jamescalumcampbell

Here is a beautiful notion:  a sculptor doesn’t so much create a work of art, as discover it.  Think of Michelangelo receiving a huge slab of marble into his studio.  Does he create David, or discover him?  The idea is that David, the finished work of art, already exists within the marble.  All Michelangelo needs to do is chip away all the extraneous irrelevancies until the statue of David is exposed.  That seems like a whimsical notion, yet it is, literally, true.  It is a daunting task, because if he makes a mistake, he needs to start again.

This idea, that the work of art already exists before it is created, begs a question.  Did Michelangelo know exactly what he was looking for?

And a second question.  Can this idea of discovering something that already has an existence be translated into the world of letters?

Massive caesura here.  Let us move away from the world of high art to the mundanity of… well, whatever it is I do.

In Click, Double-Click, I break off briefly to tell an outlandish story about a man who is driven insane by a bunch of musical “worms” he can’t get out of his head.  It’s an absurd tale and I didn’t think my publishers were going to let me get away with it but, bless them, they did.  Now I find that life is imitating art.  I can’t get Click, Double-Click out of my head.  It is a worm.  I would be surprised if other writers have not experienced this same dilemma of involuntary fixation.  I had edited and reedited the tome so often that I think, had all paper and electronic drafts been mysteriously erased, I would still have been able to sit down and reconstruct it, word for word, verbatim.  Fine.  But now I need to stop thinking about it.  It’s past, gone.  Let it go.  What happens next?

The good news is I know – roughly – what happens next.  I know this to be the case because I’ve got rid of my worm.  I’ve dropped the past and turned my attention to the future. The difference is that, while the past is fixed and irrevocable, the future is wide open to possibilities.

How do you construct a novel?  How do you start from a blank page and end with a finished, complex, multifaceted, and organic whole?  Perhaps, on the one hand, you should plot and plot again, endlessly building up a superstructure whose beginning, middle and end, you can clearly see even before you have put pen to paper.  Michelangelo stares at his marble menhir, goes into a trance, and waits until he perceives David within it.

Or maybe you start with an idea.  It might not be very much.  Something you could delineate in a single sentence.  Yet it is enough to get you going.  You start, without the foggiest idea where it is going to take you.  Or yet again, maybe you think you know, but you are prepared to abandon it all if the Muse beckons you in another direction.

I suppose I exist somewhere in the middle of that dichotomy.  I have an idea, and I have a rough notion of where it is going to take me.  Yet I’m prepared to be surprised.  The thing is, I can’t think of a convincing reason that would stop me from gritting my teeth and writing that first, agonising sentence.  Here I am in my studio.  I look at my unblemished marble slab.  And I pick up my hammer and chisel and, with only the vaguest notion of where it’s going to take me, position the chisel, raise the hammer, and make the first cut.

A friend of mine from Shetland was kind enough to text to say she liked Click, Double-Click, and when was Dr A C-S coming back?  I texted back, “Dunno.  He’s in NZ just now.  I’m hoping to hear from him.”

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been wandering around in a trance, making up stories in my head, as you do.  Thursday found me on the beach at Helensburgh.  I watched a Trident sub snake out of Faslane and head out into the Clyde Estuary before submerging and going who knows where.  It – I know ships are supposed to be referred to as “she”, but there is no way this vessel was in touch with its feminine side – was the most evil looking thing.  Its presence did not heighten my sense of security.  I wondered what Dr Cameron-Strange would have made of it.  I suspect in terms of disarmament he would be a unilateralist.  His elders and betters would tell him that his opinion was naïve, stupid, and dangerous.  Last year he would have left it at that, but now he is a little older and wiser. He knows that politics is the art of the possible.  He would find a way, through a little piece of creativity, and of lateral thinking, to move the debate on a wee way from its current state of impasse.  He would think of some way of making the world a marginally safer place.

Then on Friday I was driving west along the A811 and came upon a convoy, heading east, about half a mile long.  There were police motorcycle outriders, police cars and police vans, unmarked military trucks in their anonymous dark green livery and, right at the centre of the convoy, some kind of long black, shrouded container.  There was even an ambulance.  And I thought, bet the satnavs are set for Aldermaston.  And I thought of ACS again.  I can see him down at the Waitemata Harbour (where in 1985 they sank the Greenpeace flagship The Rainbow Warrior).  It’s a nuclear free zone.  I have a notion he is being headhunted for a job back in the UK.  But he’s turning it down and he’s being as rude as possible.  “Bunch of stuck-up, smug, snobby, bloated, poncy…”  Well.  Leave him to it.

Further along the A811 I came up behind another convoy, this time one of Mercedes, BMWs, and Audis all reduced to a crawl behind a farm vehicle.  A guy in an Audi – probably an Edinburgh commuter – was getting particularly hot and bothered.  I sent him a message by telepathy.  “Take it easy, mate.  Remember the guy in the tractor is putting bread on your table.”

Then on Saturday I forsook the car and went for a walk.  Just locally.  My route was a triangle, two of whose sides were pleasant country lanes.  Not much traffic, other than a cycling peloton recurrently swooping by with a cheery “Hello again!”  However the third side of the triangle was the A84.

Big mistake.  Nobody in their right mind walks along the verge of a trunk road, even for a short distance.  I could see all the motorists looking askance at me.  Clearly I was somebody with a mental health issue.  Had I broken out of an asylum?  Ah – there’s old Jimmy, doing a runner from the care home.  God bless ‘im.  I was clearly some sort of demented war veteran making my own way to the site of some long-forgotten campaign for my own private commemoration.  I’d probably get bulldozed by a passing combine harvester.  There’d be a column inch in the Stirling Observer.  “In a tragic and bizarre accident…”

If you really want to stand out like a sore thumb, go for a walk in the States.  Not only will they think you’re a loony, they’ll think you’re an international terrorist.  The last time I was over, I stayed in the Sheraton in Charlotte North Carolina.  It was impossible to go for a stroll because the hotel was surrounded by super highways and the only thing to do was to take a few turns round the car park.  Like the exercise yard in a state penitentiary.   I once stopped over in LA for 24 hours en route to New Zealand and hired a car to drive west down Sunset Boulevard towards Pacific Palisades and the ocean.  Half way down the road the oil light came on the dash.  I pulled over and opened the bonnet – sorry, the “hood” – and checked the dipstick.  No oil.  Nada.  Dry as a bone.  Well, I didn’t want the engine to seize and  I’d seen what looked like a garage a couple of miles back along the road so I parked in a side street and walked east back along Sunset Boulevard.

