jamescalumcampbell

Mr Trump is going to withdraw the United States from the Paris Accord on climate change.  He thinks climate change is a hoax.  It might even have been cooked up by the Chinese to damage the US economy.  He wants to fire up the US coal industry again as part of a strategy to get manufacturing industry in the mid-west rust belt to recover.

There is a stark contrast between Mr Trump’s point of view and that of Al Gore, who lost the presidential election by a hanging chad to George W Bush in 2000.  Mr Gore always had an interest in environmental issues and he went on to devote himself to persuading his country and the world that global warming was real and that we needed to do something about it.  He toured the US to give a series of lectures which are captured in the film An Inconvenient Truth.  Watching Al Gore present An Inconvenient Truth and watching President Trump announce his decision re Paris from the White House Rose Garden, it is clear that both men are consummate performers, each with their own inimitable style.  Mr Gore is rather academic, able to talk to what are known in academic circles as “busy slides”, addressing the meaning of graphs and statistics.  Mr Trump is more interested in the broad sweep of things rather than the nice details; he can hold his audience by a magnetism that is not to be underestimated.

But the question must arise, who is right?  Does global warming exist, and is the activity of mankind responsible for it?  In other words, what is the truth?

To outward appearances it would certainly seem as if Mr Gore has approached these questions with more scientific detachment than Mr Trump.  He has certainly outlined to us, in some detail, the salient scientific facts as he sees them.  By contrast, so far as I’m aware, Mr Trump has asserted that global warming is a hoax, without cogent scientific argument and back-up.  It is certainly a fact that the prevailing wisdom of the scientific community supports Mr Gore’s thesis.  If Mr Trump is privy to scientific arguments counter to the prevailing wisdom, I am not aware that he has laid them out and defended them.

I can’t help wondering what the world would have looked like if Mr Gore had won the US presidential election in 2000.  Some people think he actually did win.  These hanging chads again.  But it would seem that the US electorate vote for the man they would like to share a beer with in a bar.  Mr Kerry ran against Dubya in 2004.  Mr Kerry was a little like Mr Gore in being rather academic.  Good heavens, he speaks French!  Dubya got back in.  Perhaps we witnessed a similar phenomenon with Trump and Clinton: Hilary the Washington patrician and insider, Trump the self-professed man of the people.

The biggest event to occur in the west during this period of history has been 9/11.  Dubya looked utterly perplexed but then he was handed a gift on a plate.  A highly articulate lawyer crossed the Pond and without any need for encouragement became the voice, like Cyrano de Bergerac, for a man who could hardly string two words together.  You can see clips of Dubya behind his podium looking across at Mr Blair behind his podium with a pursed-lipped expression somewhere between bewilderment and gratitude.  It’s said Mr Blair was Dubya’s poodle but if anything it was the other way around.  Blair was miles ahead of the game.  “The kaleidoscope has been shaken…”   Then in 2003 Mr Blair persuaded the British Parliament that Saddam Hussein was such an imminent threat to the UK with his weapons of mass destruction that it was necessary to invade Iraq and remove him.  He won the Parliamentary debate by 412 to 149 votes.  Very few people in positions of influence opposed him.  Charles Kennedy did.  So did Robin Cook, whose resignation speech on March 17^th 2003 was extremely eloquent.  Both men died prematurely.  I also recall Ken Clarke stating in the House, somewhat presciently, that if we embarked on the Iraq war, we would see terrorism in the streets of London.

It seems to me that three of the people I have mentioned, Mr Blair, Mr Bush, and now Mr Trump, shared a common feature.  They had a scant regard for the truth.  They were prepared to interpret the world according to their own lights and to proceed on a course of action without much attention to external reality.  Hans Blix was telling Blair and Bush that there was no evidence of the existence in Iraq of WMD.  Virtually the entire scientific community is telling President Trump that global warming is real, and is caused by us.

We live in a “post-truth” age.  If something confronts us that is not to our taste, we call it “fake news”.  Scientists are belittled.  Not so long ago Michael Gove advised us not to pay too much attention to experts.  The idea that there might be a “truth” out there that is independent of our own imagination and will is seriously doubted.  The world is largely as we choose to see it.  This is the origin of political “spin”.  You disguise the truth by applying a heavy veneer of humbug.  You are like a defence attorney presenting a case you don’t personally believe to be true.  You could as easily argue the other side’s case by, as Mr Blair would say, “deploying other arguments”.  The Princeton University philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt dissects this indifference to external truth in his two wonderful treatises On Bullshit and On Truth.  His great insight on bullshit is that the perpetrator of it doesn’t actually care whether what he is saying is true or not; and on truth, that once you cease to believe in the reality of a truth “out there”, you cease to have any clear notion of where you as an individual begin and end.  In other words, you go a bit crazy.

After the Manchester suicide bombing some people said Jeremy Corbyn had “blamed Britain” for the atrocity simply because he had asserted that the Iraq war had fuelled Islamist extremism.

Duh.

In the middle of May the NHS computer systems throughout the UK came under cyber-attack and as a result, the NHS was temporarily crippled.  I wrote a letter to The Herald, which they were kind enough to publish, suggesting that it is unwise to become too reliant on computer systems.  The computers crash and you can’t function because you haven’t been trained to think from first principles.   Now British Airways have suffered a “catastrophic” IT systems failure resulting in the cancellation of BA flights into and out of Heathrow and Gatwick.  Serendipitously, I had likened a doctor under cyber-attack to a pilot who can’t navigate using compass turns and mental dead-reckoning.  It all reminded me of a piece I wrote in 2006 for Hoolet, the Journal of The Royal College of General Practitioners, Scotland, which I dug out and reread.  It seemed relevant to me.  As I hold the copyright, I reproduce it now.  I haven’t changed a word.

