jamescalumcampbell

Wes Streeting the Health Secretary in Westminster has opened up a national conversation about the future of the NHS.  He is consulting widely – patients, health care professionals, allied professions, ancillary staff, everybody really, for who is not a stakeholder in the NHS?  The consultation will run into the New Year, and lead to the formulation of a ten year plan which will apparently presage the biggest reform of the NHS since its inception in 1948.  The NHS is broken. Mr Streeting has suggested that three broad evolutions are necessary.  Briefly these are: complete the change of data management systems from analogue to digital, change the focus of health care from treatment to prevention, and change the locus of health care from hospital to community.

Mr Streeting does well to consult.  North of the border, I feel a certain detachment from the process, as Health is devolved.  Yet the problems up here, much as, by most parameters, the NHS fares rather better in Scotland than in the other nations of the UK, are largely the same.  The demand outstrips the supply.  In approaching this problem the Health Secretary clearly has some fundamental ideas of his own, but I hope the medical profession in England will be clear, and robust, in providing some leadership.  This is what I would say to Mr Streeting:      

Analogue to digital, as a plan to save the NHS, we can dismiss immediately, because we have been pursuing this false chimera for the last twenty years, and it has been a disaster.  Of course that is not to say that Hi-Tech doesn’t have its uses.  You can’t operate an MRI scanner without a lot of computer power.  But the invention of the MRI scanner was in response to an investigatory and ultimately a therapeutic need.  We needed a technique for imaging that was at once high resolution, non-invasive, and non-toxic.  The scanner responded to the clinical need.  But Information Technology was thrust upon the NHS, just as it was thrust upon other publically funded bodies such as policing, and education.  It was a solution in quest of a problem.  Now, in Artificial Intelligence, we see the same phenomenon.  AI has its doleful eye upon the ailing NHS.  The accumulation of massive amounts of data readily available via hyper-connected systems is the latest NHS panacea.  But the NHS needs to do precisely the opposite, and restore the sanctity of the medical consultation, with its inbuilt confidentiality.  Most of the time, all the doctor needs in order to make an accurate diagnosis is a quiet room, the skills to take a history and undertake an examination, and some tender loving care.  Medicine is an intensely human, one-on-one activity.     

Shifting the focus from treatment to prevention sounds very plausible.  It is said that we don’t have a National Health Service, but rather a National Disease Service.  And prevention is surely better than cure.  That’s true, but it is also a truism.  You could summarise the whole of preventative medicine on a postcard, or on the back of an envelope:

1. Get vaccinated.
2. Don’t smoke.
3. Don’t drink too much.
4. Don’t get overweight.
5. Eat a varied diet.
6. Get plenty of exercise.
7. Get plenty of sleep.
8. Switch off all electronic devices as often as possible.
9. Be sociable.
10. Oh – and whatever else you do, don’t be poor.

To state such recommendations briefly is not to downgrade their importance.  They should be known, and understood, across the community.  In addition to advice directed at the individual, there should also be a societal conversation about such public health issues as the importance of Health & Safety, the imperative need to adhere to the speed limit on the roads, and the inadvisability of resorting to interpersonal violence.  But this is all in the public domain.  Doctors and nurses can, and do, make such recommendations, but prevention cannot supplant their essential role of providing care to the sick and needy, by elucidating accurate pathophysiological diagnoses and initiating appropriate treatment plans.  Like it or not, bad things do happen. 

By contrast, I think the notion of “hospital to community” has merit.  The Royal College of General Practice gives the idea broad support, but rightly points out that if General Practice were to take this on, it would need a bigger portion of the health budget.  A community-based health service is integral to the nascent idea of a National Care Service.  Successive governments have paid lip-service to the notion of an NCS for about a quarter of a century now, but nothing has come of it, undoubtedly because of cost.  At the same time, there has been very little discussion about what a community-based health and social care service would look like.

So how about this for a pilot study?  Let us consider a community of 10,000 souls.  At its heart would be a health centre, with 10 doctors, as well as nursing staff, and various other professions allied to medicine, for example physiotherapy, clinical psychology, and so on.  Some people might consider a doctor-patient ratio of 1/1,000 to be “pie in the sky”.  Yet suppose you were on a cruise ship carrying 1,000 people.  Wouldn’t you want a doctor on board?  Or suppose you had a secondary school with a roll of 1,000 pupils.  Would you not expect at least one of them to wish to become a doctor?  Currently, a doctor might consider a flock of merely 1,000 people to be something of a luxury, but remember the considerable increase in workload that a community-based system would entail.  In many ways, moving the hub of medicine from the hospital to the community would mean that primary care doctors would have to adopt some of the attitudes, and work practices, of hospital doctors.  First off, doctors would have to take back the responsibility for providing 24 hour care, 7 days a week.  With a per capita list of 1,000 patients, they would be unlikely to see more than 100 patients per week.  A full time equivalent (FTE) doctor might see, for example, 25 patients on each of four days, be on-call one night per week, and have a non-clinical day following the night on call, for pursuit of special interests, research, administration, or if necessary to catch up on sleep.  Such a workload would be sustainable in the long term.

The Health Centre would have an in-patient unit.  Actually it would have three in-patient units, comprising a short-stay ward, a care home, and a hospice.  Out of hours, the on-call doctor would be responsible for oversight of the units. 

These are the beginnings of a model of care.  The trouble with political discussion about such issues thus far is that they have been too abstract.  How can they be otherwise if the Health Secretary studied History at Cambridge?  This is why the medical profession needs to provide leadership. 

But how do you fund it?  I’ll leave that to Mr Streeting.           

Speaking as a member of that rapidly dwindling constituency of grey-haired individuals who regularly attend church, I am keenly aware of the financial constraints currently placed upon the Church of Scotland in particular, and no doubt upon every other Christian denomination throughout the nations.  The problem may be summarised in a few words: congregations too small, ministers too few, real estate too vast.  I suppose it all goes back to the Disruption of 1843, when disgruntled parishioners walked out of one church, and built another one round the corner.  There is the gag about the Church of Scotland parishioner who was cast away on a desert island, and lived in solitude for thirty years, until finally rescued by a passing ship.  It was noted he had built a church just off the beach.  “Yes, I attend every Sunday.”  His rescuers had also noted another church on the other side of the island.  “Yes, I built that too.  But I never darken its doors!”

