Il pleut

If I had to take a cold shower, or even get myself ready to go swimming - even though I love swimming and used to swim in the sea all the time in Pompey, sewage and all - I prevaricate, have to psych myself up. Why is it then that as soon as it starts raining hard I want to rush outside like a large welly-clad duck? Tis a mystery, but it's raining out there and has been all night and inside I'm all smiley and can feel a Gene Kelly coming on.

Dear Lord, how courageous do you have to be to take part in Gay Pride in Jerusalem? There are the men dressed flamboyantly as women that we have come to love and expect from Pride, but in general on the newscast I'm watching, it is less colourful than in Britain or Canada. On t'other hand, the men with beards are out in full force trying to keep Jerusalem holy for the whole world, by this I imagine he means 'find some way to stop Pride' and three thousand bullet-proofed police/troops have been drafted in to deal with trouble. Fortunately they currently look bored, most likely quite a lazy day for Jerusalem.

Clichés are generally clichés because they have either once been true or still are, but Newscaster Roland was not presenting this morning, instead his colleague, whose name I forget was sitting behind the newsdesk.
Like many Frenchwomen, she knows how to present herself. In spite of an overlarge mouth and nose, she has close-cropped hair and perfect choice of dark coloured shirt so that she looks attractive and yet for the life of me I can't see how. I guess it's just a French thing.
And yes, I know that Catherine Deneuve deserves an honourable mention for being both beautiful and French at the same time.

Last night I watched Jay Leno, who I really don't like, I find him lame-arsed and often toe-curlingly gauche. But Sasha Baron-Cohen was on and I was really excited to see him being interviewed as himself. Sadly it was not so. He came on and was interviewed as Borat - very funny of course, but I was mildly disappointed to have sat through a quarter of an hour of Leno being a tosser. He had some 'ordinary Americans' and humiliated them by asking them general knowledge questions. They put up a picture of the Twat of Iran and the people couldn't identify him. One said he was the Prime Minister of Britain. Another said Israel.

I went to Ikea late yesterday afternoon, partly because I hadn't been out all day and partly to get an antidote to the awfulness of adverts for Christmas frippery. Ikea is full of light and good design and I feel lifted just by getting myself into the zone and drifting round it. No horrid little porcelain scenes, no over-decorative tat, no clutter, just clean strong lines and fabulousness.

Sorry, did that sound like an ad? Good-oh.

Sin and Science

Such weirdness going on.

Sleepy sent me an article from the Times online which shows that help is at hand for the NHS. A doctor at a Family Planning clinic is fully embracing alternative methods and suggested to a patient that she needed to consult a Catholic priest due to the fact that she was clearly possessed. Sadly for the doc, the patient wasn't as open minded and now the whole sorry shenanigans is in court. Amusingly, the doctor's name is Pratt.

I'm almost sorry that my upcoming trip to Blighty will be just too damned short to hop over to Düsseldorf and experience Marx's 'Das Kapital' the stage version. We are assured that not only is the production based on different people's takes on Marx's economic theories but that every performance will be subtly different. My mouth is positively watering. Seems as though audiences are less enthusiastic than I however and it isn't a sellout. Yet. Good news for me though.

Since I missed Bonfire Night, Sleepy also sent me an amusing account of one squaddie's prank which backfired. Mind you, how the hell it could ever not have backfired was more the question. He stuck a rocket in his bum and lit the blue touchpaper. Oddly, he was subsequently hospitalised.
I loved that 'safety experts' said this,
"....safety experts said yesterday that launching a rocket from the backside was a practice that contravened the firework code." So dry. Nicely done.

In more local news, a Synagogue in Vancouver objected to a women's gym opposite not having frosted glass, so that the worthies with the hats and the long curly hair going on were able to see women in sportswear provocatively exercising. For some reason, the lady's gym actually complied and frosted their glass, but then realised that they had insufficient light. You might have thought that the Hasidics who were already in need of enlightenment may have considered frosting their own glass.

The Japanese are scary people - sorry Raymond - but last night on the 'Daily Planet' we saw two robots being built in Japan. One was an actual android, although perhaps Fembot was the right word. The robot, whose skin was made of silicon to give it a more lifelike appearance really did have a lifelike appearance. That is if you know a young Japanese woman with large hands. An ongoing process was programming it with ever more human movements. Researchers reported that they had to treat it like a human too, if they did anything disrespectful to it, other workers got upset. The only drawback was that all these realistic movements were mediated by hydraulics, and the hydraulic power system was too large to be inside the body.

Meanwhile another robot which looked more like a pile of children's bricks that could be clicked together, were able to organise themselves both as individual units and within the whole, to overcome obstacles. At present, the researcher has to tell them the nature of the obstacle coming up and then it works out how to cope, but future bots will have sensors.

Between the two of them, we don't yet have Seven of Nine, but I'm sure somewhere, someone's working on it.

Chimera

Not that is any of my business, but I find it hard not to comment on the US mid term elections. When Dubya was re-elected, I don't think anyone could really believe it, there had been an attitude of 'Anybody but Bush,' in some parts of the States, and yet as it happened, the anybody that stood against him wasn't good enough. I certainly have enough friends in the States to know that many of them have not flourished under an ultra conservative regime. I can see that a clear message has gone out to President Bush that the time is right for Democratic leadership, so from that point of view I understand the mid-terms, but from another, I don't, I can't see that there is anything to be gained from destabilising the government.

Well now, this news story about creating human-cow embryos for use in stem cell research is a can of worms is it not? The first visual that came to me when I read the article was from that Lindsay Anderson film 'Britannia Hospital' - there was a ward with people who had been given sheep's bodies, the stuff of nightmares.

I think the BBC article is correct, there is an instant yuck factor. But the genetic material in the cow cell will have been removed. I'm not sure why it specifically has to be bovine cells and would the yuck factor be worse or better if cells from an animal more genetically similar to ourselves were used ?

Religious objections I can see as another potential problem and like it or not, because our legal system is based originally on the ethics of the Christian faith, so are many people's personal ethics. Do human cells have some sanctity? We often talk about all life being sacred. What does that mean? It would be an odd position to take to claim that all life had the same sense of sanctity to us as human life. We take life to eat. We take life to protect our own in other ways. We incarcerate animals for entertainment/education. Given a choice between saving a human life and saving an animal's life, the majority of us would save the human.