ZEITGEIST

Imagine you have been commissioned to design the front cover for the next edition of Hoolet.  The theme: zeitgeist – the spirit of the age.  The editor asks for an image that will represent for the readership the atmosphere of le nouveau siècle.  What would you choose?  Perhaps, the twin towers aflame?  An iceberg calving off the Greenland coast?  A uranium enrichment plant in Iran?  George Galloway dressed up as a vampire on Big Brother?

I choose a word picture, something I happened to hear on the radio, vivid enough for me to conjure the scene with extraordinary clarity.  It was a description, one year on, by a British tourist who happened to be in a Thai electronics shop on Boxing Day 2004 when the tsunami struck.  One moment he was browsing the shelves, the next he was swimming for his life, to escape from the shop before it was completely engulfed.  There he was – and this is my image – surrounded by floating desk top computers, mobile phones, PCs, iPods, digital cameras, and play stations, thinking, “This stuff is useless rubbish.”

He escaped with nothing but his life.  He needed rest, warmth, shelter, food and drink, and human companionship.  The local people, who had next to nothing, shared with him that which they had.  I have no idea what happened to him after that.  Perhaps he returned to Britain and resumed his job as a sales rep for Hewlett Packard.  But I’d hazard a guess that the experience must have changed his world view, and his sense of the relative value of things.  I do believe his experience has changed mine.

I am not a Luddite.  I remember as a GP trainee in Edinburgh in 1984 going on a distant house call from our practice to Gogarburn.  I made the round trip and got back, only to be given another Gogarburn house call.  I said to my trainer, “Do you think the practice should get one of these portable phones?”  I’d seen one.  It looked like a large brick, the sort of thing John Wayne might have used on Juno, Gold, or Omaha.  My trainer was dubious.  They were expensive, toys for the rich and famous, and Edinburgh was full of black holes where you lost the signal.  So we put the idea on the back burner; I paused for a coffee and signed a few repeat prescriptions that had been hand-written by the reception staff.

How times have changed.  I don’t think very many people in 1984 anticipated the sheer scale of the information technology revolution, its power, and the rapidity of its onset.  And it would be crazy, it would indeed be Luddite, to wish it away.  Apart from anything else, it is just so much easier now than it was in 1984 to book a flight, to withdraw money from the bank, to get an urgent message to New Zealand.  As one of the doctors in our practice said the other day, “We’re going paper-light; there’s no point in arguing about it; it’s coming; all that matters is that we do it right.”

Splendid.  Yet I can’t say I mind when the system crashes.  I say to the receptionist, “The computer’s down.  Thank God.  We’ll do it the old-fashioned way.” And suddenly we all talk to one another a bit more.  A computer outage affords us all a glimpse of our humanity.  There is a little frisson of excitement – you feel the same thing during an electricity power cut.  I’ve always loved power cuts.  The darkness creeps in from outside and you huddle together round the tallow lamps, sharing a kind of underground, blitzy camaraderie.

“That’s all very well,” I hear you say, “but that’s just an indulgence and a conceit.  If you were a doctor in Baghdad and you only had power for two hours every 24, you would be monumentally cheesed off!” And would I also feel the same way if the computers didn’t get up and running again?  I’m not so sure.

The miraculous thing about the medical consultation is that it can be carried out under the glow of a tallow lamp.  It is a beautiful thing.  All you need are the skills – to take an accurate and detailed history, and to carry out a physical examination with little more than your hands, ears and eyes.  Then you need the wit and experience to interpret what you have found and to consider whether you should intervene, and if so, how.  You say to yourself, “What does this person who consults me seek?  What does he need?”

Nothing should be allowed to interfere with the sanctity of the medical consultation.  If the computers go down and as a consequence we find we are unable to do our business, then I think we are in trouble.  I had the misfortune to spend ten hours in Heathrow Airport last December when the departures board suddenly and peremptorily cancelled my connection to Glasgow.  There was no explanation.  I dutifully joined a lengthy queue at the BA information desk and waited my turn.  Still no announcements.  A young man just ahead of me in the line began, politely, yet insistently, to complain to the BA staff that in the age of the superabundance of information, we weren’t getting any.  When I reached the head of the queue I learned that my flight had been cancelled, not because of a mechanical problem, but because of a computer failure; and that the outage did not affect Air Traffic Control, but the ticketing system.  “But I’ve got a ticket!” I waved my boarding pass in the air.  No matter.  I had to rescue my baggage from the carousel, join another queue, and check in to a later flight.  When I got to the head of the queue, I was told I was too early to check my baggage in.

I got home after midnight, and was moved to write a “Disgruntled of Tunbridge Wells” – type letter to The Scotsman disabusing the Roman Catholic Church of its new-found belief that Limbo did not exist; after all I had spent an eternity there.  I could give its precise location: Gate Lounge 5, Terminal 1, Heathrow Airport.

Not long after this – and perhaps this is a tiny example of the way our humanity can be bolstered by an outage – a young man came to see in in the surgery.  After the consultation, he asked me if I had written a letter to The Scotsman.  His father had sent him the cutting with the covering note, “Sounds like this doctor was in the same queue as you.”  It was a Buchanesque experience; Buchan might have written, “My eyes dislimned .”  I suddenly recognised the articulate, vociferous young man who had been ahead of me in the queue.

