Infective Bagpipes: The Hidden Peril.

Prompted by a case, I wrote a short essay as a contribution to my "Continuing Professional Development" (a professional scheme which may be thought of as serving much the same purpose as the whip when steeplechasing a horse).  I thought it might be worth sharing (what's not to like about a bagpipe story?) and so I threw in a few explanations of terms and present it thus:

Earlier today while working through the day’s respiratory specimens, I came across the clinical information supplied by the physician: “Chest infection, patient plays the bagpipes”. Not being an activity I had ever considered might lead to infection; I thought it was worth a quick search of the literature.

The results suggested a small but extant risk of contracting a fungal lung infection from a badly cleaned pipe bag. The scientific literature is sparse on the subject (there not being much research grant money flowing around the bagpipe scene) but the odd occurrence did seem to be newsworthy, prompting such as:

A Warning To Clean Bagpipes from the New York times 18 March 2013: An excellent article detailing the case of a 77 year old Glaswegian bagpipe player diagnosed with pneumonia. the cause of which was only identified after culturing Rhodoturula and Fusarium from the pipe bag. Until the question of bagpipes arose, medical staff would have had no reason to suspect a predisposition to fungal infection, only investigating further after the near fatal failure of antibacterial therapy. In our laboratory we would also not routinely culture for fungi unless requested or some predisposing factor is apparent such as immune deficiency or instrumentation.

A previous case from 1978 discussed in The Lancet  involved a 60 year old piper admitted to The Royal Prince Alfred Hospital with acute myeloblastic leukaemia. Following treatment, material from the lungs of the patient was found to be infected with Cryptococcus neoformans, an identical strain to which was again cultured from his pipe bag. There seems to have been a degree of controversy at the time over the question as to whether he contracted C.neoformans from the bagpipes, or whether he caught it elsewhere as a consequence of the leukaemia and transferred it subsequently to the instrument. My own conjecture is that when someone is looking for a comforting distraction in the event of contracting a fungal pneumonia on top of acute myeloblastic leukaemia, I can’t see them reaching for the bagpipes. It seems akin to jogging for relief of a broken ankle. A possibility might be that the player did indeed transfer C.neoformans to the matrix of his pipe bag after a short, transient period of carriage. The yeast thrived therein, only by chance being able to infect the player opportunistically when his immune system was damaged by the leukaemia.

The construction and care of bagpipes has changed over the years. The traditional cow/sheepskin bag required more regular maintenance than their more modern synthetic relatives. Synthetic bags tend to be made from a fabric such as gortex which is breathable to allow moisture from saliva to evaporate, but which may provide a matrix in which fungi could thrive. The extra maintenance of the older type bag is thought by pipers to have made these sorts of infections less likely, due to the antimicrobial properties of the honey and herbs used to cure the material. Personally, I would have thought this unlikely. The main antimicrobial property of honey, when used historically in the dressing of infected wounds, comes from its sugar concentration reducing water activity. In the small amounts used in curing material, in a moist environment the honey is more likely act as a source of food than an antimicrobial agent.

Added to this, the bagpipes are, it would seem a temperamental instrument, as a consequence of which their owners are reluctant to strip and clean them when they are working well, in case this disturbs their equilibrium.

This is a rare route of infection, however the message would appear to be to clean your bagpipes regularly because there is a chance they could do to your lungs what they do to my ears.

                                                                AA

Short Hallowe'en Story: Murder

There are torches and blue lights in the woods tonight. And two men. Tall men. Official men. It is November cold and rain has begun to run down the black trees that tilted and hissed with the wind, until a stillness flowed through everything, leaving only those quiet, graveside tears to patter from the branches.

A gentle, coffee-mug warm hand passes across a face to close the eyes, one last time. All this night and the last, the reflections of the shadows of branches and all the stars of the universe have moved with the moon across those eyes, hours before, the morning dew had glistened on them like sadness, but no more now, and never again.

On a crisp, January night, no longer in anyone’s memory, a child dances in the snow, her body whirling and stamping and falling, her mother laughing from the window.

The world turns

A young woman lies on a blanket, on a hillside, on a bed of flowers, under the hot sun, hot blood and mischief in her veins.

More officials, more lights; white hoods, blue gloves, snatched from their beds to scratch and bob for twigs, like spring birds in happier months.

The body of a woman. No life now, all poured into the ground and the grass with no mother to see and no flowers for a bed, as her heart slowed and stopped and the blood thickened and cooled in her veins, in the hard, November dark.

