jamescalumcampbell

To be honest, I don’t know where last year has gone.  Gone in a flash.  The acceleration of the seasons.  It seems no time at all since, in the twilit zone twixt Christmas and Hogmanay, 2023, I was drawing up some absurd catalogue of resolutions, a bucket list, while fully conscious at the time that the definition of insanity is to repeatedly indulge in behaviours that have never produced a desired result.  There is a first person narrator in a Graham Greene novel – I think it might be Fowler in The Quiet American – who reminisces about a time “when I still took my future seriously”.  Evelyn Waugh thought Fowler was a despicable creature, yet I rather identify with him.  Michael Caine played him beautifully in film.      

I recall I described “the daily bread” under 7 bullet points:

• Pray
• Read
• Write
• Play a musical instrument
• Speak a foreign language
• Get some exercise
• Look out!

Or something along these lines.

Well, how did that go? 

Actually, not too badly.  I always start the day with a muttered consecration.  Here I feel the need to self-deprecate.  I don’t wish to be ridiculed for speaking to an Imaginary Friend.  But you see, He once sat with me, on Ninety Mile Beach at the outlet of Te Paki stream, and told me that everything was going to be okay. 

I read voraciously, if in an undisciplined fashion.  This week I read Sarah Rainsford’s wonderful, if harrowing, Goodbye to Russia (Bloomsbury 2024 – signed by the author – it’s a terrible signature, but at least she has dated it, Oct. 2024).  Reading it on the back of the late Alexei Navalni’s Patriot, I have the sense of a country that has changed little from the one depicted through the music of Dmitry Shostakovich, the music of a lunatic asylum. 

And I’m currently reading Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies (Faber and Faber 2020).  It was given me as a gift.  I probably wouldn’t have bought it for myself, but is not this the beauty of an unsolicited gift?  It offers you something you ordinarily would never experience.  It is funny, touching, intensely Scottish, and full of humanity. 

And yes, I scribble away.  Last year I published The Last Night of the Proms.  A friend emailed me the other day and asked, is this worth reading?  I resisted the (intensely Scottish) impulse to say “No!”, but informed him that it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.  And now I am embarked on publication No. 5 – if spared.  People I know kindly ask me what it is all about, but I am coy about that, fearing that giving the game away will in some sense burst a bubble.  So the most I tell them is that it is in form “epistolatory” – you know, like Richardson’s Clarissa.  Aye, right. 

An die Musik.  In November, in the Dunblane Chamber Orchestra, we played Quilter’s Children’s Overture, Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, and Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.  The conductor, himself a violist, keeps saying to me, “James!  Play nearer the bridge!  You play like a folk musician.”  I took that as a compliment.  But I think it may be a bridge too far.  Old dog, new tricks.  Schwanengesang? 

Ich spreche Deutsch.  Nur Anfängers Kenntnisse.  Aber… I continue to attend the class Deutsch für Alltag in the Goethe Institut in Glasgow.  I’m not at all sure that I have any gift for languages, but anyway I enjoy it.   

I walk every day, and swim maybe every other day.  I need to be a little bit more “aerobic” – as the personal trainers say – when actually they mean “anaerobic”.  That is, get out of breath.  Sometimes I go on the treadmill, though the joints are beginning to complain.  It’s as easily done walking up a hill, or indeed in the pool.  I keep exercising because I don’t want to develop atrial fibrillation.  Then I’d have to go on an anticoagulant, and no doubt the medics would find good cause to put me on a suite of antihypertensives, statins, and medications for “pre-diabetes”.  I would be treated for a whole series of conditions I do not have.  I have a deep distrust of the medical profession. 

Look out!  I struggle to articulate.  I mean, stop navel-gazing.  (Is that what this is?)  I need to do something that is not inward-looking, but rather communal, collegiate, outgoing, even altruistic.  Here, I have a bad track record.  On the last two committees on which I served, I lasted two hours before I resigned.  I guess I’m not a committee man.  Sometimes I try to salve my conscience by reminding myself that I am retired, and that I spent my professional life tending the sick and needy.  But it doesn’t really work. 

Still, at the end of the day, maybe the thing to do is to identify a vocation, that which you are called upon to do, and then to do it with all your heart and all your might.  I’d better get on with the epistolatory novel.  Love, and do as you will.                       

I once attended a lecture given by an expert in stroke management who asked the audience what was the definition of a transient ischaemic attack (TIA).  Somebody volunteered a traditional definition, that it was a “cerebrovascular accident” (there’s an archaic term) whose symptoms and signs resolved completely within 24 hours.  “Too long,” said the lecturer.  Somebody else suggested resolution within one hour.  “Too long.”  “We give in,” said the audience.  The lecturer said, “Three minutes, four at the most.”

It makes sense.  We know that the success of cardiopulmonary resuscitation in the context of cardiac arrest drops off drastically with each passing minute of delay.  A neuron deprived of oxygen will die in a few minutes.  Therefore a TIA that lasts longer than a few minutes is not a TIA; it is a stroke.  The deficit may be subtle, but it will be there.  Nature may be said to be kinder to us in the context of myocardial infarction.  Heart muscle deprived of oxygen will survive for longer.  But “time is muscle”.  We talk here of “the golden hour”. 

I thought of this on Friday when a retired GP told me she had been with a patient who was clearly suffering a heart attack.  She phoned for an ambulance.  She came up against a call handler who was clearly working through an algorithm.  “Is the patient conscious and breathing?”  “Look.  I’m a doctor.  The patient is having a heart attack and needs a blue light ambulance immediately.”  “Is the patient conscious and breathing?”

