jamescalumcampbell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Letter from America

1946 – 2004

Alistair Cooke

(Allen Lane, 2004)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plus ça change.                            

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

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

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

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

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

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

God Save the Queen.                                                    

History, once more, is getting up to its rhyming tricks.  Last week, when President Trump announced he was thinking about bombing Iran’s uranium enrichment plants, I was reminded of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.  Tony Blair told the House of Commons that Saddam Hussein held weapons of mass destruction which could be deployed against us in the space of 45 minutes.  Did this mean that these WMDs were a threat to British interests abroad, or could they, in fact, be directed against the UK?  This was never made quite clear.  Either way, the announcement was met with widespread scepticism from the British public.  Hans Blix, head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission between 2000 and 2003, had been visiting Iraq on multiple occasions, looking for evidence of WMDs, and he never found any.  When the BBC reported Tony Blair’s assertions, the reports were usually accompanied by pictures of ancient ordnance rusting in the desert sands.  They didn’t look like an imminent threat.  The British public took to the streets in one of the biggest anti-war demonstrations ever seen in this country.  Most members of the government took little notice, with one or two noble exceptions, for example, two notable Scotsmen, the late Charles Kennedy and the late Robin Cook.  After the invasion, people carried on looking for the WMDs.  Tony Blair urged us all to be patient, to wait and see.  They were never found.  Then Iraq fell apart.

This time, we have been told that Iran is within weeks, perhaps days, of developing a nuclear bomb.  Is that true?  I don’t know.  I’m not party to the intelligence.  Perhaps Blaise Metreweli knows.  She has just been promoted from the position of Q, to the position of C, thus being the first woman to head MI6, not counting Judi Dench.  I didn’t know there was such a person as “Q”.  I thought it was a confabulation, not of the Bond books, but of the Bond films.  There was a Q Branch – Q perhaps for Quartermaster – which put together Bond’s attaché case, full of dirty tricks, in From Russia with Love.  You may say I digress, but these days the demarcation line between fact and fiction has become increasingly blurred. 

Unlike Tony Blair, who had to take the House of Commons with him, President Trump had no need to “reach across the aisle” in Congress.  He did fly a kite for a few days, no doubt gauging public opinion, conscious of the fact he was reneging on a promise not to take America into any more foreign conflicts.  He said, “Nobody knows what I’m going to do.”  Least of all, perhaps, himself.  At any rate the operation went ahead, apparently by Executive Order, and then President Trump, in the White House, flanked by J. D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth (what a grim picture they make), announced a fait accompli.  He said the operation was a spectacular success.  Is that true?  

Was this sortie, (one could call it a “special military operation”) justified?  The British Government sat spectacularly on the fence.  They were informed it was about to take place, but not directly involved.  They were pleased with the result, although they would have preferred that it had been brought it about through diplomacy. 

I’m not sure that I see the logic in refusing to allow Iran to develop a nuclear bomb.  After all, the UK has about 160 of them.  Most of them are stockpiled in a silo 25 nautical miles from where I now sit.  The continuous at sea deterrent is apparently keeping me safe in my bed at night.  If they guarantee our security, shouldn’t we be encouraging every other country to stockpile them, as a mutual guarantee of world peace? 

Alas, we are addicted to violence.  Periodically we become possessed by it.  There was disorder in Northern Island last week.  Two Romanian youths were charged with an alleged sexual assault on a teenage girl.  Violence flared in Ballymena.  People from minority ethnic groups, businesses, and homes, were attacked.  Racist violence was fuelled by misinformation emanating from social media.  I was reminded of Kristallnacht.  And of Quatermass and the Pit.  When I saw Nigel Kneale’s remarkable BBC series as a child I was frightened out of my wits.  But I didn’t realise at the time that Kneale was really utilising a science fiction genre to depict what happens when people in a society fall under a demonic spell and gang up to hunt down “the other”.

This morning, President Trump is flying another kite.  He is thinking about “régime change”.  History is rhyming again.  In 2003, perhaps Saddam’s putative MNDs were always known to be a figment.  They were posited as a justification for war, when all the time, régime change was the real motivator.  Could Iran’s nuclear threat be another figment, and has régime change always been the goal?  

