Winter and Early Spring 2025

Winter 'Kolf' in Holland.  See below.

Preface to 2025. 

I finished the last diary entry with a funeral on October 25^th (St Crispin’s Day).  The weather remained funereal for some while thereafter and there was little to cheer us up.  The clear-cut victory of Donald Trump in the US Presidential election depressed approximately half of the US population, and substantially more than half of my US friends and acquaintances.  His subsequent bizarre choices of confederates (if I may use that word in reference to US politics) has done nothing to reassure us.  A unifying theme according to many observers is that most of them are climate change sceptics.  One of the most unusual is Robert F Kennedy Jr, nephew of the former president John F Kennedy.  He will head Health and Human Services.  With no medical qualification and a vaccine sceptic too, it remains possible that he will not get through the screening process.  For example, his bizarre escapade in dumping a bear carcase in New York’s Central Park, may count against him.

New Year 2025

January 1st.

'Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun...'  (From 'Digging' by Seamus Heaney)

I think that Heaney wrote this while he was waiting for inspiration, struggling to write.  The pen sat in his hand awaiting instructions from his brain.  In the modern day I sit (or do not sit if feeling lethargic) at a keyboard, but the state of mind between the will to act and the act itself is the same.  Seamus Heaney sat there in the study and while he looked out of the window, either in the flesh, or in his imagination, he saw his father digging.

His father was digging his potato drills, and Heaney then remembered his grandfather who could '...cut more turf (peat) in a day/ Than any other man on Toner's bog.'  His poem was under way, and it is the first verse in his early collection entitled 'Death of a Naturalist' (1966).Although lauded worldwide, and awarded a Nobel prize in 1995, a friend who met him in the pub in Kirkwall, Orkney, during the St Magnus festival, described him as a delightful character.  He was charming, and not in the way that many media figures are - professionally charming because they have to be - but genuinely so.

I mention this because ever since I last posted, the lassitude and ordinariness of everyday life has induced a writer's block, occasioned more by sympathy for my readers than anything else.  Who wants to read about forgetting to put the bin out, golf course rounds in the high 80s, acquiring hearing aids (another badge of age), or attending funerals?  Or indeed the pettiness of our new Labour government, the disaster of the U.S. Presidential election, or the steadily deteriorating UK weather as it darkens into December?  The activities of the four horseman of the apocalypse continue unabated and are perpetual, so there is little point in mentioning them either.

But now it is January, and in Dorset the daffodils are beginning to show their heads above ground.  I saw a camellia in full bloom the other day.

What else has happened?  A friend posted about his 50th birthday on Facebook, asking whether it was a millstone or a milestone.  Would that I could remember that far back.  (I can.  We went skiing.  We had a notable lunch party).

On the 4th of November I visited friends on the other side of the harbour, and was delayed in my return.  The Barfleur (cross-channel ferry) made its final return voyage to Cherbourg after its Poole crossing and the ferry waited while it surged through the channel at the Haven.  Somehow the Barfleur, at least to me, marks the beginning and the end of summer.  On the following day the U.S. held an election and we all know what happened then.

On the 7th November (it has taken a long time to organise this), a group of us who lived at International Students' House during the early 1970s returned for a reunion.  Though much changed physically we were unchanged in our friendship and camaraderie.  For many years a fine bust of John F Kennedy stood outside the house, but following vandalism it was rescued and restored and I was pleased to see that it now sits in the lobby of the building at the top of Great Portland Street (anyone can walk in to view it if they wish).  We will meet again in 2025.

Reviewing my little diary of items that have struck my imagination (they are very few), I was intrigued to see a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine detailing the success of fish skin grafts in healing of diabetic foot ulcers.  Yes, I am a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles.

The unchanging round of the everyday improved with visits to London; to the Christmas lights and to the theatre (David Tennant as Macbeth, Mark Strong and Lesley Manville in a rewriting of Oedipus, and a quirky but excellent production of Twelfth Night at the Richmond Orange Tree Theatre).

A particular happiness came on 22nd November with the birth of daughter Katie's first child, a boy; to be christened Finley George.

 

Resting over Christmas, my brainwashed into Christianity self enjoyed the quality of the singing and the splendour of King's College Chapel in the annual festival of Nine Lessons and Carols.  Seeing the chapel again always brings back memories of being freely allowed entry as an undergraduate (now a tourist pay-to-visit venue) and my Uncle, who was a Don at the less well-off college next door, St Catharine's.

Uncle Robert fulminated against the college, 'Showing off their bloody Rubens again', he used to harrumph when the annual carol service was shown.  'Of course', he used to say, 'Keynes made them a fortune by gambling on the stock market in the 1930s.'  He rarely had a good word to say about the college and I will spare you some of his comments about their fellows, whom he regarded as very left wing and beyond the pale.  The worst epithet he could summon up about a fellow scientist who was more in the public eye than merited; whose research he regarded as meretricious was, 'He's a Spiv - he'll never get his FRS with that work.'  The decision by King's College to alter the 15th century architecture of the chapel to render the Rubens painting more visible for television viewers sparked substantial criticism from many, not just Uncle Robert.

It is true that John Maynard Keynes, the economist, became bursar at the college, and began to speculate with the college assets.  At that time (between the wars) it was the prevailing view that investments should be in real estate or fixed income, and Keynes invested in equities.  Some idea of his skill and success can be gained from the results: during a period in which the Wall Street Crash and the Second World War was fought, Keynes returned a steady 15% on the assets, and of course became very wealthy himself.  One wonders, in this cynical age, whether he had inside information on occasions, but he also pursued new investment strategies such as 'futures'.

