Hindhead and Hindpeople

Turns out my friend Nigel's campaign for getting an underpass at Hindhead is more than worthy. Sue and I were sat in the car with the two kids for about half an hour in the middle of the day on a weekday trying to get past Hindhead.
For those of you who don't know it, Hindhead is on the A3, the main London to Portsmouth road, I believe it used to be simply called the Portsmouth Road.

We were backed up as far as the Canadian Memorial Planting, quite a way back. Around the Devil's Punchbowl there was thick fog. That is a place of natural beauty that is well worth a visit if....you are the type of person who enjoys places of natural beauty. Today it looked like a steaming cauldron.

Sue told me about a Dickens book that featured a true story about a man who was robbed and killed on the then Portsmouth Road. The cutthroats were caught and hanged and there is supposed to be a plaque that marks the event and the gallows, but we have never seen it, so if anyone can pinpoint its whereabouts, don't be shy.

SO our purpose was similar to a trip my friend Sleepy made not so long ago to her great grandfather's grave, except I was visiting my parents. It was equally and equally surprisingly emotional. Although I have mentioned this before, my parents are buried in the same churchyard as Henry Morton Stanley, the explorer after whom Stanley Park and the Stanley Cup are named. I stayed awhile and then left to collect my son Laurence's belongings from my ex's house.

Quite an emotional day all in all. On the 'new things that have happened since I left' front though, there are now electronic road signs with sensors that can tell if you're approaching at a speed above the limit, if you do they flash the correct limit in bright red at you. Marvellous.

Peckham and Pompey

I had an enjoyable day yesterday in one of the dodgier parts of London, let's say not so far from Peckham and leave it at that shall we.
Alex and I did food shopping, food eating and post food relaxing. Perfick. I have a picture from Alex's room, but now that I am back to not being able to connect with my laptop, I can't load it.

I needed to get back so that I could look after Holly and Teddy this morning while Sue went out. I was greatly looking forward to this and equally greatly enjoyed it. They were both well-behaved and delightful but oh Lordy had I forgotten how utterly physically exhausting it is looking after a toddler and a baby.

You have to keep your eyes on both of them all the time. If one wants to go to the toilet you have to take them both, which will by necessity involve carrying one, but may involve carrying both. While you wipe one bottom, someone else's foot goes in the cats water bowl.

You cannot get out of your seat in a leisurely fashion, you have to leap like a panther everytime, as there is inevitably something about to occur that involves imminent death or disfigurement.

Don't be led astray by one of them claiming to know where something is, it may be an excuse to go into their parents' bedroom and apply Bonjela (mouth gel) to their eye.

No book can be read out loud just once, but rather three or four times, often with appropriate voices for the characters. Avoid Thomas the Tank Engine, because you have to do Ringo Star's voice doing someone else's, you're never drunk enough for that while kids are awake.

When I'm in Canada I feel free to whinge and moan about things that annoy me, but when I'm here, I feel obliged to talk it up. This was mostly fine at my sister's, since my nephew is determined to spend some, oh alright, quite a lot, of his mother's money doing a ski-instructor course at Whistler. But I came unstuck once.

When we were having lunch with my sister's friend, the one whose own sister had just returned from Vancouver, I made the mistake of asking how the children were settling into school here.
'Well, U. was surprised at the number of special needs pupils in M's class,' she said.
'Oh, that surprises me too, mostly over here we have actual school and separate classes for those kids, whereas in BC they're all in together, although I know that U's kids were in a private school, so maybe it just seems a lot because she wouldn't be used to having any in the class,'
'That's what U thought. Then she discovered that the reason there were so many special needs pupils in M's class was that M was actually in the special needs class here.'
'Ah.'

Oops.

London bound

This will be quick, it's almost six thirty and Amanda and I are leaving at seven thirty to go up to town.
Yesterday we met up with my sister's best friend from school, whose own sister was living in Vancouver until this summer, but it was nice to see Thea again and we had lunch in a little pub.
My sister took me to see the village where our friends Beth and Dave used to live, who now live in Vancouver. That is worth a second look sometime, very quaint and English villagey indeed.

Today I'll meet up with Alex and we'll do some Londony stuff, although since she has some actual uni work to do, not too much, then back to Pompey. I'm posting while I still have the wonderful wireless connection here.

The weather still causes havoc in the Lower Mainland BC, not to mention Seattle I understand, but here, where I was promised biting wind from Siberia, can't even wear a jacket still.

Toodle pip. Must get my stuff together.

Beds and Nosh

I guarantee you that Liz Hurley is trying to buy Battersea Power Station. How do I know this?
My sister told me about a recent article in their local rag that started with a full page picture of Liz Hurley wearing red leather, progressed to a detailed description of a local almost million pound house that was for sale, and ended with the presumption that Liz had almost bought said house, based on the sighting of a helicopter hovering over it.
Well just before my train reached Waterloo, I saw a helicopter hovering over Battersea Power Station, so....

