There appears to be some evidence that once, like me, you’re over forty, your brain begins to deteriorate, though not at the same rate as your eyes, ears, reflexes, knees and hips.  I can vouch for it.  In the last few months there seems to have been a dramatic rise in the number of things I’m unable to understand.  When I was young (at the age of six, for example) they were no problem.  But now I’m old, they’re a real puzzle.

Basically, as they say, I can’t understand public services.  Why have they become so difficult to deliver?  Take bin-collections, for example.  Once they were once a week; then they were reduced to once a fortnight; now they seem set to become once a month.

Or take home-helps.  Time was, and that in living memory, when the elderly could expect an hour every morning, half-an-hour in the evening, and time for a chat.  Now it’s twenty minutes, and the help is tagged: hardly time to draw breath, and then she’s gone.

Then there’s the enormous difficulty and expense of postal services.  It’s not that long since the Post Office could provide two deliveries a day, for 1p a letter.  Now it’s once a day for well-nigh £1, and there are grim warnings that in this modern age the old idea of a universal postal service where the same stamp could carry the letter either ten miles or a thousand can no longer be sustained; and where once every village had its Post Office they’ll soon be as rare as corncrakes.

But at least we still have the NHS.  Over the Festive Season, all the best TV programmes were on BBC Alba and the very best of them was ‘An Doctair Mòr’, a documentary on the work of Dr. Alexander Macleod, who for over forty years served the community of North Uist and its countless adjacent islands.  (No offence, Brian.  The documentary on you was very good, too, but you’re still alive and while you can still hear us we can’t tell you what a great man you were).

I watched ‘An Doctair Mor’ with a mixture of admiration and nostalgia.  It told the story of a doctor who routinely did home-visits any hour of the day or night, hazarding rough roads, choppy seas and boggy moors to get to his patients (hardships shared by his wife Julia, also a GP) and yet finding time to pioneer new obstetric techniques, contribute to medical journals and campaign successfully for a cutting-edge air-ambulance service to an island still without electricity.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the last men executed by the Nazis, once remarked, ‘You can’t expect every man to be a hero.’  I don’t expect young doctors fresh from the city to face hazards which a man fresh from the trenches of the Great War could take in his stride.  But unless my aged memory is deceiving me, the early years of the NHS seem to have produced an amazing number of heroes.  The GP of my childhood, Dr. Alex Matheson (father of the illustrious Sandy), left his bed on countless occasions to visit my ailing parents; and it takes none of the gloss off his dedication to say that every doctor from every Stornoway practice would have done the same.

But I hear it is impossible to sustain this level of service nowadays.  This troubles my brain; and it troubles me because public services today are equipped with technical resources such as even Einstein could never have dreamed of.  How can services decline when resources expand at a rate unparalleled in human history?

The first effective computer was developed at Bletchley Park in 1943 by the tragic Alan Turing to break the German Enigma code.  It had to use thousands of valves and was so massive it was called ‘Colossus’.  Soon after the War, valves gave way to transistors, which in turn gave way to micro-chips: tiny bits of silicone containing mind-blowing numbers of miniaturised transistors.

I had a brief tutorial on the subject from a very bright young Free Church minister some weeks ago, and (assuming I’m only as deaf as I personally think I am) I gathered that in any average home containing a PC, a lap-top, an I-pad, a tablet, a television, a washing-machine, a mobile-phone and a hair-dryer, the family are playing host to billions of transistors.  It sounded a bit like God’s promise to Abraham.  The descendants of Colossus are as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the sea-shore: and that’s just the ones living with me.

When these marvels first burst upon the scene fifty years ago, we were all agog.  They would take the drudgery out of work, make possible what had been impossible before, and bless every honest citizen with a short working-week and countless hours of splendid leisure.

How, then, did we get from there to here, where everything is so expensive and so impossible that the previous levels of service ‘simply cannot be maintained’?  We were promised a world without paper, and find ourselves instead in a world where commercial paper-shredding is a thriving industry.  We were told that secretaries would need to work only two days a week; instead, they’re worked to within an inch of their life.  We dreamed of ideal working-conditions: instead, more and more staff were ordered to share ever-smaller offices till at last we reached the point where they’re now sharing a desk.

And we’re in a world where GPs, unlike the highly privileged ‘Doctair Mòr’, are so stressed they can work only four days a week, never in the evenings and never at week-ends.  Yet we have all these brilliant laughing, talking, dancing computers which can count, store, file, recall, spell, print, speak to the world’s greatest consultants, and even put smilies on every letter.

Besides which, we don’t have to get about in the old banger used by the ‘Doctair Mor’.  His very car itself was a patient, requiring constant treatment with the same pliers as he used to pull teeth.  Today, our cars do their own hill-starts and kindly open their doors when they hear us approaching.

So, how come we’re here?  I’m not telling.  I’m over forty, and every life needs some sense of mystery.



This article first appeared in the West Highland Free Press 9 January 2015.