me.  I could reasonably conceal one bottle in my coat, but three… the clanking would have given me away.  So I set to with the precision of a laboratory technician.  Three measures of Gordons… two of vodka… half of Kina Lillet… I put it all in a thermos flask.

At the tea table, I endured the inevitable interrogation.  Dad asked, “Who is throwing this party?”  He was a policeman, taking a statement.

“Elaine Cochrane.  Girl in my class.  It’s her birthday.  Quite a lot of the class are going.”  Safety in numbers, I thought.

It was a massaged version of the truth.  Elaine’s birthday had been last week and it wasn’t really a birthday party.  She was in Fourth Year.  Elaine’s younger sister had been allowed to invite a handful of friends.  But I had an instinct that that intelligence might be dynamite.

“Elaine’s parents will be there?”

“Yes.”  I didn’t say, “Yes, I think so.”  I didn’t want to give him any room to manoeuvre.

He gazed at me thoughtfully.  “You’ll be home at ten sharp.”

It wasn’t a request, or a piece of advice, or a guideline.  It wasn’t even an order.  It was a statement of fact.

On the way out, Dad cast a critical eye over my attire.  I’d borrowed my cousin Johnnie’s bronze shortie coat which I wore over a fawn polo neck, my black jeans, and a pair of brown chisel-toed shoes.  He said, “You look like a spiv,” but at least he didn’t order me to change. Mum said, “You look very nice, dear,” and kissed me on the forehead.  “Have you got a present for Elaine?”

Once you start lying you have to keep going.  “She stipulated no prezzies.”  I was acutely aware that my father was an expert in detecting fraud and deception.  “See you at ten.”

I sloshed out of the house.

At that time, l I was obsessed with Bond, and was working my way through the canon.  I’d reached The Spy Who Loved Me.  There was a general consensus that it had been a bit of a misfire from Ian’s pen (for some reason I thought I was on first name terms with the author), and on Desert Island Discs he had more or less acquiesced to this view.  Certainly it had turned out to be less of a commercial success, and Ian’s readership longed for a return to the old formula.  But I can’t think that Ian was displeased with the result of his effort.  I thought it was a wonderful idea, to make the girl the “I” of the story.  It appealed to the true Bond aficionado, this opportunity to see one’s hero from another perspective.  It was a brave thing for Ian to do, frankly, to imagine what it is like to be a woman.  He was always being accused of being a misogynist.  He was certainly blatantly sexist.  When at work, women were an encumbrance, with their frightful emotional baggage.  Look at these remarks about women drivers in Thunderball!  Yet somehow he gets away with it, maybe because many of his heroines go against James’ stereotypic notion, and show themselves to be truly gritty.  Vivienne Michel is a case in point.  I think Ian had this notion (even if James didn’t share it) that men and women were not so different after all, and that if Vivienne spoke and thought much as Ian did, it would sound perfectly natural, come to life, and work.  I thought so anyway.  But how would I know?  You’d have to ask a woman.  It raises an interesting point.  Do women read Bond books?   You might want to ask a woman if she can voluntarily suspend her disbelief, if The Spy Who Loved Me works, if she reads it and is convinced she is listening to the story of a woman.  But first you have to find a woman who has read the book.  Bond books appear to be the playthings of heterosexual males passing a train journey with a little Kiss Kiss Bang Bang fantasy.  Female Bond readers are as rare as female chess players.  If Faye Dunaway plays chess with Steve McQueen, maybe that is just Steve’s fantasy.  Stroking the bishop’s mitre like that.

The party at Banavie was heaving.  It was a party on many levels, parties within parties.  There was a party in the big front lounge with the bay window, and the dining room, and on the stairs, and on the landing, and in the queue to the bathroom, and downstairs in the basement rumpus room which had been cleared for dancing.  And in the kitchen.  Always the best parties are in the kitchen.  I got tapped on the shoulder.  My heart leapt into my mouth.  It was Jennifer Marsden in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt.  She gestured at my thermos.

“Wassat?”

“It’s a Vesper.”

She held up her glass.

“Yes please.”

I poured her a double.

Of course, The Spy Who Loved Me is not only unusual because the female character is the narrator.  James doesn’t even appear until two thirds of the way through.  It’s not a conventional Bond thriller at all.  So what’s it all about?

Sex.

I had another illicit substance with me, more easily concealed about my person.  A packet of Wills’ Whiffs.  Ever since I’d seen a picture of President Kennedy out on a yacht looking very macho with a stogie between his teeth I’d thought, yep, that’s the image for me!”  Looking back on it, I had some pretty dodgy role models.  I was under the misimpression that it was JFK who had said

A woman is only a woman

But a good cigar is a smoke.

He didn’t.  But he could easily have done.  For JFK, sex was even more purely recreational that it was for James.  Actually, James by comparison is almost puritanical, certainly more gentlemanly.  JFK warmed to James, had From Russia with Love among his top ten favourite books.  And interestingly, his most cherished book, his Desert Island book if you will, was Pilgrim’s Way, The US title for John Buchan’s Memory Hold the Door.

Anyway, JFK didn’t compare women with cigars, although he did have something to say about smoke.

“There’s no smoke, without a smoke machine.”

The target at the centre of the world’s greatest conspiracy, was himself a conspiracy theorist.

So who did promulgate this unconscionable philosophy?  About women and cigars I mean.  I could propose a likely short list, like a multiple choice question:

A  Winston Churchill

B  Mark Twain

C  Rudyard Kipling

D  George Bernard Shaw

E  Groucho Marx

In the end, I didn’t smoke my Wills’ Whiff.  I felt like too much of a prat.  Instead, I bummed a Stuyvesant off Big Jobs.

Down in the rumpus room, shoulder tap again.  “It’s Vesper Man.”  Jennifer giggled.  She was gone. Vespered.  “Dance?”

“Sure.”  I couldn’t believe my luck.  She took my hand and pulled me on to the middle of the floor, centre of the throng.  Abruptly the rock’n roll stopped to be supplanted by a ballade, Roy Orbison’s In Dreams.  Normally it was one of these little awkward social corners you needed to negotiate, to dance a slow number with a stranger, not be a masher, not be too gauche.

But she grabbed my arms and pulled them round her neck and buried her sweet alcoholic breath in my neck.  And for three minutes the world came to a stop.  Four minutes.  It’s quite a long track.

I love In Dreams.  Its form is curious, not like a pop song at all.  It doesn’t have two or three verses and a chorus.  It just starts with one idea and then moves to another idea, and another, and yet another. Its growth is organic.  It is like a symphonic rhapsody.  And it works.