Nobody in their right mind walks along Sunset Boulevard.

All the mansions were heavily barricaded and the big wrought iron gates each bore the legend – “No trespassing.  Rapid armed response.”  I only passed one other pedestrian – a Hispanic lady pushing a pram.  I reached the garage and went in and explained my predicament.  The man said, “This is not a public garage.  We only service limousines.”

But to return to Charlotte, North Carolina, I hired a car with oil in it and drove downtown and went for a stroll.  I was looking for a bookshop and peering through a window into a shopping mall when a passing police officer hailed me.

“What’s up buddy?”

He could tell I was an alien.

“Just looking for a bookshop actually.”

“Yeah, there’s one in there.  Second floor.”  (He meant the first floor.)

“Thanks.”

By the time I got to the shop, they knew I was coming.  He had radioed ahead.  “There’s a really weird guy coming up the escalator.”

I bought the Schlesinger – Jackie Kennedy interviews, 1964.  Fascinating.

But to return to the A84, I got off it unscathed, and back on to a country lane, and, in beautiful sunshine, drifted back into a storytelling reverie.   A car pulled up and a charming lady offered me a lift and I knew all was well with the world after all.  I politely declined.  After all, ideas were beginning to coalesce.  I must text my Shetland friend and tell her that I think we are going to see Dr Cameron-Strange again, in one hemisphere or another.

In the film The King’s Speech, when King George VI is preparing for his coronation in Westminster Abbey, he asks the Archbishop of Canterbury to find a seat in the Royal Box for Lionel Logue, his speech therapist.  The Archbishop thinks Logue is a colonial upstart and a chancer.  He purses his lips, looks dubious, and says something to the King along the lines of, “Well of course, I’ll see what I can do, but it’s going to be very, very difficult.”

When the Falklands War broke out in 1982, 940 school children were on a cruise in the Mediterranean aboard the SS Uganda.  They were all immediately sent home.  The Uganda docked in Gibraltar for a refit.  She was turned into a military hospital ship in 3 days.

Which all goes to show, the only thing the great Ship of State needs to make something happen, is the will to make it so.

Gordon Brown announced the public inquiry into the nation’s role in the Iraq War, on 15^th June, 2009.  Thus, at time of writing, from the time of its inception, the inquiry has lasted 6 years and 72 days, with still no sign of its completion.  The Inquiry’s chairman, Sir John Chilcot, has come under criticism for the evident delay.  He issued a statement on August 26^th which is worth reading with close attention.  “My colleagues and I understand the anguish of the families of those who lost their lives in the conflict… We expect to receive the last responses to our Maxwellisation letters shortly.  That will allow us to complete our consideration of the responses, to decide what further work will be needed, and to provide the Prime Minister and thus Parliament and the public with a timetable for the publication of our work.”

It’s also worth reading Sir John’s letter to the Prime Minister on June 15^th, the PMs reply on June 17^th, and Sir John’s rejoinder by return, on the same day.  The PM expresses disappointment to the extent that he, and the British public, “are fast losing patience”.  It is clear that Sir John is being put under considerable pressure.  Yet he is not yielding to it.

In his last decisive intervention in the House of Commons, on May 8^th 1940, concerning the brief and disastrous campaign in Norway, Lloyd George urged the First Lord of the Admiralty not to allow himself to be converted into an air-raid shelter to protect the government.  Somebody might say something similar to Sir John.  He’s taking the flak.

Six years and 72 days is an awfully long time.  The entire Second World War was fought and won in less than six years.  Governments and nations can achieve extraordinary feats within a narrow time frame when they are minded to do so.  The Manhattan Project, the construction, and detonation of the A Bomb, may be said to have taken place between the time of the famous Einstein-Szilard letter to President Roosevelt on August 2^nd 1939, and the Trinity Test at Alamogordo on July 16^th, 1945 – less than 6 years again.  Putting a man on the moon took a little longer.  JFK announced that the USA was going to do this in a speech on May 25^th 1961.  That was only 20 days after Allan Shepherd had become the second man to fly into space, 23 days after Yuri Gagarin’s inaugural flight.  No doubt that rankled.  Neil Armstrong walked on the moon on 21^st July 1969.  8 years and 57 days… I wonder if the Iraq Inquiry will still be running…

The critical fact concerning the Iraq War is that the British Parliament voted in favour of it, in March 2003, by a majority of 412 to 149.  I think the general consensus now is that the Iraq War was a Bad Idea.  If the Chilcot Inquiry agrees with the general consensus, then it means that criticism will be levelled not only at a certain number of individuals, but at the whole Ship of State.  Some people might find the idea of an entire Establishment being weighed in the balance, and found wanting, intolerable.  Perhaps this is why everything appears to be grinding to a halt.   I have a sense that the British Establishment are singing a threnody that, far from being prestissimo, presto, or even allegro, isn’t andante, or even adagio.  It’s molto largo.   But, I hear you say, this has nothing to do with the British Establishment. The Chilcot Inquiry is independent.  Every Prime Minister of this century has urged its publication.  Is it possible that Sir John Chilcot has been put into what the psychiatrists call a “bind” by people who simultaneously obfuscate, kick things into the long grass, “Maxwellise”; and then, when things come to a grinding halt, shrug?  “Nothing to do with us!”

Grieving relatives have died waiting for this report.  And is there not something profoundly ironic in the fact that even a member of the Chilcot Committee has passed away during its preparation?  I refer to Sir Martin Gilbert, the distinguished historian, and biographer of Churchill.