C.P. Snow, author, was another fellow whom Robert could not stand.  Robert mixed with several of the serious scientists at Christ's College who rarely had a good word to say about him.  It is a known fact that Snow published a paper in Nature on a new method of synthesis of Vitamin A which was subsequently shown to be incorrect.  After 'The Masters' was published in 1951, there was widespread anger at Snow's revelations about college politics.  The plot revolves around the Master of an unnamed college who is dying and the various factions supporting one or other of two candidates.  At High Table in 1952, Robert secretly enjoyed the fulminations of the various fellows who came up to him in secret and whispered their detestation of Snow.  Some of them had of course been caricatured in 'The Masters'.  Many years later, during my last year at Cambridge in 1970, I invited my reluctant aunt to come to the special combined Oxford and Cambridge footlights with me.  She sat stony faced through most of the show, until one of the undergraduates joked about 'C.P. Snow; known to writers as a scientist, to scientists as a writer, and the world at large as Pamela Hansford Johnson.'  She laughed unrestrainedly.  The Snow antipathy had lingered.  This show was one of the best ever of that era in Cambridge, featuring Clive James and Pete Atkin, Julie Covington, Diana Quick, Rob Buckman, and Jonathan James-Moore.  The show had been professionally buffed by its producer, David Frost, and it went on tour to New York, though whether they understood the sketches is not recorded.  Julie Covington's performance of 'The Magic Wasn't There', a song written by James and Atkin, was described as the gem of the Edinburgh Festival by the well-known theatre critic, Harold Hobson.

 

 

 So what awaits in 2025?  The diary/blog so far is a start, but what will appear next?

 

Early January.

I hope that I can raise a smile.  I am included in a group dedicated to the radio panel game, I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue.  It seems to me that there are some very clever people out there, though the predominant form of wit on the site is pun-related; scorned by some.  Recently one of the moderators asked for suggestions for films to be shown at the I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue Welsh film club.  Here are some of the best.  I find the effect is cumulative:

Welsh Film Club:

Look Bach in Bangor

Where Eagles Aberdare

Dial M for Merthyr

How Haverfordwest Was Won

The Eagle has Llandudno

Who Framed Roger Rarebit?

Myfanwy and Other Animals

No Country for Mold Men

Bridgend Jones' Diary

Dai Another Day

Evans Can Wait

Eisteddfod in Alex

How Green Was My Valet

Last Tango in Powys

Glamorgan: a Suitable Case for Treatment

Sheepless in Seattle

The Lloyd of the Rings

Nine and a Half Leeks

Bonnie and Clwyd

The Magnificent Severn

Debbie Does Dowlais

 

The above was written in early January, and flippancy aside, I feel it is difficult to write about such matters today (January 27th) because there are several events this afternoon to commemorate the 80th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.  A strange anniversary date because it is also the anniversary of the birth of Mozart.  I cannot write much at the moment anyway because on 14th January I fell off a snowy path (not skiing) onto a concrete patio landing on my right shoulder, putting my lateral clavicle into at least three pieces.  As a doctor, I know it is better to be an interesting rather than a mundane patient, and the jigsaw puzzle of my collar bone has exercised quite a few orthopaedic surgeons, who participate in a local society called 'The Shoulder Group'.  My pain is their enjoyment.  'Doctors can bear a very large amount of pain - in other people', a favourite Somerset Maugham quotation of mine from a character suffering from cancer in his play, 'For Services Rendered'.  So it hurts to type and that must be all for the moment.

Disruption of lateral third of clavicle

Probably my last ski photo ever.  Top of the mountain in the early morning.

My first ever ski photo.  January 1974.  Top of the Valluga, St Anton.  Taken by a very kindly German gentleman who sent me the print all the way from Cologne.  Note the old fashioned equipment.

February 2nd.  Typing is a little easier and there is some sunshine today - perhaps the winter is receding?

A brief trip to London last week.  Unable to get into a preferred choice of theatre, I booked to see a new play at the Royal Court, 'A Good House', which had received a 5 star review in the Telegraph.  The plot concerns an upwardly mobile black couple who move into 'Stillwater', a dominantly white housing development.  Sihle, the husband is obviously earning more than the other white residents, and his wife has social pretensions, such as a wine aerator and a cheese knife on the platter when entertaining their neighbours.  The obvious prejudices surface throughout the play: Chris and Lynette have never been to Sihle and Bonolo's house before until a shack pops up nearby, potentially devaluing all their properties; Sihle has never been included in the neighbourhood WhatsApp group, etc.  Critics have seen this (with one or two exceptions) as a sizzling personification of the tensions and underlying prejudices of the modern South Africa.  I quote: '(Amy) Jephta's lacerating, emotionally charged interrogation of the quotidian (sic) realities and ambiguities of post-apartheid Cape Town marks her out as one of South Africa's leading contemporary playwrights, and suggests that South Africa's drama scene is in rude health.'  It seemed to me rather too predictable and I was in the three star camp.  The Royal Court not only sells you a programme, but mandatorily includes the play script, and I note the author's directions that there are quite a few places where the characters are meant to speak lines together (so one does not catch either).  Her direction that the speeches should be fast, 'Like Really Fast', is not only unrealistic, but again risks the spectator not fully appreciating the lines.  The antithesis of the Pinter pause!  In addition I found myself worrying that the actress playing the character of Jess, an ultra slim, ultra-flexible embodiment of a yoga teacher might have mitral valve prolapse.

Prior to the play, I visited the National Gallery.  I became a member late last year in the hope that I might get to the Van Gogh exhibition, celebrating the gallery’s bicentenary, but without success.  But members have a separate entrance now, which reduces queueing time.  Entry is rather similar to an airport security check, certainly since Just Stop Oil sprayed orange paint and dye on ‘Sunflowers’ (which is behind glass).  I had forgotten just how many amazing paintings are in our national collection, including four out of Vermeer’s known thirty-five paintings.  But there are so many other wonders.  A large group of schoolchildren was gathered in front of Velasquez’ Rokeby Venus, and a curator tour was in progress before the group of Titians featuring Diana and Actaeon.  But my lasting thought- why on earth do we not charge overseas visitors to visit our galleries?  Half of China and Japan were here, snappily burdening their iPhones with the images.  Something I had not heard of before was a ‘Tronie’, the Dutch word for face, which typifies many of their portraits, often with exaggerated facial expressions.

