Teddy, Snow

Today is my grandson Teddy's first birthday, Happy Birthday Teddy! Last year I was supposed to be back in England in time for Teddy's birth so that I could look after Holly, but it didn't work out because Teddy arrived three weeks early, still, at least this makes him a Capricorn, one of the best signs of the Zodiac.

We have big snow. Last night I went downtown and I could feel that bite in the air that tells you it's coming. By the time I drove back out of Vancouver, there had been a sprinkling of snow, but when we woke up this morning, there it was, magical, covering everything and still falling.

The reason I was downtown in the first place was that a lecturer from the University of Victoria was talking about First Nations plant management at Vancouver Public Library, which in itself is more like a walled city than a library.

When Europeans first came to BC, they judged that the indigenous people did not farm the land, they were classified as Hunter-Gatherers. This was quite convenient, because they could simply annexe the land, whereas it was clear that the people fished, so they were accorded the continuation of fishing rights.

The reasons why this happened were twofold. Firstly, because the First Nations methods of plant management were not what the Europeans were used to, and secondly because the women dealt with the land whilst the men fished, only the men's activity was noticed.

At that time, and for many years, European farming was broadly similar to today's, just without the technology, so fields marked off and sown.

First Nations managed the plants where they grew. So for example, a run of salal or blueberry bushes would be pruned, and after cropping, deadwood removed and even burned off, they had a method of swift, shallow burning.

A field full of camas bulbs, or clover root, both of which they used as a root vegetable, would be tended. They had a tool that they used to dig around a square of earth, then they would lift the square and turn it over, exposing the bulbs. They would harvest a certain number of bulbs of the right size. Whilst they were doing this, seeds from the flowers would fall back into the soil as well. Then they would return the section of earth to its place.

Another method they used was to build up the soil over certain roots, like composting, so that the roots would grow bigger.

When we went to the Victoria Museum on Friday, we saw a longhouse, a real one just outside the museum building, but inside there were some models of settlements. There were apparently some quite large villages, around 20 or so longhouses, with maybe 50 people living in each longhouse. When the Spanish came and brought horses, some of the bands became more mobile and with a need to find grazing for the horses and that is when tipis were used.
With the large villages however, it was important to have some way of managing the food supply and the methods we learned about last night rendered sustainable what was available.

See-saw, Marjorie Daw

Public opinion, for what it's worth, can seem like a see-saw, up and down, up and down, but in a larger sense it's more like the scenario most of us can remember from actually being on a see-saw as children. Once the bigger kid gets on the end, that see-saw stays put, the tiny one stuck in the air, the bigger one with bum firmly on the ground.

Take racism for example.
I am not arguing that racism doesn't exist, far from it, I have seen it in action and it is a very ugly beast. But there was a time when it was more embedded in our culture, that it was perceived to be the norm and that only a minority of trouble makers would challenge it.

Now, it may well be that black people are under-represented in boardrooms and parliament just as women are, but you cannot be openly racist, if people are still telling jokes about blacks and nursing hatred in their souls, they must do it in the privacy of their own toilets. It can be and is challenged. This scenario could not happen today...

A group of so-called religious leaders protest outside Parliament, that the government must not pass a bill sanctioning the equal treatment of blacks and whites. They distribute leaflets describing improbable situations where ordinary white citizens are not allowed to deny black people entry to their own homes or that hospitals and clinics must put them first for healthcare ahead of white folks, in short, a whole mess of made up stuff which the law that the government has carefully crafted does not in any case allow.

Of course that would be entirely unacceptable. Who among us could go to Synagogue or Mosque and pray with, or to Church on Sunday and take communion with a bunch of people who had done such a thing?

Well why the hell is it different because instead of black people we are talking about gay people? Why is homophobia any more acceptable than racism? How and why, instead of those people who claim to have faith wrestling with their own prejudices and begging their God to remove this stain from their soul, do they bare their evil for all the world to see? And why do the rest of us have to be tarred with their filth?
Polly Toynbee in the Guardian makes the case so much better than me. I'd love to just copy and paste her entire article, but that would be insulting all round. I'm not Polly Toynbee, I didn't write it and if you want to read her you can go to the Guardian website.

In a similar vein, Sarah Louisa Phythian-Adams has written an extremely well-argued and readable article on the F-Word site about misogynistic linguistics. She urges us to bring the whole subject of the way we use language back onto the stage. We are always dismissed whenever we talk about the effects of anti-woman language, she is so right.
She uses the same argument as I have just done to make one of her points. She reminds us of the Yorkie ad which used the catchphrase 'not for girls'. Quite rightly she points out that they could not have said 'not for Jews' or 'not for black people'.
Be warned, I have a whole post on language bubbling under, not necessarily from this same angle, but I was pleased to see such a comprehensive discussion of the topic, especially as I had e-mailed the site a few months ago and commented about the problem. I received a reply agreeing wholeheartedly with the points I had made and telling me that a post was to be forthcoming. This was well worth the wait.

Kid B

They were the best of kids, they were the worst of kids.
I said that I wanted to write more about Austen's Battlefields trip but in order to try to convey the impact, I want to try and get across what Mayhem kids can be like.

I had left the TV on, a new show on BBC Canada was playing. The premise seemed to be that two families who didn't know each other would go on holiday together, each would organise a week according to their own taste.
Both families seemed to have a working class background, but the dad in family A seemed to be or had been a police officer and the family had an interest in military history and re-enactments. Since I wasn't really watching at first, I didn't get what either of the parents in family B did.