And I loved the Big O.  Didn’t Elvis say he had the best voice in the universe?  There was a disparity between the way the Big O looked and the way he sounded.  He sounded superb and he looked a bit geekish.  That was why he wore the dark glasses.  The shades helped the man to become the voice.  And the voice helped me to become the man.  Periodically her friends would shriek at her, tease her.  “Jennifer!  What you doing?  Child snatcher!”  But she would just laugh uninhibitedly and ruffle my hair.   At the end she gave me a big vodka-soaked snog.

In Dreams…

I loved Jennifer Marsden for giving me the time of day, not because of her friends, but despite them.  She was a free spirit.  She didn’t give a damn.  I thought of her as a girl who would quite happily have gone into a bar and ordered a pint of lager and drank it, alone, if she felt like it.  She had no need to hide behind anybody, man or woman.  She was her own dazzling self.  And she gave me a moment of stillness, arrival, of blessed release from striving.  I would even get home for ten, without remorse.

I retrieved my bronze shortie and struggled through the throngs and found Big Jobs and handed him the thermos.

“Enjoy!  Shaken, not stirred.”

 

Was it in The Italian Job that a feckless bunch of crooks accidentally blow a car up?  Michael Caine says, “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”  You can hear him say it in that much-mimicked East London accent.  I suppose it’s an oblique way of stating that, in the movie industry, especially in close-up, less is more.  Hence the title of Sir Michael’s memoir, Blowing the Bloody Doors Off (Hodder & Stoughton, 2018).  Bloody good, actually.  I was prompted to get it by hearing The Great Man Himself on the radio reading an extract, and I found it quite gripping.  I bought the book and I wasn’t disappointed.  It was the ideal book to read at the end of the festive season, prior to the resumption of normal service.  (And may I say, the resumption of normal service fills me with dread.  Westminster is about to reconvene, and the carping and sniping will doubtless start up from where it left off.  It left off, as I recall, with Mr Corbyn allegedly calling Mrs May a stupid woman, prompting Mrs Leadsom to remind Mr Speaker that he had not apologised for calling her a stupid woman, prompting Mr Speaker to inform the House in a protracted roaring bellow that all of that had already been dealt with.  I think it was at that point that I thought, they’ve all taken leave of their senses!)  All the more reason for reading Blowing the Bloody Doors off.  I highly recommend it.  Despite the fact that a lot of it is set in Tinsel Town, it belongs to the real world.  It is grounded.  It is life-affirming, optimistic, encouraging, inspirational, humane, and very well written.

The book is full of technical advice for the young actor, much of it widely applicable to any and every walk of life.  Know your stuff, be prepared, turn up on time, keep your temper, and treat everybody with respect.  I know that will work for a doctor as much as for an actor.  The more prepared you are, the more relaxed you will be, and the more in control of your nerves.  How true.  And believe in yourself.  Michael Caine’s path to professional success was not an easy one; he took many knocks and suffered many set-backs.  But he never ceased to believe in himself, and he never gave up, despite the fact that powerful and influential mentors advised him to do just that: pack it in.  Didn’t John Lennon receive the same advice?  You’ll never make anything of your life!  What a dreadful thing to say to anybody.  Fortunately, Michael Caine didn’t take any notice.  So, if perchance you are feeling despondent about the world, and if the death-watch beetle of cynicism is encroaching, read Blowing the Bloody Doors Off.

And yet…

I’m not casting aspersions when I say I’m not going to read it again.  Sir Michael Caine is not Sir Walter Scott.  I’m going to pass it on.  The thing about inspirational texts of this nature is that they are only useful up to a point.  We are all unique individuals with unique lives to lead.  Neither I, nor you (I dare say), are Michael Caine.  Therefore our destinies lie elsewhere.  You need to extract those elements of the inspirational text that are useful to you, and forget the rest.  Of course it is perfectly possible that you encounter something that blows you off your feet (it’s these bloody doors again), you have a Damascene moment, and an epiphany, that changes your life.  But it is more likely that in the cold light of day you will find that somebody else’s epiphany is not your epiphany.

I’m actually writing this on Epiphany – January 6^th.  Epiphany is the church festival commemoration of the manifestation of Christ to the wise men of the East.  On January 6^th I like to reread T. S. Eliot’s 1927 poem of the Epiphany, Journey of the Magi.  It is an extremely evocative description, recounted retrospectively and from a long distance, of a difficult winter’s journey, by camel, over snow-covered mountains, culminating in a descent into a valley.  The magi can find no information; the information is all there, but it is symbolic, and they can’t see it.  Yet they eventually reach their destination, and indeed they experience their epiphany.

Sometimes you hear this poem read in church, and I often wonder whether people, perhaps expecting the sweetness and childlike simplicity of a nativity play, really apprehend what is being said.  For the magi, the Christ child represented the end of “the old dispensation”.  They looked at a birth, and saw death, their own death.  They went back to their kingdoms, but nothing would ever be the same again.  For them, Epiphany was an absolute agony.

That rings true to me.  You sometimes hear “successful” people recalling the moment that changed their lives.  “It was such a small thing, yet it turned my life around, I flew, and I never looked back.”  I doubt it.  Blood, toil, tears, and sweat.  In Rep, Michael Caine kept a bucket off stage because he was liable to throw up through sheer nerves.  Inextricably bound up with the exultation of epiphany is the realisation that to embark on a journey is going to cause you considerable loss, and profound discomfort.

But if it’s what you have to do, go for it.  Sometimes sixth formers tell me they are thinking of going into Medicine.  What do I think?  I talk it up.  God knows we need young people of imagination and aspiration in Medicine.  I would never say, as I hear some of my colleagues say, “Don’t!  Bloody nightmare!  What’s your Plan B?  Go into banking!”  I tell them, quite truthfully, “It’s fabulous.  It changed my life.  It took me all over the world, and I never looked back.”  But I don’t gild the lily.  It’s challenging, yes.  Roller coaster ride.  (I stop short of telling them about the bucket sitting off-stage.)  I quote the magus: “I would do it again.”  But not the poem’s enigmatic final line.  When it comes to last lines, I prefer Michael Caine’s:

Go and blow the bloody doors off!      

What has His Royal Highness Prince Charles’ appearance on Michael Barclay’s Private Passions (Radio 3, Sunday at noon) to do with a road crash (Glasgow, Sunday at 4)?  Let’s see.

