Reflections On Dopamine Illness, Part I : Recasting Neuropsychiatry

(For MCK and EMK)

Disclaimers - 

1. I am not a doctor, I am a retired solicitor. If you feel that either you or someone you are responsible for should see a doctor, go to the doctor.

2. I am not undertaking this exercise in order to help you sue your doctor. As previously stated I have no medical training, the theories contained in these posts are mine and mine alone, I accept no liability for any course of action anyone, anywhere, undertakes in response to them, and I will not assist anyone anywhere who seeks to use them in order to advance their cause in any litigation against any doctor.

OK. Now we all know where we stand.

At first I thought it referred merely to a spitting tic of a type not uncommon in Tourettes; but it still didn’t all add up.

The Latin verb ‘to spit’ is the First Conjugation sputo, -tare, -tavi, - tatum, and the phrase I needed to translate was ‘risus indecens, ira turpior spumante rictu’. ‘Sputo’ and ‘spumante’ are clearly of the same root, but ‘spumante’ indicates the performance of some action other than spitting.

In his translation of Chapter 5 Verse 30 of Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus’s ‘The Twelve Caesars’ (Penguin Books 1957, republished 2000, p. 177), relating to the emperor Claudius, Robert Graves, the author of ‘I, Claudius’ and ‘Goodbye To All That’, translated this phrase as ‘...an uncontrolled laugh, a horrible habit, under the stress of anger of slobbering at the mouth...’.  But this still didn’t match up with any Tourettes tic I’d heard of; until the answer came to me completely out of the blue about six weeks later, in a thoroughly Tourettic manner.

I had been looking at the wrong word. 

The phrase is not merely ‘spumante’, but ‘spumante rictu’. ‘Rictu’, with its obvious relationship to the English ‘rictus’, suggests that the real meaning of the phrase ‘spumante rictu’ is ‘liquid emanated from his mouth while his face was fixed’. Anger may certainly have been displayed during the course of the facial movements thus described, but if Suetonius was correctly describing the actions of his mouth it was possible that the action that Graves had translated as ‘slobbering’ was in fact salivating.

And if he salivated, then it would suggest that Claudius not only displayed symptoms of Tourettes, which he certainly did, but also that he showed symptoms of Parkinsonism; not the degenerative affliction known as ‘Parkinson’s Disease’ (‘paralysis agitans’), but  ‘secondary’ or ‘atypical Parkinson's’. The excitement I felt at realising that this was a possible answer to the questions posed by Claudius’s baffling symptoms was intense. 

And it that was the case, it was equally possible that during these episodes he might have been suffering a symptom of Parkinsonism known as an 'oculogyric crisis'; as Dr. Gilbert Onuaguluchi noted on pps 53 and 54 of 'Parkinsonism' (Butterworths, 1964, aforesaid), 

"Emotional disturbances occur in all severe cases. Despite rigidity and immobility during the crisis, the patients are rarely silent: grunting, mumbling, howling or moaning are commonplace: and some emit sudden squeaking sounds like the plaintive cry of a seagull...A few patients sometimes have outbursts of uncontrollable laughter...Increased salivation is seen in less than 50 percent of patients and in these it is inconstant". 

In his 'The Deification Of Claudius The Clod', Seneca remarked that Claudius had a voice like a sea monster.

I am indebted to Dr. George M. Burden for his wonderful paper 'The Imperial Gene', to my mind a work of genius, for the idea of revisiting the Julio-Claudians in this context. We'll be seeing more of them.

This might seem like little more than groping in the dark for convenient answers in the nether reaches of neurological history, the type of speculation which might make the speculator feel terribly clever while making an ass of themselves in the process but one of little useful application to modern medicine, but I would respectfully beg to differ. On the other hand, I am an interested party.

I have Tourette Syndrome; or do I? While Peter Hitchens might consider the confession of dopamine imbalance such as Tourettes to be, what was it, ah, yes, "an assertion, miles outside the rules of objective, demonstrable, predictive, repeatable or experimental science," I can assure him that I was in fact diagnosed with that condition in 1992, at the Southern General Hospital in Glasgow, and have required regular treatment for it since; yet I'm not quite as sure of that diagnosis as I used to be. 

Given the apparent level of public interest in the illness, which is certainly far greater than that in halitosis or varicose veins, it might be thought that reminiscences of Tourette Syndrome would fill the shelves, but there are remarkably few of them; Meige and Feindel's 'Tics And Their Treatment', with the foreword 'Confessions of a Ticquer', is apparently not available in the University of Glasgow Library, leaving the researcher with James McConnel's 'Life, Interrupted', a very personal book but still of value. My original plan had been merely to share experiences of having lived with the illness for over thirty years. Contrary to what some seem to think, it is an illness; I am firmly of the belief that something that makes its sufferers feel as bad as Tourettes can does not deserve to be called a ‘syndrome’, or ‘condition’, or to bear some other codename, some arcane linguistic semaphore, which serves only to tell people that organised, professional medicine can’t cure it and so should be called anything other than what it is; an unpleasant, often deeply debilitating illness. This may spare some doctors’ blushes, but it often doesn’t help the sufferer feel any better.  

However, the background reading I have done on the illness, conducted from March to May of 2012, in preparation for writing what I thought would be my memoirs has led me to what some might consider to be a rather startling conclusion, and the scope and nature of the book have changed accordingly. The principal change is that no book will now be written. The subject matter is really too technical for a medically unqualified person to deal with, the process of recollecting those events which helped lead me to where I am has been too unpleasant and the discipline of writing a 100,000 word book is beyond me. I am a blogger, and the immediacy inherent in both the production and publication of blog posts makes the blog a form of literature which it is very easy for me to produce. I should never have taken myself offline for any reason, and I won't be making that mistake again: a textbook example of 'kinetic melody' in action.

However, the second conclusion I have reached is that there might in fact be no such phenomenon as Tourette Syndrome (hereinafter and in all subsequents posts 'T'), or indeed Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), or Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD), or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), or any other picking from the biochemical grab-bag called the ‘neuropsychiatric’ family of disorders, that tombola of perverse pathologies, which anyone has so far cared to give a name to. They might all just be variations of Parkinsonism (hereinafter and in all subsequents posts 'P'), or even just something which can best be described as 'Dopamine Illness' (hereinafter and in all subsequents posts 'D'). 

The reason for this lies in what would seem to be a logical impossibility. P of the type that Claudius may have suffered from is caused by the failure of the brain to produce sufficient dopamine to enable ordinary function, while T is caused by a surfeit of dopamine which impairs ordinary function. How can symptoms suggesting both a surfeit of a substance and its lack appear in the same illness? For they certainly do. I am living proof. I suffer intermittent rigidity crises in all limbs, have a chorea (dancing movements) in my fingers and can swim, climb, and walk backward with ease but have difficulty in walking forward unassisted, all of which might suggest P. While researching what I thought would be my book, I discovered that I can achieve normal forward motion without any difficulty; it’s just that I have to keep my eyes closed to do it, not the sort of thing you expect to find out about yourself while walking up a hill in Lanarkshire.

It's with no sense of anger, really more a kind of mild irritation, that you learn that Jean-Martin Charcot first described the alleviation of rigidity upon suspension in water in the late 19th Century (Oliver Sacks, 'Awakenings', Picador, 4th edition,  1990, page 6, note 8), and that you might not therefore have had to find that out for yourself when you went for a swim while on holiday on Tenerife in 2008, or that Onuaguluchi had observed the impact of closing eyes upon rigidity. However, in the recent past I have  also suffered from involuntary swearing (coprolalia), and continue to suffer self-repetition (palilalia), obsessive-compulsive behaviours and intrusive thoughts, what the late Arthur Shapiro described as ‘mental coprolalia’, all of which suggest T. How can this be the case?