Beds. When I moved over to Canada, or in fact sometime before that, we needed to buy a bed, we'd had a futon, a good one, but it was getting a bit past its sell-by date.
We started out by looking in some well-known bed shops, this was before I had surrendered to the inevitable and seductive truth that Ikea is all anyone needs in the way of home furnishings.
Now the divan set seemed to be the way to go in many of these shops, but I prefer a slatted base. I asked. They showed me several in fact - all of which then had a complete divan set perched on top of them. I'm serious. Slats, then divan base, then mattress. Bizarre beyond compare. Before I went into sarcasm overdrive, Kevin ushered me out of the store and round the corner to a Danish furniture store where we found our ideal bedframe. Sorted.

When travelling of course, you get to sleep in many bed situations. I am very fond of the low-down to the floor kind of bed, and I seriously dislike the higher style of bed. One bed I look forward to is at Austen and Sue's, they have a more traditional style of futon for guests, very plain, basic, wooden slats and not too thick a futon. And I love it.

Nosh. Before I left, someone said to me,
'Oh, I think the food's better over there.' I was quite taken aback. I've thought for a long time that Canadian food is good, both home-cooked and restaurant, well apart from the Chinese and Indian which are miles better over here. And the idea that British food is good...that's a new one.
Except that I had to readily admit that we can get bloody good ready meals from Sainsburys, Waitrose and M&S, often as good as restaurant food. And Austen and my sister are both really good cooks.
So I guess it's just me then, the last remaining Brit flying the flag of inept cuisine.

Naughty Lambs.

The weather in Pompey continues to be balmy, the snow keeps falling in Richmond, darn it. I say that, but I know there'll be deaths because in spite of the fact it has actually snowed before, no-one ever modifies their behaviour.

Outside of Austen and Sue's living room is a short flight of stairs to the bedrooms. The bottom step is the 'naughty step' where Holly is sent to sit for a couple of minutes time-out if she is naughty, which isn't that often. She does however like to practise dealing with naughty children, and she has two cuddly lambs that frequently get sent to sit on the naughty step. No other animals get sent there, just the lambs. I CANNOT help wondering if this is something she gets from church, where every Sunday she must hear,
'Oh lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world....'maybe she send them there in case she is naughty herself.

This morning we took Teddy to the Health Centre to get him weighed, checked, normalised. Seems he is fairly normal. Apparently boys' laziness extends even to their eating habits, and Teddy is to be given food that he has to chew more from now on.
The Health Centre was of course in general full of the unhealthy, honestly, and uncharitably, some of those people looked as though they'd been unhealthy since birth.
It has made me wonder how the system works in Britain. In Canada we have a swipe card called a Care Card, and wherever you go, they just...swipe it and they have your details on the system. In Britain you just walk in.
On Saturday I had to take Ben to get new specs. Because he's under 18 a large percentage of the cost is paid for by the National Health, but there was no check whatsoever that he was entitled to NHS treatment. I suppose there would be no reason to question someone with a bog standard English accent, but surely that can't be it, the staff listening to your accent. I've never questioned this before.

It has taken me a couple of days not just to get over the jetlag, but also to get back into things. For example, when I left Britain I had to change my phone from a contract phone to pay-as-you go. Unlike most young people in the UK, I'd never dealt with pay-as-you-go before.
I had to remember to charge the phone up before I left Canada. I then had to work out how to top it up with credit. I was happier giving Ben my credit card and phone and asking him to do it for me, but realised that was too wussy for words, so made myself find out what to do.

So now I'm off to Siberia. I phoned my sister last night to tell her what time I'd be there. If you look at a map of England it looks like it should take about an hour and a half to get to Norwich, but I have to get four different trains and it'll take me four and a half hours, though I do love the trains. As you get further from the soft south the trains in general get more cruddy. My sister assures me it's cold in Norfolk, they literally do get winds from the Urals. I wonder if she can draw down some snow for me.

Lagging

I'm lagging, I'm flagging, never had jetlag this bad before. I'm also missing snow back in Richmond BC, my most favourite weather condition of all.

However, in ample and over-compensation I had the most rip-roaring time at Sleepy's last night. The troops were summoned, drink was flowing, as ever chez Sleepy, very freely. It was the best of times with the best of people, warm, funny, welcoming, and had Tom Cruise's lawyers had any way of listening in, we'd be in a lot of trouble now. But they don't, so we're not.

Crisp-e and 'Chelle dropped me at the end of Albert Road so I was able to wander down the road that never sleeps, enjoying the noise and busy-ness.