I listened to Private Passions while driving into Glasgow to visit somebody recuperating from a fall.  I think Michael Barclay is the best interviewer on the BBC.  Of course this interview was always going to be slightly different; Michael wasn’t going to be on first name terms with his guest, at least on air.  But he handled what might have been a socially awkward situation with the utmost tact and charm, and he was able to ask quite penetrating and occasionally challenging questions without prying.  It was a real conversation.  His Royal Highness remarked twice, “You’re very well informed!”  I rather admired his choice of music which tended on the whole to lift the spirits.  Beethoven, Haydn, Wagner (twice)…  No Elgar.  No Parry, come to think of it.  HRH clearly has a strong sense of the absurd, and there was much gentle laughter.  He came across as rather modest, even self-deprecating.  Michael asked him what career, with his many interests, he might have pursued if he had not been born into his particular situation.  Impossible to know, was the reply, but whatever it might have been, he didn’t imagine he would have been very good at it.

Later, we were walking in the west end of Glasgow as dusk fell, enjoying the preternaturally mild winter weather.  It is the sixth night of Christmas, and the broom is in bloom.  My companion asked me what my Hogmanay blog would be about.  I said truthfully that I hadn’t a clue.  Maybe I would write up some sort of reprise of 2018, with a putative glimpse into 2019.  Or I would hear something on the car radio on the way home that would set me off.  Something would turn up.

At that precise moment came a crash so loud that I instinctively ducked.  Something had exploded right beside us.  I turned to my right, and saw the immediate aftermath of a road crash.  At least three cars were involved.  Everything on a busy thoroughfare came to a halt and people emerged from their cars to investigate.  It was actually my companion who alerted me: “You’d better go take a look.”

I glanced into the three cars and conducted a quick triage.  The girl in the front passenger seat of the most crumpled car looked very unwell to me.  Pale as a ghost.  I asked her how she felt but she could only moan.  I took her pulse.  Thready.  I went round to the driver’s door.  It was jammed but I wrenched it open and laid her supine across the front seats.  But there was a lot of smoke in the air and I realised we needed to get her out.  I tried to ascertain as best I could that she had neither a neck injury nor a back injury and then, with some help, as gently as I could, I got her out and on to the pavement.  I asked around, “Has anybody phoned for an ambulance?”  I can’t say I got a reliable answer.  So I dialled 999.

“Emergency.  Which service?”

“Ambulance.”

“Ambulance.  What is your phone number?”

I gave it.  Then I said, “I’m at a road crash that has just occurred at the junction of X and Y.  I think it has already been reported.  I’m a doctor phoning to say one patient is very unwell and we need a ‘blue light’ ambulance immediately.”

“Where are you?”

“As I said, at the junction of X and Y.”  I even gave the post code.

“Which city?”

O Lord.  Maybe they’d outsourced to Delhi.

“Glasgow.”

“And the location?”

I gave it again.

“Could you spell that?”

Well, the road on which this crash occurred is extremely well known, at least to Glaswegians.  I said, “Look, I’m just making this call to ask you to get an ambulance here as quickly as possible.”

“Are you on duty?”

“No.”

“In that case I have to go through a protocol with you.  Is the patient conscious and breathing?”

“GCS 14.”

I don’t know how that went down.  Actually, she was really GCS 12, but she had no English, and I had a sense she might have communicated better in her own language.  I endured a lengthy catechism that I could sense had been devised by a manager entasked to provide a bulwark against the last litigious onslaught.

There followed a delay.  It is very frustrating to provide bystander care to a patient in the absence of the tools of the trade.  There is very little you can do.  It was a great relief to me that she pinked up, that her pulse improved, and that she was able to communicate through her husband, who had some English.  The police arrived, and seemed to be absorbed directing traffic.  A paramedic arrived, and wandered around appraising the scene but made no contact with patients.  Lots of emergency vehicles arrived but nobody came near us.  Eventually the ambulance turned up and my patient received attention.  The trick of being a good Good Samaritan is to step in, make a difference, and then get out.  I hope I correctly identified the point at which I was no longer needed, and disappeared.

Is she okay?  I don’t know.  To know that, you need to be the emergency physician who sits down beside her, takes a very careful history with the aid of an interpreter, and conducts a very careful physical examination.  I hope she’s all right.

But I don’t think the response of the emergency services was that impressive.  It took about half an hour for the ambulance to turn up.  Finally, there were a lot of emergency vehicles and personnel on the scene, but a curious lack of meaningful activity.  I did find myself thinking, this wouldn’t happen in New Zealand, in Australia, in the United States.  This is a peculiarly British response.  Never volunteer, keep your head down, and if there is a protocol to follow, trudge through it.  UK emergency service personnel don’t have a high opinion of themselves.  They know their place.  Our society is hierarchical.  People do as they are told.

Hierarchical societies tend to espouse “social mobility”.  The only way out, is up.  Hedge Fund managers are more valued than carers.  But social mobility is tosh.  The human interactions that really matter are intimate, and one-on-one.  Jesus taught his disciples this when he washed their feet.  The interactions that really matter happen at the kerbside, in the gutter.  And we are not automatons.  We are not pieces of software.  You can’t create an effective emergency service by getting everybody to follow an algorithm.  You need to roll up your sleeves, step in, and talk to people.

I thought of Michael Barclay’s question to Prince Charles: what would he have done had he not been heir to the throne?  I turned the question on its head, and asked myself, what would I have done if I had been heir to the throne?  I suppose my answer must be the same; I will never know.  But I like to think that I would have abdicated and gone to medical school.

 

 

 

 

 

Whichever way you look at it, BBC Radio 4’s More or Less just isn’t sexy.  The truth is, is Stats has an image problem.  Statisticians are entirely devoid of attitude.  What Stats needs is a Superhero.

Remark overheard in a bar.

 

Walter Digit, head of the Statistics Section of the long-established firm of Avro-Avalon Aeronautics, gazed across the expanse of the grand mahogany board room table at the man he imminently intended to murder.

“Ten minutes!” announced the chair grandiloquently.  “Guillotine at nine.  Then we vote.”

Guillotine.

Digit reminded himself that there are Three Laws of Company Board Room Polemics, as inviolate as the laws of Kepler or Newton.  First Law: To win, you must be present at the battle.  First, turn up.  Be amid the heat and dust of the arena.  It was no good being lofty.  If you chose to be above the battle, you would lose it.

Digit was not a violent man.  Indeed, in his 65 years he had never once perpetrated an act of aggression.  It occurred to him that if, as recently as twenty four hours previously, somebody had told him that this was what he had now resolved to do, he would have been utterly astonished.  But that was before the first extraordinary general meeting of the Board had convened, before he had encountered the Big Noise from Seattle WA, before he had realised the route which Avro-Avalon Aeronautics, if the vote went the way Digit suspected it would, would be bound to take.  There was, admittedly, a faint possibility that the vote might go the other way, Digit’s way.  But having weighed the possibilities and crunched the numbers – number-crunching was after all Digit’s long suit – he thought it vanishingly unlikely.  Such a result would be anomalous; in statistical parlance it would be an inexplicable random variable, an outlier, a quirk to be taken out of the equation.

