Departures

There is a bit of a breeze today, what a blessed relief. The tomato forest is liking this weather though, as are the peppers and the basil.
The 'bit of a breeze' over in Illinois however seems to be arriving in the form of tornadoes, I can see that might be a touche more worrying. Much of the area where my friend lives is suffering from power outages. Widespread loss of power is more than just an inconvenience, my friend was unable to put petrol in the car on her way home from work. With the distances involved here in North America and the lack of public transport - some of which relies on electricity anyway - that can be quite scary.

In the comments to yesterday's blog, Karen confessed to multiple killings and the RCMP have been alerted of course, but she also mentioned the phenomenon of tempers fraying leading to violent crime in this kind of weather. I have read about this happening in New York and some of the larger inner cities in Britain, and yet it is surely not totally explicable by the weather.

I have mentioned before that I used to live next door to a family from Trinidad. Canadians and Brits have all seen those TV ads for Malibu where West Indians try to get more serious about selling melons or using mobile phones and so on. I have no idea whether the ads show on TV in the States, but friends down south can see them here if interested. But the stereotype of the laid-back West Indian is one that I recognise almost intact from my ex-neighbours. Firstly, as often happens with groups of ex-pats, other Trinidadians would visit very regularly, but secondly, they really were amazingly chilled - quite literally for most of the year since the weather was always way too cold for them. Warmer weather just made them more relaxed and amiable than ever. The hotter it got the more hospitable they became.

Today Alex, Lou and Hazel go back to the UK. Starbucks and Tim Horton's will experience a noticeable drop in sales. I will certainly miss my girl, but she now needs to get stuck in to working and saving some money before uni starts at the end of September.

So my life tilts. Having had three girls in the house has given it a more feminine shift, from this evening there will be more males in the house than females, well, just me in fact. Later this month when Laurence arrives, even more so. And yet, and yet...with all those tomatoes out on the deck producing fruit perhaps the balance is maintained after all.

My friend Karen told me on the phone yesterday to 'dumb down' my blog or to at least add footnotes, she was sure that construction workers read it. I'm not sure that construction workers necessarily need things to be dumbed down, but just for Karen, I've glossarised some of the more difficult words.

Tomato : a vegetable*, eaten heavily disguised in pizzas, you may even have eaten one.
Feminine : lesbian** but without the sex (necessarily)
Weather : main subject of conversation for all Brits and Canucks.
Public Transport : a mythical system of getting large numbers of people around.
Malibu : coconuty*** bliss in a bottle although drunk mainly by footballers' wives.
Starbuck : one of the lead characters in 'Battlestar Galactica', the straight woman's female crush.

*Technically a tomato is a fruit
**Not to be confused with Lebanon
***I have no real idea how to spell 'coconuty', maybe it should be 'coconutty' like 'nutty' but..that just doesn't look right. The OED online is no help, no help at all.

Canicule

Holy mackerel it's hot. Tipped to reach 36° today, UV index of 5, so minutes of grace before you burn baby burn. Despite my best efforts, my arms are starting to look like the advert for Boots (I think) skin products that shows skin damage. Or a crocodile's skin, depending on your angle.

The UK have been suffering longer, my friend Ree in Illinois has been suffering longer, but the last couple of days, we have been up in the thirties too. So, Europe, the US and Canada, I think that constitutes global warming.

Yesterday my friend Yvonne and I went to visit our other friend Anne in hospital. Yvonne has air conditioning in her car, the hospital was also cool, so when we came back here and I asked her in for coffee, it was as though we were met by a wall of heat as we stepped into the house. And that was with all the windows open and the ceiling and floor standing fans going.

When we went to the Okanagan a few weeks ago, there was air conditioning in the rooms, so it was lovely to get out of the heat, but it made the most incredible noise all night, so it seems like you either get kept awake by the heat or the noise. Ah Nytol, the lightweight's drug of choice.

David Adam, the Guardian's environment correspondent, paints a scary picture for us about the implications of global warming for Britain. Still, marginally less awful than being stuck on a weird seacraft with Kevin Costner, but what can you do ? Well, I think the answer to that for Kevin and me is for us to move to Nanavut. Looks like the climate there will soon be like it is here now, perhaps a little less tropical.

In other news, and I realise what risk I take by mentioning this, but I always feel very saddened as I did in the UK whenever a police officer is killed in the line of duty. Two RCMP officers were shot recently when they went to check out a report of domestic violence. A man was assulting his own sister during the course of a fight they were having, the RCMP officers attempted to arrest him but he took off in his truck. When they finally cornered the guy, he shot them both. The female officer, Robin Cameron, was a single parent of an 11 year-old girl, the male officer, father of a nine-month old baby who will grow up without his dad.
Oddly, my take on this is NOT that we shouldn't have police officers, far from it, and I have no answer.
I have no idea whether tougher sentences for criminals has a deterrent effect. I am certainly not in favour of having the death penalty restored, hell, I have no idea whether they ever had it in Canada in the first place. I'm fairly sure that in the American States where it remains, there is no less risk to the lives of police officers.
There are severe restrictions here on the use of weapons by police officers and this, as in the UK where the boys and girls in blue are not armed at all, may have a very significant effect on overall numbers of police killed in the line of duty.
I think it may be interesting to have a comparison with heavily socialised countries like Scandinavia where taxes are high so that everyone in the country is well looked after.

Perhaps, as with everything, the answer lies in the way we educate people, maybe more personal education is needed, and at a much younger age. We are an advanced enough society to do that. Britain in the past few years has joined many of its mainland European partners in putting Citizenship on the school curriculum.

Whatever the answer is, we need to find ways of protecting those who protect us. Hell, even a conservative could appreciate that, a Mountie more than any other police officer I've ever heard of is a valuable commodity in the monetary sense. There is a lot of training and even the selection process is long and hard. Since I've been here I've met or heard of far more good people who haven't quite made it into the RCMP than those who have.
When the report says two good people down, they ain't kidding.

Poetic

The meanings of some words are quite straightforward, table for example, most English speakers, in spite of all having pictures of different tables in their heads, will understand the meaning if the word is put in context. 'I eat at the table' or 'the table will give you the results.' Different types of table, but put in context...

Some words change their meanings according to the culture as I have found since being in Canada, for example, to us English, a pillow is what we sleep on, to Canadians it is also what we would call a cushion on the sofa.

Then there are words that describe an abstract concept such as Humanity, Justice, Art. One such word that our Renaissance French lecturer spent some time trying to put over to us, was the idea of 'La Poétique'. It doesn't mean poetry itself, nor does it mean poetic, the adjective. La Poétique is the essence of poetry, that which underlies it and makes it poetry and which can be found in other things, but only if you have grasped what it is.

One small strand of Sartre's Existentialism is concerned with the way we define our world with words, and in this way we change the way we perceive the world. We use words to impose boundaries on what we see, Sartre gives us the example of looking at the root of a tree. We give it the name 'root' and thus we see it as something separate from but connected to the tree. We could have not chosen to name it and we would have then simply perceived the tree as a whole.