Ministers don’t like to talk about money.  Didn’t Our Lord tell us not to make showy demonstrations of extravagance?  If you want to pray, shut yourself up in a closet.  If you want to give, do so quietly, like the widow, with a couple of mites.  Yet Dunblane Cathedral, or more accurately Dunblane Cathedral, Kilmadock and Blair Drummond Church of Scotland have organised “a review of giving”, quite simply in order to remain financially viable.  Frankly, it would be good if everybody could increase their offering by 25%.  Now there is a very simple way of doing exactly that.  Whatever you give – Gift Aid it.  I am invited to fill in a Gift Aid form.

I have never fancied Gift Aid.  Isn’t it a kind of tax evasion, or at least tax avoidance?  Didn’t Our Lord, again, say “Render under Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s?”  But maybe my problem is that I just don’t understand how it works.  So I Googled it, and printed out the Wikipedia article:

Gift Aid is a UK tax incentive that enables tax-effective giving by individuals to charities in the United Kingdom. 

Well!  That’s just not true.  Gift Aid allows you to divert a portion of your tax burden to a charity of your personal choice, and is therefore a tax disincentive.  A tax disincentive cannot be tax-effective because it lowers the amount of money recouped by HMRC.

How does it work?  Suppose you donate £100 to charity.  If you claim Gift Aid, HMRC assumes you have actually donated £125, which they will tax at the basic rate of 20%.  You are left with 80/100 of £125, which is £100.  The charity can claim £25 from HMRC. 

Suppose you are being taxed at a higher rate, paying 40% tax on part of your income.  The charity claims 20%, and you can also reclaim 20% through your tax return, so that you are only out of pocket by £75.  You can only do this if you are a UK tax payer, and you cannot, perhaps through multiple donations to various charities, exceed your tax bill. 

Am I missing something?  Is it just me, or is this not utter lunacy?  We elect a government, for better or for worse, charged with presenting a budget (next on October 30^th), largely designed to finance public services such as health, education, social services, defence and so on.  Since the election of July 4^th we have been gloomed up about the presence of a £22,000,000,000 “black hole” in public finances, and we have been forewarned that the government will have to make some “difficult decisions”.  We may have to endure another protracted period of “austerity”.

I hate the use of the word “austerity” in this context.  It’s as cold as charity.  It first started appearing around 2010, following the financial crash, when the then chancellor George Osborne discovered another fiscal black hole and told us “We are all in this together.”  That turned out to be, tragically, a falsehood.  In fact, the gap, the gulf, between rich and poor, both here and across the western world generally, has widened, and continues to widen, dramatically.  Here, food banks are commonplace, as is begging on the street.  It is universally recognised that the National Health Service is “broken” (but don’t worry, Wes Streeting will fix it in a decade using AI and “smart” technology, God help us).  The prisons are bursting at the seams.  Winston, when he was Home Secretary said that if you want to evaluate the state of wellbeing of a society, visit the prisons.  He encouraged prisoners’ access to books.  Here and now, even amid life outside, libraries are closing.  I could go on.

Would it not be better drastically to simplify the tax system, such that the government knew how much money they have to spend?  Of course, there is always the possibility that they will spend the money on something grotesque, like Trident.  But that’s democracy for you and, at least up here in Scotland, we should all know what to do about that. So I’m not going to opt for Gift Aid.  But I remain sympathetic to Dunblane Cathedral, so I will ensure the same result.  I’m accustomed to putting £20 cash into the plate.  To use the London East End vernacular, I’ll make it a pony.                              

Kingmaker

Secrets, Lies and the Truth about Five Prime Ministers

Sir Graham Brady

Ithaka Press, 2024

In the publishing world, the fashion for pithy one word titles continues unabated.  I see that Boris’s latest tome is “Unleashed”.  The part of Sir Graham Brady’s memoir devoted to Boris begins with the chapter, “HE’S NOT SANE!”  For Sir Graham, “Kingmaker” implies that as chairman of the backbench 1922 committee he was something of an éminence grise.  But given his modest demeanour, I think Sir Graham wold have denied he held such power.  Indeed, you might understand his book simply as a rather mundane piece of bookkeeping.  He would receive from MPs letters of no confidence in the incumbent prime minister, and lock them away in a safe until their number exceeded that required to trigger a vote.  Or, in the event that the Tory Party were electing a new Prime Minister, he would dutifully announce the number of votes cast by the parliamentary party for each contender, remove the least successful candidate from the ballot paper, and move on sequentially to the next vote, until the last two members standing could be presented to the party membership.  Reading all this, I was reminded of Conclave (another one word title) a book by Robert Harris, recently, I believe, made into a film, about the cardinals in the Vatican shutting themselves up for a similar series of sequential votes for the next pope, and staying in seclusion until white smoke finally emanated from the chimney.  Habemus papam.  It’s hard to imagine that might be the stuff of a thriller, and similarly the number-crunching in Room 14 at the Palace of Westminster might be mind-numbingly tedious. 

But I have a fascination for the lives, or at least their time spent in office, of British prime ministers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  With the passage of time they seem to have become more numerous.  There have been five in the last eight years.  It was always difficult to ascend the greasy pole, “the slipper slope”, but recently it seems to have become impossible, having made the ascent, to stay up there.  Doubtless this reflects the political and economic turbulence that has characterised British public life since the economic crash, Brexit, and the pandemic.   Sir Graham examines five tenures, those of David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak, and the “events, dear boy” – Harold Macmillan’s remark – that truncated them.

David Cameron’s was the longest run – six years.  He oversaw three referenda, and won two of them – First Past the Post versus Proportional Representation, which went by, and went the way of FPTP, almost unnoticed; then the Scottish Referendum, which he won, although he and Chancellor George Osborne must have broken into a sweat when they saw the polls just prior to September 18^th 2014.  Lastly, Brexit, which he lost.  He never thought he would need to run that referendum, because he thought he would still be in coalition with the Lib Dems, and the Lib Dems would never have allowed it.  Events, dear boy.  So the podium came out into Downing Street, he resigned, and walked away whistling a breezy tune – an old Etonian’s show of insouciance. 

Boris might have been next, but Boris got stabbed in the front by Michael Gove and, in any case, for whatever reason, he chose not to run.  Thus Mrs May attained the highest office.  But Mrs May had been a Remainer, so it was always going to be impossible for her. There was a protracted period when you could not hear the BBC News because of the strident laments of Remainers on College Green.  Mrs May kept trying to cobble together a leave package, each one heavily defeated in the House of Commons.  She called a snap election to try and bolster her power base, but it all went wrong and she became heavily reliant upon the support of the DUP.  The attorney general in his booming baritone declared this parliament to be a dead parliament.  She had to go.