Is there a difference between eating cow cells and using them for research? We give cow's milk to babies even. There are human with valves from pigs' hearts in them. Vaccines are made and injected into us using animal cells. Women take Hormone Therapy made from horse urine. Where are those boundaries?

Does sacred mean the same as never taking? Personally I would argue that is not the case. I believe it is a deep and abiding respect. But I would not deny women the right to abortion on demand, I would allow euthanasia, I am opposed to capital punishment, but I believe in the right to defend freedom.

This research could lead to breakthroughs in the treatment of some of the worst of human diseases. Alzheimer's for example. My friend Sleepy debates the horror of that one on her blog today. I have yet to meet anyone who has encountered Alzheimer's who has not expressed the point of view, 'put me down if I get it,' quite possibly because the 'me' bit of each of us slides away with that disease. Now balance one against the other. If someone you love, really, really love, could be saved from that horror by stem cell research using bovine cells injected with human DNA, doesn't the yuck factor and most other objections fall away like so much Scotch mist?

The final argument reported in the BBC article is that humans and animals have always been separated. Oh well. And yet we have fought for and continue to fight for more respect for and decent treatment of all animals. White people and black people used to be separated and now they're not (so much) and that is a way better state of affairs. It seems to me that to maintain our difference from the animal kingdom on this is meaningless, we can die in an undignified fashion of our human diseases or we can get over it.

And God? Well I thought God fashioned the whole of creation, giving us what we need. Sure, she told us not to eat from the tree of knowledge, but we did, so hey, what difference does it make? Do we see our fellow people condemning the use of electricity? Well, not so much. And yet that came from the tree of knowledge, and I don't mean the build-it week-by-week encyclopaedia.

I think it is right that something as progressive as this is thoroughly discussed, preferably by ethical philosophers rather than the daily mail. And I hope that in the end they will decide there is no true ethical dilemma with this. Because it offers hope and because in any case, once someone's had the idea, either some Doctor Mengele will do it somewhere in a Boris Karloff laboratory or western scientists will do it in transparent conditions. And I for one prefer the idea of the latter.

Sickie

I seriously thought I was having an all day hot flush yesterday, but it turned out just to be my paranoia. In spite of Kevin saying to me this morning that it couldn't possibly be a flush if it lasted all day, I don't think it sunk in until I spoke to a couple of other people who had had the same thing. Certainly the weather was slightly warmer with all the rain we were having, but I think in reality I was fighting off some bug. I did and do also feel fairly crappy, but the sure sign for me was wanting to sleep during the day.

That being said, I must confess to being one of those aggravating people who refuses to take time off, not that I have anything to take time off from, but when I did, I wouldn't. Kevin's company actively try to discourage this attitude by not giving a set amount of sick time, thus people don't feel they are entitled to the sick days as extra holiday and when they are sick, they take the time off they need rather than coming in and passing it on to everyone else.

I am very used to fevers, I used to have them throughout my childhood, whenever I had any sort of illness whatsoever I would get a fever with it and this was dismissed as being a result of my having contracted malaria as a small child in Nigeria. Possibly as a result of that, the fever has become my own measure of when to give in, so what happened yesterday? I guess the answer probably is that my temperature wasn't high enough to give me that tell-tale sensitivity, but high enough to affect the workings of my brain.

So, on my return from the Nature Park, I have been for a walk and taken photos of the beautiful place where I live.

And I'll bid goodnight.

Backs and Books

Backs are funny things, just not in the comedic sense. I have been fortunate enough so far to have only suffered real pain in my back twice, but it was sufficient to allow me to empathise somewhat.

When my back went out one Christmas Eve it taught me a couple of things. One was that since there had been no warning, you really don't know what's around the corner. I bent down and couldn't get up, that was it. It was frustrating because I had to lie in bed or on the sofa but I wasn't really ill, and whilst that wouldn't be a problem for say, Homer Simpson, to me it was one big old annoyance.
Another thing that struck me was how theatrical it all looked. If you told an actor to play at having backache, they would have the exact same way of walking and facial expressions as someone who really is suffering. You wince involuntarily. You hold your back because it feels like it might come apart. You walk as though....well as though you can't walk. And there is sweet Fanny Adams that anyone can do for you, you just have to - well, not exactly ride it out, more shuffle it out.

We are told that backache is the price we pay for walking upright and maybe that's so, but if you're one of those who does suffer, cold comfort. I have a number of friends and family members who suffer with their backs, from the chronic to the about to go into surgery, the pain ranges from debilitating to completely unbearable. I wouldn't wish it on anyone.

Books are a different matter, although just as serious. I was watching the news this morning, appalled at a bunch of Iraqi Sunnis riding around in an open-topped car, anger in their faces and holding aloft pictures of Saddam Hussein. It contrasted starkly with the scenes of joy from other Iraqis, and throughout all of these news scenes, I did not see one woman.
I was pondering on the nature of the beast when a new item came up, an American author, Jonathan Littel, has been awarded the Grand Prix du Roman by the Académie Française. It reminded me that sometimes it is easier to experience the soul of a nation through its literature. However much the French irritate the hell out of me from time to time, I have witnessed their soul because I have read so many of their great works of literature. Somehow their authors mitigate their awfulness and it isn't the political commentators who do that, we don't find out about the soul of the French by reading what several of them think of the global stage, it's through their works of fiction.
The people who write and share their opinions about politics and economics are simply people who think they know something, rough cobblers together of wooden frameworks. But the true writers, the storytellers and creators of fiction, are Master craftspeople, literary cabinet makers. By their works shall we know them.

As soon as I saw the headline in the Guardian, 'Philosopher puts religion on the stage', I knew exactly which philosopher it would be.
Yes, it could easily have been Baroness Warnock, but I was sure it would turn out to be Anthony Grayling and lo, it was he.
At some point whilst I was teaching A-Level philosophy, I went on two courses taught by him. In his turn, Anthony Grayling had been taught by Freddie Ayer, so the line continues, well, unless this means that I have to publish something meaningful, which would be a bit of a pain and more or less ruin my day.
Grayling has published, but then most people you are taught by at university level have published something in their own field. But his name keeps cropping up, in the newspapers, on TV and now the stage. What impresses me most however, is his continued commitment to simply teaching philosophy, he still lectures at Birkbeck college, one of the colleges of the University of London.

