jamescalumcampbell

In April, 1874, the Scottish geologist Charles Lyell received this letter:

Dear Sir,

I thank you for your great kindness in having sent me the new Edition of yr remarkable work; and I am very glad that it has been so highly successful for a 4^th Edition to have appeared within so short a time.  Pray believe me Dear Sir,

Yours with much respect

Very faithfully

Ch. Darwin

Contrast this with the sign-off closing an email I received yesterday:

Best

I have to saying, knowing the sender, “Best” was uttered with a certain irony, by which I don’t mean he wished me the worst, rather he knew I’d be amused by the absurdity of “Best”.  The last time I got an email ending with “Best” was a couple of years ago when I sent a tome to a literary agent who sent me an acknowledgement of receipt, for which I was grateful, even though I immediately knew that we would not establish a connection.  “Best” was truly valedictory.  He might just as easily have written, “Later” which in this case would have signified “Won’t see you later.”  Getting a communication that ends with “Best” is like your girlfriend dumping you by text.

Saying goodbye seems to be inherently socially awkward.  What is the right formula for a given situation?  I once received a job application from a strong candidate whose covering letter was fatally flawed – at least in the eyes of a colleague of mine – by the fact that he had not ended with “Yours sincerely”, but with “Sincerely yours.”  My colleague thought it smacked of insincerity.  I defended the candidate on the grounds that he had worked for a time in the USA.  “Sincerely yours” has a trans-Atlantic ring to my ears.  It sounds insincere on this side of the Pond precisely because it’s so sincere.

“Yours faithfully” sounds old fashioned and formal.  It is the language of the bank manager.  You seldom see it now.  Maybe nobody takes seriously the idea that anybody “acts in good faith” any longer.  North of the border, you sometimes hear “Yours aye”.  I don’t care for it.  A military man at a Burns supper with whisky on his breath would say “Yours aye”.   “Yours truly”?  Yours truly wouldn’t adopt that either.  I’m either yours or I’m not yours.  I might say “Yours” and leave it at that but I’d have to know you just a little.

Whatever formula you apply, it generally needs to be preceded by a qualifier, to avoid a sense of abruptness.  It’s a bit like taking your leave from somebody’s house after a dinner party.  You can’t suddenly say “Goodbye” and vanish (though doubtless on occasion your hosts wish you would).  You need to linger for a moment on the doorstep.  The Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock wrote a short piece about a socially awkward young man invited to tea who stays for ever because he can’t find the right words on which to depart.

“With kind regards and best wishes…”  Best wishes are okay, but why are the regards kind?  Only the recipient of the kindness can evaluate it.  You could write, “With regards kindly meant…” but this sounds as if you are bestowing your pity on someone.  It’s a minefield.  “Best regards” sounded a bit gauche a few years ago but has become quite fashionable.

But to return to the email which ended with “Best”, I’ve just looked at my reply, which ends thus:

Go placidly amid the noise and haste.

That wasn’t entirely serious either.  It set me thinking, why have we stopped writing like Charles Darwin?  What is the fatal attraction to us in particular, who inhabit these islands, of irony?  Why are we embarrassed by an expression of sentiment?

I think of irony as a kind of perpetual in-joke.  The less foreigners understand it, the more it is valued.  Continental Europeans are exasperated by it and North Americans just don’t know it’s there.  The English in particular have this crazy compulsion to say that something is what it is not.  Some people’s entire mode of expression is like a Constance Garnett translation of a Dostoevsky novel, to the accompaniment of Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony.  Every utterance has a hidden agenda.  Some people live out their entire lives at an ironic remove.   Irony is a survival mechanism for people who have been put in a bind.  It is the seditious expression of people compelled to live in a lunatic asylum.

Now I need to think of some way of winding up this rambling blog.  Enough already.  In the immortal words of Brian Matthew, that’s your lot for this week.  See you next week.   I thank you for your continued indulgence, hoping to remain, believe me, your most obedient servant

Best

Later

JCC

On September 2nd, the literary website NewInBooks interviewed me, and asked me some searching questions.  They kindly published my answers last week, and here they are!

Tell us a little bit about your new release, Click, Double-Click.