Some of my favourite works therefore are those of the Dutch 17^th Century, including the wonderful sea pictures of the Van Der Veldes, father and son.  The only ‘snap’ I took in the gallery this time was one for my golfing friends.  Sometimes the winters here on the golf course feel like this.  Of course the image comes during the ‘Little Ice Age’.

'Kolf' being played on the ice.  Dutch, 17th Century

Among the free (and therefore popular) exhibits was a new look at the history of Constable’s Hay Wain.  I was intrigued to learn that when he exhibited it for the first time in London in 1821 it was not thought to be much good.  It was the French, some while later, I think at the 1824 Salon, who took to it, and indeed Constable was awarded a gold medal by the French in recognition of its quality.  It has remained as an example of ‘Englishness’ ever since and has been much used by cartoonists dating from early in the 20^th Century.  One re-drawing of it features a barge carrying white goods across the river while nearby, the footballer Wayne Rooney hovers on a jet-ski.  The link?  Another terrible pun – ‘Hey, Wayne’.

 

Richmond, London.  On the Ted Lasso trail.  This picturesque pub is the one in which Ted and Coach 'Beard' ruminate before and after games at 'A.F.C. Richmond'.

February 3^rd.

66^th anniversary of Buddy Holly’s death in a plane crash in an Iowa blizzard (yes, I know, pedants – and the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens).  Those with a morbid interest can read further – it may have been caused by the pilot misreading the ‘artificial horizon’ meter on board the Beechcraft Bonanza.

The wife of a friend, Sally Smith, K.C., whom I am pleased to say I am beginning to know a little better after a few meetings and a dinner together with friends, is an author.  Her first novel, ‘Of Mice And Murder’ was published last year and was well received.  ‘Conan Doyle with a touch of Rumpole’ was one comment.  A more measured but very enthusiastic piece in the Literary Review was then followed by a choice as a ‘Radio 2 Book Club’ book.  Another book featuring her legal hero, Sir Gabriel Ward,K.C. follows later this year.  I very much enjoyed reading it.

In occasional passages she neatly but gently skewers the legal profession.  For example, she mentions the elevation of the judge’s desk above the well of the court: ‘This literal and spiritual elevation, while beneficial to the abstract concept of justice, was not so good for the humility of the judges.’  Understandably (the novel is set in 1901) she draws attention to the antipathy towards any possible female entrance to the bar, despite evidence of greater intelligence than many male counterparts.  Sir Gabriel says;  ‘…They have never seemed obvious to me.  In all my reading I have never seen anything that convinced me of a correlation between gender and intellect; though certainly it is the case that, by convention, education and expectation, we do our best to make such a correlation.’

One character in the novel, Lord Dunning, inevitably makes one think of Lord ‘Tom’ Denning.  Perhaps a Freudian slip?  The two characters could not be more different.  If you do not believe me, read the novel.  (Lord Denning’s life story is worth more than a glance too.)

And finally, with some amusement as a Dorset-dweller, the reclusive Sir Gabriel considers travelling out of his beloved Temple to investigate the mystery: ‘Not the most assiduous attention to the little rituals he adopted to make travel tolerable to him would enable him to travel to Greenwich, let alone Bournemouth.’

I think it was on this day (February 3^rd) that I came down to breakfast to hear my wife say, ‘Have you heard Trump’s latest?’  (No).  ‘He’s going to take over Ghana.’  ‘Wow’, I say.  Then I wonder, is it the gold, the cocoa, or the diamonds that is the attraction?  But the tagline on the TV corrects me.  It is ‘Gaza’.  Perhaps I should demand money back on my relatively new hearing aids.  Either plan, Ghana or Gaza, seems a little fraught with problems though.

Private Eye has published a farewell poem to Jean-Marie Le Pen, right wing French leader, holocaust denier, etc, etc.  Private Eye tributes are always penned by E.J. Thribb, aged 17½.  In this case he has signed himself E.J Le Thribb, and concludes with the thought that ‘Le Pen was not mightier than Le Scythe.’

 

Chris Rapley, CBE, was a year ahead of me at school.  He and his colleague, Phil Whitemore, were considered the only two of their year and our year worth coaching for the S level physics exam.  An Oxford degree, an MSc at Jodrell Bank, and a PhD at UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory (in X-ray astronomy) seemed more or less inevitable.  He is now Professor of Climate Science at UCL.  Along the way he has been director of the Science Museum, and director of the British Antarctic Survey, among other accomplishments.  Writing in the school magazine, however, often a vehicle for self-congratulation, he offers a lesson in humility.  His theme is attempting to make science interconnected.  Often the great scientists have remarkable knowledge – but in a pigeonhole of information.  At the end of his article, he wonders why it is that humans do not act on the evidence placed before them by scientists, and states that natural scientists have much to learn from social and behavioural research.

As a medical practitioner, and, I like to think, a medical scientist, I found the following paragraph very telling:

‘Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel prize-winning economist, and expert on human behaviour, described our mind as “a machine for jumping to conclusions” and noted that “thinking to humans is as swimming to cats – we can do it, but prefer not to”.  In practice we filter information according to our predilections, and behave in ways that are all too often against our best interests.  As social beings we are strongly influenced by our peers’.

On reading this, I could not help thinking of the times as a doctor when I jumped to conclusions, hopefully more frequently in my earlier rather than my later career, and I have written at length of examples, which I hope may help medical students who follow me at a later date.

The ‘against our best interests’ is nicely detailed in the book, ‘The March of Folly’, by the American historian Barbara Tuchman.  She begins with the Wooden Horse of Troy and ends with the Vietnam War.