In contrast to the snow that I begrudge them back in Richmond, it's too bloody warm for me here at the moment, I have had to go out without my jacket in order to tolerate the temperature. Ah the sunny south, well, apart from the sunny bit, although she did put her hat on and come out at some point today.

Alex and Ben have been here for the weekend, but they have now gone back to their various colleges/unis. I will miss them but I'm off to Norwich to see my sister tomorrow anyway.

Ghosts outside the machine

Three hours on the tarmac at Vancouver Airport while they fixed the toilets. Methinks they should have discovered this before they boarded all the passengers, but hey, what do I know.

The three hours was made slightly less tedious by virtue of being sat next to an editor of the driving section of the Province newspaper. He was an ex-pat and before he left Britain in the 70s he toured in some capacity with Pink Floyd and Judas Priest.
Naturally I asked him the burning question,
'How, when and why did it happen that David Bowie (as in bow-wow) is sometimes called Bowie (as in bow-tie)?
Well, it seems that when he made it big in the States people there started pronouncing his name like American hero Jim Bowie, designer of the knife, so David had to turn a deaf ear.

I was beginning to think we might not get off the tarmac, but we did, and I slept for most of the way.

London was sweaty, just sweaty, but I love the ease of getting around by tube, by train, by bus, so I had to put up with it. And in retrospect, since I was so late, I didn't even need to go into London.

Austen and Sue no longer have wireless, but I opened the notebook hopefully anyway. It's so weird, you can see all the networks that overlap your space. As you move around the house the networks change.
All of these unseen presences that are in our lives just waiting for us to tap into them. They move around too, like ghosts. Just sitting here different ones keep coming in and dropping out.

And like ghosts, you get to know your own, back home I know the names of the networks that creep into our house and here the same thing is true. Bob came and went.

Giving Thanks

Happy Turkey day to my American friends.

Today's Guardian reminds us that 43 years ago today, not just the USA but the world was mourning the untimely death of President Kennedy. What really surprised me was how good the writing about it in the Guardian was, succinct, informative, objective. When I followed the link to the archived article, I was expecting a more flowery style of writing so I was very pleasantly surprised.

"The torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans," said Kennedy. Hmmm. Well, I was a big fan of Bill Clinton and I certainly think of him as one of the new generation of Americans.
Since Kennedy's death we have seen big steps forward, although almost entirely to do with pressure from the groups themselves, for the Gay Community, for the non-white communities and to some extent for women. I know that's a big statement and maybe you could argue that the rights of all of those groups have slipped back as much as they have advanced, but I believe we have more than we did in 1963.

More but not enough. The World Economic Forum's 'Gender Gap Report' does not make pretty reading in 2006.
Taking four quite substantial criteria for assessing ranking, Britain comes ninth, Canada is 14th and the USA is number 22 after Moldavia, Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania and Columbia.

So that leads us to a little bit of politics does it not? Clearly the majority of people in the US are better off than the majority in say, Croatia. What the report is saying is that the wealth and power are spread more equally in Croatia than in the States.

I remember peddling my socialism to a friend who had slightly right-wing tendencies. His argument was that it was better to have some people having two things and some having one, than having everyone have one thing. This didn't make any sense to me since I felt that however you divvied up the wealth, it was the same to begin with, so giving some people more than others didn't work if you started from a position of having enough for one each. It must inevitably mean that the price of giving some two was that some had none. Simple.

The conservative argument of course is not that simple, because they feel that by encouraging everyone to want more, they will create more, which I still don't get because money stands for something real, something that occupies space and thus it cannot be created, simply redistributed.

So in this case, the case of gender inequality, which is better, for a nation to have more but to distribute it so that the majority is in the hands of one gender? Or to have less but to have it owned equally.

Well, here's the thing. Above the UK in the Gender Gap table, which you can load up if you go to the link, are all the Scandinavian countries, none of which are poor. And standing at number two is Norway. Norway is a country that aggravates the hell out of the EU because it has lots and lots of money since it is oil rich, and yet it will not join the EU. But within the country itself, it has gobsmackingly progressive social policies.
At number five is Germany, a country whose population is not hugely bigger than that of Britain and yet whose industrial output is second only to the United States.

At the bottom of the table are the oil rich Arab countries. That's all I'm going to say.

We have a lot to give thanks for in the West. But we still have one hell of a long way to go.

Like me in fact, I have 8,000 kilometres to travel today. And believe you me, if I could walk them instead of fly them, I would.

Guns, Roses and Buddha's Belly

Where do we get the expression 'Buddha Belly' from? I ask because I have been thinking about Buddha, though not in a spiritual or any way a religious sense, I have been thinking about his fat belly.