I feel profoundly sorry for people who suffer through the Law’s delay.  Justice delayed truly is justice denied.  It is a horrible thing to be waiting for a legal decision.  You are on remand.  This is why it is best to keep away from the Law unless you have no other choice.  Otherwise you end up like Richard Carstone in Bleak House.  Jarndyce and Jarndyce killed him, even before the suit was swallowed up in costs.  “I am ready to begin the world!”  Poor devil.

The definitive statement on the Law is the penultimate chapter of Kafka’s The Trial.  In the Cathedral.  Joseph K hears from a priest the story of a man waiting on the Law.  Before the Law stands a door-keeper.  A man wishes to access the Law, but the door-keeper says, while it is possible, it is very, very difficult.  The man spends his life at the door, waiting for admittance to the Law.  Towards the end of his life, he says to the door-keeper, why is it that nobody has sought admittance through this door, but me?  The door-keeper explains: this door was only intended for you.  I am now going to shut it.

The Law is completely indifferent to its suitors.  As Kafka said, “It receives you when you come and it dismisses you when you go.”

In Walter Scott’s Rob Roy, Frank Osbaldistone makes a journey from Northumberland north-west to the Highland fault line.  In Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, David Balfour, an east coast lowlander, is a castaway on a west coast Scottish island and subsequently takes a flight through the heather at the time of the Appin murder.  In John Buchan’s Mr Standfast, Richard Hannay makes a journey from London to the skirts of the Cuillin, in Skye.  It’s a recurring theme in Scottish literature; a lowlander makes a trip north west to the Gaidhealtachd and, on his return, he is not the same person.

There’s something deeply significant about travelling north in Scotland, particularly north-west.  And it’s not merely a literary device.  It’s not just a concocted “Celtic twilight”.  There is a West Highland effect.  You feel it in real life.

I’ve always been drawn to the edge of places, the point beyond which you cannot go.  I’m not sure why; perhaps there is a sense that if you reach a perimeter, you have encapsulated the experience of travel.  It’s not always a comfortable experience.  Land’s End I found rather blighted, and in a pub in John O’Groats an unsmiling man told me I was sitting in his seat.  Bluff at the bottom of New Zealand’s South Island is okay.  I once took a Cessna 172 across from Invercargill to Oban in Half Moon Bay, the only inhabited part of Stewart Island, and then flew down to the southern tip of the island.  It’s entirely uninhabited and only occasionally visited by the odd fisherman or trapper.  The bush engulfs the landscape which I don’t suppose has changed in 10,000 years. It’s truly a wilderness.  I remember as I circled round two granite tors, Gog and Magog, the weather closed in and I got a bit anxious as I was 100 kilometres from Invercargill and the last man in the world.

At the other end of New Zealand, at its north-west tip, lies my favourite place in the whole world, Cape Reinga.  Each time I go to New Zealand, I make a pilgrimage.  It is a deeply spiritual place.  This is the point from which the Maori spirits depart this world.

It’s worth comparing the north-west tip of New Zealand with the north-west tip of Scotland, Cape Wrath.  I’ve only been to Cape Wrath once.  It’s not an easy trip to make.  Frankly, it’s not encouraged.  This is MOD land.  The RAF use it for bombing runs and target practice.  So sometimes the northwest peninsula is just closed to visitors.  When it’s open, you take a boat just south of Durness that takes you across a choppy inlet to the edge of the peninsula from where you pick up a minibus.  It’s an 11 mile trip to the lighthouse at Cape Wrath.  It takes an hour. That tells you something about the state of the road.

When you get there, you find you are really visiting a museum.  A derelict building on a headland once belonged to Lloyd’s Bank.  They used to watch shipping rounding the north-west corner of Scotland and they would telegraph to London to say so far so good and the insurance premium on the ship would change.  It reminds you that the whole business of the British Empire was about making money. You can get a coffee and a sandwich there but I couldn’t find a loo so just used the machair.

There’s something not right about Cape Wrath.  It ought not to be like this.  It should be like Cape Reinga.  People should always be free to travel to the edge.

It has been the greatest pleasure to me to see Click, Double-Click, Impress Prize 2014 winner, between covers.  I’ve read it many times, but the experience of rereading it in its published form was different.  It might be stretching it a bit to say it was like reading somebody else’s work, but its “official” guise did seem to lend it a certain authority, for which I was, and am, grateful.

A family member read the blurb and said, “Ah!  Your protagonist travels north-west.”  He understood that the trip north-west is not to be captured on a shortbread tin.  You might sing, in a sentimental fashion, “O ye’ll tak the high road and I’ll tak the low road and I’ll be in Scotland afore ye.”   And you might never suspect the depth of tragedy concealed behind these words.

Landline-wise, I’ve had to go on permanent answer phone.  How can I sit before my keyboard, to wrestle the best of three falls with words, and suffer for my art, when the phone keeps ringing?  I pick it up, and there is a momentary silence, prior to a recorded message, or there is the background hubbub of a call centre.  At least it affords you a split second to hang up.  Then, an impossibly thick, and indeterminate foreign accent.

“Chello?  May I shpeek plizz, with Chaimes Chamble?”

Or even worse, a local accent, chirpy, garrulous, relentlessly upbeat.  “Hi there!  Is that James? How are you to-day?”  I have an overwhelming temptation to reply, “Oh not good.  I’m so glad you rang.  I think I’m reaching the end of my tether…”   A late friend of mine used to say, “So glad you called.  I want to talk to you about Jesus.”  The line was invariably disconnected.  At his pompes funebre, we exited to the tune of “There’s no business like show business”.

The only time I pick up the phone with any confidence is 7.40 pm when, by prior arrangement, I exchange phone calls with a family member.  I used to think that as the evening wore on the risk would subside, but once at about 9.30 pm I got well and truly chugged by a very charming young lady medical student from Edinburgh University, who told me what a wonderful alumnus I was and talked me out of £50 for the swelling coffers of the alma mater.  It’s not as if they’re short of a bob or two.  I get Edit, the alumnus rag.   As a Glaswegian I can’t help being a little irritated by the smug self-confidence.  Oh yes, Professor Higgs, father of the boson, Nobel laureate, Edinburgh man, don’t y’know.  I really don’t think they should be employing students as rainmakers.  Isn’t it a form of exploitation?