 In medical practice, the best example I can think of is a consultant who shall be nameless, whom I worked for many years ago.  Anticoagulants (exclusively warfarin in those days) may be given to patients who either evince evidence of thrombosis, or are at high risk for thrombosis.  Given to these patients, a significant number of patients can be saved from the fatal occurrence of blood clots passing into the lungs (pulmonary embolism).  The down side of treatment is that a few patients, a very small, but definite number will be harmed by these drugs.  A few will develop gastrointestinal bleeding and some of these will die.  The sad fact is that one cannot know how many lives will be saved – because they will live on, oblivious to their treatment.  Only a trial of patients at risk, some of whom are given a placebo, and some the active treatment will prove the value of the treatment.  The physician in question had been asked to advise about his brother in law, who had an unpleasant deep vein thrombosis.  He advised warfarin treatment.  Unfortunately his brother in law died from a gastrointestinal bleed.  Thereafter, irrespective of the many trials, which showed benefit, it became impossible to ask him to ratify a prescription for warfarin, even if the patient in the bed in front of him was virtually clogged solid with thrombus.

A paper in the British Medical Journal, some years ago, specifically addressed the bias introduced into medical thinking by past experience, despite contrary evidence from large scale double blind clinical trials.  Professor John Hampton, when lecturing on ‘Evidence Based Medicine’, used to say, ‘When someone says “In my experience”, I reach for my shotgun.’

‘Primum non nocere’, First Do No Harm, is a byword of medicine, but the moral philosopher will of course see that in medicine, one often has to choose the lesser of two evils.  ‘Drugs are useful poisons’, Nobel laureate Sir James Black used to say, and he was right.

Another bizarre experience, related to risk and benefit, was described by W St C Symmers, the pathologist, in one of his books about the rarer reaches of pathology.  Visiting a hospital somewhere in Africa, he was horrified to see children on the ward, dying of typhoid fever.  ‘But you have chloramphenicol here’, he said.  ‘Oh yes’, was the reply, ‘But we can’t give it because of the risk of agranulocytosis (death from bone marrow suppression)’.

Chloramphenicol is almost universally successful in curing typhoid.  Fatal agranulocytosis only occurs in a tiny fraction of patients receiving it.

 

Monday 10^th February

Oh dear.  A cold day with a temperature of 3 degrees but the easterly wind makes it feel like minus 1.  I have just read ‘Orbital’, last year’s Booker Prize winner.  Best to read the reviews on Goodreads rather than mine.  Of course, they range from the adulatory to the unimpressed.  The one star reviewer seems to have a point when she talks of the romanticisation of Russia without any mention of Ukraine.  (The book concerns six astronauts circling the earth on the International Space Station (Russian, Japanese, English, American).

The Japanese astronaut is presumably there to allow the author to introduce and meditate on, the 1945 bombing of Nagasaki (the astronaut’s mother survived the bombing of Nagasaki).

Here is my review – please do not read if you are in the 5 star category – and don’t look if you are intending to read the book.

Firstly, fortunately it is only 136 pages long.  It is described as a novel, though it has no plot and is either an extended and extremely dry geography lesson, or an exercise in philosophy (or navel gazing, if you prefer), or a tract written by a Green MP (not that I disagree with the critique of man’s despoliation of the earth), or in places an attempt to out-Virginia Virginia Woolf in a stream of consciousness-like meander.

The relentless search for the telling metaphor or the super-flurry of adjectives and adverbs left me wanting to go back to the simplicity of something by Ernest Hemingway (‘Never knowingly used a word which might send a reader to the dictionary’).  Naturally, Samantha Harvey has qualifications in creative writing and philosophy.  It strikes me as the perfect example of a Booker Prize Winner. 

Hmm, got that off my chest, didn’t I?  Maybe it has to do with the constant ache from my fractured clavicle.  I have read that NSAIDs can impair healing and bone union, so I am trying to wean myself off them.

On second thoughts…

There is one section in the book which does offer real insights into the minds of the astronaut or cosmonaut.  But are they original?  Remember, ‘Good writers borrow, great writers steal’.  Perhaps I should not have been surprised to read that there are so many autobiographies by former astronauts.  I have not read any.  Looking over the list however, it sounds as though Chris Hadfield’s autobiography ‘An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth’ is one of the more revealing.  Did Samantha Harvey mine these books?  I am sure she did.  The section of the (paperback) book I have in mind is between pages 72 and 75.  It shows the inhabitants of the ISS gradually becoming aware of the lack of real boundaries on earth – other than land and sea, and a perplexity about how we cannot live in peace with one another.  And how our own species has dominated, shaped, and in many cases, ruined the land we live in 250 miles below.

 

But, ‘Life is Real, Life is Earnest’ – I think it was Longfellow who wrote that.  And the news is almost universally unbearable.  Gaunt malnourished Israeli hostages released in Gaza, surrounded by hooded gunmen bearing Kalashnikovs.  That was really successful, Mr Netanyahu, wasn’t it?  A child in a flat in Southampton with creeping black mould, like something out of a John Wyndham science fiction novel.  The awfulness of the Super Bowl half-time show.  I am with Paul Simon.  I am the only living boy in New York.

‘I can gather all the news I need on the weather report.’

‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality’.

I do know that was T.S. Eliot.  And as if to prove it, my trivial mind reminds me that there was a cracking game of rugby this last weekend with England scoring and converting a try to beat France by one point.  For American readers – this is our version of the Super Bowl.  It always amuses me when the winners of Super Bowl are announced portentously (Samatha Harvey – all those adverbs and adjectives are catching) – as ‘WORLD CHAMPIONS’!

Due to a touch of insomnia, I caught quite a bit of the Super Bowl, which could be characterised by ‘How are the mighty fallen’?  It was widely touted that the Kansas City Chiefs would win for a third year in a row (known to U.S. sports fans as a ‘Threepeat’).  However, the Philadelphia Eagles triumphed by a wide margin.  For those in the know, the Chiefs quarterback, Patrick Mahomes was ‘sacked’ six times and threw two interceptions.  The Eagles MVP was the appropriately named Jalen Hurts.  For a height of 6’1” Hurts weighs 222 lbs or 101Kg which appears to be all muscle.