I kept a slip from a fortune cookie.
'In vain have you acquired knowledge if you have not imparted it to others.'
It doesn't really matter how we do it, by passing it on to our children, by writing, or by teaching, or even through something practical which we make and add to the product of our country. But if I had anything to add to the fortune cookie message, it would be something I learnt from Anthony Grayling, whatever you do, whatever you teach, it must be ethical, passed on in good faith.

Bonfire Night

I'm missing out on Bonfire Night, Fireworks Night, Guy Fawkes Night, remember, remember the fifth of November. In truth I imagine that most people had their fireworks last night.
Pompey is particularly fond of its fireworks, they'll celebrate absolutely anything by sending explosives into the sky, sometimes you have no idea what the reason for them is.
Poor old Guido. Horrible, horrible death, and amazing that whatever awful ways people were put to death over the course of British history, it never stopped 'em expressing their religious or political beliefs. Maybe I should expand that, European history.

Perhaps it's because of this long and gruesome history that the European Union are requesting that Saddam Hussein's death sentence should not be carried out. There is no capital punishment within the EU and hasn't been for some considerable time.
It's a tough one. The verdict is from just one of the charges, the killing of 148 Shia, he can't be put even more to death for the Kurds and all the thousands of others. In spite of his outburst at the designated method of his death, it couldn't be made to match the nature of the deaths he imposed upon others, and nor should it, if we haven't moved on from hanging, drawing and quartering, then we're not better than him and we are, by thunder we are.

Moving on. Movie night at Château Schnee. Geoff the Rental clearly didn't entirely approve of my two picks this week.
'Our friend's in 'Slither',' I said apologetically.
But in fact neither Slither nor Nacho Libre actually sucked.

Nacho Libre - Jack Black, a Swede (Peter Stormare) and a bunch of Mexican actors was quietly enjoyable. Jack mesmerised with his ability to pose, posture and generally throw his five foot five 208 pound frame around like you wouldn't believe. Some of it may have been a stunt double, some of it certainly wasn't. His partner in la lucha libre, Héctor Jiménez as Esqueleto was like a cross between Napoleon Dynamite's Pedro and the Jungle Book's Mowgli. Little Darius Rose as orphan Chancho was wonderful, oh and not so little either. Jack Black's awful attempt at a Mexican accent that kept slipping into New York Italian just served the overall humour. We liked.

Slither, supposed to be set in South Carolina but actually filmed like everything else in BC, also managed to avoid some of the worst excesses of horror sci-fi. I only identified two 'oh for pity's sake, look behind you you total moron,' moments. We didn't manage to see Steve very clearly, but we identified his screaming.

The film I am looking forward to seeing at the cinema is 'Borat'. I didn't like Borat as a character when Sasha Baron Cohen first introduced him, but I feel he has developed him. My son Ben has seen the film and assured me that he laughed all the way through, those weren't quite his words but let's leave it at that.

My daughter Alex has been experiencing one of the by-product educational aspects of going to uni, a multi-culturalism that is different from school where she felt that the Pakistani kids for example would often all hang out together in a huge group. At uni, she has friends from India, the Middle East, the States, and all over the UK. She told me about political discussions with her Kurdistani friend, about budgeting, about the depth of her studies, then she bugged me about how I still needed to make her a Christmas Stocking.
Hmmm...Bah, humbug.

Paulette

I have a new person in my life, Paulette. I met Paulette in New Westminster yesterday. Firstly, this meant encountering another part of New West, which unlike flat Richmond, has hills, oh my dear Lord does it have hills. At one point, although this was on leaving, I felt I was plunging over a near vertical drop, I feared for the car's ability to stay on the road, and in fact since yesterday had been particularly windy and the car had been buffeted by heavy cross winds on the freeway going over there, I was doubly concerned.

There is a logic to the road system here, although one which has taken me a while to get my head round. The main roads literally run from one end of Vancouver and the surrounding areas, to the end of everything. The numbering seems fried at first, because everything is numbered in blocks rather than individually, but I can see there is a logic to it.

New West however, has logic and confusion intermingled. Many of the roads there are simply numbered, so third, sixth, eighth etc. The confusion, which I discovered yesterday when I was actually IN it, is that there is for example a Sixth Street and a Sixth Avenue. When I did my usual maps.google search which I do before venturing anywhere, I had simply jotted down the numbers. No matter, I still managed to find Paulette.

The Canadian government have an employment resources department. But in New Westminster they have a special one for over 45's. On the steps of their offices it reminded you that you could only use this service if you were '45 or better'. Nice, and very Canadian. We don't refer to older people as 'OAP's' here, they are seniors.

I was a little put off at first because as usual I was asked to fill in a three page form, but wait, it wasn't anything like the crappy forms I have had to fill out before, this was clear and gave them information. To be fair, Canadian government forms are for the most part well thought-out.
Yes, you do come across some glaring incompetencies, such as the part on the immigration form where there was nowhere for Kevin to indicate he was Canadian from birth, but generally, their documentation is constantly being streamlined. The form you fill in whenever you enter Canada for example has become ever simpler and clearer.

Paulette took me into her office. It was spacious but cosy, there were pictures of her children, she had the most distracting screensaver I had ever seen, it kept renewing with new and breathtaking pictures of animals and landscapes. Paulette talked to me and listened to me. She didn't make me feel that I was completely useless for having an MA and not being able to type a million words per minute, in fact quite the contrary. She suggested some ways back into my own profession without the help of the BC College of Teachers. She showed me the room where, if I did want to improve my computer skills, I could come for a free course. She showed me the blue room and the yellow room, the resource library and the.....coffee-making room. She didn't have a George Hamilton tan nor a designer suit. I really liked Paulette and felt like coming back to the place rather than running away never to return.
The annoying thing about it all was really, that although this was a government initiative, genuinely there to help people, it had been difficult to find out about. But I did and more than anything else, Paulette made me feel that at 45 plus, I wasn't over the hill, although like I said, on the way out of New West I was grateful to be exactly that.