Family B took them to the Algarve. They bagged the best accommodation in the self-catering apartment. Family B organised things to do in the day and would tell Family A when to get up and then wouldn't get up at all. The kids in family B seemed to be something like 12 and 8. Their parents exercised no parental control over them, the whole family spent an entire shopping expedition seeking out alcohol, which the two boys then fought over, trips to the beach always resulted in horrible anti-social behaviour and they only ate junk food.
Throughout this, Family A suffered stoically, being oh so very British about it, but they whispered their frustrations to the camera.

Then both families went on family A's choice. This was admittedly boring for family B, since it was a carefully planned tour of the Battlefields of some long forgotten war. Dad A tried patiently to include boys B in his explanations, but whenever they weren't directly being addressed they messed about, threw and destroyed things and complained that family A thought they were too thick to understand any of it. Mum B behaved like a bored schoolchild, and very theatrically too, the whole time. The only time they were engaged was when they were allowed to dress up in the clothes of the historic period.

At the end, mum B told the camera she thought that children A were scared of their dad, even though there had been no indication whatsoever of this in the show. The children of both families seemed in fact to espouse the values of their parents, it was just that parents A had better ones - in my value judgement you understand.

At Mayhem, I taught some of the best kids I had ever taught, these were like the kids in family A, but the majority of kids and their parents, were just like the ones in family B, so consider now, taking them to Belgium to see the Battlefields of WW1.

Austen's schoolgroup, you may remember, had suffered the full attention of customs, every child had been scanned, the coach closely inspected and only a Pompey football shirt had saved them.

When they finally arrived in Calais and driven across the top of France to Belgium, the two drivers were still muttering gloom and doom, but the courier was now on centre stage and was much more positive.

The first thing that shocked Austen when they got to the area, was the frequency of cemeteries, with their neat little rows of white military crosses. They were taken into one. The first time the kids were shocked into thinking was when they stopped at the grave of a fifteen year-old boy. The courier pointed out that at fifteen, he was no conscript, he had deliberately deceived the authorities and signed up because he wanted to give his life for his country and its ideals. The children were stunned into silence.

When they arrived at what had been the front line, the kids were allowed to stand in a trench so that they could experience the claustrophobia of it. They were shown the fields of operation behind the front line, the place where the wounded would have been taken for first aid, then the more seriously wounded, further back, and eventually the small room where the doctor treated the dying. Behind it, the mortuary. Every soldier who was treated in that room entered the mortuary and every soldier who ended up in the mortuary, entered through that room. Even without the mud and business of war, the kids were again, silenced.

The coach took off again and eight miles before another front line, the courier told them that this was where the allied army had had to retreat to, on foot when the German army tested out mustard bombs. As the coach covered the miles, so the kids were ever more disbelieving at the realisation of how far the army had to march in retreat for their lives.
A Canadian officer had worked out that if you peed into your hankie and then covered your face with it, you could save yourself from the effects of the gas.
The Germans apparently had no idea of the impact of what they had done, if they had, they could have won a pivotal victory.

At twilight, and in persistent drizzle, the tour arrived at a German wargrave cemetery.
Even now, the German cemeteries have to be protected with high fencing for fear of desecration. The kids had to literally climb into the place.
The final silence was when they surveyed the crosses. All of the German crosses were black. Even in death they were demonised by their victors. At the bottom of the graveyard, and facing in as though forever protecting their fallen, were these four lifesize statues of German officers. Austen said the whole atmosphere of the place made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

Lest we forget.

Weird Sex and Snowshoes

I could just write the whole post about 'Talladega Nights : The Ballad of Ricky Bobby'. I could go on and on about how funny it was from the first frame to the last.
I could say how brilliant Jane Lynch and Sasha Baron Cohen were in it.
I could make a glib comment about how comfortable Baron Cohen clearly is with his own sexuality.
I could marvel at how the humour extended even to the continual product placement.
I could snigger at the bitingly funny parody of pseudo-Christianity and of white trash southern States values.
I could mention how much I enjoyed the cameo by Elvis Costello.
I could say how much I've always loved Gary Cole as an actor.
I could point out Amy Adams from Junebug.
And I could end with some snarky comment about why it's always comedic seeing Will Ferrell in his white underpants.
But that would just be obsessive and you could go and read an extensive write up about the movie by some actual film critic.
So all I'll say is, I put off renting this because it appeared to be about car racing. How stoopid of me. It was an absolute GEM.

Last week, Kevin and I watched a documentary about the history of Canadian cinema. I'm actually quite genuinely interested in this because I find Canadian films to be in general very thoughtful, often quirky and well crafted. They also, like many country's own film industries, give a perceptive insight into the Canadian psyche. The documentary was based on a book about the subject, called 'Weird Sex and Snowshoes', so I guess that may give an indication of what she thought Canadian preoccupations might be. I can't personally attest to that, we don't get much snow.

What she really did feel however, was the Canadian sense of outsiderness. I found this very thought-provoking. I like the idea of cinema as a readable genre and I have studied French texts that deal with the feeling of otherness.

In a scene from the Atom Egoyan film 'Ararat', one of the characters says, 'Who remembers the Armenians?' Who indeed, I know I don't, which may not be too astonishing, since the attempted genocide happened between 1915 and 1918, but then it's not often that I can't recall learning anything about a particular moment in history.
But then that's cinema for you, sometimes it fills in the gaps.

Victoria

Victoria, not Vancouver, is the capital city of the Province of BC and the provincial parliament is there. It is a beautiful city but arguably less spectacular than Vancouver itself.

After posting my few lines yesterday I went out of the bedroom and as I paused at the top of the stairs and looked through the window of the other bedroom I realised that it was snowing hard. Suddenly, getting up at 5 was no hardship. Outside the world was transformed, so was I. Kevin had to remind me that everyone else in the neighbourhood was still asleep.