In the event, the golden hour elapsed without the ambulance arriving, and the patient died.

This story has become painfully familiar.  Sometimes an episode like this is described as an “anecdote”, as if it were some kind of amusing after dinner entertainment.  But the anecdotes mount up.  Just before the lockdown I was in a restaurant in Glasgow when somebody collapsed.  I phoned for an ambulance.  Four times.  But the ambulance never came.  It was a Saturday evening and they were too busy.  Earlier this year I tended a patient who had collapsed in the street late one evening.  Another 999 call, for an ambulance that never came.

What’s the problem?  I’m told that the ambulances convey patients to hospital, but cannot offload them, because the hospital is full.  There is no room in the inn.  So the patient stays in the ambulance, parked at the hospital’s front door, until space is found.  The patient in the ambulance is said to be in an environment which is “safe”.  That may be so, but it is the next patient out in the community who is not safe.  The ambulance is out of action because, in turn, in-patients cannot be discharged via the hospital’s back door, because there is no viable social care service.  So the entire system is constipated.  I’m reminded of a piece of whimsy from the number theorists.  If a hotel has an infinite number of rooms filled by an infinite number of guests, can the hotel accommodate another guest?  Yes.  You move the guest from Room 1 to Room 2, and the guest from Room 2 to Room 3 (or is it 4? – a subtlety that eludes me), and so on, thus freeing up Room 1.  Actually, you can accommodate an infinite number of new guests this way.  However, hospitals are not like this hotel because the capacity is finite.  You really need to discharge people, but it seems that hospitals are like the Hotel California, or Heartbreak Hotel, from which there is no escape.

An immediate, makeshift solution to the ambulance problem seems obvious; you create an emergency holding bay which mirrors the safe environment of the ambulance.  Why has this not been done?  I can only assume that hospital managers don’t consider that something adverse happening out in the community is their problem. 

I’m intrigued by the lack of a sense of urgency that is often shared by people occupying senior roles in many walks of life.  You certainly see the same thing in the justice system.  It does not appear to bother purveyors of justice, that justice delayed is justice denied.  Here, a police investigation has been rumbling on for years now concerning certain alleged financial irregularities within the Scottish National Party.  Operation Branchform.  (For some reason I keep wanting to call it Operation Trench Foot.)  A report has been, or perhaps shortly will be, or perhaps never will be, submitted to the Procurator Fiscal.  It sits there, static, like an ambulance parked outside the Emergency Department; or like a mobile home parked beside a suburban garden lawn in which has been pitched a tent of the sort you see when forensic scientists start digging up the bodies.

But sometimes, when the Establishment gets a fright, they move with extraordinary rapidity.  When there was civil unrest earlier this year following a series of murders at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class, summary justice saw the perpetrators tried, found guilty, sentenced, and jailed, almost overnight.  National emergencies call for quick action.  In 1982, when Argentina invaded the Falklands, a cruise ship, the SS Uganda, was commandeered in the Mediterranean, emptied of school children, sailed to Gibraltar, and converted into a hospital ship virtually over the course of a weekend. 

But when it comes to the constipated NHS with its protracted waiting times, outside ED in the short term, or on an elective surgical waiting list in the long term, while people certainly get exercised, the great and the good don’t seem much bothered.  Yes, the politicians knock spots off one another, but they don’t really have any original ideas, and sadly, the medical profession has not offered much by way of leadership.

With respect to the queuing ambulances, I believe that hospitals need to be “front loaded”.  Patients should not be transferred to some diminutive, miserable “Cas”, but rather to an extensive and well equipped, well-staffed Department of Emergency Medicine which should be the hub of the hospital.  All medicine is acute. 

I once wrote into the Herald to say that I thought that Emergency Medicine and Acute Medicine (two putatively disparate specialities) should dump the silo mentality, bury the hatchet, and amalgamate.  Some wag wrote in to say the newly formed specialty would be the Scottish College Royal of Emergency & Acute Medicine, or SCREAM.  Well in a way that’s quite funny, but you know, it betrays a profoundly British sense of cynicism and hopelessness.  How often do I hear it?  That’s pie in the sky.  It’s not going to happen. 

We should make a conjoined, societal New Year’s Resolution, to dump negativity.  There’s nothing worthy that cannot be achieved, if men and women of good faith set their minds to it.  But, especially in medicine, time is of the essence.  Carpe diem.          

My Autobiography

Charles Chaplin

(The Bodley Head, 1964)

Meeting Churchill, A Life in 90 Encounters

Sinclair McKay

(Viking, 2023)

I often notice when reading two apparently unconnected books in parallel, that there is some point of intersection, that one book informs the other, and vice versa. 

I picked up the handsome, hardback first edition of Chaplin’s autobiography in a second hand bookshop last week.  I can’t say I ever found Charlie Chaplin on film, in his persona as the tramp, terribly amusing.  Maybe humour – think of these clunky cartoon captions in nineteenth century Punch magazines – doesn’t travel well through time.  I saw the Richard Attenborough biopic, Chaplin, and again it didn’t make much impression.