Enter Boris, unleashed.  He vowed to “get Brexit done”.  He had an oven-ready deal.  He would rather be found dead in a ditch than not leave.  A hard Brexit loomed.  Then, dear boy, “events”.  Covid.  Covid nearly killed the Prime Minister.  But in the end it was his scant disregard for the rules, those of his own devising, that killed him politically.  Partygate. 

Liz Truss was duly elected.  Her shelf life was famously shorter than that of a lettuce.  Or was it a cabbage?  She “spooked the markets”.  She was defiant.  She said she was a fighter, not a quitter. The next day, she quit.  There were three contenders to succeed – Boris, Penny Mordaunt, and Rishi Sunak.  The 1922 Committee contrived a rule that each contender would require at least 100 parliamentary nominations.  Boris withdrew (again), Ms Mordaunt didn’t reach the threshold, so in effect Rishi’s was a coronation.

But by now the Tory government was on its last legs and consistently badly behind in the polls.  There was no political advantage to Rishi calling an early election on July 4^th 2024, and I sometimes wonder if he made an honourable decision to go to the country sooner rather than later, just to get on with it. 

Enter Sir Keir Starmer; but of course, Sir Keir was not part of Sir Graham’s remit.  He came in with a huge majority and a huge mandate, reminiscent of that of Tony Blair on 1997.  But the first 100 days don’t seem to have gone well, and who knows, maybe Labour’s 1922 equivalent, the men in suits, are already circling.

Is Kingmaker a kiss-and-tell book?  It’s not vindictive, although occasionally it can be startlingly candid.  Rishi Sunak comes across best in terms of his humanity.  And Ms May is honourable, if perhaps not a “people person”.  Reading Kingmaker, one has the impression that twenty-first century PMs are fated to topple like nine-pins.  There were, if memory serves me right, twenty PMs in the twentieth century, and already in the first quarter of the twenty-first there have been eight.  Yet perhaps this acceleration of “events” is an illusion.  After all, the period 1900 to 1924 actually saw nine PMS come and go – Salisbury, Balfour, Campbell-Bannerman, Asquith, Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Baldwin, and Ramsay MacDonald.  Events, dear boy. It was ever thus.    

Assisted Dying is very much back on the agenda, both north and south of the border.  BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions (Friday evening and Saturday afternoon) came from Beccles Public Hall and Theatre in Suffolk.  On the panel: Rushanara Ali, Labour MP, Annabel Denham, Telegraph columnist, Tobias Elwood, Conservative MP 2005 – 2024, and Adrian Ramsay, MP, co-leader of the Greens in England and Wales.  The first questioner to the panel pointed out that it had been ten years since Parliament had last voted on the issue of Assisted Dying.  Had public opinion changed sufficiently, such that a different outcome might be expected?

It was an interesting way of framing the question.  It suggests that politicians are rather like weather vanes, pointing in the direction of public opinion.  There were three MPs on the panel, two currently standing, one recently released from the responsibility.  Why not just ask, how will you, or would you, vote?  After all, this is a “conscience” vote; there is no whip.  Yet clearly the questioner felt that public opinion mattered.  Perhaps this is how MPs function.  You develop a sense of what impending innovations might be à la mode – “finger in the air” – and vote accordingly.  Is this not what it means to represent the public will? 

I have to say I thought the responses to this question were extremely poor.  Rushanara Ali thanked the questioner for the question.  It was a sensitive issue.  She had voted against Assisted Dying in 2015.  She was aware of a shift in public opinion.  This was a private bill, introduced by Kim Leadbeater, a free vote and therefore a conscience vote.  (The word “conscience” came up a lot, but there was no real analysis of what the dictates of conscience might be, or the foundations on which such might rest.)  Yes it’s an important issue.  As a minister, Rushanara Ali had a neutral position.  It would be inappropriate for ministers to express views. 

(Let me see if I’ve got this right.  We live in an open democracy, enjoying freedom of speech.  A free vote arises, but it would be “inappropriate” for a minister to express a view.  Really?) 

Tobias Elwood.  What is your stance?  …Difficult question.  (Clearly he had scruples.)  What is the role of the GP?  Will terminally ill people feel they are a burden?  Lots of questions, but apparently no answers. 

Annabel Denham.  There has been insufficient debate.  This ought not to be rushed through.  In favour in theory, but not in application.  Look at Canada.  Massive increase in assisted dying.  Slippery slopes.  Is there a forum for public debate? 

I found myself yelling at the radio, “Yes!  But what do you think?”  Or, “What do you think?” – putting my emphases on unusual words after the fashion of former-Friend Chandler Bing, aka the late, much missed Matthew Perry.  “Could you be more evasive?”

Adrian Ramsay.  Consider the evidence.  Palliative care good.  Right to choose good. 

I don’t suppose I should have been surprised.  Politicians are past-masters in the art of saying nothing.  There was no consideration of evidence from around the world.  Does mission creep exists in reality?  What are the statistics?  Are they even measurable?  People at the end of life who consider themselves to be a burden are perhaps unlikely to own up to the fact. 

You might have thought that a free vote would, indeed, free politicians up to express an opinion.  The Chief Whip gives them free rein.  But look what happens.  They clam up.  It turns out that they are only comfortable coming down on one side of an argument when they are toeing a party line, when they are reiterating a dogma.  Take the politics out of the equation, ask them what they really think, and they are struck dumb.  I think they are terrified of expressing a view that might be in contravention of some established, or perceived established, Zeitgeist.  They lack the courage of their own convictions; and because of that, they lack convictions.      

If I were an MP, or an MSP, I would vote against Assisted Dying, not, I hope, because I lack compassion for the terminally ill, and their loved ones, but because I suspect the project would be taken over, in short order, by a hidden agenda that has nothing to do with compassion.  As a medical practitioner, I would certainly not take part.  It seems to me that the administration of a lethal cocktail is entirely alien to the practice of medicine as I have known it.  I wonder what would happen if the entire medical profession declined to take part.  Presumably specialists – call them thanotologists – could be trained up for the role.  I wonder if that would sit comfortably with the public.

So I wrote to The Herald last week.  Dear Sir…  

The Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill is once more about to be scrutinised by the Scottish Parliament (“Campaigners raise further fears over safety of assisted dying legislation”, Herald, September 30).  For MSPs who may be undecided on this issue, may I recommend a trip, should they have time and space, to Berlin, specifically to Herbert von Karajan Strasse, just off Tiergarten Strasse.  In front of Philharmonie Halle, home of the Berlin Philharmonic, there is a series of exhibits relating to Aktion T4, or Aktion Tiergarten 4, a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia in Nazi Germany.  On a note dated 1^st September 1939, the Führer entrusted the medical profession with the responsibility to identify patients, both children and adults, “after a most critical diagnosis, on the basis of human judgment”, who were incurable, and to grant them “mercy death” (Gnadentod).  Conditions considered incurable included schizophrenia, epilepsy, Huntingdon’s Chorea, “imbecility”, chronic alcoholism, Down’s syndrome, microcephaly, hydrocephaly, spasticity, and paralysis.