The snow, still falling hard, did not make an easy drive over to Lori's and we did fear that the ferries might not be running.
As we neared Tsawassen however, the snow had lessened. The sea crossing to Vancouver Island's Swartz Bay takes an hour and a half, so very close to the same as the crossing from Dover to Calais. But the journey itself is very different. There is so much to see, islands with houses and beautiful coastline. It certainly doesn't need to be lost time.

When we arrived on VI, it was raining heavily. We drove out to the Goldstream Provincial Park where we were meeting with the coordinator to discuss programming strategies. We turned off the highway at the sign pointing towards the Nature House. How foolish. We were on a truly scary one-car road winding upwards. Jo and I, in the back of the car, tried to keep our gasps of horror between ourselves so as not to distract Lori as we looked down over plunging and unprotected drops. And yet there were evenly spaced houses going up, houses whose numbering was in no way matching the one we were looking for.

If we thought our mystery tour upwards was frightening, coming down was white knuckle stuff.
The correct way to the Nature House turned out to be down the road that said 'No Public Access'.

I feel that I am using superlative adjectives like 'breathtaking', 'spectacular' and 'awe-inspiring' too often when I describe the scenery around here, but the truth is not that I am exaggerating, just that I have insufficient adjectives to adequately describe the beauty of where I have come to live.

Goldstream Park was no exception. We sat in armchairs around a log fire as we shared ideas. Outside, in spite of the teeming rain, the landscape just made me stop and stare, mouth open. Here, the salmon run is the focus of an important part of the educational programmes and the previous year's run had been upset by a late start. But whilst a late start may affect fishing, to the educators here it meant increased media coverage.

Presenting information about both history and natural history is called interpretation in Canada, and the family of interpreters is extended, but most members know one another. There is even an overlap between Canada and the US in this field.

We went into Victoria for lunch and met another member of the family. Then on to Victoria Museum for the final day of an exhibition that overlaps one of our own programmes. It was interesting, but lacked the wow factor we were hoping for. The museum itself overlooks the parliamentary buildings that I see so often on the local TV News.

The weather - I presume - caused a power cut and we were all turned out a little early and so the knock-on effect was that we arrived a little early at the restaurant we we were meeting more members of the Interpretation family for dinner. This too had been closed, we again assumed by something weather related, so we had to wait for the others to arrive before finding somewhere else to eat.

Finally on the last ferry of the day we were all fairly exhausted, but it sailed on time. Not far from the destination however, the wind suddenly whipped up with the effect that at the time we were supposed to land, we were all on the car deck but the ship was unable to dock. Relief when the cars started to move.

I was disappointed to find that the morning's snow had disappeared, but relieved that our power had been restored after a cut earlier in the evening.

It was a good day but egads was I tired.

Twelve Drummers Drumming

Well what else would they do? And they signal the final day of the Christmas season. I have had to take my decorations down already as I won't be here for most of today. All done and dusted. But I didn't want the day to go unmarked so I'm posting just for that. Bye Christmas, see you at the end of the year again.

Eleven Pipers Piping

Seems like it's not just me, but Wallace and Gromit have also been wondering about the meaning of this Christmas song. I will have to wait to see what their thoughts are though.

The weather has changed from dark and lowering in the west with hints of blue in the east, to harsh, sleety showers and then back again to blue skies plus energetic winds.

I went to the Nature Park to see Lori - who told me about W&G. We're going on a Field Trip to Vancouver Island tomorrow, just the near part you understand, I say that for those of you who have long lost rellies in Port Alberni. If we get hopelessly, hideously lost, I'll look them up, however, the plan is Victoria.

As I drove into the Nature Park car park, a car was spilling children out, like tennis balls being set loose from some...tennis ball holding thing. Bounce, bop, fall, bounce again, and somehow it becomes my responsibility to keep them from beneath the wheels of my car. What a contrast, I thought to myself, when I watched Sue get her two kids out of the car, Holly gets out first, is taken to the pavement side, where she has been trained to keep one hand on the car until Teddy is out and in his pushchair.

Now who wouldn't want to encourage Jews, Christians and Muslims to co-operate peacefully on some project that they all felt was of burning and universal importance? Well the answer to that is, no-one who cares about human rights. I really get the hump with these bigots, they can't seem to see the inconsistency, any of them, in believing in a perfect being and the sheer abject hatred entailed in denying one part of society the same dignity and rights as any others.
And if they can't get that, then get this. The article I refer to was in the Daily Nazi, and even the Daily Nazi readers, so this is like VERY RIGHT WING BIGOTS we're talking about now, don't get why these religious groups are getting arsey towards the gay community.
So that, my beardy friends, makes you more intolerant than Hitler.

At some point it would be good if someone, somewhere in our lazy fat-arsed society took responsibility for something. I'm very sorry that two little boys have succeeded in hanging themselves, but blaming TV? Give me a break.
In standard pathology anyway, it's not boys who self-harm.

Where are we on Citizenship education? It is the duty of every Citizen to uphold the law. But do we teach kids to do that, or take responsibility for their own safety? What models do we show them?
Adults frequently take the option of least resistance, slide beneath the law, blame everyone else, think it's unreasonable for them to teach their own children manners, respect, responsibility, cry foul whenever things go wrong, or even when they perceive things not going the way they want.
There are people who think nothing is worth fighting for, that others shouldn't have the same rights as us.
That education isn't important, something that the State forces onto people, that health care is just a right on which there should be no limit.
That the Police should protect us without being respected.
That politicians will heal the planet and if we all suffocate or are irradiated then it's their fault.
That we can't help copying what we see on TV, but not the good stuff.
That it's the TV's fault for showing us stuff, not that we have the possibility not to look.
That we don't need God, but the one we'll take is the one we mangle in our own image.

Hmmm...well at least Wallace and Gromit still have values.