There can be only one logical answer to that question, which is that all these phenomena are expressions of the same thing; and if the extremes of T and P are the same thing, everything which is between them or classed as being related to them must be the same thing as well. T has been defined as a ‘spectrum disorder’. As the ‘waxing and waning’ of tics over periods of years is well-known, this would certainly seem to be true. Some sufferers will only ever have mild tics, others will have periods of respite from more aggravating happenings while the worst affected will be debilitated to the point of disability. However, what the apparent existence of both T and P in the same patient would seem to suggest is that all mere two-dimensional straight line models of a severity spectrum in D as a whole must be considered inadequate. While a spectrum certainly does exist, it must instead be turned on its axis and expanded outwards into three dimensions, and to a scale which Oliver Sacks has described, with blinding insight, as ‘infinite’  (‘Awakenings’, p.97). 

Sacks used the word in relation to P to express the idea that the existence of one part implies the existence of all parts. When I read this, I shouted 'Yes! Yes! Yes!', not quite in the manner of Meg Ryan but with similar brio. I had gone from obsessive counting (arithromania) in 1978 (T) to involuntary movements in the head and arms in 1991(T?)  to a diagnosis of T in 1992 to requiring to use mobility aids in 2007 (P?) to being able to swim without difficulty in 2008 (P) to being able to walk with my eyes closed in 2012 (P) while also shouting 'Toilet Duck!' (T). The presence of one part implied the existence of it all; not merely of either T or P, but T and P: D.


I am, therefore, wholly at one with Mr. Peter Hitchens in our mutual belief that ADHD does not exist (I did tell him that some of my conclusions might surprise him). What we also share is our mutual lack of medical training. Where we differ, I think, is in our reasons for believing this state of affairs to be the case; and  my belief is that the difficulties involved in diagnosing any kind of D illness present doctors with enormous problems of perception, and solving this problem of perception may be the key to the recasting of neuropsychiatry as it is currently understood . Mr. Hitchens seems to believe that ADHD does not exist at all; I believe that its continued diagnosis may not be capable of being justified as it is presently defined. 

For it is clear with anyone with eyes to see that T, and ADD, and ADHD, and ODD, and all the other neuropsychiatric illnesses do exist. They tic, and they swear, and they fidget, so therefore they are. My view is that they just don’t exist in the way formal medicine seems to think they do, as separate illnesses. My wholly untrained belief is that while do they exist, they do not exist as illnesses but as symptoms, perhaps something that might best be called, as I’ve said, a D illness of the type that already makes Tourettes the illness in the books with more symptoms than any other (see, for example, ‘Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome’, by Arthur K. Shapiro and others, Raven Press, 2^nd edn,. 1988, p. 452; "26 different simple and 54 complex motor tics, 77 sounds, 118 coprophilic symptoms, and nine echophilic symptoms. Seventy-seven percent of patients report from 11 to 60 different symptoms during the course of their illness")

If you take the time and trouble to read the aforementioned work ‘Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome’, for years the leading textbook on T, you will see that the phrase ‘the problem of heterogeneity’ recurs time and time again. The late Arthur Shapiro, may he rest in peace, was a giant in the field of T research. A most distinguished psychiatrist who held no illusions about his discipline’s limits, in 1965 he became the first doctor in the United States to prescribe haloperidol to a T patient, and was later instrumental in helping to establish the Tourette Syndrome Association. I come not to bury Shapiro; the rigour and devotion, indeed single-mindedness, he applied to his research and practice have helped improve the lives of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people.

However to this reader it is very clear that the enormous variety of symptoms that he was presented with gave Shapiro a severe problem. A good Linnaen intent in adhering to the highest clinical and academic standards, and always conscious of that most American impediment to the advance of scientific knowledge – the prospect of being sued - to the lay reader he seems at times to be lost in a taxonomical fog, unable to see the wood of illness for the trees of symptoms in a grail quest for verifiable conclusions. Branches were hacked away and raised as trophies while the trunk was ignored, his findings becoming more and more specialised and over-evolved, with the prospect of diagnostic clarity eventually diminishing into a downwardly spiralling haze of Transient Tic Disorders (TTD), Paroxysmal Myoclonic Dystonia, With Vocalisation (PMD), until the final descent into a catch-all ‘Tic Disorder not otherwise specified’. Learning of the existence of PMD was an epiphany for me; I seemed to possess all the symptoms, and, most tellingly, they had appeared at precisely the same age, 21, as the patients reported by Shapiro; but that couldn’t be right, because they all had ADD and I didn’t. What I had was like PMD, but Shapiro indicates it couldn’t be PMD. Back to the drawing board.

While academically admirable, and exercised with the very best of clinical and personal intentions, and at enormous and unacknowledged personal expense in terms of both time and money – their dogged and most scrupulously scientific endeavours to track down Tourettes must have cost the Shapiro family hundreds of thousands of dollars - Shapiro’s extreme rigour in the pursuit of verifiable certainty might in no small measure have been a consequence of having himself been obsessive, a status he freely admitted to in ‘Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome’ (p. 229), as well as admitting to having spent four years in analysis trying to get to the bottom of it.

Having read Shapiro’s book it is very easy to imagine how an obsessive nature in a great intellect driven to adhere to high standards could prevent a scholar seeing what to a layman, albeit a sophisticated one, seems absolutely clear, that the illness may be a great deal broader than researchers have thus far imagined. Arthur Shapiro perceived that the range of symptoms he was presented with was a problem, whereas the real problem might not have been that he saw too many symptoms but that he didn’t see enough; and as the yoke of Linnaeus is not easy nor his burden light, research into T seemed to descend into a frenzy of exhaustive analysis of what might be mere symptoms in the hope of discovering new illnesses; a process which if incorrect is as futile as examining your fingers while forgetting, or not realising, or, worst of all, completely ignoring, that they’re part of your hands. Even in 1988, Shapiro was complaining about the number of papers that were being published on T. The extraordinary volume of data on T may have acted as much of an impediment to its understanding as an aid. 

That D presents a vast variety and range of symptoms in all its forms has been well-known for years; indeed the presence of a phenomenon with an enormous range of symptoms might even be suggestive that the condition is affective of dopamine, or that the sufferers should be considered at risk of later dopamine illness. In 'Awakenings' (page 14 note 19), Oliver Sacks records that the phenomenon as exhibited amongst post-encephalitic Parkinsonians 'fascinated physiologists as well as physicians, and led, in the 1920's and 1930's to the founding of behavioural neurology as a science'. In his later book 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat' (Picador, 1985, p. 87), Sacks writes of Tourettes that "(i)n the years that immediately followed the publication of Tourette's original papers (in the 1880's) many hundreds of cases of this syndrome were described - no two cases being quite the same". It may be the case that volume and variety of symptoms, either as a reaction to an event or in an unspecified illness, could itself be considered as indicative of some sort of dopamine dysfunction, and that investigating that connection should be a high priority. 

If I am right, every study of T which does not come to the same conclusions as I have must be wrong, either in whole or in part. Their findings may have been correctly observed, but by mistaking symptoms for illnesses they have proceeded from the wrong starting point. For someone with no medical training to think in this way seems appallingly arrogant, even to the thinker. 

Yet in 'Awakenings', Sacks famously recorded how a number of his post-encephalitic Parkinsonian patients developed either T or Tourettic symptoms when administered L-DOPA. Similarly, Shapiro records how a small number of his T patients developed what he called an 'Extrapyramidal Parkinsonian Hand-Finger Movement' when administered neuroleptics ('Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome', page 432), and Sacks has recorded how 'Witty Ticcy Ray', the first T sufferer to whom he administered the neuroleptic haloperidol, initially 'presented a picture, even on (a) minute dose, of marked Parkinsonism' ('The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat', page 93: by the time of publication the issue had been resolved). When medication is administered for P, patients can exhibit something that looks like T, and vice versa. Logically, that suggests to me that the function which is being treated in both cases is the same; and if the same function is being treated in both cases, to my mind it makes little sense that the symptoms being displayed should be considered to be suggestive of different illnesses. 