The naming of things cause all kinds of problems because of the way it influences perception. Do we call our god God, or Allah or Jehovah ...? Do we see what we want to see because the name itself comes with a whole definition? Perhaps.

But it's that little word poetic that I wanted to come back to. Not the French one, the English adjective. Interesting how a word can come to mean something so far removed from its original meaning. When something is poetic, it might actually be just that - poetic, or we might mean it in the sense of poetic justice. Depends on the context.

In general, I'm not feeling full-on sympathy for those bleating at their respective governments for not rescuing them quickly enough from Lebanon. The governments of Britain, Canada, the US are all there, evacuating them, just apparently not quickly enough. I felt full-on sympathy for people trapped in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, because it seemed like a perfectly good place to go on holiday. But Beirut, well, for the past thirty years, the name has been synonymous with destruction and conflict. I do of course acknowledge that some people are there working, but some - are just there.

But when you are a muslim cleric, I shall not type his name because to name him is to give him some kind of credibility, who publicly praises the atrocities of 11/09/01 and organises violence against Danish embassies because of a bit of humour, and then when you hot foot it out of Britain before you are put away and you decide to go to Lebanon, to then whinge at the British government that they won't rescue you from said new country and take you on a Naval ship back to dear old blighty, well, there isn't even a word for that amount of cheek.
But the British Navy's refusal to allow him on the evacuation ship, that, THAT is poetic.

Arrival

The Benjamin of my tribe finally walked into arrivals at YVR yesterday at something like 16.00, sans baggage. Hmmm. He had waited until his flight's carousel had been picked clean and then was told by some helpful person to find his airline's desk. This turned out to be like one of those chocolate orange TV ads. An almost impossible task since Zoom do not actually have their own desk at YVR, however we did succeed in tracking down one very nice gentleman who had the task of dealing with ten different charter companies. So he was our chocolate orange and when we had done all the Indiana Jones stuff to find him, he in his turn found Ben's luggage. Sorted.

Meanwhile, over in Britain, well, that's not entirely accurate because it doesn't include Scotland, but in general, the school year is about to grind to an unnecessarily tardy close.
Throughout the temperatures of 30 plus, teachers have been giving way, oh so way more than their pound of flesh before finally collapsing in a heap for five to six weeks. Oh yes, it's the five to six weeks 'holiday' that the general public focus on. Has seemed odd to me that teacher recruitment has been low for a number of years now, you'd think teacher training would be the number one pick for lazy graduates.

Often, at this time of year, you can hear some wheezing whinge from the right wing press and their lackeys about how it's time to reform the school year, after all, wasn't it created like this so that children were out in the fields to help bring in the harvest? Now, the argument goes, that child labour laws and mechanisation in the agricultural industry have removed that need, we should be making the school year longer, or smarter or something. The five term year is the most fashionable paradigm.

Well...teachers aren't the only stakeholders in education. As the school year stands at the moment, many parents seem incapable of taking their holidays during the six week summer period, so I cannot imagine how they would cope with little slots every ten weeks.
Education is steadily disrupted by a stream of kids being taken out of class from late September through to the end of November, and then it starts up again around Easter. And maybe a little ski-ing flurry in February.
Er... I should point out that Ben is here because he has finished school, not because I am one of those parents springing him early.

I was in the middle of slagging the right wing press as usual, when I received this link from Simmi, it's a corker:)

In my LGBT slot, Simmi had also sent me this interesting article from Planetout, comparing North American airlines for LGBT friendliness. Our own Air Canuck comes third, although as I said to Simmi, the fact that they are even included is something that gives kudos to Planetout itself. I would expect commercial airlines to be quite LGBT aware. It may seem a bit of a stereotype that all male air crew are gay, not only because of Alan Cummin's half of the comic air crew in 'The High Life', but speaking as someone who spends her fair share of time on aircraft, many of them are quite camp and again, speaking as a frequent air traveller, frankly - I like that. Simmi tells me that they're doing European carriers soon.

On the F-word blog yesterday, Jess McCabe pointed out that Manchester, yes, the city not the football teams, are charging a fee of £50 to everyone participating in this year's Pride march. It seems quite outrageous to me - no pun intended, seriously - when I think of the cost to the public of policing football matches and also of the money made by the city and its commerce and merchants because of Pride, well, apologies, but they're taking the piss.

Waiting game

There's some variant of Sod's law that governs my son Ben and air travel. Last year his flight from Gatwick - charters generally fly from Gatwick, the London airport that is nowhere near London - was changed to Stanstead - London's joke airport. Now Gatwick is easily doable by train, Stanstead is a bugger to get to by any means although the airline were willing to meet people at Gatwick and shuttle them.
When his dad finally got him there, he was told that the passengers were all being taken up to Manchester, because that's where the plane was. When they got to Manchester they waited and waited and were then all put in an hotel for the night. Ben finally arrived after a 24 hour delay.

I was supposed to be meeting Ben at YVR this morning at 9.35. But he was delivered to Gatwick - remember London's airport that...yep, anyway, by Matt, his sister's boyfriend. The flight had been changed from it's original time of something sensible o'clock to 5 am. Very droll. Matt got him there for check-in at 3. He then had to wait until in fact 11 when the flight took off because there was an unforeseen delay. We don't yet know what caused that. He also of course has to clear immigration today, so.... watch this space.

The girls meanwhile have gone off to Vancouver island. I took them to Tsawassen this morning to catch the ferry at far-too-early o'clock, though of course in the middle of rush hour so that Simmi's tortoise could have crawled to the George Massey tunnel more quickly than we did.

Ah well. Britain is due some rain but we're due some serious hell-like temperatures at the weekend. I do like a good thunderstorm, me, but they are in short supply here sadly.

Blah! As the girls would say.

Happy Holly-day

Today is Holly's second birthday. Beautiful, clever, happy Holly. She had her little friends and cousins round to celebrate on Sunday. Sue's cake was all eaten by the end of it, which, I agree with Austen on this, has to be something for the record books, birthday cake that gets eaten. No, I'm sure it's not just me, I know that I'm not a cake fan, but birthday cake, like Christmas cake, generally remains after the party, long, long after the party.

It seems impossible that she is two already, this new person. And yet how much of a person she is already at two. She has her own way of doing things, her likes and dislikes, favourite shoes, toys, dresses, things to do. How she relates to people is already there. She loves Alex, if Alex is there everyone else but her mum and dad are eclipsed. She will grow taller and cleverer. Her future will be coloured by memories she is creating now. The trees in the garden, her times with her mum and all the things they do together during the day, and being hugged into her dad's big arms when he comes home from work in the evening.
Her experience of having a new brother and helping her mum look after him. All the uncles and aunts and her grandad. The nan that comes and goes from time to time.
Different scents and sounds that will come back to her later as half memories.

She already knows what she likes to eat and some of that will change and some will remain with her forever.
Her mum and dad take her to Church on a Sunday and those memories of incense and words and peace will remain with her whether she rejects or embraces them.