But Charles Chaplin, the autobiographer, is completely fascinating.  You could hardly conceive of a more starkly contrasted rags-to-riches story, from a childhood of extreme poverty in late nineteenth century London, through the harsh grinding struggle in theatrical Vaudeville.  This was hardly alleviated by a move to the United States.  But then came the rise of the silent movies in the motion picture industry.  He moved to LA, and might have continued to struggle, but for the fact that the movers and shakers of that world began to notice that Charlie Chaplin was box office.  Then he was moving in a world of fantastic glamour, the world of Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, and socialising with august luminaries like Melba, Paderewski, Nijinsky and Pavlova, and later Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Heifetz, Shaw, Thomas Mann, Churchill…  And of course, William Randolph Hearst.  Hearst’s enormous pile on the west coast sounds even more surreal than the Xanadu depicted in Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. 

Then of course the talkies came in, and Chaplin realised that the tramp could not be given a voice.  It would change his persona.  The talkies signalled the twilight of Chaplin’s career on screen, and his attention shifted more towards directing.  The world was changing in the 1930s, in more ways than one.  Then came the rise of the extreme right in Germany, leading eventually to the Second World War.  This is where the book really takes off.  Chaplin was always – hardly surprising considering his humble origins – left-leaning.  When Hitler attacked Communist Russia on June 22^nd 1941 in Operation Barbarossa, Chaplin had sympathies with the Russian people and was advocating the opening of a second front even before Pearl Harbour.  It was from this point that the USA began to harbour the suspicion that he was a Communist.  In the 1950s, during the Cold War, America fell out of love with Charlie Chaplin.  Inevitably, he fell foul of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.  People were out to get him, on a variety of fronts.  He had to get out, hiding in his cabin on the Queen Elizabeth as it left New York for Europe, waiting until the pilot disembark, lest the Feds slap him with a court summons.  He made it.  He settled in Switzerland with his beautiful young wife Oona, daughter of Eugene O’Neill, and lived happily ever after. 

The point of intersection with Churchill is of course that they met frequently.  Churchill was a fan.  Sinclair McKay’s is a clever idea, to see the biography –  yet another one – of Churchill through the prism of 90 encounters with other people, 90, presumably, being one for each year of his life.  In fact Charlie Chaplin is mentioned in despatches twice, in 1929, and then in 1956.  He first met Churchill in Marion Davies’ beach-house when they were introduced to one another by William Randolph Hearst.  They met frequently in Hollywood, and subsequently in London, and at Chartwell.  Chaplin was then due to meet Gandhi.  It may be said that Churchill’s and Chaplin’s political differences caused some strain. 

In 1956 they met in the Savoy Grill, in London.  Churchill had resigned from his second premiership the previous year.  On this occasion, Chaplin was about to meet Khrushchev.  There is again a sense of strain, a frigid politeness.

It seems to me there is an irony, and a paradox, in the way these two individuals expressed political views at different times, that landed them both in some hot water.  Chaplin and Churchill both supported Russia in 1941, at a time when many people both in the UK and the US wished that Germany and Russia should be allowed to knock spots off one another.  Chaplin espoused a second front, but Churchill, mindful of the trench warfare of the western front in the First War was more circumspect, much to Stalin’s fury.  But he had rather go for the “soft underbelly”, through North Africa and Italy.  That policy was also not without risk.  Churchill might well have thought of a similar strategy he advocated a quarter century before when he was First Lord of the Admiralty, leading to the catastrophe of the Dardanelles, and Gallipoli. 

Then in 1946 President Truman invited Churchill, now out of office, to Fulton Missouri to give a speech, not knowing what Churchill was going to say.  This of course was the famous “Iron Curtain” speech which might be said to have signalled the start of the Cold War.  Here, Chaplin was on the side of the US because he did not think this speech was helpful.  In the US at that time, Uncle Joe was in good odour after the great patriotic victory, and people thought, again, that Churchill was a sabre-rattling war-monger.  So on the one hand, Chaplin was essentially forced out of the US because he sided with Russia, and on the other, Churchill was black-balled because he did not.  It’s all a question of timing.

When I was about nine years old, my father gave me a present, either a birthday or a Christmas present – can’t remember which – of a typewriter. It was an ancient office Barlock that weighed a ton. I think it was being thrown out of the Chief Constable’s Office in the City of Glasgow Police, where he worked, and he got it for £1. It was, and remains, the best present I have ever received. It was astute of him. He knew I had a fascination with words, and I loved “composition”, an opportunity every Friday afternoon in Primary School to wax eloquent in prose. On many other occasions as a present he would give me, and my many cousins, a book. When I won a prize at the end of Primary School he suggested that I ask for Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, a tome I still possess. He had a friend, one Elphinstone Dalglish, who loved exuberant language; he described any form of humbug, or waffle, as “a farrago of heterogeneous irrelevancies”. For better or worse, I collected expressions like that.

I got quite adept on the Barlock typewriter. I was quite fast, though I can’t say I could touch-type. But I started writing stories. They were of course extremely derivative. They were modelled on Ian Fleming’s Bond novels, and I can blame my father for that as well. He borrowed Dr No from Partick Borough Library. I opened it, read that first astonishing sentence, and was immediately hooked.

Punctually at six o’clock the sun set with a last yellow flash behind the Blue Mountains, a wave of violet shadow poured down Richmond Road, and the crickets and tree frogs in the fine gardens began to zing and tinkle.

Waow!

I suppose it was unusual at the time for somebody to be so familiar with the QWERTY keyboard at such a young age. You might say now that I was way ahead of my time. But no. It really was a different age, the age of carbon paper and Gestetners. Now anybody with a mobile phone is familiar with a QWERTY keyboard, but may be less skilled in calligraphy, or what used to be called “real writing”. It could even be that the habit of putting pen to paper is dying out. The scrawl has given way to the scroll. Perhaps paper will become obsolete, as people spend untold hours staring at smart phones, ipads, and computer screens. I resist this. I love the ritual of reading the physical entity of my broadsheet morning paper.