Ten Lords a-Leaping

Wow, the tenth day of Christmas, it's almost over. It's pretty poor stuff that people have to go back to work before Christmas is over, so I was pleased to see in the Guardian yesterday that many Brits are taking annual leave during the Christmas season. What I was less pleased about was the article's title which implied that by doing this people were skiving. Bloody cheek.

Kevin's skiving today, or rather his case exactly makes my point. Like many other people in his company and elsewhere, Kevin has a backlog of holiday time which he never seems to be able to take because it's always some crucial point in the project they're working on.
He had been unable to come to the UK with me in November because the project was going to be at one of those points. Then it wasn't, so he kept his holiday time.
Now he is being bugged to take some of it. Over Christmas does seem to be a good time, not too much going on at work, and in fact there is some enforced holiday during this period. So he decided to extend the Christmas holiday, take some leave.
Wrong! He has been sent to Calgary today because he is the only engineer who can check up on the work of one of their suppliers.
Ah well, Ikea had better be readying themselves for me. Just kidding. Or am I?

I didn't make any New Year's Resolutions because, having the weeding personality, an aspect of this is setting yourself continual targets and of course, being a teacher in Britain didn't exactly undermine that side of things, far from it, it reinforced it on a daily basis.
Nonetheless, I do enjoy the idea of a fresh new year, complete with new number, to look forward to.
I did the transferring of various important dates from the old calendar to the new one a couple of days ago, and maybe that wasn't such a good exercise after all. I found I was zapping through the months and suddenly I was at December 2007 with the feeling that nothing much had changed. Of course that made me set some targets, you know, the usual ones, weight, job, personal achievements.

Another article in yesterday's Graun that caught my attention was about the dumping of kitchen gadgets.
My mother loved gadgets but she was also a very strong discourager of the 'household items as presents' school of thought. And good on her for that. She was also a discourager of the 'giving pressies just for the sake of it' thing too, so when we were all grown-up and the present finding became a chore, she called a halt and only kids got presents after that.
I did like this article though. The garlic paraphernalia, the wok, the mandolin. I love things that either have lots of functions, or that you use every day. The veggie peeler for example. Ok, uses are limited, but you use it often.
There was a time when everyone had to have a wok, but as Tim Hayward points out, many modern stoves don't have the correct level and type of heat output to render your stir-fried veggies edible. Then there are the bits and pieces that go with.
And I loved his 'inexplicable plastic thing'. Oh Lordy did my mum's kitchen drawers contain many of those. I'd say that ours do too, but it wouldn't be true, Kevin knows what all the bits of placcie are. But I also know he fears my weeding habit.

Nine Ladies Dancing

Well, nine other ladies may be dancing somewhere and hopefully my friend Anne is one of them. Happy Birthday Anne, I know you couldn't have danced this time last year.

I, on the other hand, got up and felt ill. Because my answer to feeling ill is usually to have a walk, I went out in my wellies like a sick duck in the torrential rain. I did indeed start to feel less crook, until I caught myself standing in a large puddle/small lake, well, more paddling really and there were real ducks doing the same. Ok, perhaps not actual ducks but seabirds at any rate.
I wished I had one of those bright yellow sou'westers.

When I got home and stopped walking I immediately felt dizzy and sick again. Gillian McKeith was on TV showing us what we shouldn't do or eat in order to detox for the New Year. According to Gillian, poor diet is costing the (British) NHS four times as much as smoking. But mostly I just have some deep-seated desire to please her, which is odd, because Gillian could never know whether or not I am following her instructions.

When she showed us what went into processed meat I could feel my innards rebelling. A little later I thought of what she'd shown us and threw up, so that seemed to be the time to go to bed and sleep, hopefully not to dream.
I woke up and Justin and Colin were transforming someone's bedroom with lavender stripes, God bless you boys, far quieter than green and red plaid.
The next time I awoke, Gerald Ford was being buried. I really wanted to worship Hillary, but all I could see was her hair behind Bill.

Later, when I felt better, I looked up what the Sisters of Perpetual Motion must have told Sleepy about the nine ladies dancing, and it turns out they refer to the nine fruits of the Holy Spirit. I realised that I only felt marginally better since my mind went immediately to the over-squishy kiwi fruit in the fruit bowl.

If you want some short but enjoyable reading, check out yesterday's Guardian's five 'First Person' stories. All different, all a good read and all thought provoking.

Eight Maids A-Milking

Happy New Year. Good thing there's not some St. Swithin's Day rule about the weather on New Year's Day because if there were, we might as well start building an Arc right now. And while I'm happying, a very Happy Birthday to my friend Eilish and that's from Kev too.

We celebrated chez nous last night, and I was pleased to do so, Kevin had made a wonderful turkey dinner and our friends that we had loosely planned to go out with were suffering jetlag so we stayed in.

I spoke to all the kids, Austen and Sue at just after midnight GMT, then Ben at just after midnight our time. He sounded very rough. Later on in the day, Alex phoned, having returned from celebrating the New Year in London with apparently 349,999 other people. She too sounded rough, but not so much hungover as erkältet. For some reason we don't seem to have the word 'encoldened' in English.

Today we went out for a walk and I realised I really had turned into my parents. They always made us go for walks in the country over the Christmas period. Did we relish these? Not for a moment. But this Christmas, having gotten to the point where I no longer feel the need to overeat, what I have been aware of has been too much sitting around. It's nice to hunker down, but best after walkies.

So my eight maids a-milking. I am getting pretty hung up on this song now. I'm sure there must be some meaning to it all. Of course from googling I managed to find some churchified interpretation, but it just didn't ring true. But I can't get away from this idea that it must mean something, the first seven are all different birds apart from the appearance of five gold rings, then the last five are all people. Hmmm...I don't know.