What’s to be done about all the violence in the world?  What a question.  It’s like stopping an Irishman in the street to ask for directions.  He says, “If I were you, I wouldn’t start from here.”    

A Different Kind of Power

Jacinda Ardern

Macmillan, 2025

As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

George Orwell wrote that during the Second World War.  Hold that thought.

I was very moved to read the memoir of the Right Honourable Dame Jacinda Ardern, fortieth prime minister of New Zealand.  I’ve read many political memoirs, and biographies, mostly British, in my time.  Many I admire; others, less so.  John Wilson’s CB, A Life of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, (Constable London, 1973) is a favourite.  CB was liberal PM between 1905 and 1908, and died in office, in No. 10.  His tenure was, by and large, a time of tranquillity on the international stage, such that, every September, he would take himself off to Marienbad for six weeks and read German literature.  Imagine a PM doing that now!  (I wish they would.)  R. J. Q. Adams Bonar Law (John Murray 1999) is another.  Both CB and Bonar Law were modest men, despite the fact that they both attended Glasgow High School.  Another modest man, frequently underestimated both in his own time and subsequently, was Clement Attlee.  His autobiography, As It Happened (William Heinemann, 1954) is a fascinating read.  Churchill called him a modest man, who had much to be modest about, and on another occasion, “a sheep in sheep’s clothing”.  We tend to think that the rough and tumble of parliamentary discourse has today become devoid of kindliness, and much coarser.  Yet it was ever thus.  Lloyd George said of Churchill that he would make a drum out of his mother’s skin, in order to sound his own praises.  Cabinets chaired by Churchill were said to be great historic occasions, but Cabinets chaired by Attlee got so much more done.  He just got on with it.  He ended his career as a Companion of Honour, with an Order of Merit.  You may say he got his own back on his critics, when he composed a limerick:

There were few who thought him a starter,

Many who thought themselves smarter.

But he ended PM,

CH and OM,

An Earl and a Knight of the Garter.      

Churchill himself of course dominates the whole realm of political memoir, and remains the subject of a seemingly inexhaustible supply of fresh biographies.   There seems no end to the fascination he exerts.  I’m currently reading Robert Schmul’s Mr Churchill in the White House, the untold story of a prime minister and two presidents (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2024).  Earlier, a remarkable insight came from his doctor, in Churchill, the Struggle for Survival, 1940/65 by Lord Moran (Constable London 1966).  Many doubted whether, as Churchill’s personal physician, Sir Charles Wilson, Lord Moran, ought to have published these extracts from his diaries until perhaps 50 or 100 years had passed.  But Lord Moran’s excuse was that Churchill was such a monumental figure, that the observations at first hand of somebody as close as an attending doctor must be invaluable.  Perhaps.   

More recently, I read Tony Blair’s A Journey, which seemed by and large to be a prolonged apologia for the Iraq War.  I dodged Boris Unleashed.  A step too far. 

But Jacinda Ardern’s memoir is something totally different.  What can I say?  It describes a culture, a background, and a way of life that is recognisable, and recognisably “normal”.  It is intensely familiar to me because I lived in New Zealand for thirteen years, in the North Island, and Dame Jacinda’s upbringing was in central North Island, in places such as Murupara, Te Aroha (Mount Te Aroha is the Mountain of Love, short for Te Muri-aroha-o-Kuhu, te aroha-tai, te aroha-uta), Morrinsville, Rotorua; and her subsequent political career predominantly unfolded between Wellington, and Auckland.  So I can visualise her account, with sharp clarity.  Her background is humble.  Her father was a policeman, as was mine.  And even although she attained the highest office in the land, at a very young age, she never lost her straightforwardness.  She carried on shopping in Kmart.  She once sent out to a local pizza place for a takeaway, to be delivered to Jacinda Ardern, Government House.  She had to phone back when it wasn’t delivered.  They thought it was a hoax.  Her premiership happened to begin during early pregnancy, and her main preoccupation during the inauguration ceremony was not to throw up.