In Click, Double-Click, Dr Alastair Cameron-Strange, a bereaved and emotionally labile young doctor, solves an obscure cryptic crossword, and realises that, deeply embedded within the puzzle’s solution, lies a terrorist threat.  His attempts to alert the authorities are met with derision.  The more he struggles with the puzzle, the more unbalanced he becomes.  The question is, is he mad, or is he the only sane person in a vast lunatic asylum?

I was intrigued by the idea of constructing a plot around a crossword puzzle.  If you are not a cruciverbalist, never fear; Alastair does the solving for us.  Mind you, there is one vital piece of information buried in the solution that he never divulges.  To find it, you need to solve the puzzle.  And even then you might not see it.

What draws you to the crime thriller genre?  What about it makes you want to write?

Click, Double-Click is a bit subversive.  I’ve tried to turn the crime thriller on its head.  My protagonist, rather than discovering a crime and working through the clues towards a solution, discovers a solution that may or may not allow him to prevent a crime.  I supposed I’ve hijacked elements of the crime thriller genre for my own nefarious purposes.  I don’t think I quite knew what Click, Double-Click was about until I’d finished it.  Somebody pulling it off the “Crime” section in the bookshop might justifiably feel he’d been tricked.  Click, Double-Click is not about the detection of crime; it’s about the detection of humbug.

What are your favourite books to give – and get – as gifts?

Oddly enough, it’s my birthday today!  I’ve been given A Stranger in My Country, the 1944 Prison Diary, by Hans Fallada, translated by Allan Blunden (Polity Press, 2015).  I’d never heard of Fallada until this morning.  He was a German novelist who on 4^th September 1944 was committed to the Neustrelitz-Strelitz state facility, a prison for “mentally ill criminals” in Mecklenburg.  At great personal risk, he kept a diary.  I can’t put it down.  It’s quite phenomenal. The description of life in Germany under the Third Reich is so vivid; I read it and think, yes, that must have been what it was like.

A gift, given or received, is something that comes out of the blue.  It should surprise the recipient, perhaps send him down a road he had not thought to travel.

What are you currently reading? 

I’m actually reading a textbook of Thermodynamics.  Nerdish I know.  Delta G = Delta H – T Delta S.  I’m determined to get to the bottom of it!

C P Snow used to accost his literary friends at cocktail parties and ask them if they knew what the Second Law of Thermodynamics was.  He told them that acquaintance of the Second Law was equivalent, in educational terms, to knowledge of a Shakespeare play.  F R Leavis the distinguished Cambridge literary critic famously demolished Snow’s “Two Cultures” argument and wiped the floor with him.  But I think Snow had a point.  How can you read PPE at Oxford and not know a bit of Thermodynamics?  I have this theory that economics is basically applied thermodynamics, and that every time the moguls of high finance land us all in deep trouble it is because they have tried to defy the First and Second Laws.

But what do I know?

Where is your happy place?  Why does it bring you joy? 

Is this a geographical location, or a region of the mind?

I’m sitting in Dunblane Cathedral, listening to a rendition, on the fine Flentrop organ, of the St Anne Prelude and Fugue in E flat major, BWV 552, by J S Bach.

What’s not to like?

What advice would you give your teenage self? 

Don’t be so miserable.  Stop trying so hard.  Take it easy.  Chill.  Don’t be a fake.  Just be yourself.  Go out with Jennifer Marsden.

Who are your literary heroes?

Richard Hannay and James Bond.

They’re actually quite alike.  Of course, Hannay would have found Bond’s womanizing unconscionable, but occasionally their dark worlds of espionage overlap.  In Mr Standfast, Hannay endures the after dinner conversation of a Conscientious Objector for whom he doesn’t have much time.  He stands with his back to the mantelpiece, smokes a cigarette, and looks steadily at the man’s face.  That could be Bond. There’s something cold and steely about that.

Yet Bond himself continually surprises us with little acts of courtesy and chivalry, even in the amoral carnivorous world in which he moves.  And he’s very funny.  He seems to walk a tight-rope between extreme menace, and extreme farce.

It has been virtually a lifelong ambition of mine to create a character who might surface and resurface in a series of books.  I hope he is Dr Alastair Cameron-Strange.  He’s nothing like Hannay or Bond.  Thank goodness.