But most of all, all of Holly's life will have a blanket of the incredible love that surrounds her and that itself will enable her to love.

ADDENDUM : Congratulations to my friend Di too, who I just found out has a granddaughter born today! Congrats Adam and Cheryl :)) (And especially to Di because she had to put all the hard work in beforehand;)

Daisy chains

My sources tell me that it is currently too darn hot in the south of England. Here au Canada at least à l'ouest, it has been pleasantly warm and I for one would be a happy bunny if'n it didn't get any warmer.

Yesterday I spent a happy afternoon and evening chained to my computer, which I really rather like, finishing up a couple of tasks. Around me things continued and changed, the sun moved overhead then sank into the west, Kevin took the girls to the Mall, collected them and then barbecued for us. Later in the evening they watched 'The Exorcism of Emily Rose' which is one hell of a loud film, and we watched 'The Motorcycle Diaries' which isn't particularly.

On Netdoctor this morning, I see that next to each other are the usual conflicting messages about weight. On the one hand, girls who are overweight when young may die earlier, on the other, there is a pre-emptive loss of weight in women who go on to develop dementia. Beware the Ides. It certainly isn't suggesting that you should avoid losing weight in later life, but rather that if your weight is taking an unexpected downward trend in later life, then it could be signalling trouble.
I can foresee the day when instead of leaping like a startled small furry animal everytime the words 'die younger' appear, we might look at the article with renewed interest.
'Ooh, die younger,' we might say, 'that'll save a lot of misery later.' Let's face it, if the weight loss were actually causal in dementia, who wouldn't take the weight gain in earlier life and avoid the madness? Yeah, ok, I KNOW I'm torturing this one to my will, but it's one of the ways of avoiding dementia.

In other news, now inappropriately blonde Avril Lavigne has married someone called Deryck Whibley. How wrong is that? In the first place, Derick in any of its spellings is not a name for a man under the age of 60, and in the even more first place, it's pretty obvious that Deryck Whibley is a thinly disguised form of the name Dwayne Dibley, the ultra geeky alter-ego of the Cat in Red Dwarf. Just check out the photo and you'll see that it is indeed Dwayne Dibley. Avril had better hope he turns back into the über cool Cat.

Canadians are being warned not to travel to the Lebanon under any circumstances. Phew, thank goodness someone mentioned that, because it's not something you can work out for yourself.

In Britain, the Teaching union NASUWT is calling for teachers who are members of the British National Party to be banned from teaching.
I dunno.
Simmi gave me the heads up on this one a couple of days ago, a teacher working in a pupil referral unit has been given classes that only contain white kids which has sparked a lot of controversy. Ten percent of the kids in the PRU are non-white.
It seems to me that if the British National Party with its stated racist aims is allowed to legally exist in the country, then you can't just decide to ban their members from doing any job. It's like the preposterous old argument, fortunately long since died an official death, that homosexual men shouldn't teach because every gay guy is a kiddie-fiddler. What pure garbage from people who can't deal with their own prejudices and or sexuality.
I don't like the idea of the BNP and I think that its tenets are unconstitutional, but it doesn't automatically mean that their members carry their political ideals into the classroom. I have known several teachers who were members of the communist party and they managed to teach very effectively indeed without proclaiming Marxism at every moment. Likewise people's religious persuasions.

Maybe it's just the heat talking - again.

Kafka-esque

I'm having a bit of difficulty getting my head around this particular case. Simmi had sent me a link to a website that spoofs up real news stories. Simmi's comment to me was along the lines that my beloved Tony was suffering a bit of heat stroke (not quite what she said, but a more blog-friendly version:)

It seems that the UK has extradited three bankers to the US. They have been charged with some kind of fraud against the NatWest bank in the UK, but they have been handed over to the US under some kind of treaty which Deadbrain tell us has been ratified only by the UK and is designed to deal with terrorists.
I thought the article was amusing but didn't think too deeply about the plight of another bunch of rich blokes who have potentially defrauded another major organisation that makes money out of everyone's money. I think I suggested that it might be an interesting use of Guatanamo Bay before it gets closed forever.

But then today's Observer made me think again. In fact it sent my brain into Kafka territory. Since the whole sorry tale has not drawn me in enough to notice until now, I've had to reverse engineer using the Grauniad's archives and thus I have many questions, feel free to leap in with answers if you HAVE been paying attention.

Kafka's 'Metamorphosis' starts like this,
"One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug."

Ok, so instead of that, you have to imagine that you already are a monstrous verminous bug because you are working in the kind of industry where that is an advantage, but that you and your two co-bugs wake up one morning in 2002 and discover that your life is about to take a turn for the Kafka-esque. Something you may or may not have done in 2000 has popped up to haunt you. It is unclear to me whether advising NatWest to sell their interest in an Enron company for less than it is worth results in you getting to keep the money, I suppose it must mean you made some money otherwise you wouldn't have done it.

I wonder if they felt like K in 'The Trial'

"SOMEONE must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning. His landlady's cook, who always brought him his breakfast at eight o'clock, failed to appear on this occasion."

It seems unclear, or at least without spending more than one decaf's worth of time looking I can't find out, what happened between 2002 and 2004 when a court ruled that they could indeed be sent to the States for trial.

Maybe there was a bit more Metamorphosis,
""What's happened to me," he thought. It was no dream. His room, a proper room for a human being, only somewhat too small, lay quietly between the four well-known walls....Gregor's glance then turned to the window. The dreary weather—the rain drops were falling audibly down on the metal window ledge—made him quite melancholy. "Why don't I keep sleeping for a little while longer and forget all this foolishness," he thought."

They most certainly must have wondered how they were now in some kind of prevention of terrorism-type scenario. Back to the Trial, might this kind of thing have run through their heads....

""You can't go out, you are arrested.""So it seems," said K."But what for?" he added. "We are not authorized to tell you that. Go to your room and wait there. Proceedings have been instituted against you, and you will be informed of everything in due course. I am exceeding my instructions in speaking freely to you like this. But I hope nobody hears me except Franz, and he himself has been too free with you, against his express instructions. If you continue to have as good luck as you have had in the choice of your warders, then you can be confident of the final result." "

Then in 2006 they actually get sent to the States where now the full absurdity becomes bitter reality.

Metamorphosis again,
"But to continue was difficult, particularly because he was so unusually wide. He needed arms and hands to push himself upright. Instead of these, however, he had only many small limbs which were incessantly moving with very different motions and which, in addition, he was unable to control. If he wanted to bend one of them, then it was the first to extend itself, and if he finally succeeded doing what he wanted with this limb, in the meantime all the others, as if left free, moved around in an excessively painful agitation. "But I must not stay in bed uselessly," said Gregor to himself."

Sent to the States, having to support themselves but without being able to work, having to sleep on the floor of your attorney's appartment and unable to go back to Britain where the evidence and your means of making a living are.