Now it is perfectly true that Aktion T4, and the Assisted Dying Bill are radically different in one respect: Assisted Dying is voluntary, but the Nazi euthanasia programme was compulsory.  But these two programmes do share one common feature.  They are both clandestine.  Children were removed to “Special Sections” and gassed.  The cause of death was recorded as “pneumonia”.  Buried away in Paragraph 17 of the Assisted Dying Bill, believe it or not, is this extraordinary statement:

For the purposes of section 24 (certificate of cause of death) of the Registration of Births, Deaths, and Marriages (Scotland) Act 1965, the terminal illness involved is to be recorded as the disease or condition directly leading to their death (rather than the approved substance provided to them by virtue of section 15).

In other words, MSPs will make, remotely, a pathophysiological diagnosis that was not the patient’s cause of death and, in the normal course of events, might never have been the patient’s cause of death.  How dare they?

There are some people who believe – or say they do – that Assisted Dying is coming, is inevitable, and like a tidal wave, cannot be stopped.  Lass’ sie nach Berlin kommen.  Let them come to Berlin.                    

I attended three concerts while on the European mainland last week, four if you count the impromptu buskers, two accordionists, outside St Mary’s Basilica in Kraków’s Old Town.  (I know “serious” music is not everybody’s cup of tea, but indulge me.)  I paused to hear Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, the last movement of Vivaldi’s Summer, which you might be forgiven for mistaking for autumn, if not winter, and then the Alla Turca from the Mozart A major piano sonata K.331.  I thought, they’re terribly good, so in a way I wasn’t surprised to hear them again the following night in the Sala Koncertowa Filharmonii, a lovely hall, about the size of the Glasgow City Halls, which happened to be directly across the road beside my hotel.  There is a wonderful freemasonry about live classical music, all across the world.  You enter a concert hall, and immediately feel right at home.    

Maciej Zimka and Wieslaw Ochwat.  They were joined by mezzosoprano Magdalena Kulig, and bass Piotr Lempa, for a concert of arrangements of music by Szymanowski and Mahler.  Rather a minority interest, I guess, and indeed when I bought my ticket I noticed the audience was thin on the ground.  In the event, we all sat up on the stage, maybe about sixty of us, and the performers faced us with their back to the beautiful auditorium.  It worked well and, consummate musicians as they were, they gave everything.  The Mahler, two Kindertotenlieder and two Rückert-Lieder, worked very well with an accordion accompaniment.  I thought, “So that’s what Mahler’s all about!”  The accordion is a very expressive instrument, just how expressive, I came to realise when the Dunblane Chamber Orchestra accompanied the remarkable Ryan Corbett.  And I also remember hearing Benjamin Britten’s Lachrymae for solo viola accompanied, not by an orchestra, but by an accordion, and finally “getting” it.       

In Berlin the following Saturday I heard the Berlin Philharmonic, in the Philharmonie Halle, on Herbert von Karajan Strasse.  The Philharmonie Großer Saal is a very large hall, bigger I would say than Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall, yet it was a sell-out.  I found myself wondering if the RSNO in Glasgow could have sold out the concert hall with a concert consisting of Prokofiev’s Symphonic Concerto for Cello and Orchestra, followed by Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande.  The cellist, Alisa Weilerstein, was magnificent.  As an encore she played the Sarabande from Bach’s Third Cello Suite.  After the interval the Berlin Phil played Pelleas with total commitment.  What an orchestra. 

And on the Sunday afternoon I was again in the neighbourhood, taking a stroll around the Tiergarten, and chanced to notice people congregating outside the hall on Herbert von Karajan Strasse.  I went in.  Yes, there was a concert shortly to commence, but, alas, a sell-out.  I went back outside, ran into a lady trying to sell on her ticket, bought it, and snuck in.

This was one of a series of Populäre Konzerte, given by the Philharmonie Sinfonie Orchestra of Berlin.  Another sell-out.  This time I was on the other side of the hall, behind the orchestra and choir, and facing the conductor, one Stanley Dodds, I gather of Canadian and Australian provenance who, at least from a distance bore an uncanny resemblance to Sir Alexander Gibson, who dominated Scottish classical music throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.  The orchestra certainly played a lot of “lollipops”, starting with Verdi’s Triumphal March from Aida.  The choir was extraordinarily good.  Such power. 

Next up, a Holst planet: Jupiter.  I have to say this was the least successful rendition of the evening.  I like to think I’m open to hearing English music performed by overseas orchestras.  They often get rid of all the timeworn barnacles and rediscover the essence of the music.  But I had a sense here that they didn’t really “get it”.  It was a play-through.  I’ve heard it said that Karajan couldn’t stand the Planets.  Fake news, for all I know.

Next up, Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, played most beautifully by Gabriele Strata.  We were treated to a delightful Chopin encore.

After the interval, the little heard Camille Saint-Saens „La Muse et le Poète“ for violin, cello, and orchestra.  We certainly weren’t being short-changed for lovely music.  Then, three pieces from Edvard Krieg’s Peer Gynt – Morgenstimmung (a sigh went through the audience as the famous flute solo commenced), Anitras Tanz, and In the Hall of the Mountain King. 

I confess at this moment it crossed my mind to slip out quietly, because the two remaining pieces were two movements from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, and Ravel’s Bolero.  I’m not sure if I would mind if I never heard either of these pieces again, but I was quite keen to hear the choir once more in the Orff, and they were certainly magnificent.  And well done to the side drummer, for sustaining concentration in the Bolero. 

Is there a qualitative difference between attending a concert in mainland Europe, and back home?  The atmosphere in the concert hall is certainly intensely familiar.  I suppose, as here, the audience is somewhat grey-haired.  I’m sure Glasgow would have had just as much difficulty as Kraków had, in attracting an audience for Szymanowski and Mahler with accordionists filling in for an orchestra. 

And it’s evident that there is even on the continent a need to play concerts after the fashion of the Boston Pops. Still, I’m not sure how much time the Berlin Phil devotes to film music, or “gaming” music, or other crossover genres that are becoming increasingly common over here.  At the end of the day, I’m profoundly impressed that they can sell out Philharmonie Halle performing Arnold Schoenberg.        