Now that I’m on answer phone, I can listen to some of the messages with a degree of detachment.  They tend to be truncated by my automated reply, so I hear messages like, “…entitled to a new boiler”, or “PPI; for your refund, press 5, to opt out, press 9…”  I pressed 9, but it didn’t make any difference.  So I just press delete.  In New Zealand, I put the opening to Stravinsky’s Agon on my answer phone.  My friends left messages enquiring after my mental health.

Now it’s spilled over on to the mobile.  Mine went off as I was driving home tonight, along the A811 through the Carse of Stirling, and I pulled over and answered.

“Our records indicate that you were involved in an automobile collision within the last twelve months….”

Oh really?

So I hung a right and crossed over on to a farm track and escaped into the beguiling environ of Flanders Moss.  Here, on the edge of a quag, a grimpen, and in a breathless silence only punctuated by the occasional birdsong, I can have an “Innisfree” moment.

I will arise and go now…

Last weekend I entertained an old medical school friend for our annual jaunt up a Scottish hill.  He said to me, “What’s your wireless key?”  I said I had no idea what he was talking about.  He glanced at the label on my broadband gizmo and tapped some code into his phone and said, “Now I’m getting much faster downloads.  Your broadband speed’s pretty good.”  I said, “Is this costing me any money?”

I don’t so much live in a house as in a book depository.  No kindle here.  Me and Madonna, we live in a material world.

We climbed Ben Ledi.  Not quite a Munro – but then neither is K2.   The weather was kind.  It’s a lovely walk.  You ascend from Loch Lubnaig to a bealach west of Loch Venacher, turn right, and strike up over various false summits to the true top.  The wind got up at the bealach, but mysteriously died down completely at the top so that we were able to lunch in complete comfort just off the summit, unusual on a Scottish hill.   Visibility was excellent and we had a panorama all the way from Berwick Law to Lochaber.

Climbing a hill is the absolute antithesis to surfing the net.  There’s nothing virtual about it, the experience is completely real.  You might have attended the transfiguration.  When you descend, you are not the same person who went up.

Actually we descended to a traffic jam.  A good excuse to have a cuppa tea at Loch Earn and come home via St Fillans.  Didn’t Bertrand Russell spend some time in St Fillans and feel the better for it?  I live in the most beautiful place in the world.

Enough already.  One sleep before Click, Double-Click appears.  Hope you like it.

“Ohayo!”

I risked a surprise, disarming stealth attack, and was rewarded with smiles, like two explosions of dazzling incandescence radiating across a burnished cityscape.

  “Ohayo gozaimasu!”

Mr and Mrs Ishimoto had sprung to attention and, with the exquisite manners of the Japanese, bowed to me from the waist.  We all wore name badges, even their young child Masami, I, because I was a doctor in hospital, they, because they were part of the Utsunomiya-Manukau Sister-City Friendship Delegation.  Mr Ishimoto intoned my name in a sonorous way, pronouncing it as a true spondee that somehow conjured the image of an electrified fence, and a single peal of solemnity and commemoration.  “Dr Camp Bell.”  He introduced himself and laid a hand across the front of his cotton golfing T-shirt.  “I – Australasian representative – Toyota.”  He spoke in a hoarse whisper.  These words must have been very difficult for him.  I believe he might have practised for hours before a mirror.  I was always a little wary of treating patients in the automobile industry.  They carried with them the “Homo sapiens qua internal combustion engine” metaphor.  It might be, for all I know, useful to think of malfunctioning cars in terms of their anatomy, physiology, and pathology, and one often came across troubleshooting motoring manuals based on medical diagnostic models: engine overheating; differential diagnosis – leaking radiator, broken fan belt, blown cylinder head gasket etc.  But trying to apply the metaphor the other way, to think of the dilapidated tenement of the body as a machine on the blink, was an exercise always fraught with frustration and disappointment.  Very few medical problems, almost none, could be solved by the opening of the bonnet and the turning of a screw.  Most lay people, and indeed quite a few doctors, failed to grasp this mysterious paradox of pathology, that the insult and the body’s response to it were inseparable; that, if you will, the disease and the cure were one and the same.

Mr Ishimoto gestured to the woman and child who stood deferentially a little behind him.  We had filled up the triage cubicle.  “My wife, Akeko.  My daughter, Masami.”  Mrs Ishimoto, carrying a child of about two years, bowed once more, and Masami, straddling her mother’s hip, turned and squinted incuriously at me.  I noticed the right arm hung uselessly.  She was a beautiful child, dark-haired, with perfect white skin, intelligent eyes with the shallow orbits and epicanthic folds of the orient, and a small, rosy mouth.  Mr Ishimoto was, I guessed, about forty, and his wife, as beautiful as the child, was much younger, barely older, it seemed to me, than her daughter.

“Masami she fall,” explained Mr Ishimoto.  “We go now to Hawaii, eh…”  He searched for words.  “Holiday.”  (It sounded exactly like “horrid day”.)  “If arm broken, we go back to Narita.”  He said it with simple stoicism.  They were devoted to the child.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen such delirious, almost hysterical love and devotion lavished on children as I have sometimes seen within East Asian families, the Japanese, the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cambodian.  I palpated Masami’s right arm all the way down from the shoulder girdle, the clavicle, the acromio-clavicular joint, the gleno-humeral joint, the humerus, the elbow, wrist and hand. She did not hinder me in my examination.  The arm hung, passive.  There was no point-tenderness.  I said, “You know what?  I don’t think you need to cancel your trip.  I believe she has a ‘pulled elbow’”.

“Pulled elbow?” said Mr Ishimoto.

“Did somebody give her arm a pull?”  I demonstrated the action in mid-air.  Mr Ishimoto conversed with his wife in rapid Japanese.

“Is possible, yes.”

I wondered if I could explain in simple English the idea of the radial head coming free of the anular ligament as a result of a traction injury.