The Trial,
"They both examined his nightshirt and said that he would have to wear a less fancy shirt now, but that they would take charge of this one and the rest of his underwear and, if his case turned out well, restore them to him later. "Much better give these things to us than hand them over to the depot," they said, "for in the depot there's lots of thieving, and besides they sell everything there after a certain length of time, no matter whether your case is settled or not. And you never know how long these cases will last, especially these days. Of course you would get the money out of the depot in the long run, but in the first place the prices they pay you are always wretched, for they sell your things to the best briber, not the best bidder, and anyhow it's well known that money dwindles a lot if it passes from hand to hand from one year to another."

I wonder how it will end and how long it will carry on. If it takes another two years to prepare for trial it could end like Kafka's beetle.

"Early in the morning the cleaning woman came. In her sheer energy and haste she banged all the doors—in precisely the way people had already asked her to avoid—so much so that once she arrived a quiet sleep was no longer possible anywhere in the entire apartment.........She pulled open the door of the bedroom and yelled in a loud voice into the darkness, "Come and look. It's kicked the bucket. It's lying there, totally snuffed!"

The Bard

Yes, I know, it's not a very good photo but it was high up and I had to bend back and annoy a whole bunch of people to take it, it's just that Alex and I both thought it looked like someone we know and love. Who happens to teach English. And actually it looks even more like his dad.

Enough! We went to the Bard on the Beach presentation of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'. At first I thought it was a bit of a curate's egg, some bits utterly superb, other bits nyeaah...so so. But it improved. I have to say that Puck was the MOST Puckish Puck I have ever seen. I'm sure if Will really does keep an eye on all productions of his works from on high - which is what I'd do if I were he - he'd be thinking,
'Yes!!! Yes, see,' (pointing) 'THAT'S what I meant with Puck, that's it!' only of course with a load of 'marries' and 'softs' in there.

Bottom was also excellent, the actor who played this part did it straightforwardly with an RP English accent, and perfectly well he did it too, but the comedy was non-stop, in fact all of the 'rude mechanicals' were well done. The fairies - mmm not sure, they were not very faery-like, more like clowns than fairies. They did play it comically too and I was half thinking, 'yeah, this is funny,' and half thinking, 'yeah, see proper faeries are more creepy, and I like that.'
Titania and Oberon were also good. Oberon had the most killer long coat I have ever seen. It was just beautiful. I want it.
Helena and Hermia were lame, which is a shame, and I was thinking to myself, so is this because the characters are lame or is it the actors? But then their opposite male numbers, Lysander and Demetrius are just as lame as characters but were well done in the play. It just needed to be taken outside the box a bit more.

The thing about the play itself though, is the worrying little tug-of-war between the faerie king and queen over the changeling child. I mean honestly - that's just bad-way creepy. That's so ... Michael Jackson. And then Oberon isn't punished for his mis-treatment of Titania. Why is that?

In contrast, if I haven't already sent you this link in an e-mail, please, please go and listen to Joss Wheedon's speech at this link. He keeps repeating the one question that journos always ask him,
'Why do you write such strong women characters?' and he keeps answering over and over giving ever more compelling reasons. He just tells it like it is and he just rocks.

On one of my other favourite blogs, 'Go fug yourself', sadly the ladies are not in agreement with me over the brilliance of 'Rockstar'. I on the other hand, am totally in agreement with them about Brooke Burke's stupid dress sense. Go figure. How can you be that beautiful and yet dress so fugly? Defies just about everything.

Le quatorze juillet

Something rare in France, a day off that has no connection to Saints. It seems to me that throughout my life, everytime I set foot on French soil without checking first, it's always a Saint's Day and thus France has closed up shop, like the famous quote from WC Fields,
'I went to Philadelphia once, but it was closed.' Just...substitute France obviously.

When I turned on TV5 this morning for the news, there was President Chirac talking with his hands to two journalists. One of the journos seemed more uncomfortable than the other. Both were men, just saying like.
Eventually the delayed news came on and we were able to see the Bastille Day celebrations on the Champs Elysées.

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. The underpinnings of the first republic, bought with the blood of their elite. Female military personnel sang,
'Allons enfants de la Patrié, le jour de Gloire est arrivé,
Contre nous de la Tyrannie, l'étandard sanglant est levé...' stirring stuff and accompanied by marching service men and women, tanks all rolling in synch and helicopters flying over.
And the Légion Etrangère. Yes, they still exist. And they looked étrange indeed. The French word for strange also means foreign, stranger - foreigner. Many of them wore long, full beards, Castro beards, ZZ Top beards. And their ceremonial dress is bizarre, it has a hint of the masonic, long leather apron, axe carried in one hand.

Being sent to join the foreign legion was always synonymous with being made to disappear and of a hard, disciplined life.
Arabian-looking gentlemen would pop-up in films and cartoon, even Belgian Hergé's Tintin would meet mysterious foreign legionnaires at moments of tension in the stories.

Joining the foreign legion in real life however, was a way of buying French nationality by spilling the blood of France's enemies, and of reprieving yourself if you were a petty criminal or a down and out. Human recycling.

The legionnaire's code of honour is arguably what sets them apart as such an exemplary fighting force and in the beginning bound together a bunch of such disparate people. It is based on honour, discipline, comradeship, courage and loyalty. A legionnaire must keep their body and weaponry in peak condition. Each mission is sacred and must be accomplished at all costs and you abandon neither wounded nor dead. The ultimate soldiers.

The French are a complex people. I feel that when you read a nation's literature you understand them better. You look inside their heads like looking at the workings inside a clock. But then is that an adequate way of knowing a people? Can we British be judged on Shakespeare and Chaucer, on Mallory, Gaskell, Austen, Bram Stoker, Kazuo Ishiguro? Pretty much, yes, I think so. I think maybe there is an extent to which we allow our literature to define us too.

On the other hand, I've read more French literature than most of the French people I know, but that doesn't make me more French than them.

One of my favourite French authors of all time was the Irish writer Samuel Beckett. He lived in France for a goodly part of his life and he wrote both in English and French, so I studied him as a French author but only ever saw performances of his work in English.

I could just ramble on forever, there is simply no end to my thoughts about things French, because so much of my knowledge about all kinds of stuff came to me through my study of French. I'll stop. It'll keep anyway.

Vive la France ! (And long may her hypermarkets provide us with wine,cheese and croissants)

Rockstar

My least favourite category of TV programmes is Reality TV. I think if we got to the point where all TV was 'reality' I wouldn't bother with it at all.

But I would be lying. Last summer, Kevin and I watched what I guess would be a reality show, 'Rockstar'. I don't think that it is shown in Britain for some reason, which is bizarre, since I think of Britain as the home of rock.
Last year's premiss was that the Aussie group INXS was finally ready to replace Michael Hutchence and get back on the road. The good thing about this programme is that it attracts singers - or 'rockers' as the show calls them - who are already established, so the standard is very high. The down side of the programme is the annoying host who talks. I can't stand this time wasting. Does she talk about anything of any interest to anyone? Nope, not for one second, she simply repeats several times over what is about to happen. We the viewers are Kindergarten children, no, goldfish, unable to retain information for longer than six seconds.