So I googled, or u-google-ised (I dunno, Zoolander just wandered into my head at that point)Buddha and Wikipedia reminded me of something, there's not just one Buddha. But it also gave me a picture of the sort of statue you see in Temples here and lo - no Buddha Belly. Hmmm.

Ok, this is why I am obsessing today about some guy's belly fat. On the radio I heard two interesting snippets. One was that the new Guns'n'Roses album is ready to be released and cost $13 million to produce. That seems a lot. Radio guy, DJ, said he had 'heard it was a wall of guitars, gone are the synths.' Hmm...you can buy a lot of Gibsons for 13 mill. And the album is called 'Chinese Democracy'.

The second thing was that some Canadian Health study had shown that people in South Richmond were among the fattest in the Lower Mainland, and yet people in North Richmond were the slimmest. Well, Kev and I live in North Richmond and whilst we're not Dan and Roseanne, we're not underweight either. Aside from that however, it didn't exactly defy comprehension. The south of the city is where a lot of Europeans live, and the North is where a lot of Chinese people live.
We are told that members of the Chinese community are now experiencing obesity, by their own standards of physiology, it's just that you wouldn't be able to tell by looking.

SO back to my question, where oh where did we get this idea of the little fat guy with a huge round tum? Probably some kind of status thing.

It seems that South Africa has now legalised same-sex marriage. That makes it sound like something exciting and secretive that people have been doing down back alleys for years. Yeah, well, good for them.
It is not without problems though. Firstly, being gay is considered a 'white disease' although clearly one that can leap happily across racial boundaries. I don't believe 'being on the down-low' originated in the white community.
But it could just end up bringing the end to some repressive, degrading and outmoded institutions, the offering of a dowry for example. This is referred to as 'destabilising tradition' but the words themselves are emotive. I don't remember anyone referring to Apartheid as 'tradition' because if they had, then destabilising it would have been a damn good thing to do with it.

In Save-On today, the Christmas chocs display is up and in there are.....Terry's chocolate snowballs, mintballs (chuffed to them) and Terry's orange slices. Pukka.

In 24 hours I'll be on my way to the airport.

Dashing

...but not through the snow. Plenty of rain still though. Today I'm not being a Grinch about Christmas, oh no, the Nature Park, playing its part in the Greater Vancouver 'Festival of Light', is being transformed. Of course to a certain extent it gets in the way. At the pond platform today I had to stop talking about frogs and bugs so that parents could take pictures of all the kids poking their faces through a Christmas cut-out, something Santaracious.

Sometimes I wonder what I sound like when I'm not sounding like the Queen.
'What's the name of the bug that gives off a strange smell when it senses danger?' I asked,
'A police car,' answered a little boy. Ah well.

On a Monday night I go to Writers' group. We meet at different houses every week. When I first started going this forced me to drive across the bridges into Vancouver and that's how I started to get to know it in my head.
Recently, my friend Yvonne has been doing the driving, that was particularly useful when I was unable to drive for a while there. Yvonne knows Vancouver way better than I do, so being her passenger I learned more about it, then the driving lessons.

Last night, with Yvonne away, I had to find my way on my own again, and I realised that I do feel I now know the area. I didn't have to have my google map, ok, I had been to this friend's house before, but I was able to think about which way I would go, try out some new roads. Vancouver and me, we know each other better now.

We refer to our group as 'dashers'. Some of the members write short stories, some have ongoing stories. I love these, look forward to them, all different kinds of story and damn there's some good writing.
Sometimes people try out something else instead of just continuing with their story, then we get annoyed with them, well, ok, I do.
One of the writers, from time to time, writes stories for very small children. Those stories are luminous, they are imaginative, full of colour and beautiful images and skillful use of words.
I see a lot of children's books and stories, and even the best of them are banal in comparison and yet this friend's stories have not yet been published, come close, but not in the end taken up. Yet. It quite literally angers me that I cannot go out and buy these books and read them to my granddaughter. From the stories alone I can imagine the illustrations.

My lists my endless lists are ruling me at the moment. I will be dashing around until I am finally becalmed like a battered little ship, in the departures lounge at Vancouver airport on Thursday.

So I've just dashed this off.

Sweet and Sour

It's the 20th of November today, ten days until Saint Andrew's day, which in itself is 25 days before Christmas.
Well after going into town this morning to do some shopping, I am fed up with Christmas. Every single shop has sickly sweet Christmas music already. Outside of Shoppers' Drug Mart a jaded Santa wearing sunglasses is standing ringing a bell and collecting money for the Sally Army. How annoying, you can't go in or out without passing him, and that'll go on throughout December. Ho, Ho, ARGH.

Yesterday we went for an Indian meal with some friends, we are trying to find somewhere up to the standards of the Goa in Southsea. Fat chance, but this was cheap and cheerful. They also had sweets. I have noticed that a lot of Indian Restaurants here claim to be something plus sweets, whereas I've never seen much more than odd flavoured ice-cream as pudding in Britain.
Well, the sweets seemed to be made out of playdough and so brightly coloured you can become hyperactive just from looking at them.