In New Zealand, the gap between the rich and poor, and between the powerful and the weak, is much less than it is here.  The powerful are much more accessible.  I knew a Minister of Internal Affairs, the NZ Home Secretary if you will, and I met Dame Jacinda’s predecessor, Bill English.  I once pushed, apologetically, the hospital trolley of a very distinguished finance minister out into the corridor of our Emergency Department, because we had run out of room.  He wasn’t in the least fazed. 

Politicians in the UK are almost unanimously enthusiastic about the concept of “social mobility”.  It is a manifestation of the idea that people deserve a chance to fulfil their potential no matter how humble their origin.  The trouble with social mobility is that you offer people a chance to “move up”, or to move out, without questioning the whole structure of social class.  But is it really better to be a hedge fund manager than a home help?  I have a notion that Dame Jacinda would not think so.  You can sum up the entire ethos of her book in one word: kindliness.

Not that she lacks an inner core of strength.  But she learned how to channel her own perception of her weaknesses – impostor syndrome, anxiety, sensitivity, to turn them into strengths, and hence, a different kind of power.  She needed that, to face the challenges of “events”, be they the Christchurch shooting, the White Island volcanic eruption, or Covid.

From the perspective of the Northern Hemisphere, kindliness is surely what contemporary political life lacks. The world remains in a terrible state, does it not.  Ukraine, Gaza, the West Bank, Sudan, Lebanon, and now, Israel and Iran.  Even as I write, so many people in the world might echo the words of George Orwell at the top of this piece.  Plus ça change…

I think the leaders of the G7, currently congregated in Banff, should all read A Different Kind of Power. 

Yesterday was Whit Sunday, and it also happened to be the Day of Pentecost.  Broadcasting House (BBC Radio 4, 9 am) ended with an extract from The Whitsun Weddings, read most mellifluously by its author, Philip Larkin.  Thence, as is my wont, to Dunblane Cathedral, where the lessons offered an intriguing comparison.  Old Testament Lesson – Genesis chapter 11, verses 1 – 9.  The Tower of Babel.  In one sense it is a story offering an explanation for the phenomenon of the vast diversity, and disparity, of languages spoken across the world, just as the story of Adam and Eve offers an explanation for – well – pretty well everything. 

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.   

It occurs to me that that might actually be quite accurate.  Life, human life, and with it the language enabling communication, had to start somewhere.  Then, as peoples migrated, moved about the world, their language mutated in different directions, such that people who once lived together could no longer understand one another.  A week ago I heard Michael Rosen in Word of Mouth (BBC Radio 4) talking about Proto-Indo-European, an ancient language which would develop into many languages in the world today, including English.  So it would appear that languages naturally diverge.  However the Genesis story does not depict this as a natural evolution, but rather as a divine intervention, one of retribution.  God was displeased because the people inhabiting the plain of Sinar decided to construct a Ziggurat, a skyscraper.  They wanted to do this in order to “make us a name, less we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”   

For some reason, God took exception to this.  He did not wish that a tower reach to heaven. So he decided to frustrate the operation by rendering all the movers and shakers unintelligible to one another.  I suppose that is a version of “divide and conquer”.  Babel descended into babble.  Is it purely coincidental that Babel and babble can refer to the same thing?  We would need to ask the linguistic archaeologists who reconstruct Proto-Indo-European.  But people cannot progress, if they cannot cooperate.  As a result, the tower never got built, and the people were indeed scattered upon the face of the earth.

Then came the New Testament Lesson:  Acts 2: 1 – 21. 

And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. 

Here is another story, in some ways diametrically opposed to the Babel story of the Old Testament.  Here, there is a divine intervention to allow communication among a large and disparate group of peoples visiting Jerusalem.  They seem to represent most of the known civilised world of the time: Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia.  Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes.  Cretes and Arabians…

I take my hat off to ministers of the church who dare to interpret such extraordinary tales.  On this occasion the minister characterised the builders of the ziggurat as a totalitarian state which demanded of its people uniformity, and feared diversity.  But the apostles – “the eleven” – were empowered by divine grace to move among strangers, to listen, to communicate, to understand, and be understood. 