 

But mention of Virginia Woolf reminds me that I have read one very interesting and readable book recently – my wife’s book club choice which I purloined for a short while.  Like me, she has got to the age where it is now wise to read the book only days before the meeting in which one is due to discuss it, so it was available.  ‘Deceived With Kindness’ by Angelica Garnett.  Now… I have never really got to grips with the Bloomsbury Group.  Their painting, writing, economising etcetera.  ‘Who did what, which way up, and to whom’, or if you prefer a less coarse quotation, ‘Lived in squares, moved in circles, and loved in triangles’ (Dorothy Parker).  Angelica was the daughter of Clive and Vanessa Bell, though sired as she afterwards found out by Duncan Grant.  Grant was presumably going through a heterosexual phase at the time.  He and Vanessa spent most of the rest of their lives painting.  Angelica movingly describes how the lack of a true father figure in her life left her feeling isolated and naïve – the others of her parents’ generation were all just selfishly doing their own thing.  The counterpart of the 60s and 70s hippy culture perhaps?  Poor Angelica was thrown together socially with her future husband, David ‘Bunny’ Garnett, who was 26 years older than her, without knowing that Bunny had at least made a pass at her mother, and was also the lover of Duncan Grant, her biological father.  This was a moving and poignant autobiography.

 

Thursday February 13^th

A lovely BSO concert last night – Beethoven’s 1^st Symphony, Elgar’s Cello Concerto, ‘Death and Transfiguration’ (Richard Strauss).  The cellist was Laura van der Heijden and the conductor was Alexander Soddy.

Every time I hear the Elgar concerto it sounds more melancholy than before.  The sadness is unsurprising – composed in Brinkwells Cottage, near Fittleworth in rural Sussex, as 1918 ebbed away and a gloomy armistice supervened.  Of this time, when he was often ill, worried by financial problems and the death of friends, he wrote, ‘Everything good and nice and clean and fresh and sweet is far away –never to return’ (Note from programme by Andrew Burn).

My former colleague, Dr Peter Clein, a gifted musician himself and father of Natalie Clein (cellist) and Louisa Clein (actress), once told me that the abrupt jumps and drops of the scale in the first theme of the Elgar is said to represent the identical shifts in altitude of the spine of the Malvern Hills, where Elgar was happiest.  The story may well be apocryphal, but nonetheless it is a pleasant one.

The other day, because I can only walk at the moment, I was getting my exercise on the beach when I met a lady blowing bubbles.  These were spectacular bubbles, some three feet across, floated from her own home-made bubble ring constructed of strips of cotton sheeting, suspended between two bamboo poles, which she dipped into her mixture of detergent, baking soda, glycerin, and water.  She told me that she found the experience very therapeutic.  One needed moisture in the air and a light breeze.  Here they are:

February 17th, 2025 

It is now cold and blustery.  May the weather (and my shoulder) be better by the time of my next diary.

 

The Evening Hill Diaries - Autumn 2024

 

 

September 2024

 

Walking in West Dorset the other day, I was pleased to be next to a farmer friend who is a fount of information on the various agricultural elements of the country we were passing through.  A neatly maintained succession of fields led him to mention the name of the farming family who managed this land, proof of his omniscience.  ‘Though the land itself is owned by Gonville & Caius College’, he observed.  Really?  A part of rural Dorset owned for some hundreds of years by a Cambridge college?  It put me in mind of the Agitprop theatre company who featured in Scotland and England during the 1970s and 1980s, called 7:84.  The name was a reference to an Economist article stating that 7% of the UK population owned 84% of the wealth.  A number of social activists worked with the company, though it eventually lost Arts Council funding.  David Tennant worked with 7:84 in 1991 in ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’.

 

Moving on we came to some wheat fields with ripe ears of grain hanging limply down.  My friend explained that this was not due to drought but to poorly judged feeding leading to overgrowth of the stalk during the earlier phase of growth.  This phenomenon is called ‘lodging’.  There are various causes of ‘lodging’ and the nutrition cause leads to the floppy appearance which is called ‘brackling’.  Knowing little of farming, I pointed out that it had been dry for several days with rain forecast the next day.  My friend picked an ear and chewed a grain with an experienced air, pronouncing on his estimation of the moisture content (17%).  Then as we walked down through the farmyard we were both pleased to see a grain transporter and a combine harvester starting up the farm track behind us.  The conversation was an introduction to the incredibly complex science of wheat growing.  An index called the ‘Hagberg Falling Number’ is extremely important in assessing whether a particular grain is suitable for bread making.  A low level correlates with high levels of the enzyme alpha-amylase, which breaks down starch prematurely to sugars.  An index between 250 to 350 seconds is best for wheat flour that is going to be used for bread making.  And so on…  It seems that the American Great Plains have the ideal conditions for excellent grain production.  The grain we have sampled will probably end up as commercial biscuits.  Paradoxically, it seems that the most sought after wheat in the world is Canadian hard red – not because it is the finest in the world, quite the opposite.  It can be milled extremely finely, resulting in that phenomenon known to all – the soft white loaf.  In demand everywhere for sandwiches.

 

September 4^th

 

Since watching the D-Day commemoration ceremonies earlier in the Summer we had planned a trip by bicycle to Ver-sur-Mer, in the Calvados department, where the British Normandy memorial is situated.  This site was unveiled in 2021 and contains the names of 22,442 British soldiers, and soldiers from over 30 countries under British command who died between 6^th June 1944 and 31^st August during the battle for Normandy.

 

During the 80^th anniversary ceremonies, silhouettes representing all 1746 soldiers killed on D-Day itself were displayed.  Most of these had been removed by the time of our holiday in France, but the memorial itself is still a sobering and trenchant reminder of that phase of the Second World War and the sacrifices it entailed.