Eventually the wood is emptied of strangeness. The sun is showing above the trees; silver shadows, new to the world stretch across the green. Death melts away like fairies, the dream of the dawn mist, gone in the light. All is new and the innocence of man (myth) is born for the first time, all over again. Another day, another chance to do no evil.

                                    AA

How I Came To Terms With The Tyranny Of The Weekend: A Lazy Man's Perspective.

Au contraire...

It’s raining outside, and I'm glad. It’s that deciduous summer rain peculiar to Britain, thrown casually from passing clouds which could care less for the feelings of holidaymakers. You’ll have heard it pounding the roof of your tent or caravan, or seen it streaming down the window of the seafront café or amusement arcade. If you’re eleven years old it’s bank holiday ruining weather, trapping you indoors and stealing the fag-end of the summer holiday. If you’re a chap in your forties however, maybe feeling a bit lazy, sitting on your arse and all you need to make you the happiest of men is a film in any genre where you might find David Niven, then the rain is excellent news, it means no one can reasonably expect you to set foot past the front door. I’m not talking chronic laziness you understand, of the Channel 4 documentary “Fetch mama’s stick” type, just an acute 48 hour attack of velcro buttock.

There are dark forces working against you if it refuses to rain on a

Would David Niven have attended Zumba?

weekend such as this. An unwritten British rule that sunshine must not be wasted. To do so feels like a minor sin, as though you’re giving away a little bit of your soul. You have to find something, anything to do outside, no matter if you want to or not. It’s a tyranny.

A similar tyranny is the feeling nagging at the back of your mind that you might not have done enough. You might not have put enough effort in to satisfy the inevitable post hoc discussion when you get back to work. “What did you get up to at the weekend?” is rapidly becoming one of the most intimidating questions a man like myself of simple, quiet tastes can face. A thrill runs through me as of cold war East Berlin and the demand of “Papers!”

I’m usually taken more by surprise by the question than I should be. Initially my mind goes blank and I imagine I look confused, startled. I can’t remember what I did. The pause stretches. The polite smile on the questioner’s face starts to look brittle as they begin to wonder if they are talking to an imbecile. “Why is he so reluctant?” they’re thinking, “is he covering something up? A murder, maybe, perhaps this Ukraine business is his fault.” Eventually I do remember, but then is it enough? Do I lead an interesting enough life to satisfy this person? Have they had a more interesting time than me and if so does this mean they have in some way “won”? There is the other side of the coin to consider, as well. What if I've had too interesting a weekend? What if I flew to Rome for lunch, or spent my time racing cars against high class call girls? Should I make some self-deprecating joke about it in case I’m judged harshly as a try-too-hard?

In all likelihood I won’t have done these things. Most of my weekends sound pretty pedestrian in these conversations as is the case, I suspect, with the majority of people who have exceeded their vodka and clubbing years. This, in fact, is my issue. I considered doing more exciting things in order to spice up these Monday morning exchanges, but realised in time that I would be rolling over and submitting to oppression by a minority. I chose instead a path of honest, passive resistance. These days I answer truthfully and with pride. “I read a book on marketing psychology,” I say, my expression adding: “No, no reason, I thought it might be interesting”. Sometimes I might say “I was out with friends,” and I hope my open, honest smile conveys the rest of the message, to the effect of: “we talked about interesting stuff and laughed our arses off, without feeling the need to do so whilst water skiing or learning to play Ghanaian death drums in a community centre”.

I like to flatter myself I’m not completely boring, but I also think I have the right to the occasional dull weekend without the tacit implication that I’m wasting my life. I’m not wasting it, I’m doing stuff I like, which might just be drinking tea and watching an entire run of an American cop show, or learning all the internet has to offer on the formation of metals in collapsing suns (did you know all the iron in the universe is formed in a particular twenty second window in the life of a star?) or even just spending some time with

A "fat bike" for when
just cycling somewhere
isn't enough.

my friends, perhaps in a restaurant that isn’t owned by a TV chef.

I realise of course that all this is (probably) all in my head and just my personal paranoia. When it comes down to it, it’s a trivial opener, designed to say one of two things, either:

Hello. I’d like to converse with you for no other reason than to enjoy a few moments of greeting, as we’re a social species and it’s the sort of thing we do. I have no particular information to pass to you and no need of anything specific from you. I have nothing prepared so I’ll just slot this in to give us a bit of thinking time while the chat gets going.