What’s your favourite quote or scene from Click, Double-Click?

Favourite quote:  I rather like, “The atmosphere was thick with sycophantic, meretricious concupiscence.”  It’s way over the top.  Favourite scene: Dr Alastair Cameron-Strange stands up at a medical meeting, loses his temper, and tells the group that the particular piece of managerial pseudo-science they are peddling is the biggest load of tosh he has ever heard.  I once did that.  It was very satisfying.  Mind you, it didn’t do any good.  And Dr Cameron-Strange gets hauled before the Patient Safety Committee and suspended from his hospital post because he appears to have gone off his rocker.

Do you have a motto, quote or philosophy you live by?

I can’t resist opting for the last four words of Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata.  I’d better not quote them as Max Ehrmann died on September 9^th 1945 so, at time of writing, he has one week of copyright left to run, and quoting Desiderata over the years has been a contentious copyright issue.  So look it up.  The words remind me of my late mother.  She was completely indifferent to worldly success and she could never understand why I got exercised about academic examinations.  Mind, she was a Queen’s Nurse and a midwife so she did sit a few in her time.  She once came up against an intimidating and irascible consultant obstetrician who barked, “Give me a cause of early miscarriage and don’t say syphilis.”  She said, “Syphilis!”  I once asked her what she would have liked to be if she hadn’t been a midwife.  She said she would have loved to mend roads.

What the hell.  Let’s risk it.  Strive to be happy.

Last week’s blog centred on Scottish Health Minister Shona Robison’s speech on day 1 (October 1^st) of the Royal College of General Practitioners’ annual conference held in Glasgow.  Fast forward to the morning of October 3^rd.  One of the presentations was given by Nick Ross, erstwhile BBC TV Crimewatch presenter talking, not surprisingly about crime.  GPs are interested in crime because crime and pathology are inextricably linked.  Mr Ross’s talk followed that of Shami Chakrabarti who was an extraordinarily charismatic and inspirational speaker whose talk “On Liberty” received a standing ovation.  The chairperson said “Follow that, Nick!”  Well, he did, with his own style and aplomb.

Mr Ross’s thesis was that crime prevention could learn a lot from preventative medicine.  He thought that crime, like disease, has a propensity to be endemic.  Society, he said, is not made up of crims and non-crims.  We are all potential criminals.  He challenged the audience. “If you have never committed a crime, raise your hand.”  I didn’t look round, but I gather there was no show of hands.  The Left, said Mr Ross, thinks that crime is caused by poverty; the Right thinks that crime is caused by individuals who choose to commit it.  Neither side is right, claims Mr Ross.  Crime is a product of temptation, and opportunity.  Remove the opportunity, and hence remove the crime.  If your car is burglar proof, it will not be stolen.  Society needs to take steps to vaccinate itself against crime, by removing temptation and opportunity.

To be honest, I found the notion rather dispiriting.  But I can see it has a certain validity.  Injury prevention has proceeded along similar lines.   I was reminded of the work of William Haddon, the father of injury prevention in the United States.  He would say, “There is no such thing as an accident”; he would fine his colleagues whenever they used the “A-word”, and thus he applied epidemiological principles to the disease of trauma. He devised a system known as “The Haddon Matrix”, which examines any traumatic incident in terms of the incident’s host, vehicle, and environment, along a time line of pre-event, event, and post-event.  So, with respect to a road crash, pre-event you get the driver to wear a seat belt, you give him a car with a good set of brakes, and you put a speed limit on the road.  During the event, the airbag deploys, the car doesn’t disintegrate, and the crash barrier withstands the impact.  Post event, the fuel tank doesn’t explode, the driver receives excellent Advanced Trauma Life Support, and the scene is investigated in order to learn lessons to improve outcomes in subsequent incidents.