Talking of The Herald, I wrote in on Friday. Two articles caught my eye, and they seemed to me to share a common thematic thread. A software company supplying IT systems for GPs has gone into administration. Meanwhile another company is currently wooing the NHS with promises of the enormous potential benefits of robotics. I was moved to write.

Dear Sir,

I don’t think our GPs should get too upset if they can’t transition from EMIS to Vision (Software supplier to Scots doctors goes bust, Herald, December 13th). Personally while in practice I was never so happy as when the computers crashed. We never really needed them. All a GP needs is a quiet room, and the ability to take a history and conduct an examination.

Of much more concern is the latest threat to the sanctity of the medical consultation – robotics (Robotics could transform our NHS, Agenda, Herald December 13th). Robotics are “the arms and legs of AI” according to the Tony Blair Institute, in delivering “real world impact”. This is a mirror image of the rise of Information Technology 30 years ago. It’s not that a doctor is seeking a technical solution to a clinical problem; rather that a new technology is seeking a market place. AI has its baleful eye on the NHS. It’s a hard sell. If we don’t embrace the new technology, we will be overtaken by competitors. That sort of argument is why teenagers are addicted to smart phones – fear of missing out.

But do we really want the kettle of an isolated, elderly patient to inform an enormous data base that it has not recently boiled, so as to send a robot round to make a cup of tea? That sounds like hell on earth to me. We are not robots. I don’t doubt they have a place; some of them are good at certain surgeries, albeit under supervision. But what the NHS really needs to invest in is people, doctors, nurses, and allied professionals who don’t think algorithmically but who utilise knowledge and skill with wisdom and compassion, who adopt a technology when it is needed, but will, I trust, refuse to have one imposed upon them.

Yours sincerely…

So there you go. All these years later, still typing away. We will see if it appears in tomorrow’s Herald. I have this theory that I continually write to the papers because I have a perverse desire to be castigated, to be told to wake up and smell the coffee. Dr Campbell’s latest Luddite tirade is nothing more than a farrago of heterogeneous irrelevancies…

I had a brief interchange with a church organist in Aberdeen on Saturday evening.  He, on hearing that I am a viola player, immediately told me a viola joke.  But I have had it up to here with viola jokes.  So, to use a grotesque phrase currently in vogue, I “pushed back”.  What a horrible, pussy-footing expression.  You hear it on Any Questions, when panellists disagree politically.  “I would push back on that.”  Why not just disagree?  Not that you are likely to alter your opponent’s mind set.  On the contrary, they are most likely – to use another ghastly contemporary expression – to “double down”. 

Anyway, I pushed back on the viola joke.  “Viola jokes are finished.  Gone.  History.  Kaputt.”  But no! The organist doubled down, and told me another, particularly tasteless one.  Well, I can utilise tired, outworn clichés as well as the next man.  I reminded him of the Church of Scotland minister who once asked, “What’s the difference between an organist and an international terrorist?  You can negotiate with a terrorist.” 

I can’t remember ever hearing a viola joke that made me laugh.  A member of the RSNO, recalling my brief professional career, asked me, “When were you in with us?”  I replied that it was so long ago that, at the time, viola jokes had not been invented.  He smiled and said, “That in itself is a viola joke.”

People in minority groups are often subjected to so-called “banter”.  And the viola section can certainly be a minority group.  I heard Sir Simon Rattle on the radio the other day saying that as a student he put on Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony with one viola.  As a species we can appear as endangered as the tenors are in the choir.  But as a viola player I no longer feel vulnerable.  That is because I now realise that the viola section is the power house of the orchestra.  Cinderella has found that the glass slipper fits.  I’m no longer offended by viola jokes.  I’m impatient with them, and dismissive of them.  I feel sorry for the purveyors of the jokes because they do not know that they are tin-eared.   

Now talking of pushing back and doubling down, this is the time of year when lexicographers announce the latest linguistic trends, in particular the word of the year.  In Germany the Jugendliche have gone for “Aura”.  Aura is cool, the charisma perhaps associated with movie stars and rock legends.  But German youth now apply it more generally.  It has become a currency.  “Thank you for helping me out.  Plus 50 Aura to you!  I slipped on the stair and smashed a cup and saucer.  Minus 500 Aura to me!”

Here, the word of the year is apparently “brat”.  In its restyling, it lacks a pejorative sense.  A brat is a mover and shaker.  He is looked on with a degree of admiration, perhaps envy.  He is somewhat outrageous.  Wicked!  Not likely to be a viola player.  Thank heavens.  But I’m not convinced.  A brat is still a brat.            

I told a musical joke in my German class at the Goethe Institut a couple of weeks ago.  I’m not very good at telling jokes.  Like George VI in The King’s Speech, “Timing is not my strong point.”  But it seemed to go down well.  I hardly know why I am embarking on this iteration, because it was an audio-joke, therefore this is not so much the gag itself, as an explanation thereof.

Beethoven would fly frequently into terrible rages, and if his soup was cold, he would throw it over his long-suffering butler.  Eventually the butler had had enough and said, “Maestro, I can’t stand it any longer.  Too much Sturm und Drang.  I resign.”  Beethoven muttered, “What is this ill tiding that I can barely hear, like the distant, fateful tolling of a bell?”

“I quit.”