In the absence of any solution I decided that my eight maids would be my favourite gay guys of the year. I don't care if I'm buying into the stereotype, I love 'em.

In previous years I would have to have included the Fab Five, but they haven't been much in evidence this year except Carson Kressley who has been in an ad for Special K. He was always my favourite anyway but in my chart here I'm afraid he creeps in at number eight.

At number seven is the actor Alec Mapa who has played not one but two great gay characters this past year, the deportment teacher in 'Desperate Housewives', and Ari's assistant in 'Entourage'.

Number Six has to be Doogie Howser, well, no that's silly, I mean the actor Neil Patrick Harris. His character Barney Stinson in 'How I met your Mother' is the opposite of gay, but Neil himself came out in 2006.


In my number five slot is a bit of a crossover. The gay brother in 'Six Feet Under' was my absolute favourite TV character from this year, 'Dexter'. Dexter himself isn't gay, at least he isn't really anything, but he's certainly trying hard to be straight. I still think there's a gay edge. Alright, I know I cheated with that one.

The sole reason that Daffyd Thomas is only number four is that he has been such a storming gay for three years now. He is the very best thing in an already stellar series. I will miss him horribly, I hope he gets his own spinoff, if only to squeeze his little fat bod into those eye-popping outfits.

The stupendously wonderful nephew in 'Ugly Betty' is my absolute fave pretend queen for this year. Played by 12-year-old Mark Indelicato he just makes an already brilliant series for me.

In both the number one and two slots are Colin and Justin. I love them, I love all their campness and posturing, I love all the in-your-face gayness about them that I know others detest, but I have seen so much of them this year that I feel they are part of the family. If they both walked in one night and asked what's for tea, I wouldn't be taken aback, but if they painted my wall plaid - our love might not last.

Seven Swans a-Swimming

Swans are very beautiful, graceful creatures in the water, and bloody violent monsters when they are on a towpath protecting their young. And in England, although that may well be in Britain, I'm not sure, they are themselves under the protection of the Crown, so you're not allowed to defend yourself from them very much, or not to any extent that would result in their death. The RSPB define the conservation status of swans as 'amber' that it to say in danger but not as imminently as species that they consider red, the bittern for example is one of the UK's rarest breeding birds and is classed as red for conservation.

There is a population of swans quite near here in Steveston Harbour, Steveston is part of the City of Richmond and is where a lot of the British ex-pat community live. The swans there have flourished more than the local fishermen and women would have hoped. They are not native and so there are no natural predators to keep the population down. Their faeces are polluting the water and this coupled with the fact that they eat water snails and water plants, both of which help to keep the water clear for fish means that they are changing the environment.
They also get in the way of the fishing boats as they come and go.
It sounds odd that swans should be in a harbour. A harbour we associate with the sea and swans we associate with freshwater. In this case the harbour is on the Fraser River.
Swans will normally live and breed in slow-flowing rivers and canals but will often lay their eggs beside salt and brackish water.

I find it strange that swans in the Northern Hemisphere are predominantly white whilst in the Southern Hemisphere they are predominantly black and white. There is an Australian swan which is entirely black. There is a Norse myth which explains the white swan however. In Asgaard, the home of the gods, there is a well, Urd, whose water is so pure and holy that all who drink from it turn white. The original two swans did just that.

An Irish legend, the Children of Lir, has the standard wicked stepmother turn Lir's children into swans for nine hundred years, but the story doesn't end well, when they finally become human again, they are very old and die quickly, but by then St. Patrick has come and converted Ireland, so they are able to be baptised and buried as Christians. So, depending on your point of view, maybe it does end well.

Lir had four children, and there are two in the Norse Myth. We need one more.

If you read Ovid's 'Metamorphoses' you will see that Jupiter, or Zeus as he was known to the Greeks, was always transforming into creatures so that he could have sex with beautiful but not-strictly-speaking-his-own-wife women. He turned into a swan to thus seduce the Queen of Sparta and so beget Helen of Troy.
Those things never end well.

Six Geese a-Laying

The goose that laid the golden oeufs. The golden eggs of which I speak are TV proggies.

In yesterday's Guardian, or maybe today's, the time drift lends confusion sometimes, Richard Vine whets the British TV appetite by reviewing some shows that will be on screens in the New Year.

His first pick is Ugly Betty. I have mentioned this show several times, but it was very engaging indeed and I'm glad that C4 have picked it up, particularly as this is a terrestrial channel and means that all will be able to fall in love with our heroine. The only thing that niggles me a bit is that whilst I have given mention to the writer of the article, it's fairly obvious that he in turn gets all his info from my blog since he has made almost the exact same points that I have, but hasn't mentioned me. Bad form Ricardo.

'Heroes', which is to be shown on BBC2, is also something we have really enjoyed. It is hard to keep up with all the different characters and their strengths, but very satisfying doing so. I think my favourite is the Japanese guy, Hiro Nakamura, because of his continual facial expression of excitement and wonder and the way he spits out Japanese like so many pellets from a gun, although for all I know this is the way all Japanese is spoken.
A series which started here at the same time as Heroes, but which doesn't make it to the list, is 'Six Degrees'. Another show with fascinating and inter-connected characters. It hasn't actually been cancelled here, but simply suspended until the New Year. I anxiously await its return.

'Jericho' has been picked up by the Hallmark channel and very appropriate in my opinion. Hallmark in Britain is one of the lesser cable channels. I haven't been able to persevere with this one, if something doesn't engage me I have to have some really good reason to continue watching.

'The Lost Room', to be shown on Sky One, was a three part mini-series. Luckily for me, Kevin had recorded all three parts before I sat down to watch it because it was the equivalent of a book you can't put down.