 

Unfortunately our weather was very mixed, such that on one day we even took the train after about 20 miles cycling because of an approaching storm.  Nonetheless it was a holiday to be remembered for both the right and the wrong reasons.

 

Gateway to France.  Passing Handfast Point (Old Harry Rocks) en route Cherbourg

The port of Barfleur - before the rain

Utah Beach - rain

Utah Beach

Le Marin Solitaire (the Lone Sailor)

Placemat from 'Le Roosevelt' cafe - The Beaches

A welcome sight - the Domaine de Utah Beach.  We dried out and the food was good

 

As we pedalled along it was hard to escape the thought that the French are doing very nicely thank you from the 80^th Anniversary of ‘Jour J’ as they call it.  Memorabilia everywhere.  The hotels full of tourists, particularly Americans, visiting the region.  Wine and cidre pressé bottles decorated with the flag and a quatre-vingt-huitième symbol.  Most of the flags displayed are the French Tricolore and the Stars and Stripes.  The French have bought into the notion that it was exclusively the U.S. who won the war – as evidenced by many movies including some of the latest such as ‘Saving Private Ryan’.  On our way down the Cotentin peninsula, pedalling through driving rain towards and around Utah Beach, the most westerly of the landing beaches, I noted that the roads were all named for various American heroes, e.g. ‘Named for Private First Class Walter F McGowan’.  It would seem that all of these heroes died on the day of the landing.  Perhaps, I thought, perversely, they would have preferred to have died much later of old age, and foregone the honour of which they cannot be aware, a sign on a slim lane in Normandy?

Better weather - the inner port of Issigny

Statues at Arromanches

 

British Normandy Memorial - at Ver-Sur-Mer

Much later, on Monday 9^th September, I am standing in Lessay Abbey.  (Apologies for the switch to the present tense, but it encapsulates the immediacy of the experience.  In medias res as the Creative Writing Tutors would have it).  This solemn, simple, but huge church is very sparsely decorated, as befits its Norman Romanesque beginnings.  The foundation in 1056 was by the Benedictine order.  The charter was confirmed by William the Conqueror in 1080.  The rib vault over the choir is thought to be the first example of such a structure in the world* (during excavation the remains of Eudes au Capel, known to have been buried in 1098 were found beneath the floor, thus dating the construction).  It is a Monday morning.  It is very quiet.  There is one penitent praying near the chancel.

*  Durham Cathedral claims priority, but the buildings are more or less contemporary (the 1090s) and it is impossible to know which rib vaulting was constructed first.

 

Two striking parts of its history I note.  The Abbey’s charter, signed in 1080, was signed by the Bishops of Winchester, Canterbury, Bayeux, York, and St Anselm*.  The 1066 invasion of Britain by William the Conqueror meant that the Abbey owned priories spread over a wide geographical range, including Boxgrove Benedictine Priory in West Sussex.

The second is that the Abbey has been almost completely rebuilt as it was, following an extraordinary act of cultural vandalism by retreating Germans in 1944.  They detonated mines and bombs in the church, reducing much of it to rubble.  There can have been no strategic advantage to this site.  The Abbey is inland and lies on the tiny river Ay.  The estuary of the Ay at St Germain sur Ay on the west side of the Cherbourg (Cotentin) peninsula is almost entirely marshland and unnavigable.  It seems to be on a par with the destruction of Palmyra by Islamic State.  The completion of rebuilding to the original plan was accomplished in 1957.

 

* Curiously, St Anselm, although born in Aosta (then part of Upper Burgundy), and a Benedictine monk, became Archbishop of Canterbury.

 

Lessay Abbey

 

I find it recurringly strange that despite being a non-believer, I am drawn to ecclesiastical buildings such as this.  Being a British child the seepage of Christianity into the psyche from one’s earliest days at school probably still has profound leverage.  In a church such as this one is as close to a thousand years of history as it is possible to get.*

 *  See thoughts on such experiences below, during the ‘Liverpool experience’.

 

September fishing:

 

A fishing interlude - the P.S. (Paddle Steamer) Waverley in Poole Harbour

Returning from fishing.  16th September.  Poole Harbour

There were some fish, honestly.  Two good sea bream.

 

Back in England it is soon time to follow AFC Bournemouth to Liverpool and to visit this great Merseyside city.  We take a three-day holiday to do this.

 

Liverpool is a magnificent city with more Grade 1 listed buildings than any British city outside London.  Naturally we know that its success and importance is associated with our colonial past, and that the import of cotton, sugar and other goods from the Americas (and around the world) were predicated on those goods being produced in most of those countries (not all) by slave labour.

 

We walk around most of the famous sites – the Liver building – originally the Royal Liver Assurance company building.  One of the first buildings in the world to use reinforced concrete in its construction.  Not mentioned in the online history is its use during the war.  My father, Admiralty employee but officially gazetted a naval officer, used to point out the tiny window near the top of the building where he and colleagues organised naval munitions during the earlier parts of WWII.  He was lucky.  His first work during the war was in Hull – also a target for German bombers.  But the seven night ‘May Blitz’ in Liverpool in 1941 was the most severe.  Only 15% of houses in the Bootle area, near the docks, survived.  Liverpool deaths approximated 4,000 with 70,000 rendered homeless.

 

Thus, as we pose for photos by the Beatles statue, tour the city on the ‘Magical Mystery Tour’, and finish up at the famous Cavern club, it seems to me that we are clutching at historical straws.  History is impossible to re-create.  Penny Lane, Strawberry Field (note the singular), the houses of the Fab Four are just so much wisps of a past which we experienced but cannot relive.  The oddity of it all is brought home to me when we ask a group of three giggling girl teenagers to take our photographs beside the waterfront Beatles’ statue.  Having dutifully taken theirs in return I tell them that my wife went to a Beatles concert in Bournemouth in 1963.  Their enthusiasm is immense.  ‘What were they like?’  ‘Were they fantastic?’  Their incredulity over actually meeting someone who actually saw the Beatles is fascinating.  Had I told them that she was there when the final Tyrannosaurus Rex succumbed to the asteroid they could not have been more impressed and would almost certainly have taken the information at face value.