“You can’t.  You must stay.  You see, you are my inspiration.”

The butler sarcastically and sardonically harrumphed, “Huh – huh – huh hmmmm…”  (as in quaver rest followed by three quaver G naturals followed by one minim E flat).

It’s the way I tell ’em.  You had to be there.               

Saturday, St Andrews Day, was the 150^th anniversary of the birth of Winston Churchill.  I didn’t hear much about it.  Maybe the British Empire has fallen into such a state of disrepute that people would rather brush it all under the carpet.  But surely they can’t cancel Winston.  Anybody who can write as sublimely as he could, can’t be all bad.

Towards the end of his life, increasingly frail and decrepit, he once said, “I have done my work.  I should be allowed to depart.”  I always thought of this as a plea to Mother Nature, or indeed the Almighty, to let him go, but in view of Friday’s debate in Westminster, perhaps Winston was still thinking legislatively.  For on Friday, the Assisted Dying Bill survived its first reading (or was it the second?) in the House of Commons.  Irrespective of one’s point of view, the tenor of the debate seems to have gone down well with the general public.  “Ya-Boo” politics were put to one side.  People on both sides of the debate were listened to in silence, and with respect.  The debate was expansive; many members spoke movingly.  In the end, when the “ayes” had it by a margin that was substantial if not overwhelming, there were no partisan cheers; rather respectful silence.  This, said the parliamentary reporters, was Westminster at its best.

That seems to me to say more about the normal state of affairs in Westminster, than about this particular debate.  It should surely be de rigueur, that participants in any debate should listen to one another respectfully, and in silence, not only out of courtesy, but out of genuine curiosity, and on the off-chance that they may hear an argument they have not considered, which might persuade them to change their minds.  Friday’s debate was unusual in that it ended with a “conscience vote”.  Nobody was under the whip.  The members could vote according to the dictates of their own conscience. 

But wait a minute.  Shouldn’t every vote be a “conscience vote”?  Is there any matter that comes up before parliament that is not a matter of conscience?  Whatever the issue might be, be it about the economy, health, education, defence, is there any issue that would justify an MP voting against that which they thought was right?  Why would an MP wish to vote for something they didn’t believe in?  Party discipline, I suppose.  Esprit de corps.  The whips, or shadow whips, tell the members, on one side of the house or the other, how to vote.

Much of Friday’s debate centred on the vexed issue of coercion.  Relatives of a terminally ill patient might apply pressure on the patient to request assisted dying.  This could be a blatant attempt to acquire the patient’s assets.  Most likely the coercion would be subtle, a hint, a gentle reminder that the patient had become a burden.  Champions of the bill insist that safeguards are in place.  Two doctors and a judge will ensure that coercion does not take place.  But what if it is the doctor who exhibits coercive behaviour?  There is the possibility that the assisted dying option would be proposed to patients by GPs.  A patient is given a fatal diagnosis with prognosis of life expectancy less than six months.  What are my options, doc?  Apparently the GP is free to discuss available therapies, or indeed absence of therapy, but will be prohibited from raising the assisted dying option, unless the patient first raises it.  Some GPs are not very happy about that.  Why should they be muzzled, gagged, in what they may or may not be permitted to discuss?    

I think there is something profoundly ironic in the notion that Members of Parliament should pontificate on the subject of coercion.  I can hardly think of a more coerced group in our society.  You will vote according to the three line whip, or if you don’t, you will lose the whip, not to mention the ministerial stipend, and the ministerial car.  Perhaps there will be added coercion from one’s spouse.  How are we going to afford the children’s school fees?  Those parliamentarians who told us on Friday that rigorous safeguards will be in place don’t seem to be aware that they themselves are the victims of coercion.  But that is the subtle thing about coercion.  It is invisible.  Coercive behaviour (Latin coercere: to shut in) is at its most effective, and harmful, when the victims are not aware that they are trapped.  It’s the obverse of the coin of Richard Lovelace’s “Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.”  I’ve just finished reading Alexei Navalny’s extraordinary memoir, Patriot (The Bodley Head, 2024).  Having survived an assassination attempt, and having received treatment in Germany, he returned to Russia fully aware of the possibility, indeed probability, that he would be sent to jail.  He endured the harshest conditions, helped by memorising Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.  Incarcerated, he remained to the end in some profound sense free, because he refused to be coerced.    

Anyway, with the start of the new week, no doubt the ya-boo politics will return.  Personally I can’t stand it.  When John Prescott, erstwhile Deputy Prime Minister died last week, I heard an anecdote about what he had to put up with in the House of Commons.  He had a working class background and had been, before politics, a ship’s steward.  When he entered the chamber, the posh toffs on the other benches would taunt him: “Another gin and tonic, Manuel!”

Says it all, really.    

At the tail-end of the 9.00 am news on BBC Radio 4 this morning, it was announced that visitors to the Kelpies in Falkirk would henceforth be able to enter the two sculptures, climb 100 feet to the top, and thus get a horse’s-eye view of Helix Park.  It was perhaps an unusual item for the national news, but it just goes to show that the kelpies have a national, and even international reputation.