For most of us I believe it remains the case that when the computers go down our business doesn’t grind to a halt.  Quite the contrary, we feel freed up to get on with our work.  This should at least give us pause, not to unplug the terminals, but to consider how we use the technology and whether our use of it really does improve patient care.  I can’t decide whether the people who negotiated our contract for us were childishly naïve or cynically Machiavellian in throwing a sop to a government bureaucracy obsessed with the achievement of targets through ticking boxes on a computer screen.  I think we all know that many of the measurable parameters deemed to indicate that we perform well are risible in the extreme.  Bring me the most intractable hypertensive patient in the practice and I will get his blood pressure under 135/85 – no bother at all.  He may not be able to stand up, he may be exhausted, nauseous, impotent, and depressed, but he will be normotensive.  Tick the box.  This is what happens when the IT system becomes the business.  It’s a very dangerous ménage-a-trois, a doctor, a patient, and a computer screen.  It is so easy for the doctor to misplace his loyalty within the triangle.

For myself, considering the way things have gone, I find it difficult to separate in my mind IT and childishness.  There are 700 channels on the TV and nothing to watch.  I get 700 emails a month and about 7 of them are worth reading; the rest are either spam, or “fire and forget” blanket directives sent out by the trust to a vast readership.  Travelling by public transport has become a torment not so much because of the grime, squalor, and imminent threat of physical violence, but because of the cacophony of zings and tinkles issuing from the ear-pieces of one’s fellow-travellers, and the mindboggling banality of their one-sided telephone conversations.  Mobile phones have become a sex aid for adolescents with repetitive strain injury of the thumb.  Well, good luck to them.  C U L8R!  St Paul had a word to say about IT:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

Now I think of the patient before me as the man in the Phuket electronics shop, fighting for his life, not waving but drowning.  What does he need?  Certainly not all this cyber-flotsam, impeding his efforts to escape, to be free, to live.

 

 

 

Two highly contrasting visits to Perth Concert Hall last week; on Monday to hear Nicola Benedetti and Alexei Grynyuk play Brahms, and on Thursday to hear English Touring Opera present Tosca.

Not content with playing all three Brahms sonatas for violin and piano (for the first time in one concert), Ms Benedetti prefaced each sonata with extended introductions dealing with the events in Brahms’ life at the time of each composition, the works themselves, and her own response to them.  Following the music, both performers sat down on stage for a thirty minute question and answer session with a large audience whose members almost all stayed behind for the duration.  (There was an amusing interlude when Ms Benedetti told us that her mother was in the audience.  “Where are you, mum?”  Then, with laughter and mock indignation, “Has she gone? I’m offended!”)  It said a lot for a sizeable contingent of very young people, many of them aspiring violinists, that the audience remained in rapt attention throughout.

They are a very class act, Benedetti-Grynyuk.  I’ve heard them play Perth Concert Hall once before, and particularly recall a memorable Beethoven Kreutzer Sonata.  Mr Grynyuk is as wonderful a pianist as Ms Benedetti is a violinist.  Both seem able to conjure from their respective instruments sounds of extraordinary expressivity.  (Sorry!  I sound like a guest on Michael Barclay’s Private Passions.  Sublime, Michael.)

The question and answer session was interesting.  All sorts of queries, from people of all ages.  Ms Benedetti has a rare gift for communication with warmth, sincerity, and entire lack of pretence.  Mr Grynyuk was a man of fewer words but they were well chosen and he had an irrepressible dry wit.  I was particularly struck by Ms Benedetti’s response to a question from a young girl.  “What advice would you give to somebody trying to be a violinist?”

“Do you play the violin?”

“Yes.”

There followed a conversation part private part public.  I hope I get the gist of Ms Benedetti’s reply right.  You have to decide what music, and the violin, means to you.  If you decide to devote yourself to it, you have to do the work.  Listen to your teachers and to all advice, but not uncritically.  Everything you are told has to be absorbed and evaluated by your own inner core.

It crosses my mind that when Nicola Benedetti was 16 she won the BBC Young Musician of the Year, got a recording contract, and embarked on a career.  I recall a remark she once made, that she got a lot of career advice that wasn’t necessarily any good.  She could easily have become enslaved by somebody else’s idea of what she was about.  But she didn’t.  I detect in her an extraordinary inner core of belief and resolve.  I think it was this sense of Truth to Self that she was trying to convey to her young listener.

If the Benedetti-Grynyuk-Brahms combination was inspirational and life-affirming then Tosca was something quite different.  Torture; murder; execution; suicide.  Strong meat, indeed.  I did ask myself, what are you doing here?  I have a phobia of judicial execution.  Grand Opera; honestly it’s too too bloody.  Only the other day I saw Pelleas in Edinburgh (lust, jealousy, abuse, murder) and then Bluebeard’s Castle in Glasgow (poor Judith finds herself married to a serial killer).  A Diva’s lot is not a happy one.

But, let’s face it, Grand Opera for all that it is highly stylized to the point of absurdity, does seem to hold the mirror up to human nature.  Some people think our lives are like a soap opera but on the whole I tend to think of life, public life at any rate, as Grand Opera.  In Grand Opera you are privy to the unfolding of a series of tragic events the protagonists are powerless to resist.  At the end of Act 1 of Tosca, while the Te Deum is sung in the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle, Baron Scarpia, the chief of police, formulates his dreadful plan of destruction and possession.  Puccini’s music is overwhelming.  Scarpia is a complete monster.  He tortures the painter Cavaradossi, plans to execute him and have his evil way with his lover the beautiful singer Floria Tosca.  Yet when Tosca stabbed Scarpia to death on stage I actually felt rather sorry for him.  He was in the grip of some external force of evil and as much a victim as anybody else.  This is the thing about operatic characters; they are playthings of the gods.