The Board Room was a thickly carpeted, plush, windowless inner sanctum on the third floor of a six storey art deco office block on the edge of the old apron of the Croydon Aerodrome that was the headquarters of AAA.  Digit regretted that this room in which he had spent so much of his professional life should lack a view.  The Executive Board was surrounded by portraits of past presidents of the company.  On the east wall, behind the position of the current President and Chair, was the company logo, an intertwining of five Greek letter alphas to form a coat of arms resembling an Ampersand, thus a representation of the company’s full name, Avro-Avalon Aeronautics & Avionics.  The room’s only panorama was afforded by the west wall, facing the Chair.  Here, in Mercator projection, was a representation of the world, shimmering like a migrainous aura.  On closer inspection, the map was a composite, in real time, of the radar signals of all the aircraft in the world currently aloft.  Thus the first world, the United States and Europe in particular, was well delineated; but the third world, sub-Saharan Africa in particular, was a black pool and a void.

Digit glanced again at the twelve men and two women that comprised the executive (the glass ceiling was yet to be cracked at AAA).  For the hundredth time he ran a thought experiment and conducted a straw poll as to how each individual would vote.  It really all came down to swords and ploughshares.  The peacemakers would go for Project Beta and the warmongers would go for Project Alpha, simple as that.  You might have expected the two women would vote for peace but no!  They were the most alpha male of the lot.  Any woman capable of fighting her way on to this board must have an inner core of steel.  Professor Frances Paton had MOD affiliations and Dr Vanessa Rothermere, after all, was Project Alpha’s lead.  Who else?  Digit himself would go for Beta, and so would MacFadyen.  Beta was Hector MacFadyen’s baby.  That made it two all.  Then there was Gordon Pritchard – chief engineer.  He didn’t like MacFadyen.  Thought he was a maverick, definitely a threat.  Too clever by half.  He would go with Alpha.  Peutherer, R & D, probably knew the most about both projects’ finer details and should have an even hand.  But Peutherer liked micro-tech – so probably Alpha.  Same with Blair, company lawyer.  Thanks to his training, Blair could easily deploy arguments on either side.  You might have supposed fear of litigation would lead him to support peaceful Beta over aggressive Alpha, but Alpha might get subsumed within an MOD contract, and suits against MOD were seldom successful.   5 – 2 for Alpha; not looking good.  Now the big beasts: Prendergast the CEO and Ismay the MD.  Flabbergast and Dismay, they said on the shop floor.  They were both aviators and they tended to prefer flying machines that were flown by people, over drones, so both Beta.  5 – 4.  The younger set?  Harder for Digit to judge.  Margessun the physicist would go for Beta, and Eugene Delaware the chemist, because of the nature of its payload, would go for Alpha.  As well, Delaware had the hots for Rothermere.   6 – 5 to Alpha.  Then Grey. Strategic Development.  A gentleman.  6 – 6.  It was coming down to the wire.  Hargreaves, the money man?  Hargreaves would definitely have been Beta but that was the problem; Hargreaves was absent.  His chair was occupied by the Big Noise, and even before the Big Noise had made any sort of noise at all, Digit knew he would be Alpha.  7 – 6.

That meant Alpha couldn’t lose.  But there might yet be a tie.  There might be a tie because Digit thought there was a switherer –Alan Mabie, something nebulous in management.  He would swither because he would really have no criterion of value beyond whatever madcap managerial trend happened to be flavour of the month.  Mabie was the one marginal constituency.  Digit grasped this fact when he heard Mabie remark, “Pity we can’t run with both Alpha and Beta.  That way it would be win-win, going forward.”  The rest of the time he sat with his mouth open, gawping like a cod stranded on the beach.  The Board might sit up all night and argue the case until they were blue in the face, and Digit suspected nobody but Alan Mabie would budge.  Mabie was the floating vote.  Could he somehow work on him and pull it up to 7 apiece?  What then?  In that case Sir Howard Whittingehame, the Chair, deep, silent, and patrician, would cast the deciding vote.  Digit was devoted to Sir Howard who had been his boss for 40 years, but he knew that Sir Howard was mesmerised, had fallen under the spell of the Big Noise.  He would succumb to the lure of the charismatic man from Seattle and, if it came down to the wire, exercise his franchise in favour of that particular constituency.  And that would be that.

The name of the Big Noise was Warren Paul Mitchelson.  Economist with a Huge Gong round his neck – the reason why Sir Howard was mesmerised.  He was a Nobel Laureate.  Digit had met him just prior to the first board meeting on the previous day.  Mitchelson had hijacked Sir Howard’s introductions.  “Walter Digit, our highly valued head of the Statistics Section…”  Digit’s hand was enveloped in a bone-crusher.  Mitchelson talked at Sir Howard over Digit’s head.  “You still using personnel to number crunch?  We use robots…  Hiya.  Warren P. Michelson.  My friends call me Warp.”

“How do you do, Mr Mitchelson.  My stenographer, Miss Normal.”

“Stenographer?  Geez!”

Anita Normal smiled demurely and nodded, but did not proffer her hand.

Mitchelson ignored Miss Normal, and casually ran an appraising eye over Digit, who was not surprised that the American should effect a double-take.  Somewhat under middle height, thick set, gnarled, stocky and robust, Digit had long been aware that he bore an uncanny resemblance to a legend of Hollywood’s golden age, Edward G. Robinson.  “Say!  You look like that guy in the movies.  Whazziz?”

“I simply couldn’t imagine.”

“Getaway!”  He snapped his fingers impatiently.  “Double Indemnity.  Straight down the line, Keyes!”

Mr Mitchelson himself could have been a Hollywood film star, occupying the lead.  He was six foot four inches tall.  He had taken care of himself.  He was past fifty but he retained the build of a football player and with his chiselled bronze features and a full head of black hair he was a very handsome man.  An expensive three piece suit of US cut and sheen became him, but he would have looked equally good in casual western livery, strolling across the dirt street of the set of High Noon, a revolver with an extra-long barrel in its holster strapped low outside his right thigh.  It occurred to Digit that Mitchelson would be an advocate for the Second Amendment.  From my cold, dead hands!

“You can’t have much longer to go, Keyes.  You got an exit strategy?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The golden handshake and the high goodbye?”

“I am due to retire at the end of this year.”

“I guess that’s why they’re letting you wither on the vine.   Stats is History, Keyes.”