Or alternatively:

Hello, I hate you. I’ve always hated you. For me, you’re one of the downsides of turning up here every day, but since this isn’t the last day of working here for either of us I feel telling you would bring these issues to the surface, creating needless bad feeling which we would then have to live with until one of us resigns or works out a way of murdering the other without getting caught. Further, I might, God forbid, need something from you at some point and the worse these situations are, the more degrading it will be for me to get on my knees and beg.

Either way, I suppose it’s just a useful cliché, a harmless little mental shortcut we can trot out and play our parts in while we settle more comfortably into the exchange. It could always be the case of course that the questioner genuinely cares and is honestly interested to find out just which of my riveting pastimes I may have been engaged in.

If this weekend tyranny is, at least in part, coming from my own head, I should think about what I’m trying to tell myself. Perhaps I am dull. I might be so boring that I’m embarrassed to tell myself and have to project my opinion onto others in the hope that I take my hint and liven myself up. Maybe I do want to do stuff that I don’t want to do. I suppose I have to consider the possibility that I’m over thinking the issue.

Lastly, on the subject of perspective, to anyone who may unaccountably be reading this in a refugee camp, or a bombed out school far from my armchair and is politely thinking “Yes, I can see how these problems would bring you such great suffering, tell me again about the clean water you use to make tea”, I can only apologise.

                                     
                                                                                                                            AA

Why I Love Coffee

You’re onto a bit of a winner selling anything that people are willing to get themselves addicted to,

the only downside being when some killjoy makes it illegal. Perhaps coffee will go the same way and a hundred years hence people will look back on us (whole workplaces so jacked up by four in the afternoon that we can no longer read or force a biro between our splintering teeth) with the same astonishment we direct toward those top-hatted people at the beginning of the last century who, when they weren’t quietening their babies and coughing spouses with heroin, were perking themselves up with cocaine wine.

The London coffee shop was born in 1652 when a Greek merchant Pasque Rosée began importing the bean from what are now Yemen and

Ethiopia via Istanbul. He opened a stall in a back alley so that others could share in his addiction which indeed they did with enormous enthusiasm. People of all stripes of society gathered in the London mud to get themselves jittery and gossip insatiably. The

real heyday of this initial burst of coffee culture would come through the first half of the following century, when there would grow to be eighty or so coffee houses within the old walls of the city. By the middle of that same century The East India Company had decided everyone should be drinking tea from their profitable plantations and slowly the promiscuous English taste buds began to be teased away from the bean and into their enduring love affair with the leaf. It may well have been the advent of electronic information transmission in the 19th century that finally did for the last of the London coffee house culture, the last of them closed or transformed into gentleman’s clubs around this time. London wouldn’t see another coffee shop until the espresso bars of the 1950s, springing up as a consequence of that second Roman invasion whose ambition, more modest than Caesar’s, centred on “Little Italy” in Clerkenwell.

As I write, I sit less than a mile from the Brighton house of Henry and Hester (Mrs.) Thrale, that lively 18th century daughter of Welsh gentry much visited by Samuel Johnson and I think even the good doctor would raise an eyebrow at the proliferation of coffee houses over the last couple of decades. As now, the first outbreak

I don't know if Munch enjoyed a coffee,
but it wouldn't surprise me

of the bean accompanied an insatiable general hunger for information as men (reputable women steered clear) would gather, pump each other for news and engage in over-stimulated discussions and debates. Although some of these reported were of the nonsensically existential variety familiar to anyone who has been buttonholed at a London party (the kind where no one goes to the bathroom in groups of less than four), much useful exchange was had concerning fashionable plays, politics, science (it is said that Isaac Newton dissected a dolphin on a table in the Grecian, near the Royal Society) and of course finance: the first stocks were traded in Jonathan’s near The royal Exchange and shipping (in fact, all) insurance was born at Lloyd’s (Hence the apostrophe, unlike the bank) which was situated on Tower Street, moving to Lombard Street three years later. The Thrales’ Brighton house is long demolished now, the site being occupied by the sort of bar where it isn’t possible to hold a detailed conversation with anyone, let alone a lexicographer with (probable) Tourettes and half a pound of coffee inside him.