Following the purgation of pity and terror, you leave the theatre and resume life in the real world, disconcerted to find youself observing life on “the world stage”, and what you are observing to all intents and purposes resembles Grand Opera.  There is a horrible feeling that the libretto has already been composed; the players are merely acting it out.  John Adams composed Nixon in China.  I bet you somebody writes an opera about President Trump.  I hope it’s like a piece of Gilbert & Sullivan.  Meanwhile I can’t get the close to Act 1 of Tosca out of my head.  The bells, the bells.

I watched King Charles the Third on Wednesday night.

It did not take me long to realise

That Royals speak exclusively in iambs.

Decasyllabic lines conveyed the drift

And burden of this ninety minute play.

It was a very Shakespeherian Rag;

You could not fail to spot Will’s influence

(By Will I mean the Bard and not the Prince).

You might have thought the clowns would speak in prose –

Provincial patois, slangy, a la mode

Or some such less exalted register

But nay; this wuznae punters doon the pub

But kings and queens and those and such as those –

Prince and Princesses, Crown Imperial.

Besides, to tell the truth there were no clowns

Though “circus” might describe this Windsor court

Depicted by the traffic of the stage.

Princess Diana took a cameo role

Like Hamlet’s father on the battlements

At Elsinore, or maybe Banquo’s ghost

Up Cawdor way, by Birnam, Dunsinane.

Indeed the Scottish Play was ever present –

(Eleven syllables are quite the thing

So long as endings are made feminine)

Vaulting ambition the imperial theme

And Evil’s metaphysic thrall.  I thought

The playwright took a frightful liberty

In casting Catherine as a harridan.

Lady Macbeth was never cold as this.

This futuristic melodrama was

Beyond dystopian; I cannot think

It bore much semblance to the actual Firm

Conspiring to get Charles to abdicate.

The King was shown to dither, vacillate;

With little succour from the Cambridges.

No need to ponder who the trousers wore –

The heir was firmly under Catherine’s thumb;

The spare as vacuous as his dithering dad

If dad he was – the playwright went so far

As cuckold him; what right to cast this up

Before a man with no right to reply?

Now here’s the nub: this is a travesty.

I might be Royalist or Republican –

It matters not one whit; this is abuse.

An alexandrine line to end this flood:

You can’t make monsters out of living flesh and blood.

On May 1^st in a rare show of creative scheduling I put both my eyes and my car in for a simultaneous service and MOT, creative, because with the tropicamide drops I wasn’t going to be able to drive for four hours anyway.  The garage and the optician share certain common features.  Both are kindly.  They offer a “health check” and they run “diagnostics”.  If there are problems, they both commiserate.  I remember once when an old car of mine was nearing the end of its life, I was even ushered into a room specifically designed for the breaking of bad news, a Quiet Room with the atmosphere of a chapel.  My memory is trying to tell me there was a Gideon’s Bible on the table, but that is preposterous.  It was probably Ovlov, the Volvo glossy.

I started using reading glasses in my late forties.  The secretary of Auckland Emergency Department saw me squinting at a document at arm’s length and without comment she lifted the phone and booked me into Optometry in the Med School across the road.  Otherwise I might have been in denial for the next eighteen months.  Now if I am a sedulous keeper of appointments it is because I keep sitting on my glasses.

The eye appointment started and finished with a check of ocular pressures.  They repeat the test because of the tropicamide drops, in case the pupillary dilation precipitates acute glaucoma. So, a total of six puffs of air into each eye.  I never get used to it and never cease to flinch.  Still, not as bad as the dental hygienist going between the upper first incisors with a pickaxe.  That really does bring a tear to the eye.

Then, still on the glaucoma theme, chronic this time, it’s visual fields.  How many lights?  Three!  Or maybe four!  Two and a half?  -ish.  Lights?  What lights?

Then it’s the automated modified Snellen charts and another chance to uhm and agh.  O, or maybe C… D, or maybe O…  It’s as well I didn’t become an optometrist; I wouldn’t have had the patience.  “For pity’s sake make up your mind!”  But I was treated with the utmost courtesy.  Ophthalmoscopy next, and a repeat picture of the optic fundi.  In Days of Thunder, Nicole Kidman in her capacity as consultant neurologist remarks to Tom Cruise in his capacity as racing driver, post shunt, that the retina is a beautiful thing.  Fundoscopy as a procedure is somewhat up-close and personal.  GPs undertaking it are supposed, irrespective of the genders of doctor and patient, to offer a chaperon.  Impractical and unworkable?  You decide.  Incidentally, Kidman and Cruise became an item, not just in real life, but in the film.  The ethical issue of professional boundaries wasn’t raised.  Is it okay if the doc’s a woman and the patient a man?

I sneaked a peak at my fundi on the computer screen.  No change from previous.  And indeed, no change of prescription.  My eyes have “plateaued”.  I was self-congratulatory, after the fashion of the man in the Bible who is smug about all the grain stored in his barns.  In my family, “barns, barns” has become a kind of shorthand depicting the folly of reliance on the best laid schemes of mice and men.  Thou fool…  Twenty minutes later, my dilated pupils blinded by the glare, I nearly walked under a bus.

Back at the garage, the news was similarly good.  No need to withdraw to the Chamber of Bad Tidings.  I even, apparently, passed the emissions test.  Three years ago, and for the first time, encouraged by her green credentials, HMG, and free Road Tax, I bought a diesel car.  How far-sighted was that!

Barns, barns.

Popped into Scone Palace, the crowning place of Scottish kings, in deepest Perthshire.  National Trust?  I enquired hopefully of the kindly lady at the kiosk.  No.  I stumped up the £11.50.  As I walked across the magnificent park, an air raid tocsin made me nearly jump out of skin.  It was only a peacock, strutting ostentatiously around the entrance.