Digit was only too well aware of the precarious position Statistics held within the company.  Once, during the great glory days of expansion of the aviation industry last century, the section could, and did, field a cricket team which always did rather well in in-house competition.  But these days were long gone and the section now comprised Digit himself, Miss Normal, and Mr Woo, an odd-job man with learning difficulties retained by Sir Howard who was a little ostentatious about the company’s role in the community.  At that precise moment Mr Woo loped in disco-ordinate fashion into the room, came to Digit’s heel and handed him a mauve folder much as a playful dog might retrieve a stick for his master.

“Thank you, Mr Woo.”

Mr Woo giggled and went off abruptly in search of something else.  Mitchelson watched his departure.  “That guy got issues?”

Sir Howard remarked, “He is challenged.”

“I’ll say.”

“Mr Woo is Mr Digit’s assistant.  He has Gerstmann’s Syndrome.”  Digit was aware that Miss Normal had flushed.  She couldn’t see why Mr Woo’s medical file should not be as confidential as anybody else’s.

“Whazzat?”

Sir Howard enumerated, as if reading from a text book, “Agraphia, acalculia, finger agnosia, and left-right confusion.  The lesion is in the angular gyrus of the dominant parietal lobe.”

Mitchelson produced a low and cunning chortle like an eructation.  “Let’s see.  Can’t read, can’t count – even with his fingers, doesn’t know where he’s going.  That’s Stats for you Keyes!”

“My name is Digit” – this said in the soft tones of regionless old-fashioned Received Pronunciation.  “Delta India Golf India Tango.”

“Sure it is, Keyes.”

Digit turned to Sir Howard.  “Where is Mr Hargreaves?”  Hargreaves was AAA’s chief financier.

“Seattle.  Sabbatical.  A six month placement.”

“I take it Dr MacAndrew will be acting up?”

Mitchelson interjected.  “Get with the programme Keyes.  I mean, Hello?  From now on, I’m Hargreaves. Kapische?”

Ignoring Mitchelson, Digit continued to address his boss.  “Does Mr Mitchelson have voting rights?”  Sir Howard nodded.  Digit’s heart felt like a stone.  Kapische.

 

Digit told himself that his plan to murder Warren P. Mitchelson had nothing to do with personal animosity.  He said to his stenographer, “Why is it, Miss Normal, that Americans will insist on sporting a middle initial?  Dwight D. Eisenhower, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Warren P. Mitchelson.  I’ve heard it said that Roosevelt’s initial didn’t actually stand for anything.  It’s all very Ivy League.  Phi Beta Kappa.  Or Delta in Roosevelt’s case.  You tote it, like a Glock stuck down your waistband.  Why, Edward G. Robinson, come to think of it.”

“Delano.”

“What?”

“Roosevelt’s middle name.  Delano.”

“Really?  Miss Normal.  You are a fund.”

No, it wasn’t personal.  The reason why Mitchelson had to be removed was Digit’s conviction that Mitchelson, with Hargreaves’ vote, would indubitably go for Project Alpha.  Both Alpha and Beta were R & D projects of considerable scope and ambition.  AAA could not take them both on and run with them simultaneously.  A choice had to be made.  This was why a series of extraordinary general meetings had been called.  Data already had been produced and disseminated. Now the Board would hear a short presentation from each camp, and come to a ruling.

“Toss a coin, Mr Digit, if you please.”  It amused Sir Howard that his chief statistician should perform this ritual.  “Order of ceremonies: heads – Alpha first, tails – Beta first.”  Digit spun the half-crown he retained specifically for this purpose, deftly caught it in his right palm and turned it over on to the back of his left hand.  Tails.  Hector MacFadyen was first up.  He was a freckled, red-headed young Scot.  Digit liked him.  Knew his people.  He was from Ayrshire, of lowly origins, a “lad o’ pairts” who like so many poor Scots before him had seen a way up, and a way out, through the professions, medicine, teaching, engineering.  Digit would never have thought of telling Hector but, privately, he suspected Hector was an engineering genius.  Highly imaginative, Mercurial, Mozartian.  But difficult.  He lacked people skills.  He didn’t know how to get people on board.  He was always a step ahead of his colleagues, who didn’t understand him.  Probably he was on the spectrum.  And today, he was very nervous.  Result – a botched presentation.  Inevitably, the IT acted up.  Digit decided to help him out.

“That’s a really interesting presentation Hector.  Do you mind if I just reiterate the salient features and perhaps you could let me know if I’ve followed your line?”

MacFadyen, who knew very well Digit was bailing him out, turned spaniel’s eyes of deep gratitude in Digit’s direction, and smiled his twitchy smile.

“Of course, ideas of unencumbered personal transport and of human flight have been dreamt of since time immemorial.  Your device-”

“The vacutainer.”

“…the vacutainer, takes the notion of the Hydrogen or Helium balloon to its ultimate conclusion.  What could be lighter than Hydrogen?”

“A vacuum.”

“Just so.  Now we all know nature abhors a vacuum.  Any structure containing a vacuum must be robust, therefore will likely be weighty and bulky.  You suggest you have solved this issue by using a particular material-”

“C60 Graphite.

“…designed into a specific shape-”

“The buckminsterfullerene.”

Mitchelson threw his gold pen on to his blotter, stretched, and yawned.  “Let me get this straight.  You want me to take a big golf ball, strap it on my back, and jump off a tall building.”

“That’s it.”

“How’s it powered?  Gas?  Nuclear?”

“Neither.”

“This some kinda green shit?”

“Wings.”

There was a protracted silence.  Mitchelson broke it.  “Wings.”

“Paddles if you like.”

“What d’you do with them?”

“Flap.”

“You flap?”

“Flap.”

Another strange noise emanated from Mitchelson’s mouth.  At first Digit thought he was clearing his throat, but then he realised he was laughing.

“Mister.  Anybody tell ya?  You’re a nut job.”  Mitchelson turned in his chair.  “What do you think, Keyes?”

“They all laughed at Christopher Columbus.”

Second Law of Company Board Room Polemics: It is a mistake to be seduced into debate with an adversary whose mind cannot be changed.  Under normal circumstances, Digit would have stuck to his brief and rendered a dispassionate account of the robustness of a business model, how the numbers stacked up.  But he had already recognised that Mitchelson would pay no attention, and that what Mitchelson thought was what was going to matter.

Digit had to admit that the second presentation, Project Alpha, was very much more professional.  It was given by a woman.  Vanessa Rothermere, UCL, mid-thirties, polished, cool, urbane, eloquent, and sexy.  She worked in nanotechnology.  She presented an engine of war.  It was an antipersonnel device in the shape of a drone that was tiny, silent, and could deliver a lethal injection.

Intrigued, Mitchelson asked, “What sort of injection?”