Our tour bus picked us up – a party of 30, on Wielopole, on the edge of Kraków’s beautiful Old Town.  The journey was to take an hour and a half, so we were invited to sit back, relax and enjoy the scenery.  There would be no further announcements until we reached Oświȩcim. 

We had chosen a beautiful day for our visit, with cloudless blue skies and temperatures in the mid-twenties.  One of our two tour guides, Olivia, happened to sit beside me; an elegant young lady, dressed in black, with a pale complexion and raven black hair.  She had just returned from a holiday in the forest.  She had switched off her mobile and gone for long walks with her dog.  How often did she do the Oświȩcim excursion?  Three, maybe four times a week.  It struck me, even before we had started, that maybe it was not the sort of job you would want to hold down for too long.   

In effect, the 60 mile journey took an hour and three quarters.  It took a while to negotiate the suburbs of Kraków, and we had a very careful driver – I was much impressed – and in any case it wasn’t a fast route, rather like travelling to St Andrews from somewhere in the West of Scotland, frequently slowing to go through villages and towns.  We travelled through forests, and more open countryside, very beautiful.  Oświȩcim itself was an attractive town.  I wonder why the National Socialists chose it as the hub of their killing machine?  I got the answer shortly. 

There was a car park, with a few other assembled buses.  There were toilet facilities, and you could get a coffee, but the amenities were basic.  We split into two groups of 15.  I stuck with Olivia.  We then passed through security, just as in an airport.  We were scanned, and our photo ID and documentation perused.  Certain rules were made clear: no sharp objects, no smoking, no eating, no hot drinks; bottled water was OK.  Photographs were also permitted, but not everywhere.  In some locations, silence was expected.  I had had some apprehension that the concentration camp experience might be one of “barbed wire kitsch”.  Young people would be whooping and taking selfies.  Mugs, T-shirts and other samples of tat might be available on sale.  But no.  The predominant atmosphere was one of silence.  Even the birds were silent.     

Next we passed through a transition zone in the form of a long, featureless white tunnel, eventually emerging back into the sunlight and taking us into a different world.  We might have travelled back in time 80 years.  The facility remained largely as it had been then.  We passed through a gate, and under the infamous sign vouchsafing the Big Lie.  Arbeit macht frei.  We wore headphones, and Olivia spoke to us through a microphone, so she didn’t need to raise her voice.     

You try to marry up what you see with what you already know.  What is meant by the banality of evil?  Auschwitz 1 reminded me of the Barracks in Stirling, which have been converted into a conference centre.  Here in Poland, these facilities had also been the barracks of the Polish army, but the Nazis took them over and converted them into a concentration camp.  It opened in 1940, and initially housed political prisoners largely from Poland.  But then there was an escalation, a degree of mission creep. 

So why did the Nazis choose Oświȩcim?  A large map in one of the barracks buildings told us.  It was deemed to be at the heart, the very epicentre of Europe.  The decision bespoke a certain predilection for efficiency.  All roads lead to Auschwitz. 

Auschwitz is a holocaust museum.  The exhibits include human hair, spectacles, children’s clothes, battered suitcases, medical prostheses, and of course, empty canisters of Zyklon B.  A “death factory” has been entirely preserved.  It comes in three parts – a facility for undressing, then “the showers” – in reality the Gaskammer – and then the crematoria.  The last word in ruthless efficiency. 

There were all sorts of other indications that I was not strolling through the Stirling barracks.  Punishment cells, execution walls, a “medical” facility (its workforce might have called it a scientific research laboratory), and, everywhere, gibbets.

Just when you think you have reached the nadir of human degradation, you find yourself moving to another level.  We reboarded the bus and travelled a few kilometres to Auschwitz 2 – Birkenau. Actually there’s not that much to see at Birkenau.  With the Russian advance in 1944, the Nazis destroyed most of the facilities.  The gas chambers and crematoria are in ruins.  But still, one is struck by the sheer scale of the thing.  I think Olivia said Birkenau occupied 160 hectares. 

Of course, the entrance to Birkenau must form one of the most infamous, notorious images in the world.  The railway track carries the cattle trucks through the wooden portal, and then the tracks diverge at “the ramp”, where the commandant made his “Selektion”.

Then there are the huts, row upon row.  Most of the huts have been razed, though I did go into one that still stands, and was able to see the appalling conditions under which people lived, or died.  By this time I’d just about had enough.  Thankfully, it was the last part of the tour.  I went back outside and took a few deep breaths of fresh air.  I noticed that heavy clouds had formed to the east, and there was a low rumble of thunder.  As we headed back towards the gateway to Hell, the storm clouds were amassing, and there was more thunder.  Before I left, I took a moment to imprint an image in my memory.  I walked over to the railway track, about fifty metres before it passed under the infamous gateway, and I stared in the direction of the ramp.  I didn’t actually take a photograph, but in a sense I did.  For just as I was taking in the scene, it became illuminated by a single flash of lightning.                                                        

The Great Train Robber: My Autobiography

The inside story of Britain’s most notorious heist

Ronnie Biggs

(John Blake Publishing, 60^th anniversary paperback edition, 2023)

It’s the sort of book I guess you might find in the “True Crime” book shelf in Waterstones.  But I never look there, and normally have no interest, but I had time to spend in a coffee shop and I’m always interested in the events of 1963, not exactly a slow news year.  August 8^th, 1963.  Ronnie Biggs’ 34^th birthday.  I remember it well – not the birthday bash, but the Great Train Robbery.  A Glasgow to London mail train that happened to be carrying a ton of money in used banknotes was stopped, at Bridego Bridge (Bridge 127) two miles south of Leighton Buzzard, off the B488, and emptied of about £2,500,000, worth over £50,000,000 today.  The money was never recovered. 

What I remember most about the news reports was the response of the public.  The news was greeted with a curious sense of satisfaction, as well as admiration.  A daring heist.  Such audacity!  There was a general sense of vicarious excitement.  A group of men had thumbed their noses at the authorities, at the Establishment, and some people hoped they would get away with it.  My father did not share this sentiment.  Well, he was a policeman.  But I remember him saying to me, “The train driver has suffered a significant head injury.  He has been struck with a cosh.  Is that admirable?” 