“Dislocated?” said Mr Ishimoto.  He was the sort of man who could surprise you with an unusual word.  He had taken his language studies seriously.

I said, “In a way.  I believe I can fix it very easily, by turning Masami’s arm over.  She will cry a little, but then she will be fine.”

Mr Ishimoto nodded.  I gently turned Masami’s forearm into full supination, extended the elbow and exerted a little pressure over the radial head. There was a barely palpable click.

“All done!”

Masami fixed me with an accusatory look, and silently cried huge tears.  I recognised the look, as much surprised as pained, of a child who had never before received a hurt from another human hand.  And her mother wept too.  But five minutes later the arm moved freely and normally, and Masami was once more a happy child.

“She needs plaster, bandage?” enquired Mr Ishimoto.

“No – nothing.  She won’t have any more trouble, as long as you are careful not to pull her by the arms.  I should catch your flight to Waikiki if I were you.”  It had been, after all, an “open the bonnet and turn a screw” job, one of the few occasions when a doctor can look as if he has performed a miracle.  Suddenly the Ishimotos had burst out again into broad smiles and I felt as if I were being showered with the perfumed blossoms of a Honshu spring.  I was deluged with small and gorgeously wrapped presents, produced as if from nowhere, a key-ring in the form of a tiny running shoe, a dangerous looking bamboo implement with a hook designed, I was told, to remove wax from ears, cookies, Japanese style, and a silk scarf, Mr Ishimoto said, “For your wife.”   I was embarrassed by a welter of gifts.  He looked again, with curiosity, at my name badge.

“You not Kiwi.”

“I’m from Scotland.”

“Shotland.  Ah!  Shotland!  Whisky!”  He made the name of my country sound like a celebration of its most famous export.

“Exactly.”

He peered at my name. “James.”  (He said “Jameshu.”)  “This, very difficult, for Japanese.”  He took out a small pocket diary, with a pencil, and rapidly wrote three ideograms in Kanji on the back page.  Masami, now quite relaxed, tried to grasp the pencil.  Mr Ishimoto showed the lettering to his wife, who now laughed uninhibitedly.  He turned back to me, and pointed to the three symbols.

“Your name, in ancient Chinese script.”  He pointed to each symbol in turn.

“Leaf… Seed… Sake.”

“Leaf-Seed. Yes I like that.  It has a strong, Nordic ring to it.”  Mr Ishimoto looked uncomprehending at me and smiled politely.  He produced his card.  It was entirely in vertical Japanese script.  He carefully added his telephone number, and handed it to me.

“I will have a fine view of you, in my mind. Hell! Yes!”  (Had he been attending American conversation classes?)  “When you visit Japan” – he said, “Japang” – “you stay with me, my apartment, in Tokyo.  You be my home-stay guest, yes?”

I said carefully, “That is very kind of you.  If I come to your country, I will certainly remember your invitation.”

“Why you come to New Zealand?”  I recognised the direct invitation to friendship of the Japanese, and the insatiable curiosity, that is the antithesis of inscrutability.

I shrugged.  “I enjoy overseas travel.”  It was I who was proving inscrutable.

“You will return home?”

“Maybe.  Not yet, a while.”  I looked at my watch.  “You’d better get going.  You’ll miss your flight.”

  “Ah so desu ka!”  The Ishimotos rose.  He reiterated.  “You come Japang.  Stay with me.  Thank you very much!”  He extended his hand. “Merry Christmas, Dr Jameshu!”  And, with that, the Ishimotos left for the airport.

It had perhaps been a little early in the month for a Yuletide greeting, and indeed, Mr Ishimoto might well have had another, altogether less happy anniversary in mind that day.  He had put me in mind of a film of a book, starring a very famous British rock singer, and based on a work of Laurens van der Post who had, of course, been a prisoner-of-war under the Japanese.  Some of the film had actually been shot within the quiet cloisters of one of New Zealand’s most prestigious schools, separated from our hospital by a single fairway of the city’s most exclusive golf course.  I never saw the film, but I had read the book.  Its inner core had concerned a man who had sought peace, and redemption, after committing an act of betrayal of a loved one.  He had averted tragedy by confronting people who were in the thrall of something alien, gripped by a force outside of themselves, a power of evil.  He had confronted these people; he had forced upon them an image of their own humanity.  He had succeeded in this trial, but at a terrible price.

“Come on, Leaf-Seed,” said Faith, who happened to be Charge-Nurse that day.  She must have heard the tail end of the consultation.  “They got the Sake bit right anyway.”

I mused, “What an extraordinary day for a Japanese to visit Hawaii.”

“What?”

I attempted a rich, expansive, Franklin D. Roosevelt accent.  “On this day, a day that will live in infamy…”  But Faith only looked at me enquiringly.  And, since Mr Ishimoto had put it into my head, I began to think about the impending Yule. The Ishimotos had brought the Christmas spirit to me early.  Of course it is easy now to say this with hindsight, but I feel sure that I had, from that time, a premonition that this would not be, for me, a normal Christmas.  I had the angst mixed with excitement that might be experienced by a pilot, who leaves his carrier by night, and searches the horizon at dawn, anxiously trying to pick out a scattering of islands.  I waited, with apprehension, for Yule.  It was to be my seventh under an antipodean sun.  But, as ever, when I thought of Christmas, I thought of home.

To “Bard in the Botanics” on Thursday night to see The Merchant of Venice.  Party of four.  We went with some apprehension.  Outdoor Shakespeare in Regent’s Park, circa 22 degrees Celsius, is one thing; Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens, circa 16C (we were that lucky) dropping to 12 as the night wore on, quite another.  It says a lot for the players, and the people of Glasgow, that this event, especially this dire “summer”, is so popular.  It was a full “house” and as the play progressed, the noise of the traffic on Great Western Road, and the kids in the park, seemed to recede, and by the time of the great courtroom scene (“I will have my bond!”) you could have heard a pin drop.