“There could be a suite of choices, depending on each specific situation.  Designer drugs of one sort or another, VX, Ricin, batrachotoxin, tetrodotoxin, botulinum toxin…” Dr Rothermere sounded medieval.  The rope, the rack, the garrotte, the strappado…

Mitchelson said, “Now you’re talkin’.”

Without waiting for an invitation Digit interjected, “Avro-Avalon has neither a history nor a tradition in arms manufacture.”

“That’s not entirely true Walter.  During the war…”

“That was a question of national survival.  The nation is not now at war, at least so far as I’m aware.”

“We have always made modest contributions when it comes to MOD procurement.”

Digit was later to say to Miss Normal, “Procurement!  There’s a word.  Does it not have a lewd connotation?  Is it not something gentlemen indulge in at kerbsides?  And is such trafficking not therefore a form of prostitution?”

“Proxénitisme,” volunteered Miss Normal.

“Miss Normal, you always come up with le mot that is juste.”

There was never really any doubt in Digit’s mind that the death-midge was going to win hands down over the backpack full of sweet FA.  He needed time to think.  “Could I propose a cooling off period?  We should mull over our deliberations.”

“Time is a luxury we just don’t have.  Blink, and the other guy takes the biscuit.”

“I think, Warp,” said Sir Howard with due respect to his ancient and trusted colleague, “We can allow a day for reflection.  I think we’ll follow Mr Digit’s lead, stop and think, and reconvene here in 24 hours.”

Mitchelson sighed and pointed out, “One of your prime ministers said that a week’s a long time in politics.  Well I tell you something, in war, twenty four hours is an age.  Lose twenty four hours, and you hand the other guy the day.”

Nevertheless, Sir Howard adjourned the meeting.

 

Digit never married.  He had been an only child, and he was without issue.  He lived with his aged mother and had become, since she had gradually lost herself in the labyrinthine forest of dementia, her principal carer.  The ravages of Herr Alzheimer.  Senile plaques and neurofibrillary tangles, a glorious fankle which our neurophysiologists have yet to unwind.  Digit never considered his role as carer as anything other than a privilege.  Thankfully his mother had retained her sunny personality, and he was never conscious that he was on duty or under obligation, far less that he laboured under any sense of burden.  He was a creature of routine.  He rose at 5, bathed, made a good breakfast, and solved the Financial Times crossword usually under ten minutes.  He lived in Westerham, a short bus journey from AAA’s Croydon HQ.  He reached his desk by 8 am and thus undertook a solid hour of work in solitude which he regarded as the most productive part of his day.  His office had changed little since he had first occupied it four decades ago.  It resembled that of a news editor or a private investigator.  The walls were lined, floor to ceiling, with ancient tomes, perhaps of jurisprudence, in calf-bound vellum.  The desk was littered with the office accoutrements of a bygone age.  Digit would hang his jacket over the back of an austere dark wooden office armchair on castors, and sit in his bulky tweed trousers, braces and shirtsleeves.  He affected a dark green eye shade as protection against the glare of an angle-poise lamp, and he chewed on the stub of a cheap cigar.  The smoke-free policy of the company somehow had given Digit’s office an exemption.

Digit never used email and there was very little evidence that the digital age had touched him.  Anita Normal occupied an anteroom on the other side of a battered door whose top half was of opaque glass bearing the AAA logo.  The phones were of heavy dark green Bakelite with liquorice-black wiring.  Miss Normal used a heavy office Barlock typewriter, not a word-processor.  Digit felt that its incessant clatter aided his creativity.  She would tap away while he would muse at his desk, then jump up and walk through the half-glass communicating door.  “Take a letter Miss Normal.”  Despite the fact that she was half his age she had somehow acquired the requisite shorthand (Pitman’s) and typing skills.  She would insert two pages of foolscap, carbon paper between them, into the Barlock, and take dictation.  When she had reached the bottom line Digit might reach over, pull the pages out with a flick of the wrist, and peruse her work.  “The full stop – third paragraph second sentence.  I prefer a semi-colon.”  She would dutifully retype the entire page, change the punctuation, automatically shorten the double space to a single space thereafter, and continue, recommencing in lower case.  It would never have occurred to her to object.  Twelve years ago, at her commencement, she had merely found the set-up eccentric and amusing.  But she had come to dote on her boss.  If Digit had realised it, he would have been astonished, discomfited, and embarrassed.  But he never had an inkling.  Nor had he ever been consciously aware that her feelings were reciprocated.

His day was made up of study, contemplation, and meetings.  He finished at 5.  He might reasonably have finished at 4 but the concept of “flexitime” was quite alien to him and in any case he was devoted to his work and to the company.  Regular as clockwork, he would take the bus back to Westerham.

“Good evening, mother.”

“Oh!  Good evening, sir.  Do I know you?”

He would take over again from his mother’s day-time carers, and fix supper.  He didn’t smoke at home as the smell nauseated Mrs Digit.  He hardly drank at all, aside from a small glass of Bristol Cream at New Year.  In the evening he would converse with mother, and they would ask about one another’s day.  Mrs Digit’s short-term memory was severely affected, but Digit answered her repetitive questions fully and with great patience.  She would generally ask Digit where his father was.  Mr Digit senior had died a decade before, and this news caused Mrs Digit distress.  The ironic tragedy of Alzheimer’s disease is that bad tidings need to be renewed every day, and therefore there is no attenuation of grief.  To spare her such anguish, Digit only once told his mother a lie.  He told her that his father was working late and that he would be home presently.  He soon realised that the lie would need to be repeated as often as the truth, so he abandoned this subterfuge because denial of the truth was very foreign to his nature.  His entire professional life was based on a search for truth and an enquiry as to its nature.

Sometimes he and his mother would play Scrabble.  Despite her dementia, Mrs Digit was rather adept at Scrabble, and she would sometimes astonish Digit with the placement of an obscure seven or eight letter word which would earn her a bonus of 50 points.  Marzipan and Fraught and, taking advantage of the presence on the board of Li (the Chinese mile), Imbroglio.  Around 9 they would take Horlicks and he would assist his mother to bed. He himself would retire at 9.30.

What of the prospect of retirement?  Retirement held no dread for him.  He would read.  He would walk.  He had the church.  It is certain that Walter Digit led a quiet life, and you might suppose he lacked vice.  Yet he had a flaw.  A fatal flaw, the Greek “hamartia”, something that he recognised as a Nemesis, something he knew he could not keep under control, and therefore something he knew he must abjure altogether.