Following the robbery, the police mounted a massive manhunt.  Attention turned to Leatherslade Farm, the farmhouse near the scene of the crime which had been the headquarters of the gang.  Prior to the event they played Monopoly to while away the time.  The apocryphal story circulated that they had played with real money.  Then they all scattered, but they were relentlessly hunted down, and twelve out of sixteen were caught, including Ronnie Biggs.  Three were never identified.  They were severely dealt with.  Ronnie’s was a mistrial because the jury had been made aware of his criminal past.  But he was nailed on the retrial, and got 30 years.  At the time, that seemed to most people to be excessive, and there was a general feeling that the Establishment was using the full force of the law to make quite clear who was boss.  This no doubt contributed to the sense of sympathy some people expressed.  Perhaps this sense of sympathy tells us more about the social structures of the time than it does about Ronnie.  If people get a kick out of witnessing Grand Larceny, it suggests they feel they don’t have a stake in the community.  Isn’t it all a scam anyway?  Why shouldn’t these people be in it for themselves, when blatant self-interest is exactly what characterises the Establishment?  Lord and Lady Muck.  If you got one over on them, good luck to you, mate!      

If Ronnie Biggs had gone to jail and been released in 1993, I don’t suppose we would have heard any more about him. But on the 8^th July, 1965, he escaped from Wandsworth Prison in South London.  He was on the run for 13,087 days.  Briefly, he went to Paris to effect a disguise under the care of a plastic surgeon.  Then he flew to Sydney Australia.  When the law got on his trail again, he sailed to the New World, and settled in Rio.  He survived two attempted kidnappings, and various attempts at extradition.  He was pursued and arrested in Rio by a Detective Inspector from the Flying Squad, one Jack Slipper.  What a fantastic name, a name Charles Dickens might have made up for a London sleuth.  But Ronnie slipped through Inspector Slipper’s hands. 

He lived a colourful life, with plenty of wine, women, and song.  Some women are attracted to a “loveable rogue”, and this certainly seems to have been the case with Ronnie.  The great and the good from England passing through Rio would go out of their way to get themselves photographed with him.  Yet despite the nice little earner of the Great Train Robbery, he seemed to have a lot of financial worries, and indeed he apparently put in a substantial amount of time doing an honest day’s work, mostly as a carpenter.  But then, how much of all this should we take with a pinch of salt?  Ronnie could be, by his own confession, economical with the truth.  At any rate, it wasn’t the law, but his own failing health, that made him decide to return to England, on his own terms.  He had suffered a series of strokes.  He knew he would be arrested on his return, and he didn’t think he had much life left in him.  On his return in May 2001, he couldn’t have anticipated that he was going to spend a further eight years inside.  He was eventually released on compassionate grounds, as his health further deteriorated, and he spent his final days between a care home and a hospital, and died on December 18^th, 2013, just over 60 years after the event for which he is best known.  His funeral was held at Golders Green Crematorium on January 3^rd 2014.  It was well attended.

Ronnie’s autobiography was “ghosted” by Christopher Pickard.  I don’t know how much of the narrative can be attributed to author, or ghost.  But it’s certainly a fascinating and a readable book.  Loveable rogue?  Ronnie’s funeral was conducted by the Rev Dave Tomlinson, who got a fair amount of stick for conducting the ceremony.  He said, “Jesus didn’t hang out with hoity-toity, holier-than-thou religious people.  He seemed much more at home with the sinners.  At the end of the day, we are all sinners.” 

That’s true.  And yet, I still think of my father’s remark about Jack Mills, the train driver.  I don’t really understand the fascination some of the London glitterati have for East End gangsters.  It’s not unlike the fatal attraction the entertainment world in the US has for the Mob.  Jesus certainly moved among thieves and vagabonds, but he wasn’t attracted to their world.  On the contrary, he entered their world in order to urge them to repent.  When Justice Secretary Jack Straw at first refused Ronnie’s release on parole, it was partly on the grounds that he had shown no remorse for his crime.  This absence of remorse Ronnie renders explicit in his autobiography.  And this fact seems to me to be the overriding defining characteristic of the book.  It is a colourful tale told by somebody who seems, in this regard, entirely lacking in insight.                                                      

Precipice, by Robert Harris (Hutchinson Heinemann, 2024)

In 2010, I was touring around New Zealand’s North Island in a campervan, and found myself in a “Top Ten” camping site just outside Dargaville, north of the Kaipara Harbour.  I saw a beautiful woman, less than half my age, sitting in the lotus position like a squaw outside her wigwam, her long fair hair in a ponytail, reading a book.  Later, I was titivating my van when she suddenly appeared in front of me and said, with a directness which I came to realise was her defining characteristic, “Where are you going tomorrow?”  I said, Auckland.  She said, “Can I come with you?”  I had the odd notion that if I had said I were going in the opposite direction, to Cape Reinga, she would have said, “Can I come with you?”  I said yes.

She was from the Netherlands.  Call her Kate.  She was a great linguist.  “I am learning Maori.  It is pretty easy.”  Her English was perfect.  She was very fond of English literature.  We even discussed Chaucer, and the Latin tag “Amor vincit omnia.”  I had always thought of that as a benison; two people linked by mutual love would conquer the world.  But to her it had a quite different meaning.  If you were debilitated by love, you would be useless, unable to wage war on behalf of the state.

I thought of Kate’s interpretation of Amor vincit omnia when I read Precipice.  It is always a pleasure to read a new Robert Harris novel.  He writes what are called “intelligent thrillers”, well crafted, intensely readable, often based upon a true historical event.  Walter Scott did the same.  Indeed, Robert Harris won the Walter Scott prize for historical fiction for his account, and imaginative expansion, of the Dreyfus affair, in An Officer and a Spy.  Munich features Chamberlain, Lord Dunglass (Alec Douglas-Home) and of course, Herr Hitler.  The Ghost is a ghost writer writing a biography of, I fancy, a thinly disguised Tony Blair.  Precipice is no exception to this pattern.  Here, the starting point is the correspondence between H. H. Asquith, who was British Prime Minister between 1908 and 1916, and Venetia Stanley, a woman of high caste less than half his age, and a contemporary of Asquith’s daughter Violet, later Lady Violet Bonham Carter. 

But the correspondence is one-sided; we only have Asquith’s letters to Venetia.  Venetia’s letters have not survived.  Therefore Harris has had to make them up.  Yet, as the author says in a brief note, “All the letters quoted in the text from the Prime Minister are – the reader may be astonished to learn – authentic.”  They are quoted verbatim.  They are love letters, deeply passionate.  In the first edition of Roy Jenkins’ biography, Asquith (Collins, 1986), Jenkins rather toned down this aspect of the correspondence out of respect to Lady Violet, who was still alive.  And indeed, in Violet Bonham Carter’s Winston Churchill as I knew him (Eyre & Spottiswoode and Collins, 1965), Venetia is indexed once, and gets a single mention, and barely a mention at that.  But it’s not really the declaration of love that is disconcerting; it is the casualness with which Asquith kept Venetia apprised of the machinations of high government, including the period up to and beyond the start of the First World War.  Venetia knew more state secrets than many members of the cabinet.  Asquith would send her official telegrams received from ambassadors in Paris or Berlin.  He even sent her decrypted copies, known as “flimsies”, of strategic war planning, and naval manoeuvres.  When I read this, I was reminded of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, in which, on the eve of the war, a German spy sits in on a meeting of the Admiralty, committing to photographic memory the disposition of the fleet.  His disguise as the First Sea Lord is achieved not by any elaborate cosmesis, but by the creation of “atmosphere”.  He crops up again in Mr Standfast when, in the persona of Moxon Ivery, he is not recognised, until the terror of an air raid “dislimns” his features, and Richard Hannay will never again be hoodwinked by Herr Graf von Schwabing.