You see them to good advantage from the M9, situated at the confluence of the Carron River and the Forth and Clyde Canal, between Falkirk and Grangemouth, two enormous equine heads wrought in steel, one looking downwards in repose, the other keening to the sky.  They are particularly impressive at night, when illuminated.  They were conceived by the sculptor Andy Scott, designed on a pair of smaller models or maquettes, of scale 1:10, and constructed in 2013.  It is said that they celebrate the role of horses in Scottish industry, pulling wagons, ploughs, barges, and coal ships.  Apparently they celebrate two famous Clydesdales, Duke and Baron.  But you might say that their precise location at this point on the Forth and Clyde Canal could represent the end of conventional horse-power and the dawning of the industrial revolution. It was here at the beginning of the nineteenth century that a prototype steamboat, the Charlotte Dundas, was successfully tested, hauling two 70 ton barges along a distance of 19 miles, against a headwind and at a speed of 1.9 mph.  If you walk half a mile east from the kelpies along the canal towpath to the confluence with the Carron River, you can read, on various plaques as you go, all about the history surrounding these developments. 

Some people are a bit snooty about the kelpies, rather, I fancy, the way people are snooty about the paintings of Jack Vettriano.  They’re quite commonplace, don’t you know; hardly great art.  They attract the undiscerning masses.  Well, I’m one of the undiscerning masses.  I visit quite often.  I usually park by Falkirk football stadium, cross a busy road into Helix Park, and stroll by lovely marshland and waterways to the base of the enormous structures.  There is a 10 kilometre circular walk you can do, from the kelpies to Rosebank distillery, thence to Falkirk Wheel, another inspiring feat of engineering that elevates barges between the Union Canal and the Forth & Clyde Canal.  From there you walk to Callendar House, in Callendar Park, before returning to the kelpies in Helix Park.

A trip to Helix Park is a favourite outing for parents with young children, which is rather ironic considering the mythological provenance of the kelpie.  It is a malignant water sprite, specifically inhabiting lochs in Scotland, most famously Loch Ness; but every sizeable loch in Scotland has its kelpie legend.  The nearest one to me is the Lake of Menteith, the only “lake” in Scotland.  The Lake of Menteith is the scene of a rather gruesome episode in Rob Roy, but the loch in The Lady of the Lake is I believe Loch Katrine.   

He watched the wheeling eddies boil,

Till from their foam his dazzled eyes

Beheld the River Demon rise…

And in The Bride of Lammermoor, there is a treacherous quicksand named “Kelpie’s Flow”.  Who knows, maybe the Loch Ness monster is a kelpie.

Kelpies drag humans, particularly children and young women, into the water, devour them, and cast their entrails up on to the water’s edge.  They have the capacity to extend the length of their back, so as to accommodate several children at once.  One child touched a kelpie and found he could not remove his hand as he was being dragged into the water.  He only survived by cutting his own finger off.  The name kelpie possibly comes from the Gaelic cailpeach, meaning a heifer or colt.  It appears in the 1750s, spelled kaelpie, in an ode by William Collins.  A kelpie is a shape-shifting sprite that can adopt human form, its hooves retained, but reversed in direction.  Robert Burns may have had this in mind in his Address to the Deil of 1786.

When thowes dissolve the snawy hoord,

An float the inglin icy boord,

Then, water-kelpies haunt the foord,

By your direction,

An ‘nighted trav’llers are allur’d

To their destruction. 

Parents used to warn children about kelpies, in order to keep them away from dangerous waterways.  There is a sign on the edge of the Milngavie Reservoir just north of Glasgow – another popular haunt – stating rather sombrely, “Deaths have been known to occur in reservoirs”.  Maybe it would be more effective if it said, “A kelpie lives here.”  Kelpies can pose as handsome young men – a warning which, one way or another, continues to be impressed upon young ladies.    

So maybe I should take pause before accepting the invitation to go inside a kelpie.  You never know, I might find myself embroiled in a kind of reciprocal Trojan horse myth.  The hazard is not an enemy egressing from within, rather a siren-like enticement to enter, and encounter who knows what?                         

There is something comical, indeed farcical (but for the gravity of the general situation), about some of President-elect Trump’s proposed political appointments.  Health is to be run by a vaccine sceptic, and energy by a climate change sceptic.  It reminds me of the inappropriateness of some of the appointments in Stalag Luft III, at least according to the film of The Great Escape.  The chief tunneller had claustrophobia, and the chief forger was blind.  Even the illustrious Herr Bartlett, Big X himself, outside the wire, was a security risk.  Richard Hannay, in one of John Buchan’s thrillers, passes a wry remark about the British military and British Intelligence’s absurd propensity for placing round pegs in square holes.

Another unusual political appointment is that of Elon Musk, charged with the task of doing away with red tape in Washington.  I always get nervous about people who want to get rid of red tape.  All this bumf, they say, it’s health and safety gone mad, I tell you.  Getting rid of red tape usually turns out to be an attack on legislation put in place to defend the poor and vulnerable.

Mr Musk famously bought Twitter at vast expense and then rebranded it as X.  I have no idea what it means to buy something like a social media platform.  It would be like buying a cloud, an atmospheric area of cumulonimbus.  But a lot of people are shunning X, because its content has apparently become too toxic.  Good for them.  Besides, I always think it’s a good idea to shun any goods or services which make any one individual, or group of individuals, a vast sum of money.        

Talking of bizarre appointments, there is a recurring theme in the bible about God calling the most unlikely people to fulfil equally unlikely tasks.  Moses was inarticulate, David was an adulterer and a murderer, Peter, called upon to be a rock, had already shown himself liable to cave in under pressure.  The underlying theme here is that God moves in a mysterious way, and that if you get the call, you must cast aside any personal doubts and misgivings, and put your trust in Him. Don’t allow yourself to succumb to Impostor Syndrome.  If you are called upon to be a witness, don’t worry about what you are going to say.  You are a vessel, a conduit.  The script will be given to you. 