These very eminent doctors, whose regard for their patients shines through everything they write, clearly believe that they are dealing with different conditions, and it's embarrassing to suggest that you disagree with them. Here I must take a leap of faith, and say why I think they're wrong; and I am indebted to a fellow Glaswegian for helping me find the answer. 

On pages 20 and 21 of his still in print pop-psychiatric classic from 1960 ‘The Divided Self’ (Tavistock Publications (1959) Ltd. 1960, Penguin 1990), the late R. D. Laing showed the now well-known image of a picture which can be viewed in one, other or both of two ways, either as two faces in black facing each other or as a vase (his word) between the two. He describes the image as follows –

“In this figure, there is one thing on the paper which can be seen as a vase or as two faces turned towards each other. There are not two things in the paper; there is one thing there, (MK’s italics) but, depending on how it strikes us, we see two different objects”.

And in a nutshell, that is precisely the problem which I believe both psychiatrists and neurologists have encountered when faced with dopamine illness and which, in my view, they have not resolved; not one of function or symptoms but of perception. Bob sweats and festinates, so he must be classically P, while Jim has eye tics and palilates, so he must have T. What this mentality cannot resolve is the situation of those people who do both; who are both palilalic and obsessive (T) yet who also suffer rigidity crises, and who can walk backwards but not forwards (P); people like me. The doctors cannot be blamed for this. These people are dedicated professionals who have trained for many years and who have made their diagnoses while exercising the highest degrees of care and skill, and who have their patients' best interests at the forefront of their minds in everything they do. However, they are trained to heal through science. 

Lest The Cult Of Richard Dawkins feel the urge to swarm down upon me like a flock of bungee-jumping harpies, I am not advocating any return to mysticism in medicine, nor to faith healing, nor to leeching patients, nor to examining the stool to determine the presence of dropsy or the bloody flux (although as anyone who’s actually read the leaflet contained in any packet of anti-inflammatory medication should agree, the examination of the stool certainly does still play a role in modern medicine; it’s just that instead of the doctor doing it, the patient now does it for them). However, we must recognise that modern science and therefore modern scientific thinking and thought processes have their limits. We map the stars without often having a blind clue about the processes taking place inside our own heads, five inches behind our eyebrows. This lack of knowledge concerning how our brains work presents a gross challenge to the scientific mindset, as the scrupulous scientist Arthur Shapiro found out again and again and again. In our routinely scientific, symptom–chopping world established according to principles determined by hyper-rational, post-Enlightenment thought processes, people like me should not exist, but we do. If anyone were ever to ask me to guess, I would hazard the opinion that a probable majority of dopamine illness sufferers exhibit both T and P symptoms in varying degrees at the same time; the difficulty they encounter in seeking the answer to their questions – What is the name of my illness? What do I have ?– is that the doctors they consult are only able to see the symptoms present at the time of consultation.  The symptoms of both T and P are notorious for waxing and waning. A diagnosis of T assumes that those symptoms which wax and wane within the patient will always be those of T. I would respectfully suggest that this urge towards therapeutic classification, unintentionally but effectively stamping the patient with a label like a tin of peaches in a cannery, impedes rather than enhances the understanding of dopamine illness, and that a more fruitful approach would be for patients exhibiting the qualifying symptoms of anything currently classified as a neuropsychiatric illness to be diagnosed with generic 'Dopamine Illness' instead.

To use a highly simplistic and probably unscientific analogy, the wheels of a car perform different functions depending upon whether the car is moving forward or in reverse; yet at all times they remain wheels. T is forward, P is reverse, but D is the wheel. That's what I think. 

This view of T and P may be controversial. I couldn’t really care less about that, but I am very concerned about the impact it might have on some people who have been diagnosed as suffering from T. I would never wish to push any T sufferer into an existential crisis. Too many people have spent too many years merely coming to terms with the facts that they have been told that they have that illness and that they then have to deal with it for them to be put off balance by someone without any formal training merely expressing an opinion. They will have heard enough of them already – ‘You’re a hypochondriac!’ ‘You don’t swear, how can you have Tourettes?’ While ADHD sufferers must endure the thundering public wrath of critics of Ritalin, T sufferers tend to be seasoned recipients of others’ private opinions on the validity of their illness, an indignity which is nothing less than an attack on their identity, and one which never seems to be visited upon cancer patients and heart attack survivors. Many might need my opinions like they need a new tic. This must be acknowledged; there is no reason why any member of a group which can already face great difficulty integrating into what is sometimes called ‘mainstream society’ should be pushed further away from it for any reason. 

Nor is it my intention to see anyone who receives a wage for supporting T sufferers, or the sufferers of any other declared illness which might be the same thing as T or P, lose their job. That they have been supporting people whose illness I happen to think has been wrongly defined does not mean that those people should not still be supported.

One of the consequences of the approach to D I am suggesting might be a revisiting of the processes by which some medications are prescribed for some D patients. If a patient has exhibited ADHD symptoms at some point but has developed into T, it might be the case that Ritalin, for example, might no longer be an appropriate medication for that patient; and if another medication is substituted in consequence that would be only be a good and wholesome thing, for it would deny the shrill and persistent critics of Ritalin the chance to undermine the probably already shaky confidence that worried parents have in the medication which a doctor has prescribed for their children in the utmost good faith; medications which in many cases prove to be very successful, enhancing both well-being and quality of life. 

The broader issue of treatments will be addressed in several later pieces.

Peter Hitchens On ADHD

"Personally, I think it's amazing that even an adult should swallow a substance about which so little is known, which affects an organ so sensitive, valuable and little understood" - 

Peter Hitchens, pontificating on the use of Ritalin in the treatment of ADHD. 

I will be posting a very great deal of really quite diverse material on the nature of dopamine imbalances in the next few weeks. In his foreword to the 'The Oxford Book Of The Sea', Jonathan Raban wrote that people tend to write about that which causes them difficulty; as far my relationship to my own imbalance is concerned, a truer word has never been written, and in that regard I must thank my readers for their patience and forbearance. In his foreword to 'Screwtape Proposes A Toast', C. S. Lewis wrote that he was deterred from producing a sequel to 'The Screwtape Letters' by having found the production of the original work to have been, in his words, 'gritty', a word which well describes my own experience of being a sufferer of dopamine imbalances researching these phenomena. 

A couple of points about Mr. Hitchens' exhaustive and exhausting polemic - 

"Interestingly, the next major discussion of (ADHD) took place after a large number of children tragically suffered physical damage after an epidemic of encephalitis, in the USA in 1917 and 1918 ( a secondary effect of the Spanish influenza pandemic)"  - 

Far, far too sweeping. Encephalitis lethargica (the 'sleeping' or' sleepy sickness', also known as 'Von Economo's Disease') is an entirely different phenonemon to influenza. Influenza is a very common cause of trauma to the substantia nigra, the section of the midbrain responsible for the production and regulation of dopamine, and one which can and does produce dopamine imbalances; but there is absolutely no hard evidence that the 1917-1927 'sleepy sickness' epidemic, first recorded in Paris and Vienna, was connected to the Spanish flu epidemic in any way whatsoever. There is a theory that infection with Spanish flu might have left a footprint on the brain which might have rendered it susceptible to sleepy sickness, yet none of the patient histories from New York City which were recorded by Oliver Sacks in 'Awakenings', or by Gilbert Onuaguluchi, the Nigerian doctor and academic who wrote 'Parkinsonism' in Glasgow over 50 years ago, still the very best and most humane study of dopamine illness, mention Spanish flu at all. They do mention trauma, from the loss of parents to the loss of tonsils to the loss of children; a factor certainly far more likely to induce dopamine illness than any of the items note immediately below. 