Back at the Nature Park, Lori had received feedback from one of the classes from last week. We had had a number of French immersion classes during the run-up to Halloween, and I had taken my cue from the teachers, if they spoke French to the children, then so did I.
'I'm not feeling the love,' said Lori, referring to the comments from one such teacher.
'I feel that we've done them the courtesy of speaking to them in French, which they had no reason to expect when they came, and what's their response to that? Why can't the whole programme be in French?' Except that Lori's Canadian so she said 'program'.
Quite so. Give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile. Although to some extent, now that I've gotten over the initial irritation of it, I can understand. You have to always make your case even if you have no hope of change. Just that, maybe,
'We really appreciated being spoken to in French, would it be a possibility for the future to....' would have been a politer way of putting it.

We have rain, really big rain and so for once the RCMP are evident on the roads, attending the scenes of continual prangs. I wonder where they go when it's not raining. I've never seen them in Tim Horton's.

Burner, Biscuits, Blogs.

That is an entirely inappropriate picture today, it is raining fit to float an ark, but I liked this one and we did see not only chickadees but also a Bard Owl this morning. It shook itself like a dog does to get rid of the water.

So, don't vote for Darcy Burner, she's an evil witch, I certainly won't be. Not that I can, I can't even vote here in Canada let alone down in the States.
Our friends to the South have elections coming up, and since some of our TV channels are US ones, we are overwhelmed with adverts taken out by the candidates themselves or their opponents, all trying to influence the voting.
Darcy Burner, a person I wouldn't vote for simply on account of her name, has clearly angered the Republican party for her sins. Their anti-Darcy ad claims that she will increase taxes for families, she will increase taxes for seniors and she will (specifically ) increase taxes for single mothers. A second thinking about this leads me to the conclusion that Darcy must therefore be a democrat, who will probably want to do some spending on public programmes and yes, may have to raise taxes all round. Her own ad claims that she comes from a military background and wouldn't touch veteran's benefits. It's all quite bizarre. The ones from the candidates themselves all have to end with,
'I'm (Darcy Burner) and I endorse this message.' Well duh. I'm sure there must be a history there somewhere.

At least Darcy is acting like a democrat - or at least my imagined Darcy. Our very own Tory government on the other hand don't understand what being a Tory means. Stephen and his merry crew have just made their very heartland, their own dyed in the wool supporters and those whom they might have been able to draw in all howl with pain by imposing a tax on Income Trusts, the very and exact thing they promised never to tax. See Stephen, extra taxes - that's what the other team do. Double Duh!

So. Now. Get a bunch of Brits sitting around a table on which you place a big tray of scones and very soon you'll have an argument about whether 'scones' is pronounced 'scohnes' or 'sconnes'. Almost guaranteed. And this difference in pronunciation isn't based on accent or area, it is just a quirk. But the other day, I found out that Canadians get round this.
There are various older ladies who come into the Nature House and bring baked goods. The other day, a very nice lady came in and brought a big batch of lovely looking scones and some home made jam.
'Oh, those look nice scones,' quoth I,
'Biscuits,' she said. Bizarre thought I, but I wasn't prepared to taste them to find out whether they had any of the essential qualities of biscuityness. It's particularly odd because in the supermarkets, what we would refer to as biscuits, ie biscuits are in fact labelled biscuits. Still, no-one argues about how to say 'scones'.

Blogs, I read in the Guardian yesterday, are going to be the downfall of the internet. Jolly good then. This is apparently because we spread untruths and people read them and believe them. Not only that but we link to each others' blogs and this reinforces the lies we tell. Hmm...interesting.
I have certainly noticed that there are types of blogs that are almost like small communities. So you have little clusters of left-wing or right-wing or sex or friendship blogs and they do indeed all support each other in one way or another. A bit like people do in real life, or like newspapers do. I'm sure the rise of news sheets from the coffee houses was considered subversive when they started.
But it's ok because the universities of Massachusetts (holy crap that's a difficult word to spell and in fact it's not a uni, just an Institute of Technology) and Scunner hampton, oops, sorry, Southampton, are introducing degree courses in web science. So that's alright then, I can carry on linking and blogging and disseminating my own personal opinion and all will be well.

But don't vote for Darcy Burner, she's an evil witch....or is she?

All Souls

Yes, I know All Souls was yesterday, but I have a reason for remembering it today.

Hats off to the US for both prosecuting and jailing a man for the mutilation of his daughter. This is a disgusting and spiteful hate crime against women made worse by its perpetration in the name of religion. How can you possibly think your God has fouled up in the actual design of his/her creation and that you can better it?
Personally I think that if he is only being incarcerated for this crime, he has gotten off lightly. Ooh, unless it's true what they say about the treatment meted out to child molesters in prison in which case he could be on the receiving end of some genital mutilation. Booyah.

The reason I am remembering All Souls today is that it is the anniversary of my own father's death five years ago. It's difficult to forget my parents and it's difficult to even want to. My dad was a good father and proud of having two daughters, which makes it all the more difficult to comprehend a father like the one I just talked about. I think my dad has stayed around longer than my mum too. I'm not sure exactly what keeps them here, or makes them visit, but I suspect that the need of those of us who still inhabit this plane is part of it. For the majority of the time now I can go along not giving it much thought and then all of a sudden, though far less frequently than before, as though a trap were sprung I can fall into a claustrophobic hole of despair at the thought that I can't reach them.

I'll have a wee dram with him tonight.

Compu'er says no

On the radio this morning, Beck singing 'Where it's at' reminded me of a time when I used to listen to Beck all the time, odd, because I saw him last Saturday on SNL, still being quirky, he played guitar while the rest of the band or his back-up band, whatever they are, sat around a fully laid table and tapped cutlery. And it was good.

And there's nothing unusual about a track or a scent that can take you WHAM back to a different place, a different time, but this morning it was a single word.
As we pulled out of the close, taking Laurence to work, people were scraping thick frost off their cars. Laurence mentioned this.
'Yes,' I said, 'if they have to park on the street then they are always caught like that,'
'Innit,' he said. Bam, South of England, kids I've taught, friends I've worked with. A boy in my class, second school I worked at, quite near to Heathrow. Imran. Every morning,
'Want to buy a mobile phone Miss innit?' Imran said 'innit' after everything. The phones were knock off from the airport innit.

Yesterday, during the last performance of the Halloween Howl, I leaned down to show a kid a snake skeleton.
'Are you Jewish?' she asked. I was totally taken aback. I was dressed as a witch. Later, that moment came back to me. From her angle she would have just seen the wide black rim of my hat, my hair scraped back underneath, making my forehead seem longer and long black hair hanging down from the hat. She must have seen an Hasidic Jew, but I have no beard, maybe she thought this must be what female ones look like.