I used to get annoyed at meetings because of the time-wasting aspect. The only place that grown-ups need to follow on a piece of paper what another grown-up is reading out loud is Church.
Likewise I understand that people only take in a quarter of the information they are given, thus a good teacher will repeat the same information in a different form four times during the course of a lecture. I don't think this applies to short statements such as 'one of our rockers will leave this evening' repeated in EXACTLY the same words.

This year, Rockstar is being reprised. The difference now is that the 'supergroup' who are selecting a front person didn't exist before. 'Supernova' is composed of three members of other bands, bass player from Metallica plus Tommy Lee and some other bloke.
INXS spoke with one voice, they knew who they were, what they needed. They ended up with JD Fortune, a Canadian. A bloke.

Supernova have no idea who they are. They are already being sued by another group called Supernova. They have to cope with Tommy Lee's ego.
I find that we have some artistic differences, 'we' meaning they and myself.

Last week, they sent someone packing because he chose to sing Duran Duran's 'This is Planet Earth'. Now, I know it's pretty much acceptable these days to think Duran Duran are naff, but I personally think this song is way better than some of the old dross they get given to sing. And this guy made it into a rock song. He did a fantastic job, brilliant rendition and voice but no, the curse of Simon le Bon meant he had to go. Well, ok lads, but you overlooked some far worse crimes.

On Tuesday they had a right old strop at one of the women, Jill, who has an amazing voice but is simply trying too hard and dressed up like Courtenay Love on one of her album covers to do a song from the same album. Well, she deserved that.
The guy they sent home last night was not bad at all, whilst overlooking a complete lame-arse girl from Puerta Rica who murdered a Kinks number - twice!

And this week saw two more deadly sins. One performer made a complete pig's ear of Creed's 'With Arms Wide Open'. The lead singer in Creed has the most incredible, deep, rich voice, but then so do some of the 'rockers' - there was just no need for this, it was gratuitous.

But the worst, the very worst, the crime that should have seen Vancouver's own Jenny something shipped over to England and sent to the Tower was her horrible, awful, pathetically incompetent treatment of Soft Cell's 'Tainted Love'. This is not a song that can be tampered with. There is only one Marc Almond. People need to fully comprehend that and not mess with his work.

And of course, as with every viewer of every reality show, I have picked my favourite. Dilana. She has unbelievable and yet unpretentious stage presence. She is theatrical without being self-conscious and her voice is simply incomparable, it's like purple smoke with silver edges.
Not only that, but she is able to arrange songs in a unique way. Her song for this week was 'Ring of Fire'. Think you shouldn't mess with that? Oh yes you should if you are as good as Dilana. Dilana made it more interesting than ever before. She is a binder of spells. You know what, this is how much faith I have in her, I would allow her to sing 'Tainted Love' and trust her to do it in a way that would honour the great Marc.

Of course she won't win. She's a she.

Last year it was blindingly obvious that every woman was on a hiding to nothing. Oh they paid lip service, but right from the get go we said, 'they'll never front their band with a woman.'
This time, the potential is there for 'Supernova' because they have no concept of who they are, to front their band with Dilana, and I'll take my non-existant hat off to them if they do, but I'm not holding my breath.

From Stanley Road to Stanley Park

Alex, Lou and Hazel all go to college in Woking, home of the famous Paul Weller of the Jam, hence the reference to Stanley Road. The sign that says Stanley Road still stands, a bit lonely, I think it has been kept because of the album, since it doesn't seem to denote an actual road anymore.

Yesterday the girls went to one of the beaches on the edge of Stanley Park, all of the beaches around Vancouver are breathtaking and that one was certainly no exception. Sadly, they got lost coming home due to a freak bus route change accident. The 410 bus no longer shuttles from New Westminster and back to Richmond Centre, it goes shooting off to Steveston and this is where they ended up. The bus driver got to the end of the route and turned the engine off. Then he turned to the girls, still sitting on the bus wondering what was going to happen now and said,
'So, got on the wrong bus then?' Hmmm...


I was a little bit ho-hum yesterday about a story on the CBC website about a man in Victoria on Vancouver Island who bit a police dog. See I'm not convinced that the sentiments in this story are necessarily that tongue-in-cheek. Now I would consider myself to be fairly canine-friendly, I couldn't eat more than one at a time but I like the critters. However the idea that there could be any circumstances where a person, being restrained or attacked by a police dog should be expected to treat that dog as though it were an officer of the law seems ludicrous. Of course I don't believe in cruelty to animals, it worries me a lot, but the bottom line is, if a carnivorous animal, highly trained or otherwise is trying to savage you, any other animal is going to fight back with whatever means they have, it's just instinct.

I don't want to get too het up over this, as it is the man was charged with all of the criminal actions he did do and the law doesn't allow at present for any charges with regard to the dog or the biting of it. I can think of more important things that need to be dealt with in law.

Still on the subject of 'nos amis les bêtes', the girls had asked me whether they would see a bear when they were over here. I told them they needed to hope not, but clearly they found one.
This isn't supposed to be a polar bear, but one of the 'Spirit Bears' that are around Vancouver at the moment. Spirit bears are real but rare white bears that can be glimpsed occasionally on some of the gulf islands. I think I'm right about that, but open to correction.
Why Alex is looking so glum in this picture remains a mystery, although a rather cheeky seagull did come down and steal the ziplock bag containing Hazel's dal.
The whole vegan thing has been a bit of an eye-opener for me. For example, yesterday I put out some Naan to go with their curry, thinking it must be vegan, but it turns out it is made with yoghurt. Now that is fair enough, that's what naan is, bread made with yoghurt. More annoying are the little things that seem to be more thoughtless than anything else.
I was using a Sharwood's sauce and the only thing on the bottle that stopped it being vegan was lactic acid. It seems as though that could have been easily replaced by something else meaning that vegans could eat it as well, thus just lazy thinking on their part.

Ah well, animals, you gotta love 'em, you don't HAVE to eat 'em but you can if you want. Could murder some bacon and eggs myself.

Local Day

What Tony Blair fails to realise ('comments', 'Full House')is that as soon as I open my mouth people speak to ME about footie. Only yesterday, during our 'local day for local people' - for those not of the avid or even rabid Brit-comedy watching persuasion, a misquote from 'League of Gentlemen', - at our first port of call, the recycling depot, a young man gabbled something at me. It was a bit like trying to make any sense out of what Boomhauer from 'King of the Hill' says. All I could make out was 'the game,', 'the dive,', 'the cheating,' 'Wade Rodney,' and '?'
Alex claimed that she could understand it all, however being a game sort myself I simply constructed a conversation out of what I had caught and my answer seemed to satisfy. Or maybe he couldn't understand what I said either. I got ten bucks for my bottles anyway.