But truth is stranger than fiction.  In the real world, Asquith and Venetia would take a drive, chauffeured around London, discussing the disposition of the fleet, then screwing the flimsies into a ball; and tossing them out of the car window.  Had such documents fallen into the wrong hands, the enemy would have been provided with a ready-made code-breaking key.  The German High Command could have deciphered the British codes, much as the British “Ultra” broke the German “Enigma” in the next war.  I wonder what Winston, then First Lord of the Admiralty, would have made of that.  And I wonder if John Buchan, who to all intents and purposes ran the British propaganda machine during the Great War, had some inkling of it.  He knew Asquith, who he said had every traditional virtue – dignity, honour, courage, and a fine selflessness.  But he was – Buchan’s word – impercipient.  And he knew Asquith’s son Raymond, an Oxford man, very well.  In Memory Hold-the-Door he writes of Raymond, “As a letter-writer he was easily the best of us, but his epistles were dangerous things to leave lying about, for he had a most unbridled pen.”  Clearly, a family trait.  Raymond Asquith was killed in the war.

With respect to H. H. Asquith and the flimsies, one might imagine that such cavalier behaviour from the Prime Minister would not be seen in Britain today, but of course it’s not true.  People are forever leaving folders, marked Top Secret, in taxi cabs and railway carriages.  Politicians carry documents while walking along Downing Street, blissfully unaware of the paparazzi with their telephoto lenses.                       

Thus, in Precipice, the finding of classified information scattered around the streets of London starts a police investigation in which a fictionalised police sergeant in the Special Branch gradually pieces together what is happening.  What is the Prime Minister up to?  Is it mere love-sick folly?  And is Venetia passing on information?  If so, to whom?  Is she a security risk?  Spoiler alert – but now we are firmly in the realm of fiction.

Reading Precipice, fiction apart, one has to be impressed by the Royal Mail of the time.  They were providing four deliveries a day in the early part of the twentieth century.  Now we are lucky if we get four a week.  And the price of a first class stamp (3d, as I recall, when I was a child), is about to go up to £1.65.  They say nobody uses the post anymore.  Everybody’s on WhatsApp.  We think our means of communication have changed, but Asquith’s obsessive correspondence with Venetia is remarkably similar to today’s incessant texting amongst teenagers.  They text “C U L8er”, and Asquith, and his contemporaries also used abbreviations like “yr” for “your”.  

Reading Asquith’s letters to Venetia, a strong sense of vulnerability and neediness comes through.  The relationship seems to have the fragility of those frequently encountered in the short stories of Katherine Mansfield.  It can’t last.  Sure enough, eventually, and abruptly, Venetia married a man in Asquith’s government, Edwin Montagu, and broke the Prime Minister’s heart.  It seems incredible now, that the head of the most powerful empire in the world, in charge of the prosecution of the Great War, was preoccupied, obsessively writing three letters a day to a young woman.  Maybe my Netherlands friend Kate was right.  Amor vincit omnia.

We said goodbye in Auckland.  I said, “You didn’t half take a chance, thumbing a lift from me.”  She shrugged and said, “What is life without chances?”      

Last Thursday I attended, as is my wont, the annual Bowman Lecture at the University of Glasgow, a lecture series devoted to the public understanding of statistical methods in their application to various sciences, and indeed to sundry walks of life.  Last year the lecture was given by the head of MI5.  (I suppose it must be all right now to say so: it was after all a public lecture.)  I remember Prof Bowman saying, “How are we going to follow this?”  Well, this year the speaker was Dr Chris Wiggins, Chief Data Scientist of the New York Times, also an assistant professor at Columbia University.  He gave a talk entitled How Data Happened: A history from the Age of Reason to the Age of AI.  The talk was, in effect, a precis of a book Dr Wiggins co-wrote with the historian Matthew L. Jones, entitled, How Data Happened: a history from the age of reason to the age of algorithms.  That immediately begs the question, is there a close association between “AI” and “algorithms”?  Do Turing Machines think algorithmically?  If this, do that?  I suppose they do, in the sense that everything is reduced to binary code.  We, Homo sapiens, don’t think algorithmically, unless we are forced to do so by our on-line managers and work supervisors.  That way lies mental breakdown, and madness.      

I greatly enjoyed the Bowman Lecture.  That came to me as something of a surprise, because I didn’t feel particularly kindly disposed towards my idea of Artificial Intelligence.  Recently, our erstwhile PM Sir Tony Blair came on the airwaves to wax enthusiastic about the potential for AI to transform the National Health Service.  I wrote to The Herald, twice.  I think I may have mentioned it in this blog.  I well remember the way, around a quarter of a century ago, the predecessor to AI, Information Technology (IT), “transformed” the Health Service.  When the sharp suits closed in on the NHS with their automated systems, I remember thinking at the time that this was not about improving patient outcomes, it was all about power.  Clinicians were not looking for a procedure or methodology with which to solve a clinical problem.  Rather Information Technologists were looking for a field of human activity – health, education, policing – in which a computerised system could be applied, or, perhaps, inflicted.      

But I was disarmed by Chris Wiggins, because as it seemed to me, he had no axe to grind.  He wasn’t peddling a system that might benefit an organisation.  Rather he was recounting the relationship between humanity and data – or enumerated facts – that has developed over the last 250 years.  He didn’t even seem to be particularly impressed by the notion that numerical data added weight to an argument.  Data can be used as a tool or weapon, to argue what is true.  It can be a tool for rearranging, or defending, power.  Data can be created and curated.  The use, or abuse, of “Big Data” becomes an unstable game that can be played among states, companies, and people generally. 