We had no trick or treaters last night, I wasn't even aware of any in our road at all. But there was a point when a short, sharp but spectacular firework display went off across the road, behind the portacabins of the school, right, in fact, next to their propane tank. I can see it now from my window, it looks like a bomb. Now that would have been some display.

So the poisoning of those children and parents in Corfu has now been pinpointed to carbon monoxide. The Greek authorities have acted swiftly and suspended the hotel's licence. I'm impressed. Their action has been swift, decisive and appropriate,

""We will not put up with incidents that blacken the image of Greece's tourism industry and bring our country into disrepute," Palli-Petralia said." Innit.

Dealing with two different countries' institutions I am having to be bilingual in a whole new way. In Britain, you don't hassle to much because you will annoy them and they will simply 'lose' your stuff. But Kevin has been trying to coach me into a different way of approaching Canadian ones, you must bug them, bug, bug, bug, bug, bug. The last thing I heard on the subject of getting my qualifications recognised, Kings' College had simply sent a letter saying that I did indeed have an MA, but there was no transcript, even though their website said they offered this service and I had paid for one. Just to remind British friends what a transcript is, it's not the transcript of something spoken, but some kind of summary of the marks you had when doing your degree.

I had rung the people here on Monday, and they were due to call back yesterday afternoon between 13.00 and 16.00. Around 14.00 the phone rang.
'All we need now is x, y and z,'
'You have x and y,'
'It isn't checked off,'
'But I know you have it, could you look in the file?'
'Oh yes, it's here, but it hasn't been checked off,'
'Could you check it off?'
'I'll have to ask,'
'And y is part of x,'
'I'll have to ask,'
'Couldn't you just look at x?'
'Oh yes, you're right, but it hasn't been checked off,'
'Could you do that?'
'I'll have to ask,'
'Now that you have everything except z and z (my MA) isn't vital to my application, could you consider it without z?'
'I'll have to ask, someone will ring you back,'
'Today?'
'Possibly, or could be tomorrow.'

You can just picture David Walliams from Little Britain dressed as the middle-aged spinster, just sitting there and saying,
'Compu'er says no.'

It would be funny, just that, it's stopping me from even applying for anything meaningful.

All Hallows

Yesterday, the writers' group that I am part of, had a Halloween night. From time to time we have a special evening where we all write something on a theme and we all bring a food item. The pieces of writing go into to basket and everyone takes one and reads it to the group and we try to guess who has written what. I enjoy the exercise of being given a topic or theme to write on, sometimes even a line to begin and or end with, this is good. What I hate about the exercise is having to read other people's writing out loud without reading through it first. People can make what you have written utterly meaningless and you can do the same to them.
For the first time last night, I felt happy with the way my own piece was read and with the piece I had to read. I am a little lazy on these occasions and didn't in fact write my own story, I adapted someone else's, however should you feel the need to read it, you can by clicking on the title, which is Hansel and Gretel.

I am no great cook, passable on certain things but pretty good at two things, one is chilli and the other is soup. Sometimes people even ask me for the recipe for my soups and then I get like the centipede who was asked which leg she put forward first. However, since it is Halloween, here is my soup recipe.

Ingredients.
Some stock.
Some veggies.
Anything else you have that's edible and want to use up.
Seasoning.
Three of Crisp-e's chillies.

Ah....Bisto....er I mean, the magic ingredient. Yep, that is why my soup is good, I do believe a good soup should be hot in at least two senses of the word. It should be hot as in not cold and it should be hot as in bites the back of your throat. It doesn't need to be hot as in sexy, but I guess it could be and it doesn't have to be hot as in stolen. And now you know it, the other ingredients are just for show, for example last night I made a red soup. Toms, a few carrots, sweet peppers, garlic and general onionyness and Crisp-e's chillies. Magic.

Happy Halloween, may you be spared the hyperactive ankle-biters, but may you have the spiritual experience that you wish for.

Chequing in

This morning we had frost. Parts of BC have had heavy snowfalls, and whilst I was bitter about this and felt they should share, Kevin pointed out that power cuts had accompanied their snow.

One of the things which Brits have to get their heads round when coming to live in Canada is the differences in banking practices and this is a lesson that my son Laurence is having to learn just as I did - although I think it is more difficult for him because he would not even know of a time of cheques and bank charges.

It's not like we don't ever use cheques in Britain, I do own a chequebook, although Laurence never has. Dutch colleagues that Kevin works with don't deal with cheques either. If someone here wanted for some reason to give me money, they couldn't just transfer it into my account as I can do from my British account into another British account. They would have to give me a cheque or e-mail me the money for which there would be a charge.

And charges are a whole mindset thing. Most current accounts here - which are referred to as chequing accounts, have a monthly fee and then you have a set number of transactions you can use during that month. So for example, you may have to pay four dollars a month and then have fifteen transactions. So instead of using your debit card all the time, you have to make sure they are worthwhile transactions. In Britain you could go to Boots, Sainsbury's, Marks and Sparks, back to Boots, Otakar's then the Post Office in one afternoon, use your debit card in each and not think about it. If you did that here, apart from the obvious that none of those shops exist here, you would have used up over a third of your month's allowance of transactions. Ooops. So you see what I mean about thinking differently.

Likewise getting cash. In Britain, walk down Commercial Road in Pompey, and even in my own mind's eye I can count ten different ATM points, at different banks and building societies but any of which you could withdraw money from without any charge. Here, ATMs are fewer and further between and if you withdraw cash from any bank other than your own, you can end up paying $3 per go. All of this adds up quickly, so we do have to learn over here to think ahead. One way around this is by using your credit card for everything, which is why, I believe, credit card use is so much more common here. You will find the odd quite bizarre place where you can't use it, but that's rare. Then people pay off their credit card bill using a single transaction.

I know, I know, terribly tedious stuff, but trying to change a mindset is a difficult thing. You do what you are used to doing, and changing can be an expensive lesson to learn.

Clocks

'In winter time we cry, 'Alack!'
And put the clocks an hour back,
In summer time we cry,'Très bon!'
And put the clocks an hour on.'