Scone Palace gets a mention in Shakespeare’s Scottish play, though I’m not sure if that’s a recommendation.  The site has been important historically for about fifteen hundred years.  This was the northern limit of the Roman Empire. The Romans never defeated the Picts, but Kenneth MacAlpin, King of Scots, did so, it is said by an act of treachery, in 843.  He murdered the Pictish nobles at a banquet.  (This is what puts me off the study of history – all the gore.)    It is said he set the king-making seat, the Stone of Scone, aka the Stone of Destiny, on Moot Hill next to where the palace now stands.  Macbeth ruled here in the eleventh century.  John Balliol was crowned at Scone in 1292.  In 1296 he rebelled against his patron, Edward 1, and during the English invasion the Stone of Scone was removed to Westminster.  Robert the Bruce was crowned at Scone in 1306.  The Scottish medieval parliaments met at Scone until the mid-fifteenth century.  James IV was crowned at Scone in 1488.  Then the court shifted to Edinburgh and Holyrood Palace.  In the early seventeenth century Scone passed to the aristocratic family whose descendants still hold it.  Charles II was the last king to be crowned at Scone, in 1651.

A replica of the Stone of Scone stands on Moot Hill, but the real thing is somewhere else.  In 1950 a group of students snatched the stone from Westminster and brought it back to Scotland.  (Incidentally, it’s important that the perpetrators of that act were students.  That made it a student prank.  If they had been motor mechanics or, worse still, unemployed, they would have ended up in prison.)  Then the stone was returned to London, then it came back, and I gather it’s in Edinburgh, or is it inside the palace at Scone under the crowning chair beside the Scottish crown?  Nobody quite knows.

I confess I don’t much mind.  It is only, after all, a stone.  I have never really understood the quest for the Holy Grail.  Why are people prepared to pay large sums at auction for such items as the dress Marilyn Monroe wore while singing Happy Birthday to JFK, or Elvis’s Fender bass guitar, or one of Winston’s cigars?  I can understand somebody coveting the Macdonald Stradivarius viola.  But that is not simply because it is the most valuable musical instrument in the world; it is because it produces a beautiful sound.  But when an item’s intrinsic value is due entirely to its provenance, that has me stumped.

Yet is that entirely true?  Suppose I found myself in possession of the autograph of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, or Ian Fleming’s You Only Live Twice, or Lennon-McCartney’s No Reply, would I say to myself, we have copies, this is worthless – and put it through the shredder?  I think not.  I would preserve it.  But I like to think I wouldn’t hoard it.  Give it to a museum.  What is the point of acquisition?  This is what I find myself thinking when I wander through a place like Scone Palace.  Why, as a private citizen, would you want to surround yourself with all this opulence?  All the art, the plate, the furniture.  I’m trying to imagine myself dining before one of these huge tables with all the glassware, withdrawing to a room the size of a tennis court, and finally retiring to a four poster in a huge scarlet bedroom.  I wouldn’t get a wink of sleep.  I’d feel such a prat.

Unaccountably, I’ve developed a yen to climb the Inaccessible Pinnacle, the spur of rock atop Sgurr Dearg on the Cuillin ridge that for many aspiring Munro-baggers has proved to be a Nemesis.  I realise this is for me an absurdly late mid-life crisis akin to turning up at the class reunion in a Porsche with the new 25 year old girlfriend.  I’ve been picking the brains of In Pin graduates.  I’ve noticed that none of them have expressed a wish to do it again.  They’ve ticked the box.  (Maybe it’s the same with the putative 25 year old girlfriend.  I’m reminded of these Old Testament stories of powerful men like David who lusted after attractive young women like Bathsheba.  He wished “to have lain with her.”  Presumably this is the Authorised Version of “he wished to get laid.”  But why is it in the past tense?  He didn’t really want to relish the experience at all.  He merely wished to brag about it afterwards.)

Anyway in the course of my researches I’ve been invited by a friend of mine on a rather more modest stroll up Leum Uilleim.  He has done all the Munros and with this top he will have completed all the Corbetts, and he wishes to share this experience with some friends.  I asked, will there be champagne?  You will know that Munros are over 3000 feet and Corbetts over 2500 feet.  (It’s more complicated than that but would take too long to explain.  K2 may be challenging, but it’s not a Munro.)  At 2974 feet, Leum Uilleim is really a Munro manqué.  It had a brief cameo role in the film Trainspotting.  It’s location on Rannoch Moor would be somewhat remote but for access by train at Corrour Halt.  Re this proposed expedition, it occurs to me the last time I climbed a hill with this friend it was Mount Hagen which is the second highest mountain in Papua New Guinea.  At the time he was the PNG all-comers 10,000 metres champion.  Consequently by the time we got back down I was a wreck.  I remember we ran into an Engan who tried to charge us for going through his part of the jungle.  He said in Pidgin, “Dispela bush belong me!”  He clearly hadn’t heard of the right to roam.  He looked at me, not unsympathetically, and said, “Em e no good long walkabout.”

Over lunch in the Lion & Unicorn I said to another conqueror of all the Munros, “Let’s do the In Pin.”  He said he would have to be blindfolded, tied on to a stretcher, and heavily drugged.  This does not bode well.  I don’t have much of a head for heights.  Aeroplanes are fine.  I find the presence of wings a great consolation.  On the other hand I had sweaty palms in the gondola that took me up the mountain above Funchal in Madeira.  I went on line and watched on video a couple of ascents up the In Pin.  I can see the climb itself is only moderately difficult.  When I was twelve years old I was a monkey and would have scrambled up and down without giving it a second thought.  Not now.  Sweaty palms again.  It’s the 3235 foot drop on either side of you that’s the difficulty.  Perhaps I’d freeze half way up and have to be yanked off by a helicopter.  How embarrassing.