Yet even Prof Haddon didn’t neglect the need “to fix the nut behind the wheel.”  He didn’t try to exonerate bad drivers.  Mr Ross seemed to imply that dishonesty, the propensity to commit crime, is inevitable.  I don’t believe this is so.  I know plenty of people who choose not to commit crime, all the way from breaking the speed limit to grand larceny, not because they are frightened of getting caught, but because they know it is wrong.  My father, who happened to have been a policeman, used to say, “There are two kinds of criminals.” (I think possibly he was referring specifically to the crime of theft.)  “There are the needy; and there are the greedy.”  It might be a stretch to say that that is the difference between blue collar crime, and white collar crime, but greed does seem more obviously to be a propensity of the wealthy.  The more you have, the more you want; the more you consider yourself “entitled to”.

Mr Ross’s pragmatic approach, to remove the moral dimension from the debate, is certainly the modern way.  If a group of senior executives are found to have rigged the bank rate, or to have diesel emission software rigged on their watch, they will put their hand up to own up, not because of a crisis of conscience, but because they have been found out.  They certainly won’t admit that they did wrong, rather they will say that they “fouled up”.  They “let people down”.  It was “an error of judgment.”  And so on.  This is of course all bullshit and I use that technical term specifically, in the sense of Harry G. Frankfurt, the Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University, whose two tracts, On Bullshit, and On Truth, are surely the definitive treatises on present day moral philosophy.

The trouble with removing the moral dimension from crime prevention is that all you are left with, all you can do in response to criminality of any kind, is put systems in place designed to prevent a recurrence of malpractice, by manipulating the environment to make it impossible for people to transgress.  It’s the only thing you can do if you start with the presumption that “everyone’s a dodger”.  This is what happens when inquiries are conducted into institutions such as hospitals or care homes placed into “special measures” because of a scandal, usually involving cruelty, bullying, neglect, perhaps even wrongful death.  The inquiry takes a very long time and then comes out with a fantastic number of recommendations – maybe hundreds of them.  These are designed in part to placate the desire of deeply wounded relatives who understandably wish that “nothing like this must ever be allowed to happen to anyone else”.   The Mid-Staffs Inquiry into the failings at Stafford Hospital, published on 6^th February 2013, had 290 recommendations.   Individuals implicated in such inquiries may or may not be held accountable, but either way the entire institution will in effect be punished and diminished – rather than helped – because it will be made impossible for the workforce to live and work normally.  The larger the number of recommendations, the less likely it is that the persons conducting the inquiry have reached some sort of diagnosis and formulation as to what has really taken place at the institute.  If they had, they could probably have put it all into an executive summary on one side of A4.  Critical to such recommendations would be the one that is paramount:  a small group of people in charge of the institution must be honest, trustworthy, kind, and competent.  That’s all.  Rather than trying to micromanage the institution, the inquiry should make it possible to empower a trustworthy leadership, and then say, “We trust you to fix this.”  An inquiry with 290 recommendations cannot see the wood for the trees.  Such inquiries are the product of communities whose members no longer trust one another.  I return to the Duke in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure:

There is scarce truth enough alive to make societies secure, but security enough to make fellowships accursed.

If an entire society loses belief in the trustworthiness of its members, it can only be sustained through the application of totalitarianism.  We come to inhabit a monochrome moral universe in which, as Prof Frankfurt has said, we lose even the sense of where our own individual identify stops and another’s begins.

At the annual conference of the Royal College of General Practitioners held in Glasgow (Oct 1^st to 3^rd) Shona Robison the Scottish Government Health Minister announced the demise of the “Quality Outcomes Framework” (QOF), to the applause of 2000 GPs.  The QOF was embedded in the 2004 GP contract and awarded GPs points, and income, on the basis of fulfilling certain tasks such as recording patients’ blood pressure and smoking status.  GPs, medical students and doctors generally, are very good at fulfilling set tasks and jumping hurdles; they’ve been doing it all their lives.  The 2004 QOF was easy.  Most of the GPs got near maximum points.  So the QOF evolved.  It became more complicated, more bureaucratic, and more burdensome.  I was about to say the paperwork mushroomed, but it would be more accurate to say the electronics went haywire, and before they knew it, GPs were spending twelve hour days glued to computer screens, fulfilling more and more obscure tasks.