Yeah well, not sure why we cry alack in winter, we get an extra hour of sleep, it's the losing the hour that bites me. Still, in Britain it's the end of British Summer Time, over here the end of Daylight Saving. Remember the years when we didn't do it? I was at grammar school then and it was very odd indeed. Creepy and darker than ever in the mornings. Actually, when I put it like that it sounds kinda cool.

BBC Canada for some reason best known only to themselves, decided not to honour the two o'clock changeover time and seemed to do it around midnight. Which was convenient because I was able to watch Hotel Babylon and pretend it was not insanely late.
Joan Collins was in last night's episode and for pity's sake, does that woman have some kind of pact with the Devil? Seriously, she simply isn't ageing, and she doesn't even have that over-stretched look of the older moneyed actress whose skin has been constantly hoiked back behind her ears. Her carriage is still that of a middle-aged woman, her neck has only a few wrinkles. I mean Hell's teeth, the woman was born in 1933. It's like Dorian Grey.

Yesterday we saw the film 'Just Friends' with Ryan Reynolds and a handful of other people I've seen in a bunch of other things but wouldn't be able to name. I do like Ryan Reynolds, but I wouldn't willingly watch one of his comedies unless I was on a plane, however this film was on the movie channel at some point so we'd recorded it to the TV's HD and there it was, waiting for that moment when we'd watched everything else.
And you know what? Fairly predictable storyline, but so well-scripted it was a very funny film. And Reynolds is just so good at physical comedy. Well worth a watch.

How many programmes do Colin and Justin actually have? They even have enough kudos to be mentioned by Daffydd Thomas in the last episode of Little Britain.
Yesterday on 'How not to Decorate' they were almost hoist by their own petard. The offending house looked suspiciously like the working men's club where the offending homeowner and person responsible was hiding. His wife, who could no longer stand living in what Justin politely described as,
'Everything's so brown, it's like living in one big jobbie,' had the imploring look of an Old English Sheepdog, the grey hair almost covering her puppy-dog eyes.
As the lads were taking her around the house and decrying some of her own design faux-pas, she would look at them, wounded, and say,
'But Colin/Justin, I saw you do this once.' You had to love her and her dogged loyalty to them.

If you ever forget what time it is, you can look it up on the Greenwich Mean Time website. How spiffy is that?

Poison

I have been reading a book this week at the Nature House, about poisonous plants. The ones we all know about are in there, Deadly Nightshade, the green bits of potatoes, tomato and rhubarb leaves, hemlock, although that was interesting because I now know how to identify it.
Being a technical kind of book it also had opium, marijuana and peyote as poisons, I hadn't really thought about them as such, but I suppose it depends how you define poison. I was surprised not to find Foxglove, I'm damn sure I've seen some around here somewhere.

I was surprised however, to discover that even without being drenched in e-coli infested slurry, spinach, the whole plant, counts as poisonous. It seems it contains a similar chemical to that in rhubarb leaves. In the normal course of things, I eat pounds of spinach, especially in salads and I haven't ever noticed any ill effects, however perhaps the evil compounds have been cultivated out as they tell us is the case with aubergines. I still have never been bold enough to cook aubergine without first salting it to draw out the bitter juices.

Then the section on mushrooms. I am always fascinated when the Fly Agaric - amonita muscaria - makes its appearance, partly because it is so striking, its appearance screams,
'Wanna take me on?' but a different Amonita, amonita virosa, caught my eye. Destroying Angel and deadly. It seems there is no recovery from this one, just as you think you have overcome it, your liver and kidneys shut up shop and a few hours later - so do you. And yet look at it, it looks so much like the kind of mushroom you'd eat. So innocuous.
It kind of astonishes me that vegetation can be as deadly as an animal. I'm sure you'd be more scared to be bitten by a venomous snake, and the end may come more quickly, but on t'other hand, with the mushroom you'd be just as dead, especially as I've watched 'Venom ER' and antivenins have been developed to most snake poisons, whereas according to Chris Thomas, no antidote is available to counteract the effects of the mushrooms' amatoxins.
The snake however would be coming at ya - assuming you had in some way annoyed it, whereas the lovely mushroom has to seduce you into eating it. I can understand that the snake is poisonous to protect itself, but why would a mushroom want to stop itself from being eaten? And how did it develop these deadly poisons?

Yesterday, I was at one and the same time horrified yet fascinated by this story in the Guardian about a couple and the man's children who were holidaying in Corfu and who have suffered poisoning of some as yet unknown origin. The two children have both died, both adults were found unconscious and the woman was in a coma. The causes being investigated are as wide apart as carbon monoxide and mushroom poisoning. But the reporting in this article is also odd. Why does it refer to 'the tourist' and this opening statement almost ignores the existence of her partner,
"A British tourist today came out of a coma apparently caused by poisoning that killed two children who were on holiday with her."
Bizarre and a horrible tragedy.

There are lots of things out there that are out to get us, although not generally unless we have rattled them first.
But that deadly pure white mushroom, haunting.

No Curse

Fear not, I'm not telling you things you don't want to know about my lady's cycles - and by that I do not mean bikes. No, the curse of which I speak is that old Chinese one,
'May you live in interesting times' - today wasn't so I'm thinking that just for today, I'm not.

Even the usual things I moan about didn't happen. A motorist in front of me who was ignoring the green filter light in our lane because he was on his phone and then as soon as the filter light went off, sped up like a rhino charging blindly at the oncoming traffic...... got away with it because a more competent driver coming the other way managed to swerve in the nick of time. Ah well, didn't really want some innocent person to get killed just for material for me.

I went to the interview with the Recruitment Consultant. Hopeful I was about this. My hope was kicked up a notch when she immediately asked me for my CV.
'I gave it to you on Tuesday, and I e-mailed it to you the same day,' I said, but my hopes were dashed, she reached into a file and pulled it out.
But then my hopes were undashed,
'Do you know how to find my e-mail?' she said, showing me her Outlook Inbox. She'd managed to lose a stupid button they have on there. No, not THE stupid button. I found it for her and for the rest of the time she asked appropriate and un-stoopid questions. Dammit!

Went to Superstore, nothing untoward happened. Random strangers asked my advice on purchases/stacking their shopping/told me about their dogs, but this normally happens to me, nothing unusual in that.