But sometimes I think such tales, much like the parables, defy interpretation.  Perhaps if I’d been there, I’d have been one of the crowd who accused the apostles of being drunk.  “What?” said Peter.  “At 9 o’clock in the morning?”

Communication can be deeply deceptive.  ScotRail are minded to replace the voice of their announcer with Artificial Intelligence (AI).  That reassuring Scottish accent will have been adopted by a robot, one “Iona”.  Last Tuesday, one of the journalists in the Herald took exception to this; and by coincidence, in the same issue there was a contribution from an external source, championing the use of AI in small to medium business enterprises in Scotland.  The contrast provided a Babel – Pentecostal moment for me.  I could understand the language of the AI critic, but not the AI champion.  I wrote to the Herald, who kindly published me on Thursday:          

Dear Sir,

There is a stark contrast between two articles in today’s Herald discussing Artificial Intelligence.  On page 15, there is Neil Mackay’s “When AI kills off the ScotRail lady, you know we’re all in trouble… is this what we want?”  And on page 17, there is the Agenda article, “How to make AI work for SMEs in Scotland” (Herald, June 3).  Neil Mackay’s piece is concrete rather than abstract; it lays out an argument that is coherent, intelligible, and intelligent.  The meaning is clear; the language is of the real world, humane, and passionate.

By contrast, the Agenda article, as a piece of prose, is almost entirely devoid of meaning.  It could well have been written by a robot.  Every sentence exhibits abstraction, and lack of precision.  An example: “The application layer is not a black box, it’s an enabler, a multiplier of human potential.”  I’ve read the piece several times, and still have no idea what the application in question is supposed to do.

George Orwell saw it all coming, this eradication of meaning in abstraction.  In “Politics and the English Language” (1946), he translated a verse from Ecclesiastes into modern prose:

”I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

Here is Orwell’s version in modern English:

“Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”

Well done to Neil Mackay for dumping AI from his phone.   

Yours sincerely… 

And on Saturday, the RSNO closed the season with an all Shostakovich programme: the Festive Overture, the Second Cello Concerto with soloist Daniel Müller-Schott, and the 11^th Symphony – The Year 1905.  I suppose Dmitri Shostakovich found himself trapped in the Babel of a totalitarian state.  He had to lead a double life, simultaneously critical of the Soviet authorities, while being their darling.  No wonder he kept a packed suitcase just inside the door to his flat, forever expecting the fateful nocturnal knock on the door.  So his music, often sardonic and sarcastic, is babble to some ears, and deeply significant to others.  And brutal.  The RSNO is currently on top form.  The culmination of the hour long symphony, with the sonorous ringing of the Muscovite bells, and the abrupt cessation of an enormous, tutti fortissimo, to leave the toll of a single bell, was absolutely shattering.

Maestro Sondergard thanked a full house for attending, and invited us all to reconvene on October 7^th.  He also invited us all to dump our devices.  He said, “They are making us ill.”

I applauded.               

Yesterday I failed to win the Sunday Times crossword clue competition, from a couple of weeks ago.  The light was ACETYLENE.  C2H2.  While sipping my coffee in NEXT I idly mulled it over, but I misremembered the chemical formula as C2O2, which was remarkably dumb of me as the gas is a hydrocarbon, not an oxide.  COCO, I thought.  So I came up with:

It’s Coco Chanel, yet ’e drops H for Barney Rubble (9) 

When I subsequently remembered it wasn’t COCO, but rather H – C = C – H (that should be a triple bond between the carbons, beyond the scope of my QWERTY keyboard) and that I was wasting my time in pursuit of a mirage, I tried again:

Bonding between the goal posts, couple of Charlies gas (9)  

Didn’t win.

If J. Alfred Prufrock measured out his life in coffee spoons, I’m in danger of frittering mine away doing crosswords.  I suppose it is one way of diverting one’s mind from the appalling international situation.  The defence spending review is due out today, and we are to be gloomed up for the prospect of war.  Not only must we pour money into munitions, we must all develop a warlike attitude.  Mr Healey will sound like Henry V on the eve of Agincourt.

In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man

As modest stillness and humility,

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

Then imitate the action of the tiger.

Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood,

Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage.