As we stepped outside, a police car was chasing another car down a side street. Then another police car, then another, eventually we counted ten police vehicles all involved. It seemed exciting until someone pointed out that if the police were investing ten cars in this chase you can bet there were going to be guns involved at some point. We scuttled off in the opposite direction.

I had an appointment this morning with a lady at the Employment Centre. She wanted to look at my CV. It was all wrong. She didn't like that I had my name at the top of it. ?? Under 'Qualifications' I had in fact put...my qualifications. Wrong! I should have put what my skills were. She crossed bits out and scribbled things in. She didn't like the font I used, it was too clear. Hmmmm. I'm not sure that she got irony, but she seemed like a nice lady. She told me, I thought quite rudely, that I could do this because I was a teacher. Of course, I thought, being a teacher I can split atoms and perform brain surgery, and if I have to walk on water to get there, so be it. I told my inner sarco to shut up, I really don't think it was her intention to be rude. Then she chatted to me in a sociable way. It was odd, like finding bacon in the middle of a chocolate bar.

I leave for England on Thursday. Already and for a couple of days now, I have had this Donnie Darko thing going on. Like that watery tube that Donnie could see coming out of people ahead of them, connecting them to their futures. It's like I'm here, but I'm already connected to the future.
Partly that's because I've placed an order with Sainsburys online that will be delivered to Austen and Sue's ahead of my arrival and another one with Amazon. This is going to be a whirlwind tour, I have at least the first week planned out.
I'm greatly looking forward to seeing everyone, I'm just not looking forward to the travelling.

Frosting

The recent heavy rain has fallen as snow on the mountains and suddenly I am aware of them again. They look so beautiful with their snowy frosting. Or at least they did yesterday, today they are hidden behind thick raincloud.

We were surprised to find out through national news reports, how bad things are in British Columbia. Easy for me to say, living in sunny Richmond, we get 30% less rain even than Vancouver, just across the bridge. Parts of BC have suffered loss of power and contamination of water supplies since the heavy rains of last Wednesday and more expected today.

Meanwhile, the show must go on and today is Grey Cup day. This is the final of the Canadian Football season. I'm not quite sure how many teams are involved in the CFL, there certainly seem to be a limited number of Canadian hockey teams in the NHL so I would expect even fewer Canadian Football teams. Yeah well, I won't persist, having been told off about writing about football, I get Canadian Football even less.
I will just mention however that Canada played Wales at rugby the other day, Austen told me this. I feel this shows true grit on the part of the Canadians, like David and Goliath. Unlike D&G though, no, not Dolce and Gabbana, in this case the giant won. Wales would probably have had to go into mourning otherwise.

I'm pretty pissed off with the British Press in general right now for misreporting the interview between Tony and old hack David Frost. Gordon Bennett, Frost must be about 110 by now, why does he refuse to die?
However, the BBC reportage starts as badly as any but at least then goes on to correct itself, which I'm pleased about since they are in my good books for providing so many good proggies for me to watch on BBC Canada.

One Frosting nobody needs.

Balance

At some point in the past, someone, somewhere said to me on the subject of volunteering, that it was good to give something back to the community. I went mental. Well, in a British sort of way which mainly consists of kicking the sarcasm up a notch and wondered what the hell the community had ever given to me. Sweet Fanny Adams is the answer. I'm still giving and the community is still withholding. Kinda lacks balance somehow.

Imagine then, the lack of balance for the poor bloke who has just been released from gaol in Pakistan where he has been incarcerated for 18 years for a crime he didn't commit. British citizen.
In the article it says,
'He paid a terrible price for something he didn't do.' Well that doesn't really work, he didn't pay a price, he was robbed.
Eighteen years. The entire length of my daughter's life. How do you ever square away the injustice of that? If the crime he didn't commit had not been committed in Britain, he'd have been out three years earlier too.

And then, how do the logistics work? I mean, you're chucked out of prison, there you are, no money, a British passport only lasts ten years, well except mine which is for eleven but nevermind.
In Trailer Park Boys, every time Ricky and Julian get released from prison, Bubbles illegally drives down to collect them in an old wreck of a car and that's that. So how does someone get from standing outside a prison in Pakistan to stepping off the 'plane at Heathrow, how does that work?

A Finnish study has given us some more insights into Balance. Apparently within a relationship it is better for your own health to give than to receive, especially if you are a woman, although the researchers point out that men still gain from being supportive in a relationship.
The interesting thing about the study I felt, was that it was based on people's perceptions about how supportive they were.