I hadn't noticed at first, but in his write-up of this show, Richard Vine also mentions that 'Dexter' is to be shown later in the year. This was my absolute favourite from this year and so glad to see that eventually it will be shown in Britain. So creepy, so compelling. So good.

Finally, 'Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip'. We have also enjoyed this show about the making of an SNL-type show. It is rich and multi-layered although I may have to kill the irritating wet-christian, the type that makes Christianity look like some kind of playground for the feeble-minded.
But Matthew Perry is great in this, a good transition for him. He is able to maintain his dry humour while playing a serious role.

But I must add a few more eggs to the basket, I don't know whether any of these shows have been on in Britain or whether they will be seen at some point, but other programmes that I have greatly enjoyed this year and so to look out for (did I type that out loud?) have been 'Entourage', now in its third series but we only discovered it this year, 'How I Met your Mother', nice to see Allyson Hannigan back and in something this good, 'Always Sunny in Philadelphia', quirky comedy that had us glued and Danny de Vito to boot, and '30 Rock', a half-hour comedy by Tina Fey with a similar theme to 'Studio 60'. Alec Baldwin is the draw in this, he is just excellent as the bizarre studio boss.

On the other side of the coin, we have been entertained by BBC series that have long since shown in Britain, the best of which has been 'Life on Mars' and we are looking forward to getting the new series of it which Brits will see early in the New Year I believe, but probably autumn by the time we get it.

Five Gold Rings

Two Christmases ago we visited my cousin Penny and her husband Tim on Vancouver Island. They took us to Butchart Gardens to see the Christmas light display and the theme was 'The Twelve Days of Christmas'. It was stunning. The five gold rings were floating in a lake, huge golden circles of light.

Of course Vancouver continues to prepare for the 2010 Winter Olympics, the symbol of which is also five rings.
I have heard Vancouver many times called 'the most beautiful city in the world' and yet those who are in a position to make such decisions insist on putting in more eyesores.
Our skytrain is not a patch, not one pixel of a patch on the London Underground or the Paris or Montréal Métro, but it's what we've got and we're getting a new line on it, the Canada line. Of course it's all above ground. Visually less than stunning but apparently earthquake proof.
After the recent gales and snow and what have you, the power company, BC Hydro, have finally announced that they will be investing in putting more cables underground.

For some reason it has taken Canadian authorities 16 months to tell the world that a big old chunk of ice, a small island of it in fact, had broken away from the Canadian Arctic ice-shelf and looks set to make a nuisance of itself when the spring thaw comes.
In the Guardian's article, Dr. Vincent from the University of Québec is quoted as saying that,
"he had never seen such a dramatic loss of sea ice and suggested the break-up indicated that climate change was accelerating"
further,
""This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years. We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead.

"We think this incident is consistent with global climate change. We aren't able to connect all of the dots ... but unusually warm temperatures definitely played a major role.""

Ok, and they knew about this 16 months ago and yet here, as I have just said, we are still piddling around with a Mickey Mouse public transport system, we are still inundated with TV ads for SUVs (like 4-wheel drives), we still see popular TV police programmes showing single people being moved around in Hummers (stupidly large vehicles the size of a tank).
What the frell does it take? I'm serious, when will people stop talking out of their backsides about how it'll never happen and take individual and personal responsibility for this Earth?

Last quote from the Graun, the University of Ottawa's Dr. Copland,

""What surprised us was how quickly it happened," he said. "It's pretty alarming. Even 10 years ago scientists assumed that when global warming changes occur that it would happen gradually so that perhaps we expected these ice shelves just to melt away quite slowly, but the big surprise is that, for one they are going, but secondly, that when they do go, they just go suddenly, it's all at once, in a span of an hour.""

Four Calling Birds

If your beloved sent you four calling birds, how pissed off at them would you be? I mean, a partridge in a pear tree, well, pear tree can go in the garden, wouldn't notice the bird in it, two turtle doves, well, a bit soppy, but not too noisy, French hens, well, eggs I guess and you could eat them if you fancied it, but calling birds, now THAT would annoy me, and it just gets worse.....

Enough of that though. I made some horrid mince pies on Christmas Eve, wasn't feeling at all well, managed to make rock hard pastry, knew I only had a small jar of Sainsbury's finest mincemeat so put in too little, not nice even for those of us who like them.
But yesterday I made a new batch and they are lush. I had to make my own mincemeat to go in them and when you do that, you can put in just what you like and bind it together with the blend of alcohol of your choice. Heavenly.

Now I am really excited about the British Food Standards Agency's campaign to take on the advertising industry over the labelling of food. This is the stuff. David and Goliath. Some food manufacturers, especially those who produce breakfast cereal are worried that if people know the true level of unhealthy ingredients in their products, they won't buy them.
Well, first off, people know how unhealthy most of the shit they put into their bodies is and they still buy it by the ton, and secondly, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT THEN!!! Don't just sit and whinge.
The National Health Service, we are told, is stretched to breaking point by the ill effects of diet, so it would be a pathetic country that wouldn't attempt to do something about that.

An article on NetDoctor caught my eye today. It seems that pet owners are in general unhealthier than those who don't own a pet. This seems counter-intuitive, in fact the researchers even say this.
But fear not, it turns out not to be the owning of the pet that causes the depressions, high blood pressure, sciatica, diabetes, ulcers and migraines, but rather the owning of a pet is indicative of other factors. Ah the Finns, they are full of surprises.