It strikes me that The Merchant of Venice has rather an operatic quality.  If the unfolding of the plot is like recitative, then the great set piece speeches are like arias.  It reminds me of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte.  The plots have similar elements of absurdity.  In the play, two women go into disguise and dupe their lovers; in the opera, two men go into disguise and dupe their lovers.  In both play and opera, things get out of hand.  There’s a tension in both works between elements of opera buffa, and matters of profound seriousness.  Everything is ambiguous, and ambivalent.

Since we are dealing in pairs of pairs, it seems to me that Shakespeare and Mozart share a quality which is the exact antithesis of a quality shared by Beethoven and Dickens.  Beethoven and Dickens wear their hearts on their sleeves.  They are profoundly involved, human, and humane.  Both have huge, indomitable personalities.  So, of course, do Shakespeare and Mozart; and they also have incredibly high spirits.  Yet there is also a quality of separation, of detachment, sometimes even bordering on indifference.  In Act 1 of Cosi, the men say farewell to their ladies, and supposedly leave for the wars, in music of heartbreaking poignancy.  In reality they are going undercover to pose as strangers and woo their lovers – they even swap the car keys – and expose their fickleness, all for a bet.  I don’t know if Beethoven heard Cosi but I think he must have found Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto unconscionable.  After all, Beethoven’s opera is Fidelio – the clue is in the name.  There’s Ludwig, massive genius that he is, struggling away with his deafness and his sturm und drang, endlessly working away honing and rehoning themes in his sketch books; while Wolfgang effortlessly turns out another piece of sublime perfection to a tawdry and risqué text.  When the first subject of the piano sonata K545, beloved of all aspiring young pianists, recapitulates in F major, it sounds like a toy music box, as if Mozart is saying, “You admire these baubles?  Well, you’re welcome.  Here’s another.”  Mozart has this trick of starting a piece with a call to attention in the form of a few unremarkable chords repeated in an unremarkable rhythm.  Then his next phrase completely undermines you, the way Salieri was undermined by the adagio from The Gran Partita for 13 wind instruments K 361, in Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus.

I get the same sense of detachment in Shakespeare.  I can imagine him dashing off the St Crispin’s Day speech for Henry V, and saying to Anne Hathaway, “Are you moved by that?  Does it stir you?  Doesn’t do anything for me!”  You can never tell what Shakespeare is thinking.  Beethoven is a character in his own music, but Shakespeare is invisible in his own plays. Yet he clearly loved music.  As Lorenzo said to Jessica on Thursday night:

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!

Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music

Creep in our ears.  Soft stillness and the night

Become the touches of sweet harmony…

The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,

Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.

The motions of his spirit are dull as night,

And his affections dark as Erebus.

Let no such man be trusted.  Mark the music.        

Here’s another odd thing about Shakespeare.  He retired.  He wrote The Tempest in 1611, and then nothing for five years.  He just hung out in Stratford, chilling.   I reckon Shakespeare went a bit fey in the end.

We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

I mean, what was he on?

Dropped my car off for a service in Stirling, nice and early, at 8 am.   And did I need a courtesy car?  I usually say yes, but as on this occasion I had no commitments I left on foot.

Abandoning the car and becoming a pedestrian was a spiritual experience.  The world may still be zooming around me, but I have slowed down into my own personal time zone, and the noise and haste are gradually losing relevance.  I began to notice things.  The walk from an industrial estate into the centre of town took me over a bridge, under an underpass, and across a piece of grassland.  A path had been hewn along the most direct route and through a rough gap in a hedge.  The path had nothing to do with town planning.  It had just evolved through the spontaneous behaviour of people.  There was something pleasing, and deeply nostalgic, about the ancient mossy stone walls, pavements, the smell of cut grass, the trees’ heavy summer foliage.  I was reminded of my childhood, and of the freedom of going out to play.  I found a coffee shop and had a flat white and watched the town gradually come to life.  Then I took the train to Glasgow.  I was happy to stare out of the window and watch the world go by, like Philip Larkin in The Whitsun Weddings.

In Glasgow, to continue with the public transport theme, I visited the Transport Museum, down by the Clyde, and wandered among the trams and trolley buses of my childhood.  The subway exhibit was best.  It’s a partly real, partly virtual experience.  Glasgow’s underground is very modest, a single loop with 15 stations.  Between stations you clatter and roar through the tunnel and feel the movement and vibration of the carriage and seem to get absorbed into the projected world of wartime passengers as they board and alight and indulge in banter, or rather “patter”, with the clippie.  It’s the nearest thing to time-travelling.  If they could add in that very characteristic smell of the Glasgow subway, the experience would be perfect.  I was amused that visitors to this attraction tended to alight when the carriage came to a virtual halt at a station.  I did so myself.

Then I took a walk along Dumbarton Road.  And the patter continued.  Glasgow is a city state.  For all its changes, it remains the same.  Exalted, maestoso Glasgow.  It’s very quiet in Glasgow just now.  The second fortnight in July is the time of “The Glasgow Fair” when traditionally the shipyards closed and everybody went to Saltcoats for their holidays.  Something of this must persist, even if the destination is Lanzarote, because there’s little traffic.  The place is almost serene.  Yet the patter goes on.  Somehow, Glasgow has retained a sense of community.

Maybe cars were a big mistake.  The acquisition of a car was a big thing for my parents’ generation.  Not only was the car a means to increased mobility, it was a symbol of social mobility.  Our first was a Ford Anglia.  LMS204.  We took it to Blackpool.  In these days to undertake such a journey you could actually write to the AA and request a route, as if you were planning a trek through the Hindu Kush. LMS204 nearly expired going through Shap.

Now it is beginning to look as though the mobility promised by the automobile is an illusion.  What good is your Lancia Flaminia Zagato Spyder if you are stuck behind a 15 mile queue of lorries on the M20 corridor?  Sally Traffic on Radio 2 talks up the torpid constipation of the M25 – “Mayhem, clock and anti!”