Many attribute credit (or blame, depending on your point of view) for the present caffeine explosion to Howard Schultz and his Starbucks (no apostrophe, oddly) brand, which is either the symbol of the death of heterogeneity in western culture, the responsible face of capitalism or the propaganda arm of the Israeli Defence Force, depending on which web sites most fit your politics. The truth is the blue touch paper in Britain was lit before that when Sergio and Bruno Costa opened their shop in 1978 on Vauxhall Bridge Road, near Buckingham Palace, but it was slow burning; no one at the

time was prepared to be Italian until Italy had been sanitised through the filter of American culture. Now of course fashion craves authentic individuality and Starbucks is finding it difficult to turn an honest London dollar: we customers are fickle. Starbucks entered Britain in 1998 with the purchase of the 64 strong chain The Seattle Coffee Co. The word Seattle is a clue that one of the drivers of this second coffee revolution was the beginning of another information frenzy (I.T. folk, unlike telegraph operators, do love a stimulant). Like Pasque Rosée, Scott and Ally Svenson set up their Seattle Coffee Co. because they missed the coffee houses that fuelled the finest minds of their titular city. This time around, coffee was not a new concept for the people of Britain (we had Mellow Birds, for God’s sake), what the Svensons and the Costas were offering was good coffee. (Not even Rosée had that, coffee in the 17th/18th century tasted like shit - contemprary description - mixed with soot, only more addictive).

Having a good product wasn’t the clever bit, any fool with a kettle and an import licence can do that. The clever bit was selling it wrapped in added value. Because of the way associative memory works, there is a sort of cultural metatagging that comes with a heavily marketed consumable. It has, for a long time, been impossible to just “have a glass of wine” without also consuming the information that comes with it. Perhaps we are enjoying a single vineyard Argentinian Malbec, but in doing so we are also engaging in an unspoken dialogue with a winemaker we are unlikely ever to meet that transcends geography, time and language. Consciously or subconsciously we imagine the sun on the lush slopes of the vineyard in the foothills of the Andes, the leather faced artisan removing his hat to wipe his brow and worry about the night time temperature being too cool for the grapes. In actual fact the Mendoza plains are flat and the winemaker is just as likely to be female and/or a downwardly mobile investment banker, but that sort of detail doesn’t make it through marketing.  More recently, coffee has nailed a seat firmly to this bandwagon and we are encouraged to appreciate the

geography associated with the origins of our drink and the process involved in getting it to our lips, as well as - in more extreme cases - how the digestive properties of certain species of cat might affect the taste. It’s all part of inserting the mere sensual experience into a broader narrative, and we love it. We can’t not, we’re programmed to be drawn to narrative, it’s how we make sense of the world. Once we’ve been fed the information, we can make the connections and enjoy the resulting mini neural orgasm that is our dopamine reward system. We can sip at our Monsooned Malabar and picture the beans being raked around a South Indian warehouse, open to the weather (replicating the moisture absorbing journey in the hold of a 19th century sailing ship that mellowed the flavour). It makes for a much richer experience, we value it more and the more we value something of course, the more we will be prepared to pay for it, especially if we are sitting among the kind of cool, daytime caféeistas who can be not at work and yet still afford £2.50 a cup to rent a chair. Which is where I am.

                               AA

Why I Enjoy Dialling

This is the one I was thinking of.

There is a black and white photograph (what film it comes from I don’t know), of Hedy Lamarr, reputedly the world’s most beautiful woman if 1940s P.R. is to be believed. She is holding a telephone receiver to her ear and looking both past the camera (possibly at a yawning boom operator) and fantastic. You know by looking at her that she’s in a drama. You just know she’s talking to a smirking alpha with a moustache and a double breasted suit and you know she’s going to end the call with an emphatic slamming down of the receiver, or maybe she will replace it slowly and deliberately with silent, restrained emotion. What she does straight after that you won’t find out, however, because the scene is inevitably cut there. There’s no need to see more, the message has been sent. We, the audience, already know what’s going on in her head and in her heart.

This picture wouldn’t work with an iPhone, you’d just assume she was ordering Japanese food or expounding plot exposition with a hipster hacker in front of a screen somewhere. Either way you would, in this scenario, almost certainly find out what she does afterwards because you would get a few seconds of post-call reaction. You have to; watching someone talking on an iPhone is just not that evocative.

Similarly, while in the days of bakelite and braided cable you would often see a character dialling, you rarely see anyone searching through a smartphone menu in a film, unless the content of the menu is necessary to move the plot forward. The activity within itself is emotionally meaningless. It’s too new and we have attached no symbolism to it. Even when you see someone doing it in real life there’s an awful, blank-faced sterility about it. Dialling on a rotary dial is different. It’s more of a physical action. The visual impact of it builds tension. Even the mechanical click-whirr seems to build a connection with the character on the other end of the dialling finger that thumbing a menu, even with Idris Elba scowling down at it, cannot.