Running parallel to the contractual obligations were the requirements of continuous professional development (CPD).  Previously, GPs were required to demonstrate maintenance of professional standards largely by demonstrating attendance at a number of medical education meetings or courses.  Just before the inauguration of the new contract, annual GP appraisal was introduced as a means of monitoring GP CPD, checking not only that GPs were putting in the CPD hours, but were also doing so in a planned way based on their own (and their appraiser’s) perception of their educational needs.  GPs were required to “reflect” on their educational experience.  Appraisal was put in place not long after the trial and conviction on 31/1/00 of Dr Harold Shipman who was found guilty of the murder of fifteen of his patients.   The Shipman Inquiry commenced on 1/9/00 and ran for about 2 years.  Dr Shipman committed suicide in prison on 13/1/04.  By an extraordinary non sequitur sections of the lay press somehow developed the notion that the purpose of GP appraisal was “to prevent another Shipman”.  Any newspaper article on the subject of GP appraisal would almost certainly mention the name Harold Shipman.  Then, as with QOF, the paperwork, or electronic-work, of appraisal also began to burgeon and grow more complex.  The medical profession began to suspect that it was being punished and made to suffer as an expiation and apology to the public, because a serial killer happened to have been a doctor.   This was felt all the more keenly as the demands of QOF and appraisal became more surreal.  It is well known that if you wish not only to punish people but also to damage them psychologically, you give them a futile task like writing out lines at school, or painting coal white in the army.

Hence GPs would be subjected to a directive like this:

Reflecting on the practice’s outpatient referral dataset and comparison with other practices, list the internal factors that contribute to any variation in the practice overall and individual GP referral patterns (eg clinical expertise; learning needs; demographic profile etc).  If your discussions around activity levels confirm your current practice; outline specific areas of your own practice internal to the practice which are aimed at supporting independent management in the community and avoiding potentially unnecessary referrals.  List a minimum of three useful elements which could be shared with other practices.        

I’m not sure, but I think it means, are you referring too many people to hospital, and can you think of a few ways of cutting it out?

When I read the above paragraph about three years ago, I wrote an incensed letter to a prestigious medical journal, which started thus:

Dear Doctor,

I would like to invite you into Fellowship of an august medical society, DAMASK.  DAMASK stands for Doctors Against Muddle and So-called Quality (with a capital K).  You will be relieved to hear there is no subscription, no journal, no conference, and no AGM.  It’s more of a kind of freemasonry than a society.  All that is required of you is that, when you are attending a medical meeting at which somebody who doesn’t know anything about medicine propounds something utterly preposterous, you stand up and make, either figuratively or literally, a bad smell.

I got an email back from the journal to say yes, we’ll print that.  We’ll just run it by the letters editor.

Then, stony silence.

I find that stony silence is the modern way.  In this day when communication was never easier, it is only the passage of time that tells you you have become a “lapsed action”.  We have email we have twitter we have facebook we have text we have SMS we have smart phones we have landlines we have The Royal Mail.  We even have, I discovered while dining with friends this weekend, “Snapchat”.  The defining characteristic of Snapchat is that the message dissolves in the ether after 10 seconds.  Maybe my prestigious journal snapchatted, “On mature consideration, we’ve decided your piece is too inflammatory.”  And I was just too slow on the uptake.  I would have accepted that.  It’s the silence I can’t abide.

(Incidentally, why snapchat?  I can only think it’s useful if you’re into sexting or internet trawling.  You know you’re going to send out something you regret, so get your expression of regret in first.)

Medicine has learned a great deal from the world of aviation in terms of managing risk through the use of checklists.  Medicine – actually any large corporate activity – should also adopt the aviation practice of “read back”.   Read back is vital on the r/t.  I recall with nostalgia the romantic poetry exchanged between the control tower and the big jets on the runway at Glasgow while I, a callow youth, was doing circuits and bumps in the Chipmunk.  “BA 53 you are clear to Heathrow via White Nine, Amber One, to cross Lanark and Talla at flight level 55 and to climb when instructed by Scottish radar to flight level 320 today.”

And it would be read back, verbatim.

“Read back correct.”

Falling foul of a lapsed action is one of the great dispiriting experiences of modern life.  When you write a letter to a bank, or a utility company, or the Inland Revenue, or a multinational conglomerate, and get no reply, you are like a pilot in a stricken aircraft sending out a Mayday call and hearing nothing in your headphones except static.