Well, I’m all for Faith, Hope, & Love, but I prefer to back them up with 10,000 hours of practice, preparation, and rehearsal.  You really ought not to entrust somebody with a huge task, when they are really not up to the job.  My impression of Mr Trump is that, basically, he is winging it.  That is not to say that he is not in many ways a shrewd operator.  He knows how to work a crowd; well, his own crowd.  He can be charming if he feels so inclined.  He certainly knows how to win a political contest in a world which, by his own admission, is not very nice.  But he’s at heart a game show host.  He thrives on entertainment value.  He operates on the surface. He is a superficialist.  I don’t believe I have ever seen him subjected to an in-depth interview at which, under the forensic probing of a Robin Day or a David Frost or an Eddie Mair, the BBC used to excel.

Mr Trump appeared to enjoy his visit with Mr Biden in the White House, as part of the transition of power.  He had a nice day.  He was very courteous to the incumbent president, whom he had lambasted during the presidential election campaign, as unfit for office.  He did the same with Mrs Clinton in 2016, after he had defeated her.  He was terribly gracious.  He thanked her for her public service.  “And I mean that most sincerely.”  Previously, he had wanted to lock her up.  In Victory, Magnanimity, Winston used to say.  But this is something different.  It’s just a blatant disregard for the truth.  You say whatever is politically expedient.                

Meanwhile, President Biden has given the green light to President Zelenskyy, allowing him to fire US rockets deep into Russian territory.  It’s an abrupt change of policy, a volte face. Why now?  Could it have something to do with the fact that the President-elect has reportedly been on the phone to Mr Putin?  It is said that Mr Trump asked Mr Putin not to escalate the war in Ukraine.  But Russia has just launched the largest drone and missile attack on Ukraine in the last three months – 90 drones and 120 missiles – targeting energy infrastructure, as winter looms.  The attacks reached Western Ukraine, and Poland scrambled its fighter jets.  That Poland should be extremely nervous about Russian military activity on its eastern border, is very understandable.

Sir Keir Starmer is currently in Brazil, urging member states of the G20 to show solidarity with Ukraine.  But people in the Trump camp want a negotiation.  Some of them address President Zelenskyy with great condescension.  You can forget Crimea.  Crimea’s gone.  But they don’t share the experience, and the collective memory of the European continent.  Civil war aside, apart from their War of Independence, Pearl Harbour, and 9/11, they’ve never been attacked.  Negotiating with Mr Putin will surely be like an episode of The Apprentice.

Well, it is better to jaw-jaw than to war-war.  But I have a horrible feeling that Mr Trump, alleged master of the art of the deal, will be no match, even, perhaps especially, at the negotiating table, for Mr Putin.         

When I heard the result of the US Presidential election last Wednesday morning, I experienced a vague sense of free-floating anxiety.  I was surprised that the result had come through so quickly.  My initial thought was that it was fake news.  The polls said it was going to be close.  We might not get a result for days.  Surely there would be accusations of voting irregularity.  Remember the “hanging chads” in 2000.  Maybe the losing side would contest the result.  There is, after all, a precedent. 

But no.  It was all done and dusted even by 9 am our time.  The magical 270 college votes had been achieved.  270 indicates due west in compass degrees.  270+ is, as it were, west of sunset.  In fact, as has subsequently become evident, Mr Trump got 312 college votes, and his (sic) Republican Party has gained control of the Senate, and at time of writing perhaps the House of Representatives.  He has won all seven “battleground” states.  The result is not a landslide, yet it is unequivocal.  The Democrats were silent for a while, perhaps absorbing the shock.  But they eventually conceded defeat.  They did not incite anybody to storm the Capitol.  Mr Trump will be “47”.

The reaction of most people I’ve been in contact with here in the UK has been one of dismay and disbelief, accompanied by a sardonic burst of hysterical laughter at life’s absurdity.  How could the Americans possibly vote into the highest office in the land a convicted felon who in 2020, it is said, tried to find a whole lot of votes that weren’t actually there, and then, allegedly, mounted an insurrection in the very centre of US power?

I just shrugged and texted my friends, “Keep calm, and carry on.”  The crucial thing is, from this side of the Pond, the USA is a foreign country.  None of us has a vote.  Winston said that we are two different nations divided by a common language.  He had a right to say that, because he was half American.  From May 10^th 1940, when he became Prime Minister, right up to the Japanese attack on PearI Harbour on December 7^th, 1941, he tried to get the USA to enter the war.  Roosevelt was sympathetic, an isolationist Congress less so.  Financial and military aid was forthcoming, but it was at a price, a quid pro quo.  Lend-Lease was a hard-nosed bargain, the loan of some obsolete war ships, largely a symbolic gesture, in return for the lease of some outposts of the British Empire.  The debt incurred by the UK was only finally paid off in 2006.  In the end, the USA only entered the war in Europe when Hitler declared war on them.  We seem to have been heavily reliant on the support, nay patronage, of the US ever since.  Every time a new Commander-in-Chief is installed, we get on the phone, like an anxious lover, to make sure the “special relationship” is still intact.  