This is some of the reason, I think, why I enjoy dialling. I didn’t dial for years and never realised I missed it. like everyone else I have a smartphone and if I do feel the need to go wired when I’m out and about I’m usually a button man, as this is what is universally available. I am, however, old enough to remember the time when push-button phones first became popular and everyone had to have one. They were modernity, sophistication, the pina colada of British Telecom supplanting the warm beer of the General Post Office. This obsolescence of style, although we could not know it, foreshadowed the irrational orgy of consumption to which the communication hardware market would aspire. Even the Trimphone became old. You felt more dynamic hitting buttons, more immediate, more - dare I say it - American. J.R. Ewing pressed buttons to dial or, more accurately, he pressed one button and his secretary dialled, but she (yes, she: this was J.R.) would press buttons. Before you knew it, all of Britain was sleek, stark and modern. You would no more catch Ultravox on a rotary dial telephone than you would Tubbs or Crockett.

The spread of the communication cocaine that is the mobile telephone was a further revolution, the end of staying in and pacing fretfully while awaiting the life changing call from that special girl/boy/employer/G.U.M. doctor.

There are many people to thank for the astonishing impact of the mobile telephone, not least among them Gene Roddenbury and Captain Kirk for the inspiration and indeed Hedy Lamarr who, as well as being the most beautiful woman in the world and a Hollywood star of the kind you just don’t get any more, was a mathematician and electronics genius. When she wasn’t in front of the camera simpering to her chest-measurement I.Q. leading men, Lamarr worked out the spread-spectrum, frequency hopping technology which enables you to carry on an unbroken call as you cross from cell to cell. She wasn’t thinking about telephones of course (this was the 1940s and people were still happy to be tethered to the wall by their ears) she was trying to control musical instruments remotely. I’ve no idea why she wanted to do this, or if there was a need for it at the time, but there would shortly be a definite need to prevent Johnny Nazi jamming the signals of good American radio controlled torpedoes, which is how the technology was first usefully employed. I would have liked to say you wouldn’t catch Hedy Lamarr being J.R.’s secretary but I expect you would if the script called for it and they could afford her. Some revolutions take longer than others.

Even our phone books have become electronic and dialling of any kind has almost gone out of vogue altogether. Indeed it feels odd and old fashioned now even to have to push buttons. Everything is getting very electronic. No, that’s the wrong word, it was always electronic. Everything is getting very digital. As communication gets more effortless, the process loses something of its soul. Yes we can talk to whoever we want, whenever we want and wherever we want but the activity within itself becomes devalued. There is - to my mind - a payoff between the increasing ease of connection via layers of technology and an increasing emotional disconnection with the actual process.

What I mean by that can be illustrated by looking at the parallel changes in the music recording industry over the decades. When you listen to a studio album now, a great deal of effort has gone into the production. The musicians have likely played in a special environment to separately record the sound of each instrument so that they may be expertly mixed, with echo and reverb to make everything sound more “natural”. The best parts of many takes will be stitched together and the overall final product that meets your ears will be as close to perfection as the recording engineer and producer can make it. That’s a wonderful thing, assuming their ideas of musical perfection agree with yours and recorded music sounds incredible now, especially as, with more digital storage space available we start to move beyond the CD and have access to the same resolution, range and depth in what we buy as was heard in the studio. Contrast this with an old 1920s blues 78. The recording process for this, in its simplest form, involved musicians playing and singing into a horn mechanically vibrating the recording stylus, which cut the wax of the master disc, which in turn was used to make the record. The quality will be terrible to modern ears, the sound reedy, thin and metallic and most likely scratchy. Why people still love and collect them however is because of that connection, the emotional bond with the process. When you hear a 1920s acoustic recording you’re only two handshakes away from the guy with the guitar. How much value does this have? In 2013 John Tefteller, not a particularly wealthy man, paid $37100 for a copy of Tommy Johnson’s 1929 recording “Alcohol And Jake Blues”

It was this sensation of increasing disconnection that got me nostalgically hankering after and then searching for an old rotary dial telephone. I wanted to dial like Roger Moore in The Saint again. It’s possible what I was actually doing was making a futile subconscious effort to reconnect with the less complicated years of my youth when the action of one finger could summon a whole group of us to an evening dedicated solely to fun, with fewer of the nonsensical emotional distractions that, like rust, accumulate with time. Originally, I would have been happy with the 1960s/70s GPO models of my childhood, the ones that sat in the hall at home that you see Jack Regan shouting into. In the end however, I couldn’t resist the 'otel réception elegance of a black and gold 1940s Belgique Bell telephone. Not quite Hercules Poirot country, but not far off.