"In my view, this history cannot be understood without looking at other major events going in the world at the same time. It was during the post-1960s cultural revolution in Western countries that several things began to affect childhood. Some of them are direct results of that cultural revolution. Others are independent of it, but happened at the same time. They seem to me to provide an alternative explanation of the astonishing growth in the numbers of troublesome children.Some of these features are common to Britain and the USA (where 'ADHD' is most commonly diagnosed). Some are specific to only one. Remember that 'ADHD' is far more commonly diagnosed in boys than in girls, and that its symptoms in girls are almost always different" - 

"4.The abolition of school sports and other physical exercise, accompanied by the sale of playing fields.

5.The growing danger on the roads, leading to children no longer walking or bicycling to school, so depriving them of a key form of exercise."

Good God almighty, does this man not know that exercise is the one thing guaranteed to aggravate the symptoms of dopamine illness? That the one thing that sufferers of dopamine illness in any form cannot tolerate is exertion?

"6.The arrival in almost all homes of colour TV, broadcast 24 hours a day and including a growing number of channels aimed at children. The installation in the majority of children's bedrooms of a TV set which the child controls."

Writing of the dopamine impaired patients that he treated in Stobhill General Hospital between 1959 and 1962, Gilbert Onuaguluchi indicated that the advent of television was a virtual godsend.

"7.The invention, and rapid spread of computer games."

A contextless assertion. 

"8.The rapid increase in the numbers of mothers going out of the home to work, further reducing adult supervision, example and restraint in the lives of the young." - 

If there is one factor guaranteed to turn the drama of dopamine illness into a crisis, it is an unhealthily close relationship between mother and child. Dopamine illness seems to thrive in matriarchies. For some families afflicted by dopamine illness, the period of separation between mother and child caused by Mum going out to work might be the only factor keeping the show on the road. 

"9.The increase in the use of highly-processed fast foods in the home, many aimed specifically at children, and rich in sugar, chemicals and other unhealthy ingredients."

Broadly, maybe. As far as the consumption of baked beans is concerned, he might have a point, but as far as anything else is concerned I'd want to see his notes. 

"10.The almost total collapse, influenced by many of the factors above, of the idea that children should have fixed bedtimes and should sleep for far longer than adults"

Tell that to the sufferers of sleepy sickness whose illness kept them off their sleep for six months, and who then slept for the next 50 years. The role of sleep in human physiology is vastly important, for sure; but there is absolutely no indication anywhere that strict adherence to normal bedtimes will ameliorate the symptoms of ADHD in any way whatsoever. The nature, indeed perhaps the will, of the illness is that it wishes to overpower the urge to sleep. With an illness like that in your system, the fact that you are sent to bed at seven will not make the slightest difference to your condition. 

I'll be revisiting both this topic and Mr. Hitchens in the very near future. For what my opinion's worth, this is not a scientific article but a political one, which renders it contemptible.

Normal Service Is Resumed

Thank you all for continuing to drop by while I've been otherwise engaged. My first few posts will be a mixing of 'normal posts' with the fruits of the research I conducted for my sadly uncompletable book. It was too big a project for me, but some bits of it might be of some use to someone. 

That being the case, I have to say it's good to be back. Bloggito Ergo Sum; Te Deum Laudamus!

On The Scottish Spring

This Browser does not support Blogger, so anything could happen here.

Seeing both Rangers Football Club and the Scottish National Party in such turmoil could almost make one think we are seeing could be called a 'Scottish Spring'; like the Arab Spring, but with more rain. A considerable portion of Scottish society is now rudderless, their bearings to their environment completely uprooted. For the student of universal history, watching a civilisation undergo an existential crisis of the type that Scotland is undergoing right now makes for riveting viewing. This is the collapse of Easter Island and the Sack of Rome all rolled into one. The only thing that would shock them some of them even more than they have been already would be the captain of the Royal and Ancient performing a pole dance with the flag on the eighteenth green.

Yet even now, some of them are behaving as if nothing has happened, their denial of reality almost absolute. I remember hearing Arthur Miller being interviewed years before his death, and how he described how his father, having lost everything in '29, just went about with the same smile on his face afterwards that he had worn before, completely unable to reconcile himself to the change in his circumstances. I have a lot of time for Ally McCoist; the image that he presents is of  a genuinely nice guy, certainly a very thoughtful one, and his work with SCIAF tells me he carries no unpleasant baggage. Yet in my opinion his demand for the names of the SFA judicial panel that meted out due and lawful punishment to Rangers Football Club was the product of a moment's frustration born of almost Plantagenet hauteur, of the type that Henry II momentarily but fatally suffered with regard to Becket. Some people will just never get over the idea that their faction, their clan, are no longer top dogs.

In years to come, the whole 'For every fiver Celtic spend, we'll spend a tenner' mentality exhibited by Rangers will be held up as a textbook example of the phenomenon that anthropologists call 'overshoot'. Given that the civilisation he created at Rangers has shown virtually no resilience to changes in circumstances, and a subsequent lack of cultural staying power, Sir David Murray might as well have been dragging giant stone heads up a hillside on Rapa Nui, some of them maybe more mobile than the Rangers back four.

What Alex Salmond's Next Conversation With The Chinese Ambassador Might Sound Like

"Those giraffes you sold me, they won't mate. They just walk around, eating, and not mating. You sold me... queer giraffes. I want my money back"

Proximo (Oliver Reed), 'Gladiator'.

The Petroloo Crisis

For what my opinion's worth, Francis Maude's advice to stock up on petrol in anticipation of a tanker drivers' strike was a deliberate attempt to stampede the public into a panic. If that was the case, the all too many British citizens whose principal characters traits are venality, malleability and gullibility fell for it hook, line and sinker. For many years, this has been a country in which trust in public institutions has been declining, a feature of all societies on the slide. Maude's behaviour shows that the lack of trust is well justified, his desire to pick a fight with a trade union, any trade union, over matters which sit firmly outwith the sphere of government betraying the true character of Tory Big Beasts such as himself - belligerent beastliness which will not stop being beastly until every impediment to the self-perceived right of business to do what it wants, when it wants, where it wants, to whom it wants, how it wants to do it has been removed. For what my opinion's worth, he is not fit to be employed as a contract cleaner earning minimum wage to empty the bins in the House of Commons while wearing a blue pinny, let alone be a member of Her Majesty's Government.

However, the constitutional implications of this matter go further than the unfulfilled aggression of Tory ultra non-entities like Maude. It is reported that the army is being or will be co-opted into delivering fuel in the event of any strike ever taking place. If that is the case, if that is the plan, then the citizen is entitled to ask why soldiers are presumably being ordered to help subsidise the private sector by helping to keep fuel delivery companies in business. If business cannot stay in business by managing its industrial relations without the support of the armed forces, then it would seem to undermine any philosophical case that the efficiency of the fuel delivery sector is best maximised in private hands, and the whole sector should be brought into public ownership immediately and without compensation. It is not as if the character of this dispute is identical to that of a firefighters' strike; firefighting is an essential public service, and one could see why soldiers could be lawfully co-opted to help keep the service running without the impression being given that they are being ordered to act as breakers of what would appear to be perfectly lawful proposed strike action, which is precisely the impression I receive from reports that they're being trained to drive fuel tanks.

Where would it end? Would they be given orders to plough through picket lines, or even open fire on those attempting to prevent them crossing picket lines? Such scenarios are sadly not unthinkable in modern Britain. I see nothing in David Cameron, George Osborne, Francis Maude or any other prominent Tory that stops me from thinking that they would not hesitate to sanction any such action if the perceived 'need' required it.

Given this impression, one would hope that any soldier who refused to participate in such strike-breaking on grounds of conscience would not be subject to court-martial. I wouldn't count on it. This isn't Peterloo. It's Petroloo instead.

On Gay Marriage

Not planning to contract one myself, it was interesting to see that Lynne Featherstone has been reported as saying, jokingly, apparently, that opponents of gay marriage should not feel under pressure to enter them, or something smart like that.

The advent of civil partnerships secured the ability of gay couples to inherit each others' property. The failure of the law to recognise this basic human deceny was a weeping sore on our public life, and Thank God it's been removed.