But here I must write in praise of Shona Robison, who had the courtesy to let us know she is scrapping QOF.  Of course, being a politician, she said something along the lines of, “QOF was of its time; but it has outgrown its usefulness and is no longer fit for purpose.”  It’s not true.  It was never fit for purpose.  The politicians might not know that, but the doctors always knew it.  I like to think we went along with it out of naivety rather than out of cynicism.

Cato the Elder used to end all his addresses to the Roman Senate by reminding them, no matter the topic of discourse, “Oh – and by the way, Carthage must be destroyed.”  He knew that if he said it often enough, one day it would happen.  For a period of about five years I adopted this technique and made a point of saying, at the end of any and every medical meeting I attended, “Oh – and by the way, the QOF must be destroyed.”  I made myself an utter pain in the neck.  My colleagues would say, “James, put a sock in it.”

It just shows you.  You plug away at something.  You think your effort is futile.  You think you’re trapped. But you’re not.

         

Towards the end of term, Mr McIvor our maths teacher lightened up and cut us some slack.  “Here’s a problem for the weekend – but only if you like.  It’s not particularly mathematical.  All you need is pure logic.  It’s called the twelve cannon ball problem.”

You have twelve cannon balls.  They look identical, and eleven of them are, but one has a different weight from the others; it could be heavier or it could be lighter.  You have a simple set of scales – two pans on a fulcrum.  Can you identify the unique cannon ball in three weighings, and say whether it is lighter or heavier?

I realise this blog might be aimed at a minority interest group.  If you are allergic to numbers, it may be you are more interested in the qualitative rather than the quantitative aspects of cannon balls.  Therefore I digress for a moment on your behalf.  I had always thought the expression, “It was cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” had a somewhat vulgar connotation.  Not so!  It turns out that a brass monkey was a rack for holding cannon balls, and that in very cold weather the rack contracted more than the cannon balls and extruded them.  Back to the twelve cannon ball problem – but, as Mr McIvor said, only if you like.

So, to return to the dim and distant past, I was up for it.  I took the problem home with me and wrestled with it.  It absorbed me completely.  By Friday night I had realised that to put six balls on each pan was a squandered shot because it yielded too little information.  I was pretty certain you needed to place four balls on each pan.  All throughout Saturday I experimented with four ball patterns.  Didn’t go to the swimming baths, didn’t go to badminton club.  Didn’t watch telly.  I became a recluse and an irritant to my family.  By Saturday night I had solved the special case, when your first weighing, four x four, shows equilibrium.  Therefore the rogue ball lies within the remaining four.  You leave three of the balls you have already weighed on one pan to act as a control; you know they are all normal.  You take three of the four untested balls and put them on the other pan.  Suppose there is equilibrium.  Then the remaining unweighed ball is the rogue ball.  You use your third weighing to weigh it against any control ball in order to establish whether it is lighter or heavier.

Go back to the second weighing, three x three, however, and suppose there is disequilibrium.

(Are you still with me?  Or have your eyes glazed over because you’re not that interested?  Don’t fret.)

Well, now you know the rogue ball is one of three, and you know, depending on which way the scales have gone, whether it is lighter or heavier.  So take two of the suspect three balls, clear the scales, and weigh one suspect ball against another.  If there is equilibrium, the third ball is the rogue ball, and you already know whether it is lighter or heavier.  If there is disequilibrium, you identify the rogue ball because you know whether you are looking for a lighter or heavier ball.  Take note of this last paragraph; it is a recurring theme.  If you know the rogue ball is one of a group of three, and you know the relative weight of the ball you are looking for, you have a scenario in which the ball can be identified with just one further weighing.  Let us call this scenario “The Brass Monkey Scenario”.

Fine.  Saturday midnight, and I have my special theory.  But I’m miles away from my general theory.  I still have no idea what to do if the first four v four weighing shows disequilibrium.

Sunday.  Sunday is murder.

I struggle with combinations and permutations and seem to be getting nowhere.  Moreover, I am dogged by a nagging sense of guilt that I’ve wasted a precious weekend in a futile gesture.  But I can’t stop.  It’s not fun any more, yet I can’t stop. Isn’t this what it is supposed to be like to be addicted to something?  Am I in some kind of trouble?