I’ve been rotary dialling in the privacy of my own home now for some time and from it I still derive a great deal of simple if curious enjoyment. I know I’m lying to myself and my conversation partner of the moment isn’t simply at the end of a copper wire, but I find myself able and happy to go along with the illusion. Even the dialling in of foot-long mobile numbers is a harmless pleasure rather than a chore. I’m even beginning to remember some frequently used numbers (incidentally, I can still remember all my friends’ telephone numbers from when I was a teenager).

  If by any chance you do have cause to call me on my landline you may well imagine you hear me speaking with a slightly posher accent than I do on my mobile. Please understand it’s not an affectation on my part, it’s just how you sound through vintage bakelite. It’s also worth bearing in mind, should you decide to pick an argument, that I can’t lose, because even if you bite your mobile in half and throw it into a lake it won’t be as satisfying as crashing 380 grams of bakelite into its cradle with the same defiantly cheeky ding that Hedy Lamarr would have heard.

                                                   AA

In Our Time: A tribute...

As part of a MOOC (look it up) I'm doing, an excercise we had to do was to write a very short peice inspired by the first thing we heard on the radio. I turned on Radio4 and heard Melvyn Bragg's "In Our Time", an excellent programme where Bragg seeks out professorial types who sometimes sound as though they haven't spoken to anyone in years and encourages them to discuss their subject. Again, for some of them I suspect this is a unique experience. The subject of this one was "Photosynthesis"

“Thank you so much for filling in Dr. Sittler, you got us out of something of a tight spot.” Tom walked them through reception. A tanned and lithe man in a tight t-shirt, he had the look of a latin rent boy nearing the close of his window of profitability. He was, in his thirties, surprisingly long in the tooth for a producer, but that was the arts for you.

"No problem at all, happy to do it, really,” Sittler drained his water bottle and looked around for a bin. “I’ve never been on the radio.” Christ, his head hurt. Was he still drunk? He must be, they’d been chugging through the second bottle when Drexler texted him. “It’s on photosynthesis isn’t it?”

“Yes, Melvyn’s bricking it. He’s not what you’d call a natural at science, he’s rather hoping you experts will carry him through.”

“Well, Drexler’s the expert, but I’m sure I can muddle through for an hour.” Sittler hadn’t covered photosynthesis since he was an undergraduate, but he’d leafed through it on the train and mugged enough for a quick pop science discussion.

“How is the professor? Unlucky to get a cold out of season.

“Oh he’s fine, he’ll be right as rain in a couple of days.” Drexler’s text had said migraine. Was it boozy paranoia, or was something a little off?

“The studio’s through there, but we’ve got half an hour.”

Sittler glanced in and stopped, hand on the cold metal handle.

“Jesus Christ! Is that Ezra Blumenthal?”

Tom looked at his notes.

“Emeritus Professor of biochemistry…. Hebrew University of Jerusalem… Oh. Nobel prize. Do you know him?”

“I know of him. He wrote the bloody book on photosynthesis.” Literally, in fact, it was the one Sittler had in his bag. He regarded the tall, dapper laureate, in his eighties now but looking sharp and intimidating, a full head of white hair, and the direct, laser-beam gaze of someone who has only ever been proven right.

“He’s deaf as a post, I know that,” Said Tom, “we’ve had to crank his cans up to eleven.”

“Drexler, you dirty swine!” Sittler muttered out loud then quickly asked: “Who’s the woman he’s talking to?” The lady in question was holding her own with Blumenthal by the look of it, nodding as he spoke but slowly, colleague to colleague, not the eager pecking of the wide eyed arse-licker. Sittler made a note to remember to do that as well.

“Julie Sandford, a botanist with the Natural History Museum.”

“You mean Director of The Natural History Museum!” Sittler put his hands over his eyes for a second of comfort. Sandford had written the foreword to the edition of the book that weighed heavy in his bag. This was too horrible. He wondered how many people he knew would be listening. Everyone. He’d told everyone. He took a breath, glanced at Tom, entered the room:

“Professor Blumenthal, Dr. Sandford, hello, my name’s Sittler.” He extended a hand to Blumenthal, who did not take it. Instead, he stopped talking and stared at Sittler as though he’d been hit with a shovel. Julie Sandford was looking at him with an odd expression as well:

“What did you say?”