What is “Artificial Intelligence”?  Are these super-computers really “Intelligent”?  It turned out that this was a question of more interest to the audience than to the lecturer, who was more focused on what these machines can, of themselves, achieve.  After all, Alan Turing devised a computer that could break the Nazi Enigma Code, without pondering whether or not his Colossus could “think”.  So Dr Wiggins was less interested in the philosophical questions posed by AI, referred to by an audience member as “epistemological”, as to what these systems might be capable of.  Similarly, he wasn’t preoccupied by the notion that AI might present humanity with an existential threat.  Would AI, asked the Vice-Principal, signal the death of scientific creativity?  Dr Wiggins thought not.  Was AI a good thing?  All he would say was that he thought it was here to stay.

Here to stay indeed.  It’s back on the front page of today’s Herald.  AI hopes for patients with heart failure.  This describes a pilot study led by the University of Dundee, working with an AI company to develop software to scan patient records and patient investigations, such as echocardiography, in order to identify specific patients who would benefit from specific treatments.  AI tech, says the follow-up article on Page 8, could “revolutionise” care for heart failure patients. 

But you see, medicine is not remotely like that.  You don’t start with an investigation and then go looking for a patient.  You start with a patient, and you start with a history.  As a doctor, you don’t just collect data.  You step into the patient’s shoes.  You almost go into a trance.  For a moment, you become the patient.  You try to experience yourself, something of the patient’s experience, and you try to formulate a plan of management that is utterly unique to a specific individual.  It comes at a cost.

One thing is clear; the outcome achieved by the automated perusal of vast amounts of data will only ever be as good as the quality, and validity, of the data itself.  Data in medicine, for example, must always be taken with a pinch of salt.  Death certificate data is particularly suspect.  As to cause of death, in the absence of a post mortem, the doctor usually takes a punt, primarily aimed at facilitating funeral arrangements on behalf of the bereaved.  There is a letter in today’s Herald about Lib Dem MSP Liam McArthur’s Assisted Dying Bill, shortly to reappear in Holyrood, which instructs doctors to issue death certificates recording cause of death as the terminal illness of the deceased, and not the lethal potion that has been taken.  The cause of death is misrepresented.  The terminal illness did not kill the patient; and in the normal course of events, it might never have killed the patient.  This is just one more example of the recording of bad data.  It needs to be resisted.                            

The oft quoted cliché attributed to Mark Twain about lies, damned lies, and statistics, can be taken two ways, either as short-hand for a rapidly accelerating spiral of disinformation, or as a portrayal of a contrast – on the one hand lies and damned lies, and on the other, data as an exemplar of truth.  Even more obscure than Mark Twain, Robert Burns once said that “Facts are chiels that winna ding”, which I think means that truths will resonate with one another, and not be dissonant.  Yet we live in an age of cognitive dissonance, humbug, and fake news.  Pontius Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” is the question of our time.        

Let’s talk about the weather.  (If this were a G & S Operetta, a patter song would follow.)

A glance at the forecast in the Herald says it all.  Cloud will bubble up… heavy rain will push into the northwest…

…Unsettled tomorrow with cloudy skies and heavy rain to start the day…

The pattern seems to have been prolonged rainy days with moments of brief respite in the evening.  It has been dreich, not to say gruamach.  Incidentally, an airline pilot who corresponds with the Herald wrote in (he writes a very good letter) to say that on leaving Heathrow en route – “I think” – for Chicago he had remarked to the passengers that the weather in Chicago was “dreich”.  He was inundated with enquiries as to what he meant.  I was more intrigued by his dubious recollection of the destination.  Perhaps he had announced, “Ladies and gentleman welcome to this BA flight to – I think – Chicago.”    

To say that we here in Caledonia have had an indifferent summer would be a gross exaggeration.  In fact we have elided seamlessly from spring to autumn.  There is general consensus in the farming community in which I live that the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness is upon us.  We have been complaining about the rain for weeks, but exactly to whom, or about whom, are we complaining? Surely this is one element of general public dissatisfaction that cannot be pinned upon the Scottish National Party.  Granted climate change is manmade (though many correspondents to the Herald continue to disagree), but we’re supposed to be warming up.  At home, I’ve had the heater on most evenings.  Shouldn’t complain.  I dare say many people who have had to endure a scorching summer in continental Europe would envy us our climate.  And we have not had any startling events of the sort that so tragically sunk a yacht off Sicily within the space of a few moments.   

So we have reached the “auld claes an’ purritch” time of year without really having had an interlude of warmth and sunshine.  The clothes shops, like Burss on Glasgow’s Dumbarton Road, used to sport new uniforms in the window with the mantra “Back to school” – which as scholars we would read with a sinking of the heart.  I have never lost the autumnal “Back to school” mentality.  Time to resume all the activities that have been put on hold.  Back to the orchestra, back to the German class; time to get serious about the three literary projects that are currently lying fallow – an essay, a memoir, an epistolatory novel, of a sort.  Don’t knock it.  Routine is very important.  A reason for getting up in the morning.  I’m sure this was why President Biden was initially so reluctant to pass the torch.  It must be the most difficult thing in the world, one moment to be at the centre of things, the next to be faced with the prospect of an eternity watching daytime TV.  The Germans, as ever, have an expressive composite word denoting the terror of the aged, experiencing the gradual closing down of opportunities, like the shutting of doors: Türschlosspanik.   A centenarian lady on Broadcasting House (BBC Radio 4) on Sunday morning, who happened to be doing a sky-dive for charity, encouraged us all never to give anything up, although she did add a rider…  unless you have to.  Perhaps equally encouraging advice would be to consider taking up something new.      

So I dusted off my viola on Saturday and played with the Antonine Ensemble.  We played Mozart, Grieg, Warlock, and Janáček.  Janáček’s Idyla was unknown to me, reminiscent of Dvořák, very Czech, and very beautiful, but tricky.  And we only have one and a half more rehearsals before we give two performances, one in St Michael’s Linlithgow and one in Dunblane Cathedral.  Still, it’s good to resurrect the muscle memory.  The previous day I’d enjoyed a beautiful lunch – made entirely, I think, out of home grown products – in West Kilbride, home of the world’s tastiest potato.  It was a convocation of musicians.  Somebody produced a bundle of photographs of us all from 50 years ago.  As John Buchan said in Memory Hold the Door, “I have no new theory of time”, but sometimes I have a feeling that time, the passage of time, is an illusion, and that everything that resides in memory remains forever in the present.  But I struggle to express myself. Yet I’m not quite ready to start the Michaelmas Term.  I’ve felt the need to create a little “hiatus”, as American students dub the summer break, in order to start the new academic year with something like recharged batteries.  So in September I’ve arranged to spend a few days in Kraków, and Berlin.  I will come back a new man!  Watch this space.