Give it till Sunday teatime.  I’m sure I’ve missed something.  There’s something creative I need to do.  Something I haven’t thought of.  A little piece of lateral thinking.

I skipped Sunday evening youth orchestra.

Eureka!  I worked on, with growing excitement.  Yet still with that nagging sense of guilt, that would just not go away, even when I was on the brink of success.

Late at night, when Barry Alldis was doing his Top 20 countdown on Luxembourg 208, the dark metallic strangled voice of Gene Pitney recounted the tale of the man who lost everything twenty four hours from Tulsa.  I had it.  And yet that terrible sense of squandered energy just wouldn’t leave me.  Why are you wasting your substance on this rubbish?  This is a complete waste of time.

Maybe not completely.  If this weekend has taught me anything, it has taught me that, even when a problem seems utterly insurmountable, when you have run out of rope, still with a little bit of creativity, and lateral thinking, there might just be a way out.

McIvor had me demonstrate my general theory on the blackboard before the class.  The extra pressure of performance might have snarled up my logical circuits, but I was fired up, and my exposition was sound.

Let the balls be numbered  1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12.  First weighing:  balls 1,2,3,4 v balls 5,6,7,8 gives disequilibrium.  You know the rogue ball is somewhere on the scales.

Second weighing is 1,2,3,5 v 9,10,11,4.

That’s the little creative leap, the little piece of lateral thinking.  You swap two of the balls.

Consider now what might happen.  The scales show equilibrium.  Therefore the rogue ball is in the group of three you have removed, namely balls 6,7, and 8.  You already know whether the rogue ball is lighter or heavier because of the disequilibrium of the first weighing.   This is The Brass Monkey Scenario.  All you need do now is weigh ball 6 against ball 7.

Consider now that in the second weighing a disequilibrium occurs but the scales tip over in the other direction.  Now the rogue ball has to be one of the balls you have swapped  – 4 or 5.  If 4 is on the down scale and it turns out to be the rogue ball, then it is heavier.  If 4 is on the up scale and it turns out to be the rogue ball, then it is lighter.  Same scenario for ball 5.

Third weighing: ball 4 against any control ball.  If there is equilibrium, then ball 5 is the rogue ball, and you already know whether it is lighter or heavier.  If there is disequilibrium, then ball 4 is the rogue ball and it is lighter or heavier depending on how it now tips the scales.

Consider now that in the second weighing the same disequilibrium occurs as in the first weighing.  Then the rogue ball is in the group 1, 2, 3, because balls 9, 10, 11 are control balls, and, had balls 4 or 5 been rogue, the scales would have tipped over.  We are back to The Brass Monkey Scenario.  We now know that the rogue ball (1,2, or 3) is lighter or heavier depending on how the scales tipped, and, as before, we clear the scales and weigh ball 1 against ball 2, knowing we are looking for a lighter or a heavier ball.  If the scales show equilibrium, then ball 3 is the rogue ball, and we already know whether it is lighter or heavier.

That’s it.  Every situation dealt with.

I sat down.

There was no applause from the class.  They had long since lost interest.  Mr McIvor said, “Well done!”  And indeed there was admiration.  Yet I could sense something else.  I thought I could detect a sense of guilt that he had subjected me to this conundrum in the first place, and driven me to spend so much time on it. I was completely confused.  It crossed my mind that he pitied me. He might have shaken his head and said, “You poor sad boy!”

How is the news where you are?  The news where I am isn’t very good.  In fact, it’s so bad, I’m tempted to turn the sound down when it comes on my car radio.  But that’s a bad thing.  That’s what we did in the 1930s, closing our ears to the rumblings of continental Europe.

In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Vincentio, the Duke of Vienna, goes undercover, disguises himself as a Papal emissary and moves about his own Dukedom, taking the temperature.  He meets Escalus, one of his lords, who asks him, “What news abroad i’th’ world?”