However, the coming of gay marriage will at last enable what I suspect will be only a very hard core of zealots to insist that their spouses' parents refer to them as their sons- and daughter-s in law, and on being addressed as 'Unlce' or 'Aunty' by the children of their spouses' siblings. Contrary to popular belief, civil partnerships do not invest homosexual relationships with the quality of family life. Gay marriage would.

This is not a re-definition of marriage, but a complete re-definition of what a family is. The one consolation that its opponents can draw from this farrago is that it's going to fail. Oh, it will get on the statute books, for surem, but the take-up rate will probably be low. Her smart mouth betrays Lynne Featherstone as being full of pride, and that pride comes before a fall is one of the universe's constants.

On The Loan Of A Horse By The Metropolitan Police To Rebekah Brooks

Saved from the knackers's yard, it was sent to the hackers' yard instead.

Twenty years for them all, that's what I say. Tom Watson was right, News International is a crime gang. Of greater interest to me than the number of corrupt police officers its employees had contact with is the number of police officers they corrupted.

The Final Days

As a greater gentleman than me notes that 'liquidation is inevitable', and the fantasies of that event coming to pass become more ornate, even rococo - perhaps some puckish group of opposing supporters will begin to chant 'Your team's gone bankrupt, you've got to go home' - it's instructive to reflect on the lessons the rest of us with no interest in the doings of Rangers Football Club can draw from the events of the past few weeks.

The kid gloves with which it seems to have been treated by its administrators, the tax authorities and politicians seems to indicate that Rangers Football Club is indeed what its supporters have proclaimed it to be for many years - the most important institution in Scotland. Either that, or they recognise that we have finally descended into being a 'panem et circenses' economy and that the bankruptcy of just one top flight Scottish football club could cause the whole house of cards to come down. Football, the cause of so much aggravation and stupefaction in Scotland for so long, is now what we do; and it must be preserved at all costs, even when those costs include the loss to the public purse of tax revenues. Preserving football is more important than ensuring equality of treatment before the law, and ensuring that the public purse receives its due.

I hope they go down and that they take the whole structure down with them. The last day on which a football is kicked in Scotland is the day it will truly be free.

Some More Thoughts On The Administration Of Rangers Football Club

I don't feel so good - being unable to stop themselves from shouting 'Fuck Off!', and, bizarrely, 'Toilet Duck!' has that effect on some people - so my apologies if I seem a bit crapulous. Hopefully we can keep it within the bounds allowed by the law of Scotland.

Random thoughts - there is a delicious irony in the idea that all the jelly bellied flag flappers waving Union flags at Ibrox and proclaiming their undying love of Her Majesty have, since May 2011 at least, only been able to do so through the auspices of a limited company which has been systematically bilking Her Majesty's Government of its lawful revenues. Do they not feel some sense of either shame or embarrassment at this state of affairs?

If Joe's Builders Ltd. refused to pay its PAYE and VAT, it would be put into liquidation, without fear and favour. There would be no chance for it to re-enter the commercial sphere under another name, its directors  would be disqualified, if not actually imprisoned, and no camel-coated wide boys in square-toed slip-on shoes would be able to appear from the wordwork, like the good lice they are, to seize the assets and start again. Rangers Football Club has not paid its PAYE and VAT, but has thus far avoided this fate, as have the people responsible for these blatantly uncivil acts. The ordinary citizen and taxpayer with no interest in its doings is entitled to ask why this is the case, just as they are entitled to ask why politicians from all parts of  the spectrum seem to be arguing that it is a community asset which has to be preserved. Is it because they understand that the wider Scottish economy is so weak that it could not sustain the loss of a business which provides employment for so little as 250 people? Or is there another reason, that they understand that this company might, perhaps, who knows, provide a safety valve for the expression of the encultarated hatred which many Scots feel for other Scots on account of comparative differences in religious beliefs and ethnic origins? That Rangers' existence has stopped Jocky and Doddy from conducting their own wee urban safari? If the latter is the case, then the Scottish public deserves nothing less than a full and frank admission of that fact from its politicians, because those of us with no interest in Rangers are entitled to know where we stand. When the next election comes around, it won't just be the Rangers vote that will remember what they have said and done at this moment.

The self-image of the people who used to run Rangers seems to be based on their belief in their competence as businesspeople. Craig Whyte took them for mugs, putting another nail in the coffin of the myth of the Scotch moneyman's hypercompetence. He might as well have put dunces' hats and donkeys' ears on the lot of them.

In the next few years, children in some parts of Lanarkshire will be admonished by their mothers that if they don't behave, Craig Whyte will come and get them.

I have sort of been advised that the means by which Whyte, the secured creditor, can have priority over HMRC, historically a preferred creditor, is provided  by the Enterprise Act 2002. If that is the case, and the Labour Party enacted a law which gave the banks a greater chance of making a recovery than the state, then the moment that that law received Royal Assent should be classed as the point at which power in this country passed from the people to the banks, as at that point the right of banks to recover debt owing to them was deemed to be of greater importance to the good conduct of public policy than the collection of revenue necessary for the provision of public services. My understanding of the Act might be wrong, but if it's right then Labour should never be elected again.

By the same token, it would be a good one to throw in the face of the Tories - after all, if we have a deficit that has to be cut then how much revenue has the public purse lost since 2002 which it would previously have received but which the Enterprise Act has decreed should pass to the banks instead? Will they either reform or repeal the Enterprise Act? You know and I know that the answer to both questions is No, because they don't know how to.

It's good to see rules on financial fair play being brought into football, yet also unfortunate that they are coming in too late. The burning desire of everyone associated with Rangers Football Club always to be first seems to be a classic example of what I once called 'the cannibalistic entropy of Anglo-Saxon capitalism', which in Rangers case has come all too true - they were so desperate to succed that they ate themselves in the process. However, once can only wonder how UEFA feels about having paid out monies to Rangers Football Club now that it is known that it was only able to enter UEFA competitions by way of the subsidy provided by its reckless borrowing policies? Or that UEFA was placed in a position of subsidising Rangers at the expense of clubs which were run very much more responsibly? Would that not be a fraud upon UEFA worthy of some sanction?

A Quick Thought On Glasgow Rangers' Impending Descent Into Administration

Sic transit gloria mundi.

The irony of Glasgow Rangers possibly being laid low by a body known as HMRC notwithstanding, it's only fair to ask, before it goes the way of Elvis, the dodo and the Holy Roman Empire, whether administration is the most equitable method of protecting the ongoing interests of both creditors and shareholders.

The guddle that the club and its owners seem to have got themselves into over the payment of tax is oddly reminiscent of the situation in which Paul 'Crocodile Dundee' Hogan has been embroiled in Australia for many years now. It's difficult not to have some sympathy for Hoags in his predicament, given that he received, and perhaps even relied on, advice from one of the world's major accountancy practices.

Unlike some, I have little taste for truffling around in the minutiae of tax law, but it would be very interesting to know what advice Rangers received before embarking upon the whackadoo course to which HMRC has taken righteous excption. If it is the case that that advice may have been negligent, then one would have thought that that might give the shareholders a right of action against the advisers. Whether any such claim, which could probably be regarded as a potential asset of the club's the full value of which is yet to be realised, has been made or is in the process of being made should be a matter of the utmost concern to the minority shareholders, the value of whose assets would be wiped out by an administration and subsequent fall into the depths of the corporate recovery system.

There are, of course, some businesspeople who only like being told what they want to hear, and the recent collapse of the banking system has shown that there may be many professional advisers willing to subordinate their duties to the public on the off-chance of picking up the groats such people can be coaxed into throwing in their direction. The methods by which the club has been managed should be of the utmost concern to the minority shareholders; they are the owners, after all.

Some Thoughts On The Decision Not To Prosecute Alan Pollock

One would never dream of crossing Alan Pollock, if only because what to my eyes seem to be the extreme nature of the facial injuries he inflicted or caused to be inflicted on Sam Main suggest to me that he is a very violent man prone to public outbursts of ill-temper.