“Sittler, I’m Adam Sittler. Sittler smiled, puzzled and left his hand hanging. Blumenthal turned white and stared at it.

Melvyn arrived at that moment, to have Blumenthal turn on him. His stare could have lit a match. “Is this some sort of sick joke?”

Sittler hadn’t expected this. It should be a simple situation, just saying hello, but it was running away from him. He was sure this would be weird even if he wasn’t hung over. As it was, he had no idea what the bloody hell was going on. It didn’t help that he was slightly starstruck with those urbane, Teutonic tones he usually only heard on Horizon documentaries.

“Is what a joke? What’s happening here?” Melvyn spoke loudly, catering to the Professor’s deafness, but looked in Sittler’s direction, suspiciously.

“This young man seems to think he’s Hitler!”

“I am Sittler.” Sittler was even more confused, but flattered that the great man had heard of him.

“Sittler!” Melvyn spoke loudly and emphasised the sibilant. The professor stared at him.

Dr. Sandford turned to Sittler, “Ezra’s hearing was damaged when he was young,” she explained, delicately. She leaned slightly closer, “he spent his childhood in Flossenbürg, during the war.”

“Oh, I see,” said Sittler and then louder to Blumenthal “Flossenbürg must have been a beautiful and inspiring place to have shaped your ideas concerning the mechanisms of life, Professor.” Sittler had considered this a pretty bloody suave sentence, considering his headache, but it seemed to fall flat as Blumenthal turned without a word and walked to the door. Dr. Sandford had her hands on her head.

“Flossenbürg was a concentration camp you cretin!” Melvyn looked as though he might actually spit on Sittler but settled on following the professor, shaking his head.

Dr. Sandford just stared, her mouth open in disbelief. “For the love of God man, what’s the matter with you?”

A few moments before air and the technicians in the studio picked up on the atmosphere and glanced portentously at each other as they completed their checks. Inside Sittler’s head the atmosphere was, if anything, even thicker. His hangover was now beyond painkillers. He could hear blood throbbing in his head and there was a pain behind his left eye so sharp it was causing it to fill with tears. He thought of his wife, parents, colleagues, collaborators, students, all turning on their radios, kettles boiling. Bloody Drexler. Could one hour make of break a career?

As the countdown began, Professor Blumenthal, across the table leaned toward Dr Sandford and whispered, possibly louder than he needed to:

“Now then, let us see just what “Herr Hitler” knows about photosynthesis…”

Melvyn didn’t make eye contact, he just looked down at his papers and smiled.


                                              AA

On seeing a terrible street puppeteer in the Brighton Festival.

In the geographical centre of the festival, a less than competent puppeteer grinned, ever more ingratiatingly as one by one his little crowd melted away, each finding their own small but decisive disappointment. Oddly perhaps, people were less concerned with his flagrant lack of talent than with particular small incongruities that added up to an air of falseness. No one took any particular note of the random flailing of the puppet itself, which was a shame as under the brown varnish danced a particularly fine, vintage marionette. Their attention never made it past the young man on the other end of the strings where, not consciously perhaps, they sensed the bohemian affectation, a Brightonista veneer, more fartsy than artsy. His hair was a little too estate agent neat; his junk shop, loud check suit a shade too contrived; his beard fell more into the hipster camp than the artist. People can take a bad puppeteer, that might be funny, but when it's just a man with a puppet demanding attention from adults it's insulting. No one likes being deceived.

                                     AA

An Even Cheerier End to 1984.

I felt I should respond to a barrage (three people) of criticism that my cheerier last chapter of 1984 wasn’t that cheerful. As I said to one complainant:

“I couldn't make 1984 completely cheerful, I wanted to but it just wouldn't fit. I was trying to make it into a sort of Trumanesque game show where he won at the end and everyone came back to life and they had a massive party, but I couldn't get around the fact that they'd starved him, beaten him to a pulp and pulled his teeth out. They wouldn't even do that on Japanese TV, so I went for authenticity instead and gave Winston a bit of a break. I did hint that it might be all right with Julia. Do you know there's no such word as "alright"? I was quite shocked.”

On reflection and re-reading, I have to admit my version isn’t as fun-filled as it seemed when I was writing it. Remember I had just read the book which is pretty stark and you have to admit my ending is a bit less dour than Orwell’s, (although I’d still have to give him the edge on style and skill. Yes, yes and grammar).

Anyway, you’re right. I should have taken advantage of the fact that instead of dying from tuberculosis on a remote Scottish island, I’m at home in Brighton, in rude, cheerful health, drinking coffee while listening to Madeleine Peyroux and waiting for Goldfinger to come on.