And maybe the concept of social mobility is just as illusory.  Just as you graduate from your Ford Anglia to your Rover to your Jag to your Porsche (midlife crisis) and become more and more stuck in traffic jams, so might you get off the dole and slog away at the checkout and go to night school and get a diploma and enter a profession and still you find you are coping with some sort of interaction with another person only somehow along the way you have lost a sense of sympathy and identity.  Somewhere along the way you have eschewed plain vanilla and become an exotic derivative.  You have become an instrument in a scam, suspicious of this person by the wayside trying to hitch a ride from you in your Lamborghini.

After Dumbarton Road I turned into Victoria Park.  I like to admire the fowl on the pond.  I could very easily become a twitcher.  Look at this beautiful family of swans.  The cygnets still retain their dun plumage, but are nearly as big now as ma and pa.  Pa takes to the air with much commotion in a protracted take-off run across the length of the pond.  It’s like watching a 747.  His landing is less successful.  He overshoots and crashes on to dry land, vandalising a floral display, his pride hurt more than his physique.  You don’t often see “avian error” in their world of aviation.  The birds are entirely at one with their environment.  Their long haul flights are extraordinary.  Off to Antarctica for the winter and then back to this very pond.  That’s some GPS.  I’m sure they look down their beaks at us, snarled up on the M8, and say, “Homo sapiens?  Flash in the pan.  They’ll do themselves in pretty soon, if they haven’t turned the whole place into a tip first.”

Fowl solved the transport problem millions of years ago.  For them, it just isn’t an issue.  Meanwhile our middle class mothers carry on dropping off progeny from their Chelsea tractors to the preparatory school where they can make useful acquaintance and get ahead.

Sorry I’m getting lugubrious.  Social mobility.  I ask you.  I know I’m sounding like a man in a pub with an opinion, but who is more useful to mankind?  A hedge fund manager or a conscientious lavatory attendant?  I have the highest opinion of conscientious lavatory attendants.  They should be paid danger money.  As one of them said, “The things that go on in here!  Honestly, if somebody comes in for a straightforward ****, it’s like a breath of fresh air.”

With Click, Double-Click due for publication on August 1^st, I thought the time was ripe for some reflection on the experience of winning the Impress New Writers’ Prize, and the subsequent process of preparation for publication.

It can hardly be surprising that, as a doctor, I have chosen to write about a doctor, and, to an extent, about medicine.  Therefore there is something fitting about my publication date, August 1^st, the day when new doctors start their careers, and all the junior hospital posts are rotated.

I’ve been scribbling virtually all my life.  I’m very fascinated by the phenomenon of the early recognition and identification of – call it what you will – a metier, calling, or obsession.  I was drawn to writing in my childhood by two forces.  One was the power of story-telling, and the other was the power of language.  In Primary School, I just loved “composition”, when I could spin a yarn and chuck in a few exotic words and phrases I’d picked up from somewhere, like “a farrago of heterogeneous irrelevancies” (which is usually what they were).

When you feel comfortable in your calling, there seems to be something God-given and inevitable about it.  Yehudi Menuhin described how he went to his first violin lesson with Louis Persinger, and came away convinced of what his life’s work was going to be.   And yet I sometimes wonder if that sense of vocation might not be much more haphazard than we think.  A chance exposure to a particular walk of life, a chance meeting with some charismatic and inspirational teacher, an enthusiasm for an endeavour combined with a certain talent to indulge in it – and there you have it.  But might not the same thing have occurred, on a different day, in a different location, and in an entirely different walk of life?

At any rate, as I’ve mentioned before in this blog, with adolescence I hit writer’s block and in due course realised I needed to go off and do something else for a time.  Eventually, I chose medicine.  Any notion I might have had that I was merely a writer going under cover for a bit to gather copy was soon completely and utterly dispelled.  The fact is that medicine devours you.  It certainly devoured me.  Medicine is an all-consuming devotion.  I disappeared for 40 years.

And yet here’s the thing.  I couldn’t stop scribbling.  Even supposing I was churning out the most god awful crap, I kept scribbling away.  And I thought, what is this?  Am I being mocked?  D’you know, I conceived the notion for Click, Double-Click in the sauna beside the pool at my local gym.  I’d got into the habit of running for 20 minutes on the treadmill, then the sauna and a swim.  Something about the exertion and the accompanying explosion of endorphins, combined with incipient heat exhaustion, made my brain teem with ideas.  Admittedly, once I’d dived into the cool waters of the pool, most of the ideas didn’t seem that good.  But a few stuck.

I read about the Impress Prize in Writers’ Magazine, three days before the competition’s closing date.  They were looking for an unpublished first novel, a synopsis, and a 6,000 word extract.  Serendipitously, chapter 1 of Click, Double-Click is approximately 6,000 words.  I sent it off.   That was last June.

I forgot all about it.  Then in October I got short-listed.  One of twelve.  That was very nice.  I got the tome out, and gave it a dusting down.  Just in case.  Then there was the “get to know the authors” sequence when we all had the chance to write in answer to various questions and I enjoyed that.  I was also impressed by my fellow contestants.

Then in November I got the phone call to say I’d won.  I don’t think I made much sense on the phone that day.   I was very euphoric for about 24 hours and then the anxiety set in.  Was it good enough?  What would Impress think of the Magnum Opus?  I knew they weren’t going to say, “Don’t change a word – it’s a masterpiece!” and I dreaded them saying, “This needs to be gutted radically!”

The reality turned out to be somewhere in the middle – some suggestions for a few revisions.  What was I going to do?  Perhaps be like Beethoven and fly into a rage – “Not a note to be changed!”  No.  While I may have murdered a few of my darlings with regret, most of the advice was right.  And I enjoyed the act of revision.  Soon we had a manuscript that was essentially ready for the more detailed process of copy editing.

I was deeply impressed by the copy editor.  She was incredibly astute. She reminded me of Lieutenant Columbo.  She would say, “Oh – just one more thing… just a small thing… oh don’t worry about it, it’s nothing…”

Of course it was entirely pertinent.

And my main contact person with Impress has been a delight.