After a whirlwind tour of some interesting local premises, I'm saving the interesting local premisses for when we have a philosophical day for philosophical people, I gave the girls a guided tour of the Nature Park.Although Alex considers my Nature Park fixation to be a lame and pathetic slide into senility, they all marvelled at my tales of leaf miners, the boss moss and hummingbird tongue fungus, they were awed by the tree that smells like grapefruit and the leaves that smell like peanut butter. They did a bog jump and made the trees shake. And as I had hoped, the turtles were sunbathing in the pond and a red squirrel with devil eyes - see the first photo - came and entertained us.
In the evening Kevin was called upon to drop them at the Silver City cinema to see 'Pirates of the Caribbean II'. Johnny Depp never fails to please. Sadly they had been a little tardy in their preps and missed the 20.30 showing and ended up having to play air hockey until the 22.00 programme. I had to collect them at getting on for one o'clock.



I myself had been on a scenic mystery tour earlier in the evening. Oh alright, Yvonne and I had managed to get ourselves a little bit lost both going to and coming back from Writers' Group, but I took this picture as the sun was setting over ..... somewhere.

Visitors from another world

Here are my weird girls, by popular request (theirs) bless 'em. This first photo, of Hazel, we threatened to have blown up at Kevin's work so that Hazel could post it on her car when she gets back. However, Hazel is going to Oxford in the autumn and intends to keep the environment happy by biking. Although it looks as though she catches small animals and eats them, it's Hazel who's a vegan.



I'm not sure what has caused the bad smell faces, maybe a bad smell....






Then we have the sixties London model girl look.....


I think in the next one, Hazel and Lou are trying to catch a mountie, they heard that mounties roam freely in British Columbia. Well, at least Lou did until one of the others explained what a mountie was.

Finally Alex and Lou scoffing Kevin's very fine brownies - sorry, not the herbal sort girls.



I think today is going to be a local day for local people, we haven't ventured across the bridges into Vancouver yet, but we have a number of things to visit in Richmond and the weather is a little cooler and overcast today.

I'm lucky to be able to do stuff at all today. I was supposed to go back to 'the Office' mornings only this week, and I had moments of dread last week just thinking about it. I have realised that I'm not really communicating very well why this job filled me with so much horror, it certainly wasn't that I felt the work was beneath me, I know I'd have been much happier cleaning than doing the filing and general office work. (And I couldn't help noticing that the cleaner was being paid twice as much per hour as I was, but that wasn't it either.) I don't deal with boredom very well so I have a range of strategies for overcoming it. But when you are at work you can't use those strategies. I did try watching my news programmes from time to time, but I felt it was too obvious because the office was too quiet. So you end up trying to make up jobs and I felt that I'd simply run out of those too.
But on Friday, I was reprieved. I was standing in for someone who had been sorting their office out in a couple of months' 'downtime' from managing her own company, but she was having to return to that. The person in charge of the firm I was working for has now decided to buy out her company and have her run that, plus his office from the premises where they are.

Now of course, I feel guilty at feeling relieved. I'm sure the whole thing is caused by the Protestant Work Ethic, inappropriately named since it's not peculiar to any particular persuasion but does underly our upbringing. I feel as though I will offend karma if I don't feel bad (no doubt too much watching 'My Name is Earl') but what I need to do is convince myself that I did my bit and I have been released to do finer things.

Full House

A nice stem of Rosebay Willow Herb poking out of the beautifully kept communal grounds around the strata. I think it is generally known as Fireweed here, but it is a plant that I have associated with summer for a long time.

Lou and Hazel arrived yesterday, their flight was being reported as due half an hour early. As Alex and I left the house, their plane flew over us, there's no mistaking the Zoom aircraft with their mid blue bodies and the word 'Zoom' across them. In spite of actually landing half an hour early, we had to wait 45 minutes for them to clear customs.

On Friday, Alex and I had gone to IHOP (International House of Pancakes) for lunch. I can't say I was terribly impressed with the food there, it wasn't awful, it just was a bit....flavourfree and stodgy really.
What DID impress us though was firstly the toilet, yes, we're British, naturally we find toilets fascinating. The seat was covered in a kind of plastic sleeve, and when you pushed a lever, the sleeve moved along so that your bottom never had to touch where anyone else's had.
Secondly, there was a white Canadian speaking Chinese, I shall assume Cantonese, to the staff. It was quite strange. You hear various Chinese dialects being spoken all the time here and yet when this man spoke it sounded like the scene from Star Wars where Luke Skywalker or Han Solo is in a bar filled with aliens and one starts to talk to them. However, the guy clearly made himself understood, the staff were responding and laughing in a seemingly appropriate way. I was impressed I must admit, and I also understood how he must have felt, wanting to use the skill he has.
I had a two minute opportunity to speak French at Vancouver airport while waiting for Hazel and Lou, a French lady asked me about flights and then seemed quite effusively grateful when I answered her in French. If I hang around at the airport for the next eight years, maybe I will get another opportunity, although by then no doubt I will have forgotten every word I ever knew.

Hazel and Lou's plane was flown by a woman pilot, something that in all my to-ings and fro-ings across the Pond, has never happened to me. When she made a perfect landing she couldn't help announcing to the passengers that it was 'not a bad landing for a woman,' at which they all cheered.

So here they all are. They have two rooms between three friends and I've left them to decide how they organise themselves. I think that poor Hazel is going to get stuck with a lot of cooking, she is a vegan, but she assures me she loves cooking. She's already booked for girls' night on Thursday - Kevin has a frat meeting so he can escape.

They all went to the Mall earlier, Alex HAD to show them the 'Big Beaver Sale' and they went in and asked if the shop had any spares of the smaller posters. 'Spare, spare?' the girl kept repeating. A young man came out and told them in a tired voice that they didn't have any to give away and that yes, they understood the humour.

And Italy have won the World Cup. I didn't really much care, but out of the two I'd have liked to see France win. I'm not sure which team contains more players from British clubs, but see, France are momentarily popular with us Brits for having seen off Portugal.

It won't last.

Polly

Nearly thirty years ago now, well, let's call it 25, were Halcyon days for female readers of the Guardian, or Grauniad as we affectionately called it - in the days before desktop publishing and all that goes with that, spellcheck for one, the Guardian was notorious for its typos.

The Guardian's women's page was a showcase for leftwing female writers. Monday was redeemed as a day because of the line-up. The late Jill Tweedie wrote her 'Letters from a Fainthearted Feminist' column and Posy Simmonds' cartoon, 'Posy' ran on that day. Michelle Hansen was in there somewhere as was Molly Parkin.

I can't remember if Polly Toynbee particularly published on a Monday, nor even whether she was necessarily on the women's page, but her writing and journalism were then as now, second to none.

This week there was an article by Polly about Britain's attempt to deal with Child Poverty. It is objective, inclusive and informative. Rather than join the trend towards criticising the Blair Socialism, she says that his ability to envision what is important to the country and to come out and say it, baldly and then to find a way to make it happen is something that can never be taken away from his legacy. She points out that when the government, against a backdrop of a previous conservative government which doubled child poverty, sets a target of lowering it by 1,000,000 in a given year and achieves 700,000, it is nonsense to report this as a failure.