I was always aware that the US is a foreign country, ever since I first visited in 1982.  I went to New York.  I remember I saw Evita on Broadway.  On a street corner outside the theatre, somebody offered to take my blood pressure, while a passer-by took his llama for an evening walk.  I hired a car and drove north through New York state, the Adirondacks, to Thousand Island Country, and hence Canada.  In Canada I knew I was much nearer home.  Before I re-entered the US through Buffalo, the Canadians looked at me quizzically and asked, “Why do you want to go back down there?”  About 30 years later I had an almost identical exchange at the Portugal/Spain border when, having landed at Faro, I hired a car with the intention of crossing into Spain.  It was the same question, posed by a smaller country contiguous with a larger:  “Why do you want to go there?”

Mr Trump has said he will end the war in Ukraine in a single day, with a single phone call.  Today, apparently, it transpires that he has already made that call, to Mr Putin.  Russia denies it.  But if Mr Trump made the call, that seems extraordinary.  He is not yet the President, so presumably he was making the call as a private citizen.  No officials were keeping a record.  Mr Trump sounds very confident.  I seem to recall that Mr Chamberlain was similarly confident, when he met the Führer at Berchtesgaden.  I hope Mr Trump has better luck.  But blessed are the Peacemakers. 

Today is Remembrance Day.  My free-floating anxiety continues.  Mr Trump is completely unpredictable.  What will 2025 bring?  I am afraid we live in interesting times.    

In the Dunblane Chamber Orchestra we are rehearsing Beethoven Symphony No. 3, the Eroica.  It is said to be the symphony that completely revolutionised music in the early part of the nineteenth symphony.  It is unusually long, about fifty minutes, and unusually fraught, full of Sturm und Drang.  Beethoven planned to dedicate the symphony to Napoleon, who I guess he initially thought was a man of the people.  But then Napoleon crowned himself Emperor and Beethoven realised he was just like all the other movers and shakers – in it for himself.  So in a fit of rage (it is said) he scored Napoleon’s name out of the score’s frontispiece so violently that he tore right through the paper.  This autograph, this iconic memorial to disgust, survives, and remains to be seen.  Some people think that the second movement, the funeral march, stands as a memorial to what might have been.  It is a remarkable piece of music to play, or even to attempt to play.  Central to the movement, its fugue seems to explore heights, or depths, of emotion quite unprecedented.

The notion of music exploring, and expressing a response to contemporary events, is examined in a book by the critic and historian Jeremy Eichler, Time’s Echo, Music, Memory, and the Second World War (Faber & Faber, 2023).  Eichler makes the startling proposition that music might serve as a kind of cultural memory.  Music is history, a unique way of recording and defining the past.  He looks at the response of four composers to the events of the Second World War – Strauss, Schoenberg, Britten, and Shostakovich.  In particular, Eichler concentrates on four major works – Strauss’s Metamorphosen, Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Britten’s War Requiem, and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13.  These four composers all had an uneasy relationship with the authorities, and the society in which they moved, and worked.  They were all outsiders, who might easily have been destroyed, but for the fact that their celebrity and their pre-eminence offered them a modicum of protection.  Strauss survived the Third Reich, and also managed to escape the subsequent censure of the allies, in a way that Furtwängler didn’t quite.  His relationship to Nazi high officialdom remains ambiguous.  Schoenberg’s opposition to Nazidom was entirely unambiguous, and he had to get out.  In the USA, as a composer he was revered, but perhaps not loved.  Serial music has yet to “catch on”.  He did not fulfil his ambition of having his tunes, or more precisely tone rows, whistled in the street.  Nevertheless, the highly unlikely world premiere of A Survivor from Warsaw, given by an amateur orchestra and a choir of cowboys in Albuquerque, was a huge success.  The piece was immediately encored in the way that, for example, the allegretto of Beethoven 7 was immediately encored.  Perhaps twelve tone music had finally found its home, depicting episodes of utter degradation.

Britten was homosexual and pacifist.  But that wasn’t why he felt tortured; rather it was the combination of these traits with his wish to be conventional, a pillar of the community.  He set the words of a First World War poet while commemorating an event that occurred during the Second World War.  Setting “Futility” was perhaps more acceptable when it alluded to events two generations ago.

Shostakovich greatly admired Britten’s War Requiem.  Always at odds with the authorities, he himself famously lived in various apartments, a suitcase packed ready to go, with the expectation that the secret police would call for him in the night.  There was huge pressure on him not to go ahead with the premiere of the 13^th symphony, with its settings of poetry by Yevtushenko, in particular Babi Yar, the dreadful atrocity at Kyiv, whose depiction forms the first movement of the symphony.  The authorities tried to obliterate the memory of Babi Yar, precisely by obliterating the site itself.  But the memory lives on in the poetry, and in the music.  That is the point.

I found myself wondering about contemporary music, and its relationship to the troubled world in which we live, when I attended the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday for a concert of Scandinavian music, part of “Nordic Music Days”, a long-running music festival that has come to Scotland for the first time.  The RSNO were joined for the opening piece by young players from Big Noise Govanhill, an educational enterprise modelled on the Simón Bolívar project in Venezuela.  The concert is being broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Tuesday evening.  It was introduced by Radio 3’s Ian Skelly.  There was a sense of occasion.  We heard music by Lisa Robertson, Errollyn Wallen, (Master of the King’s Music), Rune Glerup (a violin concerto played by Isabelle Faust), Bent Sørensen, Hildur Elísa Jónsdóttir, and Aileen Sweeney.  I think all the composers were present.

It was certainly an interesting, if emotionally somewhat chilly, concert.  And although the audience reception, by contrast, was characteristically Glaswegian and warm, I can’t say I was conscious of any profound sense of emotional rapport which bound us all together.  But then the RSNO played Sibelius 7, and at last, we heard great music.