Then lend the eye a terrible aspect…

Presumably the gentler sex must emulate Lady Macbeth.

Come, you spirits,

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty. 

Meanwhile I am like M. Manette, Lucy’s father, in A Tale of Two Cities, driven by the revolution, and PTSD, back to his cobbler’s last.  And continuing on the anodyne theme of preoccupation with trivia, I burst in on a conversation this morning as I popped into the village store for my morning paper. 

“What’s the point in tipping for a buffet?”  My opinion was sought.  “Would you give a tip at a buffet?”

I shrugged.  “I suppose if the food was good.”

“Yes but you’re serving yourself!”  Then my local shopkeeper had a recollection.  “You’re at a function attended my 100 people.  50% of the adults eat 3 sausage rolls each, 75% of the children eat 2 sausage tolls each.  How many sausage rolls are eaten?”

“Sounds like a non sequitur.  A bit like Question 7.”

“Question 7?”

“A memoir by Richard Flanagan.  Chatto and Windus 2024.  Won the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction.”

“What’s the question?”

“Posed by Anton Chekhov.  I paraphrase.  Or rather, embellish.  A train leaves Aberdeen at 3 a.m. in order to reach Penzance at 11 p.m.  As the train is about to depart Aberdeen, an order comes through that the train has to reach Penzance by 7 p.m.  Who loves longer, a man or a woman?”

“That’s absurd.”

“Precisely.  Back to the sausage rolls.  I suppose it’s a piece of algebra.  Leave it with me.”

“No.  You’re on a game show.  You’ve only got 30 seconds.”

“Give in.”

“150.”

“Pourquoi?”

“Suppose the hundred guests are all adult.  50 of them eat 3 sausage rolls, ergo, 150.  Suppose they are all children.  75 of them eat 2 sausage rolls, ergo, 150.  Say there are 60 adults and 40 children.  That’s (30 x 3) + (30 x 2) = 150.  See?  It always works.”

“I’m not convinced.  Suppose there are 90 adults and 10 children.”

“Well, that’s 135 + 15.”

“No, no.  That means seven and a half children eat 2 sausage rolls each, which really is absurd.  A half child isn’t capable of eating anything.”   

“I think you’re taking the scenario too literally.”

And I was reminded of the arithmetical problems we were posed in primary school, when we were introduced to algebra by stealth.  I suppose Chekhov’s Question 7 was a spoof, much like a subsequent piece by the Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock.   You know the sort of thing.  If it takes 3 men 4 days to dig a hole 20 feet deep, how long would it take 2 men to dig a hole 10 feet deep?  The trick was to realise that you were merely manipulating numbers.  It had nothing to do with men, or holes.  If you started thinking about men and holes, you realised that the problem was much more complicated than it appeared.  The third man, who has been made redundant; was he a toiler or a slacker?  Are the soil substrata of the holes the same?  Do the men take tea breaks?  Have they organised?  What does the union think?  It was always assumed that the people adept at solving these problems were cleverer than those who sweated endlessly over them.  But I don’t know.  Weren’t the people who appreciated all the potential complications actually more insightful?  And the people with the facility for simplicity were, in reality, simpletons. 

The sausage rolls reminded me of Gauss, the mathematical prodigy.  At school, his class was asked to sum all the integers between 1 and 100.  Perhaps the teacher wanted a break, to read the newspaper.  The class settled down to the laborious task.  But, so the story goes, Gauss realised instantly that 1 + 100 = 101, 2 + 99 = 101, 3 + 98 = 101… 50 pairs = 50 x 101 = 5050.  Just like that.  I wonder if the teacher gave him a pat on the back, or two swipes of the Lochgelly, or its Teutonic equivalent, for the unpardonable breach of discipline that is precocity.  It was such a minefield, education.  Sometimes I would deliberately aim for mediocrity, just to keep my head under the parapet.  I once wrote an essay on Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale which I think – I still have the C2 ink exercise jotter – was quite good.  Mr George handed it back to me with a cool demeanour and dubious, pursed lips.  “It’s very good, Campbell.  Where did you get it?”

“I made it up, sir.”

“Hmm.”