I think perception is part of the answer. I am very happy giving my time at the Nature Park until some jackass tries to make it into something it isn't. I get a great deal from the place itself and from the people I work with, but I don't think of them as the community.
The man who has been robbed of 18 years of his own life is probably better off than someone who has actually killed an innocent person for no reason and he is certainly glad to be back with his family and friends in Britain.

Maybe the balance we seek is about our life as a whole rather than as part of a community.
I know, that sounds a bit Aristotelian, the Golden Mean, but then why not? The only difference that I would contend is one of judgement. Aristotle would have us judged by others, but for most of us - well we are our own sternest critics.

Chocolate, Orange

Mandarins are the small orange of choice here, I guess that makes sense, mandarins would seem to come from China and we are much closer to China than we are to Spain.
In the period that leads up to Christmas in the UK though, we are seduced by the Satsuma and the Clementine.
Of course I have been trying to work out whether there is in fact any difference between the Mandarin and the Satsuma and maybe the Sat has that slightly thicker skin that almost peels itself, but I can't be sure. Superstore have kindly given me a free box of Mandarins though, so I have plenty of purely scientific consumer research ahead of me.

Chocolate on t'other hand, I have been researching assiduously since I got here. And I am not so unhappy with the provision anymore. We can buy plenty of Côte d'Or and Lindt choccie at reasonable prices, and Superstore, whose task it is to please moi, have recently been trying their hand at their own 'President's Choice' brand. And I must say they are doing quite well. The pretend Ferrero Rocher got a thumbs down, but the ersatz Toblerone is not bad at all, likewise their fruit and nut. All good. Yesterday, just for my delectation (why else?) they had 1 Kilo bars of Cadbury's Dairy Milk IMPORTED. Yes, there is a difference, quite seriously there is a difference in taste between the Cadbury's they make in Toronto and the Cadbury's they make at...well.... Cadbury's.

Put the two together and of course you get a Terry's Chocolate Orange. Now I feel that the TCO follows the same rule as Sleepy's thoughts on brollies. Somehow you never actually buy them, but at times of celebration there are always plenty around, and in the lead up to Christmas you are almost swimming in them. And Terry's of York do make exceedingly good chocolate. Rather like Mr. Kipling and his cakes.
We do have TCO's here, though I haven't yet done the necessary research on them, but in the interests of science, I will.
I haven't yet seen any but the milk chocolate ones, nor have I seen the bars, but I'm sure they must be around somewhere ...... just a question of finding where Kevin has hidden them...
Just kidding,
'They're not Terry's, they're mine.' Ah yes, I think Dawn French already said that.

Stiltskin

I am an inveterate weeder, everyone knows this about me. It helped enormously when it came to moving across the Atlantic because I had to weed everything I own down to just a few boxes of books and a suitcase full of clothes. Whenever I have perpetrated a crime against clutter my friend Ree will say to me,
'Oh I wish you'd come and sort out my stuff,' but she wouldn't really, because I would do it, I'd go and sort anyone's clutter, but no-one really wants that to happen. It makes Kevin nervous and I can understand that even though I've never thrown out or recycled anything without showing it to him first.

Now this character flaw of mine should be compatible with the music system we have in this house. All of our music is on a central server and there is a kind of terminal in each room that we play it from. All I have to do is browse the database and find the artist or album or track that I want to hear. Very slick. The system is called Slim Server and the terminal is called Squeezebox and Kevin writes some of the code for it.

In the morning, we are awoken by Squeezebox which selects random tracks and turns on at the time set. I think I'm correct in saying that Kevin wrote the alarm function. I am always already awake when the alarm goes off, I preempt it, if the alarm goes off at 7.30 I will be awake by 7.28, I don't know how that works, but it works.

So what's the problem? Well, Kevin and I have creative differences, different approaches to the music system database. I don't know if I mentioned this, but I like to weed. I would just have music on there that we like, and by we I mean me really.
Now in the first place, Kevin has far wider tastes in music than I and I mean far wider. But as well as that, he has a sort of music library thing going on. He likes, within reason, the idea of anyone being able to browse our music collection and I can certainly respect that ideal. Obviously there are limits to his tolerance. No-one wants BS on their music database.

Somehow, Stiltskin has escaped our system. Yes, Stiltskin. And so I know for sure that I wasn't woken by them this morning and yet inexplicably, as I lay in bed, one of the tracks from their album 'Inside' was running through my head. It has haunted me all morning, it won't bloody well go away.

Stiltskin were an Edinburgh band who had a number one single at some point in the 90's with a track that was the background to a Levis (I think, memory faltering, so please correct me) ad. It was an amazing track and an amazing album. And that was that - until now. They are either about to release or have just released a new single. But I had to Google them to find that out, so that doesn't explain why 'Illusion' is in my head suddenly. And where is my Stiltskin album? What happened to it, it would have escaped even my weeding, although maybe not the outside weeding, where one of my kids comes along and says,
'Oh, can I borrow this?' where 'borrow' = half inch.