However, the failure of the Scottish authorities to prosecute him for what, in my opinion, was a reprehensible act of vigilantism in ejecting Mr. Main from a train without lawful authority or reasonable excuse, a contention supported by the failure of the same authorities who have failed to prosecute Mr. Pollock to prosecute Mr. Main, is disappointing. If I were to suffer an episode caused by my own condition on public transport, the Scottish authorities have, in my opinion, given the go-ahead to someone as violent and ill-tempered as Mr. Pollock seems to be to assault me with impunity, and for me to suffer injury through ignorance. 

Yet another of those many  instances in which the Scottish prosecuting authorities have failed to shine, the bastards.

Some Thoughts On The National Secular Society's Victory In Banning Prayers At Public Meetings In England And Wales

Not God botherers, but godless bothered.

I wonder whether Clive has a mate called Derek. It would somehow seem appropriate if he did.

Some Thoughts On Alex Salmond's Proposal For A Referendum On Independence For Scotland

Sorry to be a bit behind with this one - as regular readers will know, I no longer have a home internet connection, so my apologies if anyone else has made these points already.

So Alex Salmond (pictured), the constitutional adventurer who for some reason or other holds the rank of First Minister of Scotland, has published his proposals for a referendum on whether Scotland should become independent. The loaded, juvenile use of words such as 'independent' and 'independence' in this context, with their mental associations that Scotland is in some way a colony of the United Kingdom, by Scottish 'civic nationalists' is, of course, a typically gross abuse of language on their part. There are few more independent people in the world than the Scots; at least that's what the Scottish 'civic nationalists' keep telling us. If an independent people are already independent, why should they seek independence?

The Tartanissimo wishes to hold his jamboree in the autumn of 2014. I have seen no comment being made on why this should be the case, but to me the reason for it being held at that time is clear. He is hoping that the Commonwealth Games, due to be held in Glasgow in the summer of 2014, will provide him with a national 'feelgood factor' upon which he will coast to victory.

There is, however, a credible alternative argument, which is that he is hoping that the sight of the English national team winning many more medals than the Scots, a statistical inevitability given the relative sizes of the two nations' populations, will cause an  anti-English backlash, hopefully non-violent. I sincerely hope that this is not the case, if only because such a possible rationale for the timing of an event of such importance to our constitution would be negative, frivolous and deeply unstatesmanlike. But in the event that that is the case, I'll be supporting Australia, who'll probably win everything anyway.

The ubiquitous, sylphlike lingerie tycoon Michelle Mone has indicated that she will relocate her business elsewhere if The Tartanissimo is successful in his constitutional adventure. One hopes that Mrs. Mone ultimately has no need to pursue such a drastic course of action. I do not doubt for a moment that she is sincere in her desire that Scotland should remain a part of the United Kingdom, and that she will pursue whatever action she thinks is appropriate for the conduct of her business.

However, there are some matters upon which businesspeople don't have to be automatically believed, and one of them is their protests that they will move their business elsewhere if they don't get what they want - see, for example, Sir Robert Peel speaking on the textile manufacturers' intentions in 1807. The act of relocation is rare and is usually performed by zealots.

However, there is one area in which their word should be trusted as a rule, and that is their descriptions of the negative effects that constitutional uncertainty has upon business, a historical phenomenon usually known as 'decay of trade'. The Tunnocks Teacake is as Scottish as tossing the caber and the Stone of Scone, and Boyd Tunnock, the man who makes them, has already spoken out about the negative effect that constitutional uncertainty will have on Scottish business.

Decay of trade is not a fiction, it is a fact. At the moment, I'm reading 'God's Fury, England's Fire', Michael Braddick's fascinating account of the English Civil Wars. Professor Braddick goes into great detail about just how badly trade decayed during the constitutional upheavals of the 1640s, and how frequently those who were concerned by it expressed their fears (define irony - buying a book about the Puritans with the booktoken you got in the office Secret Santa). It could be that The Tartanissimo believes that any decay in trade occasioned by the uncertainty he is manufacturing over Scotland's constitutional status will be a necessary part of the new nation's birth pangs, before it comes crying in to the light; an intellectually cogent position, if also a lamentably naive one.

It is sincerely to be hoped that The Tartanissimo is not seeking to foster decay of trade, to create an economic position so bad that he will then be able to position himself as the strong guy we can turn to to sort it all out. As well as being horribly negative, it would be suggestive of megalomania.

The Tartanissimo is a member of the Privy Council, and has either sworn or affirmed the following oath -

"You do swear by Almighty God to be a true and faithful Servant unto The Queen's Majesty as one of Her Majesty's Privy Council. You will not know or understand of any manner of thing to be attempted, done or spoken against Her Majesty's Person, Honour, Crown or Dignity Royal, but you will lett and withstand the same to the uttermost of your power, and either cause it to be revealed to Her Majesty Herself, or to such of Her Privy Council as shall advertise Her Majesty of the same. You will in all things to be moved, treated and debated in Council, faithfully and truly declare your Mind and Opinion, according to your Heart and Conscience; and will keep secret all matters committed and revealed unto you, or that shall be treated of secretly in Council. And if any of the said Treaties or Counsels shall touch any of the Counsellors you will not reveal it unto him but will keep the same until such time as, by the consent of Her Majesty or of the Council, Publication shall be made thereof. You will to your uttermost bear Faith and Allegiance to the Queen's Majesty; and will assist and defend all civil and temporal Jurisdictions, Pre-eminences, and Authorities, granted to Her Majesty and annexed to the Crown by Acts of Parliament, or otherwise, against all Foreign Princes, Persons, Prelates, States, or Potentates. And generally in all things you will do as a faithful and true Servant ought to do to Her Majesty so help you God"

Now for the life of me, I can't see how he can square taking an oath to defend all of Her Majesty's 'civil and temporal Jurisdictions' with a course of action which would result in her principal jurisdiction, the United Kingdom, being rent asunder. To my mind, he should resign either from  the Privy Council or from the Scottish National Party. While this might seem unfair, don't forget that he is demanding that Scots and those who live in Scotland make a once in a lifetime choice as to what country they live in. The very least he can do is show the way and make a difficult choice himself before insisting that everyone else does.

I might be wrong, but I think that the exercise of power is going to the heads of the soi-disant, ersatz 'Scottish Government' just a little. The absurd gagging order placed on Pollok Pot The Tartan Trot upon his release from chokey, itself less The Long Walk To Freedom than the long walk to Govan, is without precedent in our history. The Tories might have been out of touch with Scotland, but nothing like this ever happened on their watch (and they certainly would have had more political savvy than to place a gagging order on a person infamously incapable of keeping his mouth shut). If I didn't know any better, I'd think that the authorities were afraid of any Scottish republican voice, even as one as discredited as Pollok Pot's, being heard in the public domain. Remember, in their minds the Scottish 'civic nationalists' are the ones who speak for Scotland; nobody else does. Or should.

Similarly, the news that it's planned to give Scottish school pupils the right to study Scots to Higher level makes one wonder just how useful knowing the meaning of words like 'ilquhame' and 'oxter' will be when the Chinese come for our jobs. It's all so Scottish, and my thanks to Professor Braddick for furnishing one of the great quotes on this sort of situation, from a resident of Newcastle-upon-Tyne who had lived under the occupation of the Scottish Covenanters - for a week -

"God grant this viperous brood so freely received into the body of the Kingdom, do not eat through the belly of their fosterers: for I assure you where they shall govern we shall find them proud lords".

As the great philosopher Robert Mitchum noted in 'Anzio', nothing changes except the uniforms and the transportation.

David Cameron's Tourettes Gaff

I'm against the clock again, and the background music's terrible, so here goes.