We had rented the movie 'The Da Vinci Code' before I went to England, but we hadn't managed to see it. I feared it might annoy me. Finally yesterday we watched it and we both enjoyed it.
I had read the book and found it hard to put down in spite of the awful writing that made my eyes water and the poor characterisation that made me wince. But the film managed, of course, to avoid both those pitfalls. I say of course, but there are bad screenplays, there is dialogue that makes you say ouch. Another writer whose books I can't put down because of the story tension is Michael Crichton, but his characters are barely even one dimensional. And one of the films of a book of his, I think it may have been Sphere, managed to maintain intact the lack of dimension in the characters.
Not so in Da Vinci. I was not really a Tom Hanks fan until 'The Road to Perdition', but I really liked him in this. I think his ordinariness lends a flexibility and range that many Hollywood stars don't have.
The only character that made me wish that Ron Howard hadn't been so true to the book was 'Sir Leigh Teabing'. True of course, Sir Ian McKellen made the character come to life. But in the book, he irritated the hell out of me. Firstly, the stupid name. No British aristocrat would be called Leigh for a kick-off. Sorry if you have beloved friends called Leigh, but this would be the equivalent of having a 'Sir Wayne' or a 'Sir Darren'.
Then Brown made a horrible ham-fisted attempt at an English stereotype who obsessed over tea as his ridiculous name suggests, but who kept using American vernacular. Grated like nails on a blackboard.
That apart, I found the film thoroughly enjoyable and satisfying.

As for those calling birds, I'd have succumbed to all the pet-owner's ailments by now and had to release them into the wild.

Three French Hens

Third day of Christmas - three French hens. Yes, no, I know those are camels. And I have no idea who would want three French hens, although I do remember an advert for Sainsbury's or Tesco's free range chickens with some celeb chasing hens through the woods in a remote part of France.

Yeah, well yesterday, I gave in and clicked the button that kept bugging me to update my blog. Then it took me a couple of hours to comb through the copy of the old template that they had kindly kept for me to put back in some of the features I already had. The new and updated blogger in some ways is more user friendly, it prompts you to do this and that, but it's more difficult to find things in the actual html, so I am far from happy with it, but I was also fed up with it, so it will have to wait until I am overcome with patience again. Happens about as often as Halley's comet.

Whilst Kevin and I are fortunate enough to be able to continue celebrating the festive season, Laurence was back to work today and thus had to get up for the 7.30 bus again. I set my own alarm for 8.00 so that I could go down and check he'd made it and still have time to drive him to work if he hadn't, but he had. I shouldn't have doubted him but if I'm honest I'd have doubted my own ability to get up this morning.

On the National Geographic HD channel, a rather annoying man is following the route Moses took when he led the Israelites across the Sinai desert. He has two native guides and one explains to him about the substance that the Israelites called Manna. He says that when it is heated and melted it tastes like honey.
'Do you have any prepared that I can taste?' asks annoying man. Of course he does and of course he keeps it in a coca cola bottle. Why wouldn't he? Product placement is everywhere.

It seems that the desert Bedouin have very strong hospitality rules, everyone who comes by is given three days' shelter and food, after that the guest is 'as welcome as a snake'.
The annoying man doesn't mind who he foists himself on, he went to stay at a Greek Orthodox monastery that was built at the site of the Burning Bush (nothing to do with feminine itching before anyone mentions it). The Burning Bush had been shifted a bit and seemed to be a wild raspberry.
Tip for if you ever find yourself tempted to accept the hospitality of Greek Orthodox monks, Matins is at 4 am and isn't optional.

Last week we rented the movie 'The Devil wears Prada'. The story starts out like that of 'Ugly Betty' the TV series, but progresses differently. Meryl Streep was just brilliant throughout. Every time Meryl would do some subtle little Meryl thing, Kevin would say,
'Now THAT'S why you hire Meryl Streep.'
She had a way of letting you know she'd finished with you, she'd look away and say quietly but firmly,
'That's all.'

That's all.

The Feast of Stephen

Ah, how I love Boxing Day, the feast of St. Stephen. Cold turkey, the actual turkey type, warmed up sprouties, cold bread sauce, cold stuffing, cold sausages wrapped in bacon, all kinds of pickles and when my mum was alive, cold squashy peas. Love it all.

Well, it's a bit different here, but we do have cold turkey, the actual turkey type, and spiced beef.
Pickles here aren't quite the same, 'pickles' here seems to mean pickled gherkins, whereas in Britain you would expect any or all of the following, Branston pickle, pickled onions (large) pickled cocktail onions (small and sweet)Piccalilli, chutney and pickled walnuts. Probably several I've forgotten too. We love our pickles.

I love the Christmas drinks that you wouldn't be inspired by at any other time of the year, Sherry, Port, well I'd drink Port at other times too, Snowballs, Whisky Mac, Baileys, used to be you'd only drink Baileys at Christmas, nowadays people drink it all year round. Oddly coloured liqueurs, mulled wine, Buck's Fizz.
Here we have eggnog, which is quite nice, I just can't drink too much of it, it's like a thin custard with rum and nutmeg.

Poor St.Stephen, like so many saints, suffered a violent death, stoned for his witness to Christ's teaching and resurrection, bet he wouldn't have turned down a cold turkey sarnie.

And nor would good King Wenceslas, born around 907 near Prague and King by the age of 18. You had to live fast in those days, Wenceslas died in 929 after a five year reign of beneficence and expansion of the Christian faith in his land of Bohemia.

Of course, there are ten more days of Christmas left and let us not forget that, Christmas ain't over til it's over.

Merry Christmas

Wishing one and all a truly Merry Christmas.

Christmas Eve

Tis the night before Christmas and all through the house...well, basically, not our house and people are boozing and playing pool. Same as most I guess.
We have the threat of more storms tonight and with that the worry of power cuts. From the news, both ours and the Seattle area stations, the trick is not to bring your propane BBQ into the house to cook on, there have been any number of people killed from carbon monoxide poisoning from doing just that. One Seattle family whose parents had succumbed in this way said that it was quite a normal thing to do in their native Afghanistan where apparently more houses are draughty.