One point that Polly Toynbee makes however really resonated with me from my experience as a teacher who has always taught in inner city and education action zone schools.
She says that poverty is entrenched and cross generational, "Intergenerational poverty is solidifying, so poor children are more firmly anchored to the floor than for decades, their social mobility frozen."

My generation, brought up and living through the years of Harold Wilson's Labour Party, when education was opened up to all, saw for the first time working class children being enabled, empowered to stay at school to fulfill their potential, and able to go to university. I'm not naive enough to think that all working class children who had the ability actually did go to university, but a cycle was started, so that as those people came through we were no longer hearing just Oxford accents on TV, from playwrights to politicians, our public landscape was changing.

But what is it we see in schools, still today? Yes, frequently we were seeing parents who were interested in and supportive to their children's academic achievement, but equally and all too frequently we were coming across parents who felt threatened by it. The rebel child was too often supported by a parent who paid lip service to wanting their child to 'do well' but in reality undermined them at every turn, who challenged the view that the child was disruptive or would do no work either in the classroom or at home. So much teacher time was spent dealing with parents who feared their child overtaking them in life.

What is to be done about this? It is a very difficult phenomenon to tackle. What socialism has given people is access to opportunities that they didn't have before. You can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink. I have heard similar points made by friends who work in the Health Service. Not everyone uses it responsibly, the 'social contract' dictates that rights and responsibilites go hand in hand, but socialism itself dictates that everyone should be put in a position of having equal access to resources. Polly Toynbee in her article mentions the social ideals of Scandinavia, but to achieve such levels of utopia, taxes would also have to be raised to Scandinavian levels.

I feel that as Polly says, it has to be seen as a National target, not simply one for a political party. The Labour Party has raised public awareness on this hot potato over its lifetime in power, but this has to be seen merely as a starting block, the first few rungs on the ladder. Companies and organisations need to sing from the same hymnsheet as the grassroots. Those working in Health and Education see the problem every day, but too much of society is able to, no, is allowed to, ignore it.

Ooh er Missus !

Canadians are bold aren't they? I snapped this picture yesterday outside the Canadian sports clothing shop 'Roots' - no, seriously, it is called Roots, like Kunta Kinte type of Roots, not boy body parts. Here, a toilet isn't called a toilet, but when it comes to lady bits, a beaver is most definately a beaver, even my brother-in-law Trevor can't leave it alone, I told him off and would have threatened to smack his bum only that would have been very creepy indeed even for an Englishwoman. Oh, they do have Bush pilots here too. Goodness knows what they do. Yeah, please don't tell me they fly planes into the forest, that would spoil it, although if you said they explored the interior, that might fit.

Now yesterday, Alex was a bit taken aback, she let out a surprised giggle, at a big old sign on the Nature Park that said, 'Bees in the Bog'.
'They have bees in their bog here?' she asked, 'and they advertise it,'
'Er, yes and no, the toilet isn't called the bog here, the bees are in the...bog, peat bog...that's what the Nature Park is, it's a peat bog.'
'Oooooh.'
I guess I've kinda got used to that one.

I often wonder whether French people think it's funny when they come to England - well or Canada or any other English speaking country and see the sign 'SALE'. Sale of course means 'dirty' in French. I've asked several of them, and all but none said,
'But we know what it means, so we don't laugh.' One once said,
'And in any case, your shops are often dirty.'
Yes. The French sense of humour must be more highly evolved than ours because they certainly used to laugh at the scatalogical, of course, that was in the 16th century.

Ah well, they say that little things please little minds, but heck a BIG beaver sale, now THAT's funny, but I know what could make it even funnier - if someone complained about it being politically incorrect. That would totally rock. It would almost be worth doing - just for the crack you understand..no, not THAT kind of crack, it's AN EXPRESSION! *rolls eyes and raises eyebrows*.

Cockroach

The film 'Team America : World Police' had me crying with laughter, I found it hysterically funny. The film was made by Matt Stone and Trey Parker of South Park fame and is about as reverent. It lampoons anyone and everyone, including themselves. I loved the fictitious 'Film Actor's Guild' led by Alec Baldwin, FAG for short, so that everytime the name of an actor appears on the screen, the letters FAG appear too.

Team America get captured by North Korea's evil mastermind, Kim Jong il who later gets killed by falling from a balcony onto the spike of a Prussian helmet. As Kim Jong il dies, a cockroach emerges from his body and we see that he was only ever a puppet of a higher power.

Until Team America, Kim Jong il had slipped beneath my radar, never had to think about him. Now however, as he is doing the kinds of things that his puppet character would do in Team America : World Police, I CAN only think of him as the marionette who walks as though he has some serious bottom problems and whose spectacles cover his entire face, and of course, who talks like Cartman.

On Independence Day, when the US space shuttle was once again launched after a false start last week, Kim Jong il, anxious presumably to draw attention to himself, launched seven rockets to coincide with the shuttle launch.

Reading the press, little cockroach has few if any allies. He is portrayed like an annoying kid that you want to swat away, and not only that, but one who insists on playing with his willy in the classroom. I can only picture the puppet Kim Jong jumping up and down and saying in Cartman's voice but with an exaggerated Chinese accent,
'I get you George Bush, I get you, you try to attack honolable North Korea and I launch annihilating stlike and nooclear war on you and all amelicans.' Conveniently forgetting that he has already upset Japan, South Korea, China and..well pretty much the rest of the planet.
He's both funny and dangerous at the same time. He should have a sign that can be seen from space at the border to his country saying 'Approach with Caution' except that, well he doesn't really need one. I mean, good god, even the UN are prepared to raise their toothless whiskery head to talk.
And meanwhile, so far, little cockroach has been firing blanks, well not so much blanks as suffering a bit of brewer's droop. The missile fired at Alaska plopped into the sea.

But from what I understand, North Korea is in the same position as a good old-fashioned city under siege. No-one has to do anything but wait it out and ignore him. So long as foreign funds are frozen, so is little cockroach and all he can do is jump up and down on his little wooden puppet legs.

Unless it turns out to be more than just hot air and he really does have nuclear capabilities. Then we'll have to choose who we want to save us, Team America : World Police or FAG? And frankly, even Alec Baldwin may not be able to act his way out of this one.

Heat

Holy cow it has been hot here, today we have some respite in the form of a bit of cloud cover and a slight breeze.

Yesterday, Simmi, who reads the right-wing press so that I don't have to ;) sent me the Daily Mail's take on a patronising little bit of research that is today reported equally annoyingly, in less right-wing organs.

One of the compulsory components of my MA course was Research Methods and I did have to teach the Scientific Method paper when I taught A-level Philosophy, so deep down I do appreciate that all research is useful in some way, so long as it is ethically conducted. But yet it still aggravates me no end that money is spent on reaching conclusions like this.