*

In Perth Concert Hall I heard the young New Zealand violinist Benjamin Baker give a solo lunchtime recital.  He played the Bach D minor Partita, and the Bartok Sonata, both for unaccompanied violin, on a Tononi violin of 1709.  By coincidence, in The Seven Trials of Cameron-Strange, the troubled doctor’s twin sister gave a performance on her Stradivarius viola, in the Auckland Town Hall, of the Bach D minor partita.  Life emulates art.  Benjamin Baker was superb.  I don’t normally do the Green Room bit but it’s always nice to talk to a New Zealander.  I said, “You’ve lost your Kiwi accent.”

“I know.  It’s awful.  I sound like a Brit.  Almost as bad as a Scotsman sounding English.”

“Oh, not that bad!”

Just banter.

He was spotted by Nigel Kennedy and enrolled in the Yehudi Menuhin school aged 8, the last pupil to enrol before Lord Menuhin died.  He played before the great man.  These two unaccompanied works, the Bach and the Bartok were very close to Menuhin’s heart (he commissioned the Bartok), and I thought I could hear in Mr Baker’s playing an occasional trace of that unique, distinctive voice.  He played the Bach from memory but he used electronic music for the Bartok, turning the pages by means of a foot pad.  The world is being taken over by robots.  Perhaps the union acting for les tourneuses des pages will hack the system in a gesture of protest.  The French really know how to organise a demo.

I was further reminded after the concert of the encroachment of mechanisation into all our lives when visiting Sainsbury’s.  What do les beepeuses have to say about self-check-out?  I have an idea for self-check-out which I hope to put before Dragons’ Den.  It is to turn one of the self-check-out consoles into a Dalek.  The kids who are being beguiled by all the confectionary and electronic games at toddler eye level would just love it.  The swivelling Dalek antenna would be the scanner.  Falling foul of the system would be a terrifying experience.

UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING AREA!!  REMOVE ITEM IMMEDIATELY!!!

I don’t think my pitch in Dragons’ Den would go down too well.  One of these hawks – one of the women, or that great Scottish bruiser – would give me a flinty stare.  “Let me get this straight.  You want to buy your groceries off a Dalek?”  Eyes raised to the ceiling.  “I’m out.”  Actually I had a mishap at the self-check-out.  I asked one of Lord Sainsbury’s representatives to take a security tag off a bottle of gin, while I was packing my bag.  Then I proceeded to forget all about it and on lifting up my bag swept the gin across the floor.  Broken glass everywhere, a gin-clear puddle, and the subtle tang of juniper berries.  I abjectly apologised, assumed ownership of culpability, and thanked them profusely for cleaning up after me.  I decided to think of the episode as divine intervention: you’ve had enough gin!  On my way out, a blonde woman of personable attribute said, “They’ll give you another one.”  I said, “Oh no.  Entirely my fault.”  But sure enough, I was called back, and given a replacement.  I accepted the gift with grateful thanks.  The blonde lady said, “What-I-tell-you?”

*

To Perth Airport to fly the EV-97 teamEurostar two seater light aircraft.  After a gap, it was good to be back in the aviation world.  Weather permitting (it’s looking a bit dodgy at the moment) I’m going back up on Monday.  Flying a plane is like climbing a mountain.  You rise above all your petty cares and preoccupations.  You live in the present.  You get away from the rat race.  For an hour you are free of the surly bonds.  Quite apart from anything else, everybody is very polite, and everybody observes the rules and conventions of Air Law.  You don’t have Audi drivers snarling up behind you to within a distance of six inches just because you are observing the speed limit.  Dear Jane, Audi driver, you are the exception.  Believe me.

*

To Waitrose.

“Oh hello!”

I said, “Hi, how are you?” – not having a clue who she was.  She gave me a hint.

“Gin!”

Perhaps I’ll make a habit of wandering down supermarket aisles smashing bottles of gin in the hope of running into her again.

It’s Day 86 of the president’s first term, and two nuclear powers would appear to be on the edge of war.  The extraordinary thing about it is that nobody seems much bothered.  There’s no panic buying in the Seoul supermarkets, no nose to tail traffic jams as the 10 million inhabitants try to head out.  One can only imagine they are so used to the intermittent heightening of tensions, the rhetoric and the brinkmanship, that they have become rather blasé.  Certainly the pundits in the British Sunday broadsheets, while recognising a crisis might develop, still think the threats and counter-threats are mostly hot air.  And yet, if we are to take the statements of the leaders of the two powers in question at face value, things are looking bleak.  It is evident that the president wants to curtail North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.  He would rather China do this work on his behalf but has stated that if China does not, he will “take care of it.”  A pre-emptive strike to disable the North Korean nuclear programme has been mooted.  The fact that North Korea’s ballistic missile test failed today, might persuade the US that this is the time to strike, while the opposition appears powerless to reply.  The opposition could effectively be neutralised.  But North Korea has stated that any such strike would inevitably result in retaliation.  This would presumably start the second Korean War.

There is every reason to suppose that the president is not bluffing.  In the course of the last week he has ordered the firing of fifty nine cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase in response to President Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons on his own people, and he has deployed an 11 ton “Moab” (Massive Ordnance Air Blast) against an ISIS underground installation in Afghanistan.  Meanwhile a US Navy “Armada” is heading for the Korean Peninsula.  (Armada could be an ironic choice of word considering that in the sixteenth century part of the Spanish Armada foundered off Lewis; might the president have Spanish ancestry?)