Our Planet Earth watching had arrived at the desert. The desert apparently covers one third of the land on the planet. I can see the beauty in the desert and I totally get that many species have evolved there and that is their environment. But if I were boss of the planet I'd be greening it. Actually, even if I were boss of the US I'd be greening it. We have the technology, we could make it habitable for more people.
But then sometimes, when someone I really respect says something like,
'The desert is my favourite landscape, I love it,' I stop and think. It's a tough one, the needs of the people versus the integrity of the land.

The writer Kim Stanley Robinson who wrote a very thorough 'future history' account of the settlement of Mars, explored this very question. His characters set out with the intention of terraforming the planet only to find that a faction of the original settlers love the planet in its original form so much that they opposed any intervention.

Nonetheless, the segment on the desert was beautiful and interesting. Awe and wonder. Very appropriate.

Caves

I think the internet gives you a kind of radar or spider's web vibration on your friends. There are friends I hear from from time to time and some I hear from more regularly and you kind of get a feeling for when that frequency gets disturbed.

I know if I don't hear from Sleepy for a couple of days that the most likely explanation is that she's gone rural.
Not hearing from another friend for a couple of days though got me anxious and when I checked she was on her back in hospital.
Another friend that I don't hear from regularly, but expect to at certain times had also gone quiet and that also turned out to be a worry well-founded as his mother has died suddenly.

Those times you want to be there for your friends and yet can't but then it isn't about me, those are times that each of us has to deal with according to our own feelings, sometimes we just need to go into our cave and be still. The knowledge of connection and prayer may be all that those of us on the outside can offer.

Yesterday we watched the episode on Caves from 'Planet Earth'. This was spectacular and although many of the scenes in this series make you wish you could see the places yourself, not so with caves. The camera people went down there so that we don't have to. And there were some breathtaking scenes. The Lechuguilla cave system in the States has the most spectacular crystal formations of any known cave system. The BBC were the first team to be allowed to take a camera crane down into the caves to film and they will be the last to film down there since no further permission will be given in order to maintain the caves in their natural state.
The BBC team squeezed their bodies and film equipment through spaces so small that it made me feel claustrophobic just to watch. They also negotiated underwater caves in Patagonia (I think) and there the fear was that the breathing equipment could get damaged and they would be fatally trapped.

Snow Leopard

TV here isn't what it is in the UK. Although Canada has always had way more channels than Britain, we are at the mercy of bizarre programming schedules. Thus, right now, and for the past week, there has not been a single programme on that we watch that has had new episodes. That's the way it is here, stop, start, stop, start.
But Nil Desperandum. There is always the Discovery HD Channel, which occasionally has some interesting Natural History shows. Last week we were watching something about the extremes of weather, fascinating, and you had to wonder how it was that the camera men and women just happen to be there in the right place at the right time. Yeah, well, at the end of the programme there was a disclaimer about how some of the scenes had been simulated.

Not so on the BBC's amazing 'Planet Earth' however. I brought the DVDs of the series back from England and we have been watching those. At the end of each episode is a diary about how one of the segments was made.
There was amazing footage of a snow leopard, apparently an animal that is rarely seen by humans and which has never been filmed before in the wild in this way. Then we saw the diary. A hardy Scotsman was sent up into the Himalayas with a tent and a camera, he had to set up his cover and just stay immobile for hours at a time, waiting for a sighting. The project itself took three years, but the snow leopard seemed to have taken something like seven weeks and several moves to capture on film, but it was worthwhile. Well, to us the viewers it was.

My son Austen is Head of English at Mayhem and he decreed that his department should take a term teaching poetry and a play about the first world war. So he also decided to take that particular year group to Belgium to tour the Battlefields. This is a trip that many schools take, but Mayhem hasn't done it before. Organising Mayhem kids into doing anything is like trying to keep water in a sieve, but finally he had all the money in, permission forms, the nightmare collective passport done and was all set to take off at 5 one Friday morning. Then gale force winds closed Dover and stranded any number of transcontinental lorries along the M20.
Austen got home from a parents' consultation evening late on the Thursday only to find that the travel company had been trying to phone him, they had various options for him, one of which was to cancel the trip. He did careful research and it seemed that the weather forecast for the day of the trip was more hopeful, so he decided to go ahead.
At 5 am, all kids on the coach, they took off, with dire warnings from the drivers that they wouldn't get to France. They took back roads because the M20 was all choked up with lorries that couldn't get back to the continent. Finally they arrived in Dover, which seemed fairly clear compared with what they were expecting.

Now there is a mythical thing that can happen when you take a coach load of kids across the channel. We always tell them about this because it could happen, yet never has. We could be sent into the customs shed and the coach thoroughly searched, bolt by bolt. Austen's coach was sent into the customs shed. He couldn't believe it.
'Will it matter that I have a knife with me?' asked one girl.
'Yes.'
The customs officers stood around, their poker faces like a bunch of funeral directors. Each child had to go through the metal detector. Austen noticed that the official with the most po-face of all hadn't taken his eyes off one boy. Finally Austen watched as he walked slowly over to the boy.
He pulled the boy's coat aside to reveal his shirt underneath.
'Do you support Pompey?' asked the customs official.
'We all do, we're a Pompey school,' said Austen. Suddenly the frigid atmosphere of the customs shed changed, the man said that he supported them too as he was from just outside Portsmouth and Harry Redknap (manager of Pompey football team) stories were shared. And the coach was allowed onto a ferry.

I don't understand the whole football thing, you all know that, but hey, in the customs shed, even I wouldn't argue that the Blue Army broke the ice.

And there will be more vicarious tales from Belgium to come.