Oh well. The answer will come to me no doubt, unlike the album.
And the pic, well I just 'borrowed' it from some bloke's Flickr site.

Brolly

Brollies are wonderful symbolic and poetic images of rain, but what the hell are they for in reality?

We were awoken early by rain being blown hard against the window panes, so I was raring to get out there for my walk to the Nature Park. But then the brollies, people wearing hoods, using their brollies to ...what? Protect their raincoats? People doing battle with the wind, fighting to keep their brollies from blowing inside out. Small people now transformed into wide vehicles, taking up the whole pavement, unable to see. They'd poke your eye out as soon as look at you.
Bloody things.

At the Nature Park, uncertainty over whether we would be able to take children out on the trails for fear of falling branches. But we did. The wind had been blowing all night, most of the leaves had now fallen from the trees and anything that was coming down had long since done so. But the frogs didn't pop their heads out to see us, we found spiders but no webs. I found one, single, tiny, forgotten millipede, deep down below a log, buried beneath the decomposing leaves.

At the end of the programme we lost power. On the main roads, the traffic lights were out, so endless beeping of car horns as drivers disagreed with other drivers' decisions about whose turn it was to move forward. We cancelled the afternoon session, but the teacher was about to cancel anyway, one mum with an SUV, presumably the real point of which is to be able to drive in these conditions, was refusing to drive. Schade.

The Queen and I

Yesterday the Province of BC had a Bank Holiday for Remembrance Day and so all of the elderly ladies in our area, plus Kevin and myself, went to Silver City mid-afternoon to see the film 'The Queen'. Wow. What an amazing film. Not only did it achieve what Hollywood rarely does, in that both the Queen and Tony Blair were presented in a sympathetic light in spite of it being about a tension between them, but it captured so much of the Zeitgeist of that time that it had me crying for most of the way through. I could happily sit through it all over again and I'm heartily glad that we went to see it on the big screen.

So today, Kevin has the day off and I am not going into the Nature Park. One year ago today, friends and family around the world, well, OK, UK and the States, watched us being married by a lovely Jewish lady in our dining room. How's that for Zeitgeist?
By the end of that day, Sleepy had sent me pictures of her, Crisp-e, Eilie and Barbara all sitting on the sofa watching us on their TV. Brilliant. Barbara had brought flowers for the occasion. I think they had all been toasting us long before we were actually married.
We included those pictures in our immigration application.

My son Austen had written a speech which was to be read out in an English accent and no, he didn't expect me to read it out myself, he knew our friend Steve, who is an actor, would be there. It was also wonderful that he was able to read out e-mails from my friends Dawn and Ree in the States. It's amazing what you can put together in a few days.

Our friend Shaniah, the very same Shaniah from whom Ms. Twain stole her name - a fact acknowledged on her biopic - scheduled her meetings so that she was able to stop in Vancouver long enough to be with us for the afternoon and evening.

I like the system here of having a marriage commissioner whom you can select and get in touch with and will come to your house. She was brilliant, held our hands so to speak, made suggestions and was positive about everything.
We were able to choose the timing so that family and friends in the UK would still be awake, but in the States they'd be home from work, also to tie in with Steve's committments and Shaniah's.

So, here we are, a year on and going strong.
More glasses to raise, bottoms up.

Twitching

Like my friend Sleepy, we have been out twitching. In fact, at the bird sanctuary we went to with friends from the Nature Park, they even had blinds that you could go into and peer out at the birdies. The place itself was amazing enough, you could hike round trails for hours if you wanted, and it is always brilliant to go on any kind of nature walk with Lori and Jo because they simply know so much. But my friends Beth and Dave, who were also with us, are real value added because they know about both British and North American natural history, so they can not only tell you what the things we're seeing are, but they can also say,
'...and we call it a ... in Europe,' or, '....and that's related to a ....'Dave also reputedly looks like Harry Potter only without the specs, so to counteract that, he's had all his hair shaved ...well, nearly off.

In a tree in the lane leading down to the sanctuary, called ironically, Reifel, we saw a horned owl. I do have a picture of it, but the foliage of the tree is so close and dark that you can hardly see the owl. These are amazing creatures, they just sit up there, so still and look at you.

The most spectacular birds at the moment, because you can see them flying in the south of Richmond, are the snow geese, sadly the biggest flocks of them were seen from the car, so I only have quite a lame picture of a small number.

Excuses, excuses.

The birds who were most up for being photographed were the wide variety of ducks. There were signs up telling you not to chase them, but the truth was, they chased us. Mostly in a friendly way, except when they tried to take out Harry, er I mean Dave.