Why doesn’t the president want North Korea to have deliverable nuclear weapons?  After all, if they are good enough for the US, and the UK, Russia, China, France, India, Pakistan, and Israel, why not North Korea?  The British Government is always extolling the virtues of an independent nuclear deterrent.  This is why Trident is due for an upgrade.  Trident submarines can travel anywhere, anytime, and therefore obliterate any target across the entire planet.  This system is allegedly keeping the peace.  There are thousands of nuclear bombs in existence and only about 200 sovereign states.  Why not get the United Nations to divvy them up and arm everybody to the teeth?  I imagine the answer to this would be that, while there might be a debate to be had between proponents of unilateral and multilateral nuclear disarmament, most countries wish to strive for a world free of nuclear weapons.  That is a long term aim, but in the meantime the world is a dangerous place.  There are, if you will, some bad dudes out there.

I dare say that in this context the president regards the US as the goodies and North Koreans, particularly if they continue on their current trajectory, as the baddies.  The West tends to regard, and depict, North Korea as a repressed and secretive nation run by a bunch of utter nutters.  Certainly the intensity of the enthusiasm of their TV newscasters, and the synchronised and prolonged applause of serried ranks of military in uniform may not be to our taste.  On the other hand the Pyongyang subway stations look rather grand, the vehicles freshly painted and spotlessly clean, and the people – well, much like any other people across the world.  I imagine that the North Korean government, aware of the approaching Armada and aware that a pre-emptive strike is being mooted, might well be feeling very nervous.

I for one am feeling very nervous and I’m 6,000 miles away.  I can’t remember when the world situation last felt this jittery.  It might have been 1961.  We seem to be heading with astonishing rapidity towards a cliff edge.  Brinkmanship is all about Game Theory.  What’s the other guy gonna do?  The trouble is that in making such predictions, in playing out these war games, you have to believe that the players in the game are playing by certain rules and making decisions along rational lines.  You imagine the players have a game plan, a strategy, and they are each methodically developing their position as chess players do.   But this is not like a conventional game of chess.  This is more like speed chess.  You set the chess clocks to two and a half minutes to midnight and then you move so fast you haven’t time to think.  Anything might happen.  You make it up as you go along and you shoot from the hip.  Before you know it the board is laid waste, both sides obliterate one another, and if there is any victory to be won it is a Pyrrhic one.  It’s like Ozymandias.  “Nothing beside remains.” 

Got home the other night to this message on my answer phone:

This is to inform you that HMRC is filing a law suit against you.  Press one to speak to a police officer.

Then I got an email ostensibly from HMRC to inform me I was a due a considerable tax repayment, which I could claim by accessing a certain web site.  The email looked very convincing and cited a London address, in “Parliament Street”.

I didn’t press one and I didn’t access the web site.  I did let my accountant know.  He said I did well to ignore both messages as they were clearly scams.

Then promptly on April 6^th HMRC sent me forms SA100-6 and SA101 2017 with a notice I am required, by law, to file a tax return.  It’s that dismal time of year again.  Might this be a scam also?  I think not.  I’ve also received from them my latest tax code for the New Year.  This is a combination of letters and digits with an explanation as to how the code was arrived at, and an accompanying set of notes to help me crack the code.  Now in an amateurish way I’m rather fond of codebreaking.  Crosswords and the like.  But this particular conundrum has me stumped.

The explanation starts out promisingly enough with a tax free personal allowance to which is added Gift Aid.  I’m having second thoughts about Gift Aid.  I recently sent some money to the Disasters Emergency Committee but I didn’t gift aid it.  DEC promptly sent me a form with a polite request that I consider it.  It made me wonder, why have I gone off Gift Aid?  I don’t intend to claim any tax relief on my gift either for myself or anybody else.  I think the tax system is too complicated and needs to be grossly simplified.

Anyway the rest of the procedure for working out my tax code involves a series of deductions such as “adjustment to rate bands”, “higher rate tax adjustment”, “underpayment restriction” etc. etc. which not only reduces my personal allowance to zero but turns it into a considerable negative quantity.  What can it mean to have a tax free amount that is a negative number?  I presume it must mean that I must pay tax not only on all of my income, but on all of my income plus this not inconsiderable amount that is expressed as a negative.  I will not weary you with the arithmetical convolutions that arrived at this sum, but proceed to Note 9, “Tax-free amount”:

To create your tax code, we’ve removed the last digit of your tax-free amount and included a letter…  We tell your employer(s) or pension provider(s) your tax code but we do not tell them how we worked it out.

This Bletchley-like utterance is reminiscent of the rubrics you come across above the 12 x 12 crosswords in the Sunday broadsheets that take you (or at least, me) all week to solve.  I’m thinking of compiling one and sending it to The Telegraph:

Enigmatic Variations No 666: “Gimme a break.”

Solutions to clues are a combination of letters and digits.  Prior to entry to the grid, solvers must remove the last digit to each solution and include a letter.  Solutions should reach The Telegraph by Oct 31^st (Jan 31^st if filing on line).  Do not tell us how you worked it out.

Incidentally, HMRC didn’t, as far as I can see, remove the last digit at all; they removed the second last.  It’s a nice point.

It’s enough to make you chuck your hand in, take their word for it, fill in the form and keep your fingers crossed you haven’t inadvertently made a mistake.  This is why I get an accountant to do it and I pay insurance against being investigated.  The professional fee protection blurb says:

HMRC are coming.  Even innocent taxpayers are caught out… a visit from (HMRC) can deal a severe blow to anyone… Nothing to hide?  Unfortunately even innocent taxpayers get caught up in the process and are under threat of investigation… It is an unfortunate fact, but it is often impossible to second guess when a tax investigation will take place…

It’s positively Kafkaesque.

