A lot’s been written recently about reviewing – from the ‘Sock Puppet’ controversy to the many anonymous trolls which/who seem to lurk everywhere. I thought I’d add to it by a sort of double review: the first a reviewer’s assessment of my own work, the second my review of that review. It came in the form of a 4 page card from one Isla Kirton. She’s at primary school and she’s the granddaughter to whom I referred in a blog way back in June.

Her first page is non-committal but already introduces a disturbing element. It seems to depict the reviewer, the reviewer’s brother and a long, thin, bespectacled person with a book, which is obviously me. The sun is shining, giving the opening a positive spin, but the reviewer’s dress – the only real splash of colour – is an arrowhead in disquieting red, the colour of anger, heat, blood; the colour referenced by Marlowe’s Faustus when he cries ‘See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament’. Already then, under the surface of the review, there’s an unsettling implication that all is not as it seems. (The thinness of the bespectacled giant is no doubt a satirical reference to my girth.) On each face there is a smile, my own no doubt indicative of a certain smugness, the others revealing a knowledge of what is to come.

And what does come next is a stark, seemingly unambiguous symbol. Once more, no words are used. The reviewer is disarmingly direct. In the middle of the heart, an ugly, evil tear suggesting that the time is out of joint. What can it mean? That love is a fiction? That her liking for my work needs to be qualified in some sinister way? Or simply that it has a dodgy aortic valve? Its elongated shape adds yet another dimension to the critique it represents. It is clearly an inverted teardrop which ends in a pair of buttocks. This is reviewing at its most complex.

But then comes page 3 and, for the first time, words. But what words – enigmatic, mystical, seeming to evoke global truths (‘In the earth live some herts’), reversals in Nature (‘In the leevs live some trees’), and then, bringing the referential framework right down to the personal level and hinting at a rhyming game we played when I last visited her, the seemingly artless ‘In mummys live some tomees’ – a clear reference to gestation, with ‘tomees’ signifying wombs.

And then, the power of the gap in the narrative, the wordless space between her gnomic pronouncements and the true start of her critical analysis. It’s a space in which the reviewer pauses for breath, gives the reader time to absorb the mysterious, complex frameworks she’s constructed, before her direct appreciation of me as a ‘grate writer’.

And yet, the greatness of her critique, its teasing ambiguity, even as she expresses her love, is continued in the intrusion of that one little word ‘it’. On the surface, ‘I hope you get better’ is a clear ‘Get Well Soon’ message, but ‘I hope you get IT better’ begs a question. What ‘it’? My writing? The valve? The recognition she thinks I deserve?

But, as one turns over to the final page, her breathtakingly assured mastery of the medium is clear. In both words and image, she delivers her conclusion. The small figure sitting at the computer table is her, representing my readership, tiny and existing at a level beneath that of the greatness of my works, with the larger screen suggesting perhaps that it is time for those works to be adapted for the cinema. 

It is a master class in criticism..

I’ll be in hospital this weekend so, realizing that depriving you of a blog would create an unbearable gap in your lives, I’ve asked my brother Ron to increase my visitor numbers (as his contributions always do). Ron is bottom right in the shot of the Kirton siblings. This is what he has to say:

Although this entry is unlikely to further the literary aims of Bill’s blog, it will have a thematic link with his current situation, in that it shares my recent encounters with the National Health Service.

What seems to characterize my time with health professionals is a profound need to make them feel better and an acute awareness that I’m wasting their time. And the higher their status, the more acute that awareness becomes. Ayisha, who was the last person to look at my teeth, was not high ranking. When I booked the appointment, the guy at the desk asked if, given the non-serious nature of my problem, I would be happy seeing the dental therapist. As it’s almost more important to keep the front of house sweet than to improve the lot of the expert professional I said yes, at the same time pondering the link between my understanding of therapy and a dental filling.

Hearing the name Ayisha, I used my time in the waiting room making a mental note to write a blog sometime on nominative determinism: the idea that a person’s name might condition their choice of career. It seemed to me that the sound of the name AYISHA is pretty close to the cry one might utter if the drill got a bit close to the nerve, so she might feature in the blog.

Once in the chair and with the temporary filling in place, Ayisha asked, “Are you happy?” (Clearly she and the receptionist had been to the same training session. At least her question called for a monosyllabic answer, unlike that of my usual dentist who fills my mouth with instruments, then asks where I’m going for my holiday this year.) I said I was fine and, once my mouth was free to move again, toyed with the idea of going into a bit of existential detail but, instead, made the mistake of saying, “So, a therapist….does that mean you’re on the way to becoming a fully fledged dentist?”

She was obviously – and quite rightly – offended and at pains to tell me that dental therapy was a legitimate career path and that she was already fully qualified. (Second mental note: don’t offend a woman in a nurse’s outfit when you’re lying on your back and she has a power tool in her hand – even though that image might appeal to some of this blog’s readers). (Bill’s editorial note: dear readers, please feel free to sue him for such a libel. I can supply full contact details.) The twenty-seven pounds I paid at the desk seemed a meager recompense for the trouble I had caused.