Now I sit with the penultimate proof before me.  I read it through yesterday.  I hadn’t looked at Click, Double-Click for a while.  It was a slightly spooky experience rereading it.  It’s darker than I remember it.  It has been described as a “crime thriller” and it is certainly true that a crime is committed within its pages.  Yet if it lands up on the “Crime” shelf at Waterstones maybe the putative reader might feel cheated.  It’s talking heads.  It’s not so much “whodunnit” as “what have we all done?”  I hope they put it in general fiction.

For a while there, I was feeling detached about the whole thing, but now that the prospect of seeing my book between covers is imminent, I admit I’m genuinely excited.  I know the bits of my book that work, and if I suspect anything in it might be “clunky”, I’m not going to let on where.  Just so long as I don’t win the prize for Worst Sex Scene.

The young daughter of a good friend of mine has aspirations to act.  She has passion and talent and temperament and, at 17, has built up a small but impressive portfolio.  Acting can be an uncertain profession.  Between jobs you might find yourself “resting”.  While she was preparing to audition for a part, a family friend, an elderly gentleman, took her aside and said, no doubt in a well-meaning and avuncular way, “Now then Rebecca, just in case it doesn’t work out, what is your Plan B?” She replied, with some indignation. “Nobody ever asks Debbie what her Plan B is!”  Deborah is her older sister.  She studies engineering at university.  I think of Debbie and Becky as Elinor and Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility.

This started me thinking about Plan B.  Last September the Chancellor made a day trip to Edinburgh to inform the Scottish people that, in the event of their voting for independence, there would be no currency union with the rest of the UK.  Unequivocally.  No ifs no buts.  Then Mr Darling, leader of the No campaign (perhaps he should have called it “Oxi” to give it a bit more oomph) engaged in debate with Mr Salmond and kept hammering away – “What is your Plan B?”  Mr Salmond didn’t have a Plan B, or if he did, he was keeping it to himself.  Mr Darling upheld this as a proof that Mr Salmond was living in cloud-cuckoo land, but I have to say I rather admired Mr Salmond for his position.  He was seeking a mandate from the Scottish people that would allow him to enter negotiations that were real rather than hypothetical.  In short, he had not given up on Plan A.

He never got his mandate.  Then Scotland returned 56 Nationalist MPs of a total of 59 to Westminster.  This reminds me of “Ally’s Tartan Army” that went off to the World Cup in Argentina in 1978, got a terrible drubbing, and then beat Holland 3-2 in a game that in the end didn’t matter.  It’s a Scottish characteristic.  56 MPs are returned to a place where they don’t matter.  This is by the by.

I wonder about the Plan B advice to the aspiring actor.  It’s a very tricky business, the dispensation of advice, especially if it is not asked for, and especially to the young.  As a doctor, I have spent a career dispensing advice, but I could never get very enthusiastic about giving it out when it was unsolicited.  I suppose that is what screening and case-finding are all about.  I always preferred the patients to set the agenda.  They would outline their problem and then ask me one of two questions which they used more or less interchangeably: “What would you advise?” and “What would you do?”

But these questions are not interchangeable.  Doctors are very bad at taking their own advice.  Sometimes I would point this out to the patient and then ask him which question he would like me to answer.  Usually the patient opted for the latter.  That was because he recognised that the practice of medicine, while grounded in medical science, is really an art.  The patients didn’t solely want an explication of the evidence base; they wanted it with a human face.  But then I had to be careful.  Why should I fob off my own prejudices and preconceptions on to the patient?  Personally I belong to the “ostrich” school of health care.  Keep your head down and don’t go looking for trouble.  Just deal with it when it turns up.  Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.  So, asks the patient, “Should I go for my ultrasound screen for aortic aneurysm?  What would you do?”  The trouble with screening is the amount of anxiety it creates.  Your aorta turns out to be a little wide, though not dangerously so… yet.  We’ll screen you again next year.  As Job said, “I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.”  And again, “Yet man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward.”   Here is the difficulty of dispensing advice: you intend to soothe, and you end up causing harm.  You become a Job’s comforter, like one of these oily saxophones in Vaughan Williams’ Job, A Masque for Dancing.  Or like Polonius, loitering behind the arras, with his smug desiderata.    

So I don’t think I will presume to give Rebecca advice.  But if she were to ask me, what would you do? – I would answer as follows:

If I were lucky enough to have a Plan A, and if the plan were honourable, I wouldn’t even think of looking at Plan B.  Because if you do, rest assured, Plan B will begin to unfold, and before you know it you will have constructed a B-life, you will surround yourself with like-minded B-lifers, and your life will become a bit part in a B-movie.  If you’re really serious about Plan A, give it everything you’ve got.  As Brutus said to Cassius,

There is a tide in the affairs of men

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

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

Of course you are taking a risk.  But then life is inherently risky.  And after all, what, precisely is that risk?  If you analyse the concern and the preoccupation of the purveyors of Plan B, you will always find that at its heart lies fear.  And it is usually the fear of poverty.  Plan B is Project Fear.  Project Fear is favoured by the wealthy, preoccupied with the acquisition and the hoarding of stuff.   Yet “what shall it profit a man…?”  We are taught that the man who buries his talent in the ground will lose even that which he has buried.   And this is not because of some divine retribution, but rather because the act of repressing or suppressing a talent has already made him destitute.   The difference between Plan A and Plan B is the difference between somebody who is alive, and one of the undead.  Purveyors of Plan B (not thinking of anybody in particular) will try to frighten you with the prospect that you are imminently going to become an economic basket case.  But remember the words of the bard – the other bard:

Is there for honest poverty

That hings his head, an a’ that?

The coward slave, we pass him by –

We dare be poor for a’ that!

Reckless?  Winston said to the boys at Harrow, “Never give in. Never give in.  Never never never never…”  Yet even Winston tempered that with a rider – “…save for convictions of honour and good sense.”    Yes, you might fail.  Whatever happens, you have to be completely honest with yourself, and ask, is this worth the candle?  Nobody can advise you on that.  Plan A, unfolding, may change, and will certainly change you.  You may need to make adjustments to the plan as you go, because of events that you could never predict and you never saw coming.  That’s not a Plan B.  You just found you had to open your reserve parachute.  Yet you still made the jump.

Becky got the part.