In his book 'Peace of Soul', the Servant of God Fulton Sheen recorded how 'GK's Weekly' once published a satire on Freudian psychology in which the word 'beer' appeared wherever a Freudian would mention the word 'sex'. The result was, of course, hilarious.

This piece came to mind when hearing that David Cameron had said of Ed Balls's behaviour in the House of Commons that 'it’s like having someone with Tourette’s permanently sitting opposite you'. He would never dream of saying that 'it’s like having someone with cancer permanently sitting opposite you', or 'it’s like having a schizophrenic permanently sitting opposite you'; so why mention Tourettes?

Utterly predictably, this incident says more about Cameron than it does about the condition. He required to accustom himself to being challenged by other people at an age far older than the rest of us, and accordingly finds the experience unpleasant; hopefully not as unpleasant as developing a Tourettes symptomology in adulthood, but unpleasant nonetheless. His ideology is still sodden with the dreary insolence that has been the mark of the Tory Party since the eighteenth century. When insolence meets challenge, it lashes out in rage, and rage takes no account of propriety when fixing on a target. Balls challenges Cameron; Cameron lacks the character and experience of life to handle it; so Balls acts like someone with Tourettes. QED.

When barracking Cameron in the House of Commons, Balls is not in fact acting like a Tourettist. He is instead using the time-honoured leftist tactic of trying to prevent your opponent from speaking by talking over them all the time. It says much for Balls that he should try this in a noisy room. I can vividly recall the late Mick McGahey doing this to a representative of the National Coal Board on 'Reporting Scotland' during the miners' strike of 1983-84. It was unpleasant to watch then, indeed is something of a bad memory, and it's still unpleasant to think of now. On the other hand, it's impossible to watch the blimpish Kenneth Clarke on 'Question Time' without seeing him do the same thing to whatever sacrificial lamb the Labour Party has put up for the purpose. Clarke's scenes on that show give me the impression that he must be an utterly horrible person to be around. On the other hand, perhaps it's all theatre. On the other hand perhaps it's not.

What is also evident from Cameron's outburst is that he seems to think he is free to say the same things in public as he might do in private. If correct, this may suggest that the circle within which he moves is a very narrow one, and that he does not make a great deal of contact with people who are not similar to him in terms of their backgrounds and experiences. To my mind, the proof of this is Cameron's now bog standard response to this controversy of his own making, that he didn't mean to cause offence. If he did not realise that he would cause offence, then he may be accustomed to causing offence as a matter of routine, or else spend a lot of time around people who are in the habit of saying offensive things. I recall David Lindsay once writing that Cameron's accent was narrowing with age instead of broadening. With trademark certitude, David remarked that this was the consequence of Cameron only having contact with people like himself, and he might have been more correct than he imagined. If so, it says little about the mindset of the circles Cameron moves in if they are all of the mind that their will should be obeyed without question. Two other groups in society are affected by this pathology; the first are tyrants, the second children. Tyrants tend not to do apologies under any circumstances, leaving only children as the ones to expect conduct demanding an apology to attract no other consequences.

But what should we expect of a Prime Minister whose Chancellor, when in opposition, described the then Chancellor as 'autistic' without suffering any penalty? These incidents say much about those in power and their calibre, or lack thereof.

As a sufferer of Tourettes, I find it a bit rich that a person who refuses to discuss his historic use of recreational drugs should describe a person whose conduct he finds objectionable as having my problem. Hopefully he wasn't strung out when he said it; for how terrible it would be if the finger on the nuclear button belonged to a cokehead or a stoner.  

Happy New Year

The Year Of Our Lord 2012 has begun with my fourth dose of food poisoning in nine months. My hands are inflamed with contact dermatitis, the windows still haven't been fixed, my face is adorned with a crop of pustules the like of which I haven't had since I was 14, I can't hear out of my left ear as a result of getting water in it in the shower this morning, the Internet's still switched off, I still haven't started the book and I'm back to work on Wednesday. Piling masochism upon improvidence and infirmity, I'm also reading Emerson's 'Essays', a work which, when read along with 'Walden', proves that in the 1840's there couldn't have been a great deal to do in Concord on a Sunday afternoon.

All in all, the year's shaping up nicely.

A very happy, blessed and prosperous New Year to you all.

'Grumpy Old Men'

I usually look forward to the BBC's annnual Christmas offering 'Grumpy Old Men', in which a group of aging and probably wealthy celebrities with unrivalled media access moan publicly about how much they dislike the behaviour of the people they share the planet with.

Sometimes it's quite funny, but an odd thing happened while watching this year's (or is it now last year's?) edition. Usually they've got guys like Will Self or Arthur Smith on it, men whose stock in trade is disgust and disaffection, so they make the exercise amusing. However this year it had a remarkably lightweight line up that included Bobby Davro, Huey Morgan and Matthew Le Tissier.

While I was watching it, the thought occurred to me that that particular selection of grumpy old men was, to put it bluntly, crap; and I thus became a grumpy old man at 'Grumpy Old Men'.

I do hope that the producers will do better next year - or is that this year?

David Cameron's New Year Message

The tardiness of its delivery makes one wonder whether he was not preparing a statement for New Year, but formulating a position on it instead.

Moving To Somalia

Well, it's been an interesting few weeks since I last blogged, all of them jam-packed with life changing incidents of the type you wouldn't believe if you read about them in a book, which you will hopefully be able to do in the near future.

Although the squalid lack of professionalism which assorted commercial contractors have subjected my household to over the past two months shouldn't be considered surprising, it still has been. We have been forced into the act of having to comprehend the depths of the mental squalor in which some of these people operate, and at times it's been very unpleasant. What has been equally surprising has been the discovery that some of them seem to think that you live in that kind of squalor as well. Nothing in the UK seems to work any more. You agree that you will give people money to do things for you, and then they don't do them. This has happened three times in the past two months, capitalism so stagnant and squalid it makes Marxism seem vital. The past two months have merely reinforced my long held impression that the United Kingdom is sinking into a state of torpor and squalor so squalid that recovery from it is an impossibility.

You see this squalor in everything, from the streets paved with dogshit to the almost comically Ruritanian uniforms worn by the Royal Family, from the grossly high number of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed thinktankers and journalists talking about capitalism rather getting out there and doing it, from our Coalition government's dogged insistence that the private sector will take up the slack in the job market when the history of the past 200 years shows that it never does because it never can (if only because true entrepreneurs are as rare as phoenixes), and in the squalid anthropology of the contractor, from their absolute, in my mind now proverbial, lack of dependability to their willingness to lie to you. In his compelling if necessarily grisly book 'Sins Of the Fathers', the late James Pope-Hennessey recorded that the act of subjection makes liars of the subjected. The extent to which the British now tell each other lies makes me wonder whether we have also assumed the psychological mantle of the subjected, and express it in false expressions. If so, we are subjects of the most squalid form of mainstream capitalism that has ever existed; the capitalism of inefficiency, incompetence, squalor and lies.

It's enough to make you want to emigrate. I think Somalia would be a good bet. They've been badly governed for so long that at least it's understandable if things don't work. With any luck, bits of it might be being administered by the UN, so you'll still get rice and bog rolls. Anything, anything, is better than the squalor in which so many British people are forced to live so that some can get rich. If you think it would be better in an independent Scotland think again, because for what my opinion's worth it would be run as squalidly as the UK is run at the moment, but with a higher proportion of narrow-minded village bullies - Bothyneuk Curling Club's Gala Committee writ on a national scale.

All in all, I will be glad to see the back of this year. Merry Christmas to you all.

'Let The Children Live'

It's not been the best of weeks.

Essential building works being conducted in the house, which should have ended on Wednesday, are still apparently ongoing. It has been largely uninhabitable, rendering the effort to inhabit it unpleasant for everyone concerned. Indeed, at times it's felt that if a movie were to be made of our home life over the past week, of a mother, father and small son living in a cold property full of furniture swathed in dust sheets, it'd be called 'The Shining'.