James, my physiotherapist, looks a little older than Ayisha – about fourteen – and has an excellent bedside manner. He is a little more methodical: “Are you happy?” has been supplemented by, “On a scale of one to ten.” And this is where my problems start. I have already been waiting six weeks for this appointment and, if I blow it, I may be sent back to my GP for some more cortisone, which doesn’t make me happy. If, for instance, I say, “Well, at its worst it’s about six…” he might conclude that, at its best, it’s one or two and tell me to look again at those poor wasted patients I just skipped past in the waiting room and stop being such a resource-wasting wimp. So I have to create a narrative over the next few sessions.

“I’d say nine in the early morning then easing to around seven as I warm up during the day. It’s plantar fasciitis.”

And that’s another glaring error. I’ve already been signed off by another physio a year ago, who told me that’s what I’d got, but why did I tell James? I’ve now saved him the trouble of diagnosing me and shortened my appointment time. I go on to tell him how active I am: walking the dog, cycling – carefully neglecting to mention golf in case he tells me to play less – all of which makes me sound far too fit and even less deserving of his help. But, having made a note of every word I’ve said, he does eventually do some hands-on treatment. This takes the form of kneading the sole of my foot with a knuckle duster out of which protrudes what looks like the “male” part of a recycled hip joint. And this time I’m not fabricating. Instead of cries of pain I speak what I take to be his language and squeal, “eight” or “nine” then, stepping right outside his lexicon, say, “bingo”. I’m rewarding him for hurting me and he’s loving it.

At my next appointment I declare that I’ve been doing the exercises regularly – lies – but tell him there’s still a bit of seven about the morning – more lies. I’m almost too delighted to hear him say that these things take a while to treat, that my patient status has been affirmed, and that I’m in his hands for the next few weeks. Just as we’re settling into our respective roles I risk referring to my other problem, in my left shoulder, but cannot prevent myself making the same pretentious mistake I made with the foot…

”I think it’s a rotator cuff issue.”

“Next please.”.

If the heart problem which the NHS is going to sort out next Friday were stress-related, watching last night’s documentary, You’ve been Trumped, might well have saved them the trouble. It was about an item that’s been very big news in my area for a long time now. It should be just as big in the rest of Scotland and, indeed, the UK and any other country which prizes democracy and respects its citizens, but there are many people who’d prefer not to acknowledge what’s been happening.

In brief, Donald Trump has destroyed a site of Special Scientific Interest, one of the very few of its kind (some people say the only one) in Scotland in order to build a vanity project golf course. It’s on a stretch of coast that already boasts, in the 22 miles between Aberdeen and Cruden Bay, 3 excellent championship links courses. I play golf (badly, sometimes very badly indeed), but like it a lot and I’ve had some great times on the many wonderful courses all over Scotland. But this is not about golf, it’s about hubris and corruption; the proof that waving money at governments and the police has a greater impact than principles or ideologies.

Trump is self-parody taken to extremes. His hair is too easy a target. I mean, if he looks in the mirror and thinks what he sees is an acceptable self-image, what value can you put on his judgement of anything? He flies in and out of places in his private jet, is surrounded by sycophants and recites his ill-considered (if considered at all) opinions as facts. (According to him, Aberdeen is on the West coast of Scotland and lots of the top environmental experts have approved of his destruction of the Menie links.)

We know there are such people and there’s little we can do to shake their self-belief, challenge their world view or match the power they derive from their money. But far more depressing is the fact that, in this case, his corporate vandalism, his disregard for the environment and, above all, his despicable treatment of local residents has been condoned and even facilitated by the Scottish government and Grampian police. The Robert Gordon University, an excellent institution whose record of graduate employment is exemplary, was even craven enough to award him an honorary degree.

The full extent of the spread of culpability in this whole sorry affair was revealed in that multi-award-winning documentary, made by a persistent and very courageous journalist, Anthony Baxter. You can see it here on the BBC iPlayer.

Our First Minister is a highly intelligent man and probably the most astute politician in the UK. He is passionate about Scotland achieving independence through the 2014 referendum. When the Aberdeenshire Council rejected the Trump application to build the course (admittedly needing the Chairman’s casting vote to do so), it was overruled by his government. He is far too canny not to have recognised the irony in a context where independence is fairly won through democratic processes and then overridden with ease by the power of corporations which simply threaten to move their money elsewhere. A highly respected economics expert has questioned the validity of the arguments which Trump and his political allies have cited for allowing the development to go ahead (more jobs for locals, visitors spending more money in the region). But even if they ARE valid, the way in which Trump, aided by the police, has treated the residents whose lives he’s ruined is inexcusable and taints the whole scheme with its disregard for individuals, and its explicit demonstration that their needs and values are less important than his own.

The whole deplorable project is a direct negation of the proud, long-standing Scottish values of compassion, community and respect..