Digit was a gambler.  He was not secretive about it.  He called himself a “recovering gambler”.  He hadn’t made a wager for forty years, for the same time that he had been working for AAA.  Before that, when he was 25, he would have been declared bankrupt but for the fact that his parents bailed him out, offering to pay off his debts so long as he attended an addiction clinic for gamblers.  This he duly did, and since then he had assiduously avoided regions of temptation, the dogs and the turf and the trots, the casino, fruit machines, the betting shop, even the stock market.  Of course nobody living in a capitalist world can avoid the stock market.  Digit’s investments were through the bank and were generally low risk. ‘Cautious growth funds’. His only stocks were in AAA and these represented a profound belief in AAA’s activities rather than any form of speculation.  Digit knew that AAA had saved him.  He had studied mathematics and then statistics and had been attracted to actuarial work, the study of probability, and the assessment of risk.  He subsumed his fascination with the odds into his devotion to his profession.

Yet he never thought of himself as cured, always in recovery.  So he sedulously avoided any office sweepstake, a flutter on the National, even a lottery ticket in aid of a good cause.  He always knew that he would never be free of the Mad Impulse, the sudden overwhelming desire to risk absolutely everything on a game of pitch and toss.

At the reconvening of the Board, it became evident that Warren P. Mitchelson had decided to play Digit at his own game, by producing data.

“I ran my own analysis.  Yeah.”  He passed reams of A4 around like a croupier dealing from the shoe.  “You can get this stuff off the net.  Google it.  Easy-peasy.  Wikipedia and so on.”

Digit said, “Off the peg statistics?”

“Bespoke I’d say.  D’you know ‘R’?  It’s very good.  The language of big data.  Sorry Keyes.  No hard feelings, but you’re redundant.  Anyway-” He glanced at his laptop.

“Let’s look at the units.  Vacutainers versus stealth drones.  Compare and contrast. Let’s cut to the meat and potatoes.”  Mitchelson performed some rapid arpeggios on his laptop keyboard with the facility of a concert pianist.  The Mercator projection of the world’s aviation activity was replaced by a graph projected on to the bare wall beyond the foot of the table.  There were no glitches.  The IT was on Mitchelson’s side.

“Instant economics.  Apologies.”

The graph represented a bell shaped curve.  “This is a projection model for the movement of units, aka sales.  “On the Y axis –” the red dot of the laser pointer ran up and down the line – “number of units.  On the X axis –” laser pointer again – “we have the Mitchelson Index.”

Digit enquired, “What is the Mitchelson Index?”

“As I say it’s rather technical.  It’s an index of risk.  Or, more accurately, it is the square root of the reciprocal of what is known as the risk attraction-aversion amalgam.”

“Gobbledegook,” said Digit.

“Don’t spit the hickory, Keyes.”  The laser pointer began to dance around the slide projection.

“Mitchelson for Plan B…”  He clicked the mouse.  “…and Mr Mitchelson for Plan A.”  The bell curve moved upwards and to the right.  “Let’s do it again… Plan B… Plan A… and then A and B superimposed.   Two populations.  I calculated the pooled standard error.  As a business venture, going forward, the drones win hands down.  No contest.”

Digit glanced down at the handout and gave the paper a cursory glance.  It was a mix of ready-to-go statistics and on-line advertising.  Statistics how to… practically cheating statistics handbook… how to calculate pooled standard error… Fast Money Transfers… How to retire in Thailand…

It is a mistake to be seduced into debate with an adversary whose mind cannot be changed.

In for a penny.  Digit laid the paper down.  “It’s flawed.  You can’t apply the pooled SE when the variances are different.  You need to apply the Satterthwaite Approximation.  It’s elementary.  It’s a subtle distinction, but critical.”

“Well you know what they say. There’s lies, damn’d lies, and statistics.”

“A remark attributed to Mr Twain that is, I believe, widely misconstrued.  You think it describes a downward continuum of misinformation, but in fact it conveys a contrast.  You have on the one hand, humbug, then bullshit, but, on the other hand and by way of contrast, the truth.”

It was very remarkable that Digit, who abjured vulgar language, should use the word ‘bullshit’.  That he should do so betrayed a deep inner passion.

“Bullshit!  You said it.  You can make numbers mean anything you like.”

“On the contrary, data, if properly collected, construed, interpreted, and presented, in terms of hard evidence, are really all we have.  They allow us to get as close to the truth as is humanly possible.  The truth is not an inner construct of the imagination.  The truth is out there, waiting to be discovered, and revealed.  That is why it is so important to speak the truth to power.”

“Nah.  See Keyes, that’s why you’re obsolete.  I guess that’s why I’m here.  To speak power to truth if you like!  Yes I like that.  Just as the victors are the ones who write history, so it is that the powerful define truth.  And that’s why Avro-Avalon Aeronautics must back adversarial drone technology.  The next time some tin-pot despot from some shit-hole banana republic sends his suicide bombers in our direction – sshhhht!”  Mitchelson slapped the side of his neck.  “His successor will think twice believe me.”

It was at that point that Digit realised Mitchelson had to go.

Back home, Mrs Digit was sitting over the Scrabble board in quiet contemplation of yesterday evening’s undisturbed game.  She wore an expression of great sweetness, but she was grey and inert.  Digit gently took his mother’s hand and laid his fingertips across her wrist.  She was still warm, but he verified there was no pulse.  The carer would have departed an hour ago, so Mrs Digit’s passing was extremely recent.  Digit felt a strangely intense emotion of sad serenity.  He glanced down at the Scrabble board, idly curious as to what her last play had been.

LOOFAH

Digit picked up the telephone and called the family doctor.

 

“Take a letter, Miss Normal.”  He waited until his secretary had arranged the paper and the carbon copy in the typewriter’s roller.

“To Sir Howard Whittingehame, Chairman, Avro-Avalon Aeronautics….

“Dear Sir Howard…”  Digit paced about behind Miss Normal’s straight back.

“With respect to the recent deliberations of the company’s executive board…”

Of course, he had always known that Miss Normal was pretty.  It only occurred to him now that she was a remarkably beautiful woman.

“…a board whose make-up has been subtly yet significantly altered by…

“…by the replacement of Mr Hargreaves by our visitor from overseas…

“…with respect… where was I?”

She read back.  “Our visitor from overseas…”

“Ah yes.  Where is Mr Woo?”

“Hastings.”

“What on earth is Mr Woo doing in Hastings?”

“He has been relocated.”

“Relocated?  Why wasn’t I told?  Which section?”

“Not by the company.  His sheltered House in Croydon has closed.  Council cuts.  I believe a place has been found for him in Hastings.”

“But Mr Woo will not know anybody in Hastings.  He will be confused.  Does Sir Howard know?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“He must be told.”

“Yes, sir.”

There was a pause.  Digit looked down at the nape of Miss Normal’s neck.  Miss Normal sat patiently before the Barlock, awaiting further dictation.