This has meant that none of us have really been able to do the things we like doing in the comfort of our own home. It's taught us a lot of lessons about ourselves. Hopefully we can take them to heart. In my case, I had planned to blog a little more than usual, if only because Internet service is being switched off tomorrow. This means that any new posts that appear on the blog from now on will be written from other locations, and will appear at best infrequently. Please don't email me, because I won't be able to answer you.

Yet at 12.00 Mass today, God, in His sublime way, gave me a kick up the backside to remind me that no matter how unpleasant the past week has been, there is always some more unfortunate than myself.

We had a guest celebrant today, Father Peter Walters of the charity, 'Let The Children Live'. Father Walters, a convert from Anglicanism whose attitude to the aid establishment seems to be what I can only describe as benign exasperation, has devoted his life to caring for the street children of Colombia. He pulls no punches, particularly to a congregation in the country with the highest rate of cocaine consumption in Europe.

He is a passionate speaker, which makes him a compelling one. He certainly made a good case for supporting his charity to me.

Please support him and his charges.

On Disposing Of Your Constituents' Confidential Documents In Public Bins

I wonder if he'd ever have dreamed of doing that with paperwork from Rothschilds.

On Freezing Out Civil Servants

If a hypothetical Cabinet Minister, one who might both look and sound like he was the sort of wee boy who always stayed in the classroom at playtime in order to read 'The Lord Of The Rings', or to play 'Dungeons and Dragons' along with the rest of the nerds in Muck o' Pitbonkle, were to try to remove Labour appointed senior civil servants from his department, would that not amount to an attack on the integrity of the civil service?

Or could it be a much more profound, ideologically motivated attack not upon the Civil Service but on the state itself - to make the state so unattractive an employer to work for that nobody will want to work for it, thus causing the size of the state to reduce; or more properly, for the state to atrophy?

All very neoconservative, it seems to me; all very entryist. But then again it's entirely hypothetical.

Misconduct In Public Office?

"Misconduct in public office is an offence at common law triable only on indictment. It carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. It is an offence confined to those who are public office holders and is committed when the office holder acts (or fails to act) in a way that constitutes a breach of the duties of that office" -

The Crown Prosecution Service.

Don't want to kick a bloke when he's down and all that, but doesn't seeking funds for a private company, even a non-profit one, when you're a member of the Cabinet fall within that definition?

A Short Thought On Civil Liberties (As We Near The End Of The Blogging Road)

The Labour government of Tony Blair created over 3,000 new crimes.

This can only be described as government against the people, proscribing the people, attacking the people.

One of the little patterns that Western history has splashed onto the history books is that when an ideology is fresh and untested, it very quickly butts its head against the brick wall of events and then retreats to its natural limits.

The French Revolution's 'Grande Terreur' was the natural consequence of unbridled liberalism. Liberalism born of absolutism proved itself to be as capable of bloodthirstiness and score-settling as absolutism itself. When La Grande Terreur hit its buffers, less than two days after Robespierre was laughed at, so did liberalism, and for all practical purposes it's been on the back foot ever since, and don't let anyone tell you anything different.

Similarly, the oppression of the poor in the early to middle phases of the Industrial Revolution occasioned by self-serving readings of the 'Wealth of Nations' hit the buffers once that book's very obvious failings became clear. That moment came when the evangelical Anglicans of that period, the type deplored by the less reputable type of modern British historian, got wise to them.

So it is and will be with this attack on civil liberties. Under Blair, the Labour Party became a party of the right, intent on restricting the ability of labour to express its collective desires rather than promoting and encouraging it. They never saw a strike they didn't deplore. Yet even although many of Labour's natural supporters now seem to be almost as demented as Adam Smith in their pursuit of self-interest (a pursuit which is a feature of all societies blighted by failing public institutions and a consequent narrowing of what Francis Fukuyama and others have labelled 'the radius of trust'), I retain great hope that the Blair government's attack on civil liberties will go the way of La Grande Terreur and the dark satanic mills in the end; the people will see through it, and its effect will be nullified by that peculiarly British combination of obstinacy and apathy best described as 'Britishness'.

There is always hope.

Men Behaving Badly

One doesn't really wish to kick a loyal son of South Lanarkshire when he's down, even a self-proclaimed Thatcherite one who might not hesitate doing the same thing to you were the boot ever to be on the other foot, but it's good to see that the 'Daily Telegraph' has picked up on what, for me, is the most disturbing aspect of the current unpleasantness surrounding Doctor Liam Fox.

That newspaper has picked up on the fact that Adam Werritty resided with Dr. Fox at the latter's flat in Southwark at a time when his mortgage costs were being picked up by the taxpayer. 'Resided' seems to be the best verb to use in this context, for Mr. Werritty cannot be described as having been a lodger, if only because the flat's then owner has indicated that he didn't pay rent.

Although one is fully aware that previous regimes for the claiming of parliamentary expenses were notoriously lax, by the same token it is staggering that it didn't occur to a person of opinions so emphatically right-wing as Dr. Fox's seem to be that he might have some moral obligation to minimise the loss that his arrangement with Mr. Werritty occasioned to the public purse. A loss was certainly occasioned, for Mr. Werritty received shelter at no cost to himself, his housing costs being borne by the taxpayer instead. Dr. Fox could have minimised this loss to the taxpayer by charging Mr. Werritty rent. He didn't do so. To my mind, this illustrates an inability to understand his own ideology so profound that it casts a very grey shadow over his judgment.

It all seems very redolent of the kind of relationship portrayed in the sitcom 'Men Behaving Badly'.

In Scotland, Hatred Never Dies

The best book about Ireland that I have ever read is VS Naipaul's 'Among The Believers'.

Some people might find that sentence surprising, perhaps not least Sir Vidia. However, his analysis of Pakistani nationalism's mindset circa 1980-81 almost directly matches my experience of the Irish nationalist mindset. In particular, his description of how Pakistani nationals of that era regarded emigration as wholly acceptable as they already had a country of their own to be eerily redolent of thinking that I have encountered in some Irish quarters.

This makes all the more questionable the claims of some Scottish civic nationalists - see Angus Calder's 'Scotlands Of The Mind', for example - that everyone who comes to Scotland should be considered to be a Scot, if only because it impertinently removes the freedom to choose which nation they consider themselves as belonging to from the objects of their affection. We can and should consider them to be neighbours; the obligation to show charity demands no less. However, whether they should be considered Scots is really their choice to make. The civic nationalists of the soi-disant, ersatz 'Scottish Government' might know fewer new Scots, and be more unfamiliar with how they think, than they are letting on.

And it goes without saying that any independent Scotland crafted by Scottish civic nationalists will also produce emigrants who feel the same way about Scotland as some Irish emigrants feel about Ireland and Sir Vidia Naipaul reported some Pakistani emigrants as feeling about Pakistan. But they'll be Scots, so it'll be all right.

However, those of us who really have no choice but to belong here must labour under the constraints imposed by the culture of the sometime Best Small Country In The World. Ruth Davidson, a kickboxing lesbian who is currently running for the leadership of the Scottish Conservatives, has parted company with one Ross McFarlane after he got a little carried away with the sectarianism.

If one were in an uncharitable frame of mind, one might be tempted to believe that the very unpleasant nature of his comments reveal Mr. McFarlane to be, in an untranslatable Glaswegian vernacular, a baw-faced balloon. As far as a political career in Scotland goes, he's toast. His name is now filed in too many memories to make any kind of comeback viable; not soon, not ever.

However, it's the disappointingly casual nature of his contempt for others' beliefs that gets to you. In Scotland, this sort of thing never stops getting to you. I've worked in places where being a Catholic, particularly one with some education, has given me the sort of status I imagine that an educated Greek slave might have had on a Roman latifundium; a useful guy to have around when brainwork needs doing but otherwise firmly out of the loop. In this respect, Scotland will never change. In this country, there will always be ignorant wallies out there who feel offended by you just because you're here.

Yes, we're a great wee country.