What I’m trying to say, in my roundabout way is “stick this up your trumpet”:

Part Four

_________________________________

1

“Winston dear, is there time for another woo woo before your broadcast?”

Winston shielded his eyes against the evening sun that dappled through the trees and shone a halo around Julia.

“There’s always time for woo woo,” he said, “let’s have it Georgia peach style.”

Julia turned to the house and raised her voice:

“O’Brien! Another pitcher of woo woo. Is there any rum left?”

“Yes madam,” O’Brien appeared in the doorway, “a quarter of a bottle or so.”

“Then we’ll have it Georgia peach style. You haven’t started tea yet have you?”

“No madam, the children won’t be back until around seven.”

“Oh yes, I forgot, said Winston, “They said they’d be watching it round at the Parsons’ tonight, Tom will drop them back here.”

Winston reached up and pulled Julia down onto his lap. There was a dangerous creak of wicker as the chair flexed and she slapped him playfully. She leaned against him and gazed at the sun through the trees. Winston gazed at her. God he loved her. Her dark hair was a little greyer now (Winston wished she’d colour it but since he was now bald as a billiard ball, he had an inadequate power base for negotiation), but she was, in fact, more beautiful than in her youth. There was something in her strength of character, her basic decency that had allowed her to grow into her years, in some indefinable way. He looked down at her t-shirt and smiled. His face was on there, back when he’d had at least some hair left. His eyes glared sternly out and beneath was the slogan “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING…”

O’Brien arrived with the drinks. “It’s almost time for your broadcast sir,” he said, “shall I turn on the telescreen?”

“No, don’t worry old man,” Winston stretched as Julia disengaged and stood up, “We’ll sort it out. We’ll give you a call if we need you.”

“Very good, sir” O’Brien withdrew.

“Good man, O’Brien,” said Winston as they made their way inside, “Very loyal, considering.”

Julia turned on the telescreen and they settled onto the sofa, woo woo within reach. Winston’s face appeared, filling most of the screen, stern and forbidding; the omniscient eyes glared out. The slogan appeared, slamming into the space under the face with a leaden sound effect. An iron voice read the words: “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING…” The sentence was completed by a ragged, shouting choir of child voices: “DINOSAURS!!!”

The face was replaced with the brightly coloured interior of a television studio. Seated among an audience of plainly excited children was Winston, his shirt loud and patterned, his lined face creased into smiles.

“That’s right!” He momentarily lost the camera as the shot changed, which the children found hilarious. “That’s right,” he repeated, “tonight we’re going to be talking dinosaurs! In the studio we’ve got not one, not two but THREE professors from the Ministry of Evidence Based History, and not only that we’re going GLOBAL! Later on we’ll be linking live to digs in Eurasia AND Eastasia…”

Winston poured the cocktails and lounged back on the sofa. He never really watched his broadcasts, after the first minute he was lost in memories. The prerogative of age he called it when his children caught him out. Julia merely held him closer.

His reflections gave him a great deal of pleasure. After his reorganisation of the ministries (not popular in all quarters, but the ruthless iron boot of absolute power had seen him get his way), he had dismantled the Party and its mechanisms of power and brought back popular elections. Both ex-Party members and Prole leaders had petitioned him to stand for leader but as Winston pointed out: “No one should have the intention of grabbing power who hasn’t got much better things to do once they’ve achieved what they want with it. Life’s too bloody short.”

He’d spent his political retirement reforming the telescreen system into something much more useful and had ended up producing and hosting the most popular children’s programme in the world. After the end of the war it began broadcasting with subtitles in Eastasia and Eurasia.

His attention wandered back to the screen where his beshirted self was stamping around in a custard tar pit, tyrannosaur hands held in front of him. He roared with laughter.

“You idiot!” He megaphoned his hands around his mouth “Where’s your self respect?”

Julia pinched his arm:

“There haven’t been microphones in those things for fifteen years. You’re the one who banned them!”

“Quite right too,” Winston reached for his woo woo, “but it makes no difference because when we were filming, I knew I’d be shouting that.”

As he spoke, his screen self mock-saluted the camera with an almost unnoticeable flick of the eyebrows.

“O’Brien will be settled by now,” he said, “let’s ring him.”

“Why, what do you want?”

“Oh, nothing, really.”

“You’re a devil. Let me do it!”

They both rang together giggling mischievously.

Winston was having the time of his life.

The End