I pondered a while about how the French labelling on things is often more accurate than the English, Superstore were offering a 'Virtual Flat screen TV' and I thought that sounded a bit useless, who wants a virtual screen? But then I looked at the French and it said 'Ecran presque plat' so almost flat then, much better. Unfortunately the next thing I looked at let me down, it was something to do with Sponge Bob Square Pants, but he's just 'Bob the Sponge' in French. Disappointing.

See, it's not that I want something bad to happen, far from it, but I have come to expect a certain level of comic incompetence and I realise I've become slightly dependent on it. Ah well, I'll just have to raise my game I suppose.
And I certainly mustn't grumble.

Shopping for God

Muahahahaha...after the school programmes this morning, Lori insisted we go to lunch still in our witch costumes. We went to the Cactus Cub Lounge, not a particularly up market place, but we drew quite a range of reactions from being blanked to having a guy come over and insist on showing us a magic trick. It was fun, but itchy.

When the guy had shown us his magic trick, I said to Lori,
'You've pulled.' And yet again, I failed horribly to explain this most British of expressions, so anyone who would like to try, be my guest.

Especially for Canadian Karen, the little girl from Saturday night who was afraid of her father, was in the front row this morning. She clearly survived the weekend.
'You have a British accent,' she said,
'English,' I corrected her because she had threatened to kill me Saturday, also because there is an RP English accent which I in fact have, but until they come up with one that is RP and encompasses Scottish, Northern and Southern Irish and Welsh too, I shall continue to correct.

When the play was over, she was first in line to go into the Haunted House, but she wouldn't move. After a couple of minutes all the rest of the kids were shouting at her to go in. I was prepared to just push her in but felt it might get Lori into hot water so didn't.

So, in other news, interestingly, it turns out that black women are responsible for the high numbers of young black men in gaol. How fascinating. Yes, they are far too independent which apparently and without any logical link, forces black men to commit crimes. Ah, hang on, could it be that black men who commit crimes end up in gaol? Could THAT be the link? I think I've discovered something.
Sleepy and I used to continually have to deal with a black kid at Mayhem whose behaviour was appalling. Without fail he would claim that he was disciplined because he was black. Without fail we retorted that he was disciplined because his behaviour was dreadful. He even tried this line on a member of my department who was from Senegal. She looked him up and down and said,
'Boy, I am WAY blacker than you.' And she was.

And of course if black women are responsible for crimes by black men, it turns out, yet again, that women are responsible for being raped. Jess McCabe of the F-Word deals with this tired and poisonous old chestnut. It's this simple. Whatever the circumstances, just don't rape.
I do love that the Muslim cleric is called the mufti though. Gives new meaning to mufti day.

After the miracle of the safe driver yesterday, for some reason my attention was drawn back to the Richmond Christian school this morning. It is on a stretch of road which is like a strip mall for places of worship.
In most places, if you set up as a Church, however spurious, you can avoid taxes. In Richmond, if you set up on designated farmland and promise to farm a proportion of it you can avoid taxes.
On a short section of Five Road are the following places of worship that have done just that, only they have forgotten they need to do the farming bit. In a row is, the Bethel church, The India Cultural centre (looks like a really big Mosque), the Islamic Cultural Centre (looks like a really big Mosque), a Buddhist Temple, the Vedic Cultural Centre, the Peace Evangelical Free Church, the Chinese Evangelical Church and the Baptist Evangelical Church. These are not small buildings, the Buddhist Temple is the size of a small asteroid.

No Synagogue though. Perhaps there aren't so many Chinese Jews, who knows.
Me, I'm off to my place of worship - well one of them at any rate - Ikea, I hear you calling.

The Queen and Alex

I have been at the Nature Park for enough programmes now that I am starting to recognise the same parents coming back. This morning we had the man who said before and said again to me,
'You sound like the Queen,' to which I replied once again,
'The Queen sounds posher than me.' Then I gave him a short burst of queenly tones to demonstrate.

I spoke to my daughter Alex yesterday. It must have been about two am for her. I remember the days when two o'clock was a time I could stay up for, now it's just a time I wake at unexpectedly sometimes. And very unwelcome it is too when that happens.
My friend Dawn had asked me whether students in the UK often change their subjects and I blithely assured her that no, this was quite rare because it's so complicated to do. Wrong again! Oh yes, Alex has swapped, admittedly her second subject, from drama to American studies. She has to learn some historical cultural context for the literature, so I told her to watch Deadwood. Alex seems to be really enjoying having no money but living in London. Well who wouldn't, apart from the no money bit. But my kitten is the most beautiful young woman on the entire planet, so I'm sure that helps a lot.

I realised - for some reason while doing the washing up yesterday - that I was turning into Ken Adams. You would have to very religiously read my friend Sleepy's blog to have heard of him, and more specifically still, the comments. Mine in fact.
I will explain.
Ken was Head of Science at the first school I worked at. He was what you might call a petite man, although not if you spoke French, you'd have to call him a petit man. And this I feel was his downfall. He was somewhat elfin like, but not in an eldritch way. He was however, abso-blooming-lutely first class at his job. Then the time came when he needed to look for a promotion. He would apply for suitable senior teacher jobs, always get called for interview and never be offered the job. After a while, clearly aware that he was being passed over because of his lack of height, and I'm sure that was what it was, I cannot believe he didn't interview well, eventually he got into the whole interview circus in a different way. He would go to the school, be shown around and when they interviewed him, he would tell them everything that was wrong with their school. He would then come back and entertain us with his tales.

Yesterday afternoon, I went to an 'Employment Fair' which promised resources, employers, yada yada, and all there actually was were wall-to-wall Chinese people and Toys R Us, Old Navy, the Casino, and employers of that ilk.
There was however one professional recruiter so I gave her my CV and made an appointment for Friday.
While I was washing up, I realised that I was looking forward to the interview, that deep down I was hoping that it would provide me with material for stories. I had become Ken.

Ken eventually got a job, I can still remember the name of the school because part of it was 'Haberdashers'. The school that got Ken would have been patting themselves on the back for a long time, but I think there was just a slight tinge of disappointment on his part that his dining out tales were coming to an end.

This morning on the way to taking Laurence to work, a small miracle. Behind me at the correct stopping distance and driving exactly at the speed limit was a red minivan. I was so stunned by encountering such a phenomenon as someone else driving at the correct speed that I kept glancing at it in my mirror. Eventually, the car pulled alongside me and I sighed, realising it was too good to last. But wait, no, it was in fact turning left into the Richmond Christian School.