“None, but that there is so great a fever on goodness that the dissolution of it must cure it.  Novelty is only in request, and it is as dangerous to be aged in any kind of course as it is virtuous to be constant in any undertaking.  There is scarce truth enough alive to make societies secure, but security enough to make fellowships accursed.  Much upon this riddle runs the wisdom of the world.  This news is old enough, yet it is every day’s news.”

I’ve been pondering this enigmatic utterance for the duration of my adult life, and making little headway with it, until this past week.  It occurred to me, the Duke’s utterance really is a summary of the news.  Three items dominated the news during the week – the refugee crisis; the election of Jeremy Corbyn to leadership of the Labour Party; and the unprecedented interview with the head of MI5 on the “Today” programme, coming out to gloom a nation armed with desktops, lap tops, tablets and smart phones, that it will need to be snooped on to an extent that would make even the Rector of Glasgow University raise his eyebrows.

The Duke makes five points, which I venture to precis as follows:

We are suffering from an institutional malaise so profound that we can only recover by making a radical change to the way in which we conduct our affairs.

There is an appetite for change, but we seem incapable of turning our ideas into reality.

You may think it praiseworthy to be resolute in a course of action; but if your policies are outdated and no longer fit for purpose, it is not.  On the contrary, it is positively dangerous.

Public life is full of humbug.

Our lives are being rendered miserable by surveillance.

Now, I could marry up the Shakespeare remarks with this week’s items of news, but that seems rather a pedestrian route to take, and I will leave it to your imagination.  Let’s just focus for a moment on the idea of change:

At Prime Minister’s Question Time last Wednesday, Mr Corbyn made a request, on our behalf, that PMQs be less “theatrical”. Well, good luck with that.  I’m intrigued by the way the British right wing press have already ganged up on Mr Corbyn to nip him in the bud, by criticising everything about him from his demeanour to his dress to his apparent espousal of dodgy ideologies to his silence during the National Anthem to his apparent reluctance to kneel before Her Majesty as a Privy Counsellor.  And I think, why are they carrying out a demolition job?  After all, if he is the loose cannon that they say he is, wouldn’t they want him to head the opposition for ever?  I wonder if it’s because they are afraid.  They are afraid of anything they do not understand, and cannot predict.  And they are afraid of that quality of Mr Corbyn’s that won him the leadership – authenticity.  He isn’t the concoction of a focus group of spin doctors; he’s the real deal.  I can’t say I’m a fan of Old Labour, but I do think the media should cut this guy some slack and see what he has to say.  History never quite repeats itself.  Mr Corbyn is not Mr Foot.  He might surprise us.

But to return to Shakespeare, I wonder if his Duke of Vienna is right, that the news is always the same, that the old news is every day’s news.  Sophie Raworth, Fiona Bruce, Mishal Husain et al might say, “Welcome to the BBC news at ten.  The headlines tonight – we are in a terrible mess; we’re trying to get out of it but we seem to be stuck; we make a virtue out of repeating our mistakes over and over again; we completely lack any moral leadership and hence we are creating a dystopia. And now, the news wherever you are…”

So I checked it out, and you may care to do the same next time you hear the news; apply the Measure for Measure test.  I watched the news late on Sunday night.  (As Lennon put it, “I heard the news to-day, oh boy…”)

Well let’s see.  There’s chaos in Croatia where migrants are struggling to get on board west-bound trains.  Jeremy Corbyn wants to renationalise the railways line by line.  Jackie Collins has passed away.  Andy Murray has got us into the final of the Davis Cup.  Gas explosion in Derby.  Pope Frances addressed an enthusiastic crowd in Revolution Square, Havana, then met with Fidel Castro.  Good news about the release of some hostages in Yemen.  The Greek General Election is veering leftward.  75^th anniversary in Westminster of the Battle of Britain.  Rugby World Cup.  Footie.  And now, the news where you are.

And then – how often does this happen? – something slips under the radar.  Something momentous passes unnoticed.  Johann Lamont, the ex-labour leader in Scotland, recognises that a lot of Labour supporters voted Yes in the Referendum just over a year ago.  Kezia Dugdale, the current incumbent, says she won’t shut down a debate on a repeat referendum.  She said Labour MPs and MSPs should be able to argue for Independence.

It was all reported quite casually.

I don’t think Westminster will be too happy about that.

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.