The Daily Mail, or Daily Nazi as Simmi appropriately calls it, claims 'Hot Water Bottle Really does ease Period Pain.' Thank Goodness someone wasted money checking that 'old wives' tale' out. Believe it or not it was the Guardian that called it that.

Now, to my mind, an old wives' tale is something like 'rub a potato on a wart and bury it in the garden when the moon is full'. Whereas using a hottle to ease period pain is something that all women KNOW works.
The Daily Mail says, "The research will be welcomed by millions of women who suffer debilitating period pains, which can leave them bedridden." Get outta here! Are we all sitting around waiting for someone to tell us it works? Uh...no. And here's more news for ya GUYS, it wouldn't do squat diddly for debilitating pain. But we feel so much better now.
And all of that is without mentioning the fact that Boots LONG since brought out a self-heating pad that sticks to your tummy and can be used during the first couple of days of your period.

But perhaps the research itself isn't to blame, but rather the reporting thereof. Well, that wouldn't be a first.
Net Doctor tells us that the research shows that "hot water bottles were effective in killing period pains on a molecular level – in much the same way as drugs such as paracetamol. "
Well, ok, but now I have a new question that I really don't want researched. If, as the Guardian says, "if heat of more than 40C (104F) is applied to the skin near where internal pain is felt, it switches on heat receptors at the site of injury. These in turn block the body's ability to detect pain." then how come burning people at the stake was such a brutal and horrifyingly painful end, and why are burns victims in so much agony that they have to be kept in a coma sometimes until healing is well on its way? Well I guess the answer is that the skin, with all its pain receptors is actually being denatured rather than gently heated or something along those lines.

The next thing the article claims is that the hottle can work for other gyne problems such as cystitis. Do me a favour. The pain in cystitis is from the two walls of the urinary tract being inflamed and touching each other. The other pain possible is due to the infection having spread to the kidneys, calling for immediate use of antibiotics and opiates. In the first instance, I'm not buying that the pain can be relieved by using a hottle. No Ma'am. You can tell me all the science you like, a hottle bottle is not going to relieve that inflamation the way a good old-fashioned delivered-by-mouth painkiller can and in the second instance, if it did work, it'll probably cause you to be hospitalised or die because that amount of pain is there to give you a firm message. 'DEAL with me or die.'

The whole thing is laughable. When Simmi sent me the original article she made the comment,
'Imagine if a man were told to use a hot water bottle for pain.... There would be fucking questions asked in Parliament...' No kidding.

It's summer, it's hot, so all pain should be less anyway now, but this morning Alex wanted to watch the film of 'Evita'. I hate musicals. This reminded me of why. I was interested in the story of the film, but the fact that everything has to be sung in cheesy lyrics makes me lose what the hell is going on. It's slow, it's painful, no amount of hot water bottles are going to help.

I wonder if they're going to waste even more money researching why good old-fashioned rumpy-pumpy relieves period pain. Now that as a general method of pain-relief might be a tad more interesting.

Euronalia

I just can't help it, like a guest at a party who keeps turning their head to see who's coming in the room, I can't help looking Europe-wards and wondering what's going on.

Alex has arrived safely and has informed me that Matt's cousin Grace has been booted out of the Big Brother house three weeks since. I guess that was pretty much eclipsed by you-know-what. Seems like Garce has been dissing Matt's part of the family in the press. That would be the gutter press I'm guessing. So that's pretty much what's going on in Britain - thingy, the game you eat strawberries at and Big Brother. Oh, and an interesting little conundrum involving Gordon Brown. I've never heard the abbreviation 'Gord' in Britain, so he will always be Gordon.

Now Gordon as you know, is Tony's annointed successor. I'd prefer it to be a woman, but even though Tony is well aware of my feelings on the matter, he has chosen to ignore them. Nonetheless.
Now Gordon is Scottish. Well, you might say, Scotland is part of Britain. Yes it is. But Scotland has its own government although not with full powers. For example, they do not, nor do they wish to, raise taxes. Sound reasoning oh wiley Scots, because as I have mentioned before, the population of Scotland has more per capita spent on it by Westminster than does England or Wales.
Some issues concerning Scotland are voted on by Parliament in London and the article I read in the 'Economist' while I was in Scotland argued that the Scots MPs wouldn't have it any other way, because there were certain things they didn't trust their own people with.
Fair enough.
Now Scottish MPs traditionally do not vote on English matters. Except for the labour MPs. And Scotland has been Labour (socialist) since the 1940s. Oh yes. SO this is quite useful to Tony. But where does it leave Gordon ? Even the quality Press have been muddying the waters a bit on this one. I kid you not. I remember clearly when Neil Kinnock, a good, old-fashioned socialist was leader of the Labour Party, the press wouldn't leave him alone because he was sandy-haired and a Welshman.
Gordon of course has more Saturnine, dark looks, but they are doing anything they can to scotch (pun intended) the hopes of a Scotsman as premier.

Meanwhile, take the Seacat to Ostend and then drive across Belgium to the Hook of Holland and you would find that the Dutch government is scrapping. This has been bothering me for a few days since I saw it on the French news. They were showing a picture of a very dark-skinned black woman, so I mistakenly thought that the prime minster of Holland was that same woman. This plus the fact that there is no difference in French between the personal pronoun for his or her.

The problem seems to have been caused yet again by the indomitable Ms.Verdonk. Not only does she have a fabulous name, but she was once a prison governor. You may remember that 'Iron Rita' upset many of her countryfolk by trying to bring in a law insisting that only Dutch should be spoken in public. You can't help warming to her. Now she has taken away the citizenship of a popular politician, Ayaan Hirsi Ali because she lied on her original asylum application, putting a false date of birth and name. Except that the name she gave turned out to be her grandmother's surname. Ms. Ali was trying to escape one of those usual women-hating regimes, Somalia in this case, and she has written extensively about the repressive side of Islam.

But one of the parties in the coalition withdrew support for the government, resulting in a domino cascade. A vote of no-confidence against Iron Rita left her barely hanging onto her job, and Jan Peter Balkenende, the real Prime Minister, resigned. Ms. Verdonk has had to give Ms. Ali her citizenship back.

I feel there is a place for Iron Rita, maybe it's cell-block H, but I think she may become a bit of a star akin to Big Brother's fall-from-Grace.

Whilst you're paddling in the North Sea, wade over to Sweden and see that something is missing. The Swedes have given back a very important totem pole belonging to the Haisla tribe from just north of here. I can see that this is enormously important to the band concerned, but I personally am more grateful to Sweden for Ikea, that's like one big old totem to me.

And finally, this morning, Simmi brought to my attention a story from Spain about this amazing 81-year-old's self-built cathedral. The cathedral didn't build itself, Justo Gallego built it on his own.
There is poetry, there is art and there is cathedral building and all can glorify your God or Goddess. Justo deserves admiration in my opinion. Well, I think I can safely say 'in our opinion' and not be emulating the great Queen Victoria.