Less visited, but revered by the Beatles, is the statue of Billy Fury (Ronald Wycherley), whose ballads I loved.  Sadly Billy succumbed to the late effects of rheumatic heart disease at an early age.

The Liver Building - by day and by night

 

Ringo's House

'With The Beatles'.  The title of their second album of course

 

The Cavern Club stage

Historic guitars.  Cavern Club

Anthony Gormley statues, Crosby beach

‘O call back yesterday, bid time return…’

 

The visit to Anfield is equally inspiring.  It seems to me that it is impossible to hear 50,000 fans singing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ without goosebumps, nay tears.

 

And Bournemouth lost three-nil.

The Shankly Gates, Anfield

And recently, more experiences with the Northern Lights seen as far as Stonehenge.

Northern Lights, Stonehenge.  Please note this is not my photograph and it is copyright.  For private perusal only.

September 23^rd

Israel commences a new offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon.  Hezbollah is an Iranian backed Shia political and paramilitary (terrorist) group.  Because of the now near permanence of Israel’s war against Hamas and Hezbollah I would probably not have mentioned this were it not for the navel-gazing BBC who chose to place the Lebanese attacks/retaliations in second place in the morning news to a report into allegations of bullying in ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ (Dancing with the Stars in the U.S.).  Amanda Abbington (actress) accused her professional dance partner of verbal and physical abuse.  This resulted in an enormous BBC internal inquiry.  The popular dancer, Giovanni Pernice, was in fact subsequently cleared of any physical abuse.  It would appear that Amanda found the hard graft, hard training, and harsh comments about her dancing and participation a little hard to take.

 

September 27^th

A dash to London.  A friend’s 80^th birthday dinner, held at the Royal Society in Carlton House Terrace.  A hugely respected cardiologist, with a creditable textbook to his name, I occasionally tell him, tongue in cheek, that his son is now more famous than he.  His son is indeed a Fellow of the Royal Society, and undertakes complex molecular research, which may one day result in a cure for cancer.

 

Another inspiring experience.  We are allowed to see its Royal Charter, the name of ‘Charles R’ at the top (1660).  The signatures of all of the Fellows on the vellum pages of the Charter Book is a record of scientific fame.  Newton’s original Principia Mathematica is a highlight.

 

The motto of the Royal Society is ‘Nullius in Verba’, literally ‘No one’s words’, or ‘Take no-one’s word for it’.  The Royal Society’s website states that it is ‘An expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment.’  My favourite quotation from Sir Peter Medawar in his ‘Advice to a Young Scientist’ bears exactly on this:  ‘I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not.’

Newton's 'Principia Mathematica'

 

The Motto of the Royal Society

I heard Medawar lecture once.  Not only a gifted scientist but also a gifted communicator.  Naturally, looking up the exact wording of the quotation remembered above I have found numerous examples of his sayings.  Here is a rather delightfully waspish one:  ‘The spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.’

Non-scientists may like to know that Sir Peter Medawar shared the 1960 Nobel Prize with Frank Macfarlane Burnet for his demonstration of ‘Acquired Immune Tolerance’, the phenomenon which underpins all of transplant biology.

 

Our friend’s speech of thanks is urbane, modest, and amusing, by turns.  A story I had not heard before, of how, at the Middlesex Hospital, a deranged patient with hepatic encephalopathy threw a bedpan out of a ward window which landed squarely on the windscreen of his brand new Jaguar is hilarious.  But an appendix to the story is also credible in today’s NHS.  The hospital director wrote to my colleague to say that they would be funding the repair of the car, not because they had failed to protect it, but because they had ‘failed in a duty of care to the patient.’

 

And I also find myself thinking – if had happened today it would merely have been one of those ghastly corrugated cardboard bedpans, not the stainless steel beauties of the past, which resembled nothing so much as the ‘peanut’* sculpture by Anish Kapoor in Chicago’s Millennium Park.

*Official name Cloud Gate.

Upside down bedpan aka Anish Kapoor's 'Cloud Gate'.  Chicagoans call it 'The Peanut'

 

 

Thursday, October 3rd

At this time of year, the Scottish Medical Golf Society visits West Sussex Golf Club.  'Designed unmistakably by providence for a golf course and man for once has done the right thing.'  (Henry Longhurst).  'It is a little sandy jewel set in the Sussex clay, what more can anyone desire?'  (Bernard Darwin).  Here is one of its little gems, the par three 15th hole:

West Sussex Golf Club, near Pulborough

 

We wind on, into autumn and my book club choice is ‘Rain’ (and any other of the short stories) of Somerset Maugham.  Reading ‘The Moon and Sixpence’ and ‘Of Human Bondage’ when young was inspiring but I had not read the short stories until I was chatting with a fellow medical student at UCH, John Lourie*.  I knew that John had done a PhD in anthropology at Oxford before coming to join us at clinical school.  The conversation turned to canals, of which a fellow student, Gerald, was an enthusiast.  He was holding forth about sundry British canals when John made some mild interjection about the remarkable nature of the Panama canal.  This stopped Gerald dead.  ‘You’ve been through the Panama canal?’  He gawped.  ‘Yes,’ Was the answer.  John made a few remarks about it, and then said something like, ‘But the third time I went through it was blah blah blah…’  (I have forgotten the point he was making).  Collapse of stout party Gerald.

Some of John’s anthropological research had been in the South Seas and Papua New Guinea.  ‘I’ve stayed in the room in which Somerset Maugham wrote “Rain”,’ He said.  (For pedantic reasons I will tell you that this was in Pago Pago, American Samoa.)