I know I sound like a barrack-room lawyer but I think the whole tax system should be simplified on to one side of a sheet of A4.  If you need more than one sheet of paper to explain it, it’s too complicated.  You have an income tax rate at x%.  You pay x% of your income per annum to HMRC.  How hard can it be?

Mrs May’s letter to President Tusk triggering Article 50 is a strange document.  President Tusk waved it in the air in a manner rather different from that of Neville Chamberlain returning from Munich.  “Here is the paper…”  President Tusk said, with evident consternation, “Six pages!”  What did he mean?  Was it too long or too short?  The important message was contained in two sentences buried within the text:

I hereby notify the European Council in accordance with Article 50(2) of the Treaty on European Union of the United Kingdom’s intention to withdraw from the European Union.  In addition, in accordance with the same Article 50(2) as applied by Article 106a of the Treaty Establishing the European Atomic Energy Community, I hereby notify the European Council of the United Kingdom’s intention to withdraw from the European Atomic Energy Community.  

I think Mrs May might have done well to leave it at that.  The rest of the text was reminiscent of a “Dear John” letter designed to effect the break-up of a relationship while letting the other side down gently.  You know the sort of thing.  “We can still be friends…”  There was even a hint of “It’s not you, it’s me…” in Mrs May’s contrite “there can be no ‘cherry picking’” (it crossed my mind that might be because there will be no East European labour available for the crop next harvest).

But let us subject Mrs May’s 2200 words to close textual analysis (not that I counted: Eddie Mair, sitting in for Andrew Marr on Sunday morning, did.  Gibraltar’s not mentioned.)

Dear President Tusk,

On 23 June last year, the people of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union.

True.

As I have said before, that decision was no rejection of the values we share as fellow Europeans.

Now, how does Mrs May know that?  A referendum is rather a blunt instrument, usually offering an electorate, as in this case, a binary choice.  Cabinet decision-making is liable to be more nuanced and may more reflect the rationale underpinning an executive action.  Mrs May would need to peer into the minds of millions of voters to know whether or not European values were being rejected.  On the face of it, the much cherished four freedoms – freedom of movement of goods, people, services, and capital – might be said to be EU values which the British electorate has rejected.

This letter sets out the approach of Her Majesty’s Government to the discussions we will have about the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union and about the deep and special partnership we hope to enjoy – as your closest friend and neighbour – with the European Union once we leave. 

That is like flirting with your spouse while suing for divorce.

We therefore believe it is necessary to agree the terms of our future partnership alongside those of our withdrawal from the European Union.

This is an important point for Mrs May because she actually makes it in her letter three further times, as follows:

The United Kingdom wants to agree with the European Union a deep and special partnership that takes in both economic and security cooperation.  To achieve this, we believe it is necessary to agree the terms of our future partnership alongside those of our withdrawal from the EU. 

Note that on this second occasion of stressing the necessity of conducting withdrawal and renegotiation discussions in parallel, Mrs May also conflates economic with security issues.

We want to be able to agree a deep and special partnership, taking in both economic and security cooperation.

This is a third iteration of the parallel negotiations theme, with a second iteration of the economic-security conflation.  Mrs May also points out that the failure to reach a deal, and the resulting default to the fall-back position of World Trade Organisation terms, would weaken the fight against international crime and terrorism.  But she does not explain why this should be so.

It is for these reasons that we want to be able to agree a deep and special partnership, taking in both economic and security cooperation.

Fourth economic, third security iteration.  Is Mrs May being so repetitive because she fears President Tusk will not pick up on these points?  She need not have worried.  President Tusk said immediately that parallel talks were not going to happen.  You can hardly blame him.  Imagine resigning from a golf club, cancelling your subscription, then insisting on setting the green fees for visitors.

The process in the United Kingdom

This is a paragraph about the business of converting the body of existing European law (the “acquis”) into UK law.  What will be tweaked, devolved, reserved, or dumped?  Why should President Tusk be remotely interested?  It’s a bit like the divorcee telling her ex, having settled the inventory, how she is going to dispone her cut of the CDs around her new living room.  Not only that, she wants to retain a close interest in the affairs of the ex, when all the ex wants to do, following a short period of mourning, is to start afresh with somebody else.

Proposed principles for our discussions

Mrs May expounds seven principles.

i We should engage with one another constructively and respectfully, in a spirit of sincere cooperation.

When I first read that I thought, well, she would say that, wouldn’t she?  Yet I can hardly say it is a truism.  Indeed it is worth saying.  I remember on the day after the referendum Nigel Farage addressed the European Parliament in a breath-taking display of schadenfreude (remember: “you laughed at me; well, you aren’t laughing now”).  It was clear that he did not consider the EU to be a benign institution.  Mrs May needed to tell the EU that she wishes it to prosper.  Having said that, however, five of the six remaining principles do seem be of the “taken-as-read” variety, to wit –

ii We should always put our citizens first

iii We should work towards securing a comprehensive agreement

iv We should work together to minimise disruption and give as much certainty as possible

vi We should begin technical talks on detailed policy areas as soon as possible, but we should prioritise the biggest challenges

And vii We should continue to work together to advance and protect our shared European values.

Six pages.  A thicket of platitudes?

Yet, buried away inside all of this, there is one further crucial principle.

v In particular, we must pay attention to the UK’s unique relationship with the Republic of Ireland and the importance of the peace process in Northern Ireland. 

It strikes me that it is this issue more than any other, the reality of a land border between the EU and the UK, which will result in a profound alteration in the constitutional arrangements within the British Isles.