Lord T'underin' God works in mysterious ways.

If....

If for some reason you feel it necessary to have a sign up in the back of your unstable, environmentally unsound SUV that says 'Baby on Board', you'd better not drive like one. I'm assuming here that a baby would drive as though she or he couldn't see over the steering wheel or read road signs or realise that there were other people on the planet.

If you work in a bank, you need to make connections. A paycheque is something that is issued by the place you work at, so please don't ask me stupid questions like,
'Is your son's paycheque from his work?' because that arouses in me an uncontrollable urge to patronise you.

If you are travelling to a different city in the rush hour for a school programme, and you happen to know that all of your class are hyperactive in the extreme, if you only allow the amount of time it would take to get there at say three o'clock in the morning, then you will arrive at least 25 minutes late and if you furthermore decide to make a detour to a pumpkin patch, don't tell anyone because they will be even more pissed off at you.

If you are going to ask a favour of someone, don't piss them off bigtime first.

If you are gay and live in the Republic of Ireland, the good news is that if you want to get married and your partner is a British citizen, then you can go and tie the civil knot at the British Embassy. Though personally, I still find it rather odd to think that there are British Embassies in Ireland. I suppose I have difficulty differentiating between Great Britain and the British Isles.

If you are anyone on the planet whatsoever, best to avoid Heather Mills McCartney. I should probably have taken my own advice and not mentioned her.

Trafalgar

No, I seriously thought it was on October the 23rd, turns out I am two days adrift. D'oh! Oh well, Saturday in that case, was the 201st anniversary of Nelson's legendary battle. Top hole. Sea battles are of the utmost importance to Britain, just ask Helen Mirren, she'll tell you. Helen Mirren has been both Queen Elizabeths now so I think she should just be slotted in as the real thing should the current Queen not make it to 150 as expected.

On the radio this morning I heard that Kazbekistan, home of Borat and who have been generally crying 'foul' over the way they are portrayed as a country of women hating incompetents by Sasha Baron Cohen, are just about to release a banknote on which the word for 'bank' is incorrectly spelt. Woe, woe and thrice woe.

I was quite disturbed to see that Condominium Rice took time out from her busy schedule last week to bizarrely announce that Kim Jong-Il of North Korea was lying when he said there would be no more nuclear tests. Well he might well be, but way to wind up an insane despot Condi, couldn't you just have kept it shut? What earthly good can it do to call him out on this. Sheesh.

And speaking of insane despots, Iran's very own Ah'm-mad-in-a-bad-jihad is trying to get women to have more babies in order to take over the west. Yeah, nice try idiot, not only do your own clerics advise against it, all you will do is water down the population so that they will be even more male and even more poor.
Firstly, I'd be surprised if Mad-bad-jihad didn't own a flat screen TV and a whole bunch of other western trash, secondly, I'm pretty sure that any nation that UPPED the percentage of women in the workforce rather than cut it, would increase productivity, general work-rate and all kinds of benefits.

Especially if Hewlett-Packard are anything to go by, their predominantly male top-dogs conduct business in strip clubs. So basically, they are all horribly worried that the other male top-dogs won't think them testosteroney enough, not enough to swing their dicks at each other, they need to be surrounded by women who let them think they are in control.
Imagine what could be achieved if women and gay men were in charge. For a kick-off, women wouldn't have to work in sleazy strip-clubs. And they wouldn't have to conduct business there either. Their minds would be on whatever the problem in hand was and not how insecure they feel about the size of their equipment.
Ah, such efficiency. The world would be our lobster.

And you know what I'm thinking? David Walliams could have played the Queen in the film of the same name. I mean, look at the pic at the top, can you even tell whether it's him or Helen Mirren?

Eye of Newt

Wild Things was a great success last night. And someone very powerful must read my blog because no sooner than I had complained about the lack of weather in these parts, than wonderful deep fog was supplied to make our fright night even more creepy.

Joanne was a fly and I was a spider and we were stationed on the pond platform that you can see in the picture. Over the course of the evening we developed a little routine, I had a web, I tried to trick her into my web and during the ensuing mayhem we discussed our respective eating habits, numbers of legs, eyes and other interesting details.

As it grew darker, we became more scary - we knew this because small children started to jump and squeal when they saw a huge spider emerge from the pumpkin lit corner. In spite of this, they started to ask for hugs. I had somehow developed a Transylvannian accent - possibly thanks to Igor earlier on in the week. The children couldn't see our faces, hands, feet, every part of us that wasn't costume was covered in black cloth or mesh. Yet still, one kid came straight up to Jo's fly and said,
'You're Griselda,' - Jo's witch in the Halloween Howl.

One little girl was scarier than us. She arrived with a bat drawn on her face and she told Jo that she liked flies but didn't like spiders.
'Are you scared of spiders?' asked Jo,
'I'm afraid of my dad,' she said,
'Oh,' said Jo, taken aback,
'I'm afraid of him all the time,' said the little girl with mum standing by watching placidly. Bat-face girl turned into a stalker, she kept coming back and threatening to kill me if I ate Jo. She became a bloody nuisance.

At one point while we were performing our little ad lib, it seemed as though someone had grabbed a floodlight and was pointing it straight at us. We could see less than when it was total darkness, but there seemed to be an unusually large crowd at this point so we kept on and on and on.
Later we were told that this had been the local news station. Gulp. Hope our ad lib hadn't gotten too bawdy but hey, there were kids present so most likely not.

A man shoved a little boy towards me.
'Go and make friends with the spider,' he told the boy, 'you need to be aware of your Scottish roots.' Well good thing that no-one had brought the brandy I'd been whining for all evening, because I was able to still access my memory banks and trawl up what he was talking about. My Transylvannian had to become Scots as I reminded the boy about Robert the Bruce, inspired by a wee spider. Dad seemed impressed,
'Not many people know about that,' he said, yeah they do, I thought, if they're English they certainly do. No matter, I don't think it was a five foot six tarantula that helped Robert the Bruce defeat the English though it could probably have been fairly useful.

Finally all the children had been scared, hugged and educated and we were able to get out of our costumes and head for a local hostelry.
Halloween is coming, Halloween is coming.