This minor episode led me on to read more of Somerset Maugham’s short stories.  I do hope that my book club colleagues will have enjoyed some of them.  In view of the location of so many of the stories (Far East, South Seas, Malaysia (then the Federated Malay States or FMS), Singapore, I have promised them Tiffin and some Gin Pahit when they come.

 

* John Lourie subsequently trained as an Orthopaedic Surgeon in Oxford, but true to his wanderlust, became Professor of Human Anatomy in Papua New Guinea.  He returned to the UK to recommence work in Orthopaedics.  We first got to know one another when we had to share a pigeon hole in the UCH Medical School entry lobby (Lourie-McLeod).  The mailbox was crammed with reprint requests for his paper entitled ‘Hand-clasping and arm-folding among middle eastern Jews in Israel.’  As students on a ‘firm’ together I would note in him the impatience of somebody with a proper scientific training (DPhil) when confronted with the arbitrary diktats of medical teaching which often relied on accepted wisdom rather than scientific proof.

A footnote to the Lourie story.  Sharing the same firm and the same teaching with him, we were both much amused by the vast number of eponymous medical diseases.  Osgood-Schlatter’s disease, Dercum’s disease, Behçet’s Syndrome, for example.  During a brief foray into urology, we were introduced to the wide variety of urinary catheters available, many of which were brought to the medical world by French physicians and surgeons.  One is tempted to suggest that it was the high incidence of gonorrhoeal urethral stricture in France (you may have to look this up, non-medics; or possibly not), which gave birth to so many French catheters.  The catheters were even measured in a bizarre French way.  The size (thickness) is measured in Ch.  In this instance, Ch stands for Charrière, not the unit of Swiss currency.  Later changed to Fr for French in homage to M. Charrière.  But our lecturer caught us out: ‘Who was Coude?’ He asked.

‘French urologist, sir,’ was the prompt reply.

‘Wrong!  Coude means bent or elbow in French!’  Ahhh, failed.  A favourite trick of examiners.  It is a bent (angled) catheter.  There is even a Bi-coude (double bend).  Coude catheters are still widely sold for ‘self-catheterisation.’  Aggghh!  The complete French physician of the 19^th century carried a variety of shapes and sizes of catheters stuffed into his hatband (sterility a secondary consideration).

John Lourie collated many of these eponymous diseases and subsequently wrote a book entitled, ‘Who Was Coude?’

 

 

October 24^th

This used to be celebrated as United Nations Day.  When I was at Grammar School in Haverfordwest, specific mention of it was made on this day in school assembly.  I suppose that only 14 years after the acclamation of its charter there was still some hope that it was an organisation which might save the world.

 

I travel to London to visit my daughter and her husband, and then, on the following day (St Crispin’s Day) journey to Richmond for a funeral of an associate from a very distant past.  We were all students together at ‘ISH’.  International Students’ House.  The umbrella organisation was called the ‘Goats’ Club’, founded in 1956 by Mary Trevelyan to foster better worldwide understanding through the mixing of students from all nations.  Mary, or ‘Miss Trevelyan’ as we called her, was a regular presence in the house at the time that I lived there – 1970 to 1972.  More recently she has gained prominence as the acknowledged companion and possibly would be wife (never achieved) of T S Eliot from 1938 to 1957.  Mary was truly a saintly lady, as even a brief look at her biography will show.

Despite our ages, three of us (and one wife) are there to support our companion Kitty, in the loss of her husband.  Kitty being Irish, with a strong Irish presence, the funeral is held at Saint Elizabeth of Portugal Roman Catholic church in Richmond.  A plaque on the wall nearby indicates that Bernardo O’Higgins lived there in the late 18^th Century.  Is there a link?

 

Attending funerals tends to provoke a philosophical mood, especially as I note that the deceased was exactly one day younger than I am.  I muse as the train gathers speed back towards Dorset.  Will the world one day be taken over by buddleias?  Or is it just the wilderness around railway tracks which has the monopoly?  The low-lying heathland of the New Forest often has an inviting charm, especially when the heather is in bloom.  But today it seems gloomy under louring skies and the flowers are finished.  Not until the squat reassuring presence of the square tower of 900-year-old Christchurch Priory comes into view is there the faintest hint of reassurance, of permanence.  And it is now lit by a very low late October sun.  It stands resolute and defiant against the fads and preoccupations of a world too busy to take note.  Over the Avon, over the Stour, and into Bournemouth.

But some final introspection – I recently had to apply for a new passport.  Will this be the last one?

 

 

I sense that much of this diary so far is preoccupied with tragedy, and it may well be time to draw it to a close.  It is however in keeping with the season of autumn.  But a final wry comment following my Richmond experience.  We ‘ISH’ residents, lifelong members of the Goats’ Club, are due to meet again in London in two weeks’ time.  I show my friends my original Goats membership card.

‘Where did you get that?’  gasps Joe.

‘Well, I had an old cardboard one,’ I say, ‘But when they issued the plastic cards in 1973 I was sent this.’

‘But they were all withdrawn,’ says Joe. 

‘Why?’ I say.

‘Because the original Goats logo was drawn by an honorary member.’

‘Who was that?’

‘Surely you can guess?  He sat on committees with us and helped to judge art and photographic competitions.  Rolf Harris.’*

 

*For my non-UK readers, Rolf Harris was a very popular Australian entertainer, musician and artist who settled in the UK.  (Some of his records were hits on both sides of the Atlantic).  He appeared frequently on TV doing instant drawings, and on one occasion even received the accolade of painting a portrait of the Queen for her 80^th birthday.  However, in 2014 he was convicted of a number of sexual assaults, several involving underage girls including his daughter’s best friend.  When I sat on committee with him in my role of Chairman of International Students’ House in the early 1970s he was charming and helpful.  I have since wondered if he associated himself with the House because of the many young students from overseas, but that as the lawyers would say is pure speculation.

 

Goats' Club membership card.  Designer: R.H.