“As you know Miss Normal, I am due shortly to retire.”

“Yes, Mr Digit.”

“In the event that I am not replaced, in the event that the section folds…”

“Sir?”

“Forgive me.  None of my business.  Shouldn’t pry.  Anita, have you any plans, for example, to marry, settle down?”

Miss Normal sat stock-still.  She was unable to interpret the sense of pent-up turmoil within her bosom.  In the course of their twelve year professional relationship, Digit had never until now addressed her by her Christian name.

 

Before the final meeting, and the vote, it was absolutely essential that Digit pave the way for Warren P. Mitchelson’s timely assassination.  For this, he needed to recruit Hector MacFadyen.  He entertained no hopes of being able to deceive MacFadyen as to his intent, yet he was determined that MacFadyen not be an accessory to the crime; all he needed was some information, and some technical know-how.  MacFadyen would have both because MacFadyen had a handle on AAA’s every project.  He phoned Hector at about 9 pm, after Dr Campbell had visited and issued his mother’s death certificate, and after he had made preliminary arrangements with the undertaker.  MacFadyen lived in a bachelor apartment in Biggin Hill, twenty minutes away.  Digit drove over, declined refreshment, and explained succinctly what he needed.

“You’re going to do the bastard in, then?”

“If that were the case, then you would doubtless be interviewed by the police.  Speaking hypothetically, in such a case you would be able to tell them that I made some enquiries into Project Alpha, enquiries perfectly commensurate with my role as Chief of the Statistical Section.  Your suspicions were not aroused for one moment.”

“Sure you don’t need my help?  Hypothetically, I mean.”

“I don’t make hypotheses.”

 

“Five minutes!” announced Sir Howard Whittingehame.  “Five minutes!”  Digit rose from his chair.

“Where are you going, Mr Digit?”

Mr Digit replied gravely, “I am going to the lavatory.”

“Ha!  Too much information Keyes.”

In fact Digit had no need to answer a call of nature.  He was merely following the Marginal Constituency, Mabie, the ditherer, into the men’s room.  It was his final chance to change the course of the meeting through the ballot box rather than the bullet.  They stood together before the pissoir in companionable silence, and then before the wash basins.

“What was that Proxy business about? Saturday… Saturnine…”

“Satterthwaite.”

“Yes.  What is that?”

“It is a way of comparing apples and pears without distorting the truth.”

It occurred to Digit that Mabie was like Pontius Pilate, washing his hands.  “The truth?”

“Yes.”

Mabie dried his hands under the roaring vortex of the Dyson air blades.  He had a fixed expression, a musing pout of puzzlement.  Maybe he just couldn’t hear above the racket.

“The truth.”

“Only the truth will make you free.”

“The truth?  What is that?”

Mabie was going to vote for Alpha.

 

Third Law of Company Board Room Polemics:  The most critical decision is made during the last five minutes of the meeting.

Digit had long understood that the board room decisions that really mattered took place during “Any Other Competent Business”.  Nothing is decided, until everything is decided.  This was when you had to be at your most alert.  Why is it that politicians are the last people to apprehend this?  Airline pilots and physicians know to quit when they are tired.  Not politicians.  They slog it out during an all-night session and then make the critical decision in a state of exhaustion.  But now Digit was sure, with 95% confidence he might have said, of the outcome, and it was time to activate Project Charlie.

He took the laptop out of his brief case, placed it on the mahogany surface, opened the lid, and switched it on.

“Good heavens Walter!  In the 40 years I’ve known you, I’ve never once seen you engage with the satanic looms of Apple and Microsoft!”  There was an eruption of astonished laughter round the table.  Most people thought Digit was a Luddite, computer-illiterate.  That was their great mistake.  In fact Digit had spent a considerable portion of his career undertaking work which, while distasteful to him, he was rather adept at – programming.  Two of his great scientific heroes were Alan Turing and James Clerk Maxwell.  He understood their work at a deep level.  Sir Howard opened his mouth to make another quip, but he was silenced by his own further sense of astonishment at the facility with which Digit utilised a machine he was wont to refer to as a “hellish contraption”.

Digit exercised a few mystic passes, shut the machine down, closed the lid, and put it back in his briefcase.

“What was that about?”

“Exit strategy.”

“Sorry?”

“Just checking the bus timetable.  Some of us do have a home to go to.”  (Was that true?)

“Don’t sweat the small stuff Keyes.   My driver will give you a ride.”

The culmination to the meeting turned out to be somewhat anticlimactic.  Mitchelson passed away in much the same manner as Mrs Digit on the previous evening.  Death entered the room, and departed therefrom so silently, that Digit was the only person to see Mitchelson absently reach a hand up to his neck and brush away a mosquito.  Digit rose unhurriedly, picked up his briefcase, and made for the door.

“Walter!  The vote!”

“Don’t want to miss the bus.”

“Like I said, Keyes, don’t spit the hickory.”

“Walter, you must vote.”

But Digit had suddenly decided, now he was a felon, there was a moral imperative he not vote.

“I abstain.”

“Don’t spit the hic-  hic – hic – hic!”  Abruptly, Mitchelson stopped talking and stared straight ahead.

Digit took the back stairs, not the lift.  On the top floor, yes, here was the equipage, fully prepared and lying in wait.  The vacutainer was the size of a bulky rucksack – and once deployed, it would expand considerably – yet amazingly light.    Digit strapped it on.  Helmet and goggles.  Now he looked like a cross between a bumblebee and a free fall parachutist.  He stepped out on to the flat roof.  Clear skies, a crescent moon, and the great panoply of the Milky Way.   Last safety checks.  He ran Hector’s briefing again over in his mind.  Final, vital actions.  The emergency door at the top of the service stairs scraped open and MacFadyen, breathing heavily, was at his side.

Digit asked blandly, “How did the vote go?”

“A tie.  Six apiece.  You shouldn’t have abstained.”

“Six all?  Somebody else must have abstained also.”

“Mitchelson.  As you very well know.  There’s pandemonium down there.  Cardiac arrest they think.  They’ve started CPR.  They can’t find the defib.”  The sound of the siren floated up to them from somewhere in the southeast.  In a moment they would be able to track, quite clearly, the course of the twinkling blue lights.

“How do you suppose Sir Howard will cast his deciding vote?”

“He will vote for you, Hector.”

“How do you know?”

“I worked it out.  It’s a great project.  Good luck with it.  Every success.”  Digit stepped towards the edge of the roof.

“Walter.  I’m not sure this contraption’s going to work.”

“I have every faith.  It will work.”

“How do you know?”

“Probability.”

Digit stepped off the roof.