Enough! In the evening, Kevin and I watched one of last Monday's film picks, Juon 2. The video rental place were heavily pushing this, presumably since the Grudge 2 is due out soon. We enjoyed it. We always find it interesting to watch the foreign language films because it shows you some of the culture of the place in an incidental way.
I think from reputation I was expecting the film to be creepier, but it was good, I liked the method of overlapping the stories of some of the characters. I found the acting style at times of great tension to be somewhat melodramatic, but not to the extent that it interfered with belief.

Lying in bed at night, we had one of those surreal conversations about whether Colin and Justin would ever tackle Japan and whether it would have any impact on haunted houses. I tended to think it might, Kevin felt that maybe the houses might tackle Colin and Justin.

Rita

Ah....our old friend, Rita Verdonk, she of the deliciously cheeky Dutch name, is up to her old tricks, God bless you Ms. Verdonk. For the sake of controlling an estimated 50 people out of the one million Muslims in Holland, Ms. Verdonk risks pissing off the international community.
Now on the one hand, I can totally see the whole disguise aspect. It seems way too easy to put on this full body armour that is the burka and hide a multitude of sins. Hell, even Muslim Pakistan has now banned women lawyers from wearing them and the veil within the courthouse since they had been playing fast and loose and swapping about at their whim while representing clients.
So what am I suggesting? I dunno, I have no answers, just that Rita seems about as subtle as her name. Slam Verdonk.

Still in the Netherlands, surely only Mike Meyers could make this up,

"Religious tensions have been heightened by the murder of film director Theo van Gogh by a Dutch-Moroccan militant in 2004, and by the dramatic rise of Pim Fortuyn, an anti-immigration and anti-Muslim gay politician who was assassinated by an animal rights activist days before national elections in 2002."

Or maybe....you couldn't make this stuff up.

Nor this. The F-Word reports on a new phenomenon that you might think only happens in Iran, well in Iran as we have seen before you can be hanged for reporting rape, but in Britain you can still end up with a criminal record.
In the case that Jess McCabe refers to here, a woman who had never had sex with a man, was raped by one who told her she was gagging for it, the police determined that she had had intercourse and that there was bruising on her breasts and neck. The rapist walked free and she has been charged with perverting the course of justice, ie lying. Bear in mind that they had proved she had been entered but until that point, in spite of having a full sex life with her partner, she had NEVER had sexual intercourse with a man. I was beyond outraged by this story. It is already difficult enough to get women to report rape, even more difficult to secure a conviction. Women who have gone through the courts have reported the process of taking a man to court as being like going through the rape all over again and then the state rapes them a third time.

I can make no comment on this but one big WHY???

Nachtmusik

When the rain comes here, the sky turns so grey it feels like continual twilight. In Britain it seems more as though someone adjusts the colour settings on the TV and the blue fades to grey. Here the cloud cover is like a stack of thick duvets, all of them Tog 15. It's pretty funky actually.

On TV there is currently an ad for an X-Box game with the background music of Gary Jules' version of Tears for Fears' 'Mad World', the version he did for Donnie Darko. It seems an odd and yet strangely appropriate choice. And it sends me back to my last winter at Mayhem. By summer things were beginning to get sorted out and I knew I was coming here, we'd made the decision.
My journeys to and from school were accompanied by Greenday, Snow Patrol (Final Straw) and Queens of the Stone Age, but in the winter, when things were far from clear, I cycled down dark streets, past houses lit-up for the evening, past chimneys that breathed smoke when they shouldn't, past the cemetery that called to me, past chippies and pubs and churches and big little Tesco, across the park and past the Students' Union and Gary Jules sang to me. On my mp3 player I had Linkin Park, Evanescence, Nickelback, Staind, a single Beth Orton track - Central Reservation.
Eine kleine Nachtmusik.

When I think about this, now, I can hear someone else's voice in my head. Hearing voices? Maybe, but I am hooked on 'Dexter'. I've mentioned this show before, but now when I am aware of my own voice, sometimes I hear his, the soft, low voicing of thoughts which separates him from what he thinks of as 'normal' people. Dexter is a police forensics expert who kills other killers and who is locked into a psychological game of chess with one of them.

Not that I'm turning into a serial killer or anything, but I am eating too many chillies. I've realised that some days, the only meal I eat with no chillies is breakfast, I don't yet crave them with my porridge. This has no consequence until I do something stupid, ignore the rules of sensible cuisine. I made a wonderful stir fry flavoured with coriander, - I love the smell of that so much I could roll in it - ginger and fresh chillies. I put in tofu, too much tofu. Kevin has explained to me before about avoiding the stomach problems normally associated with beans by combining them with rice for example, something to complete the amino acid chain. Did I do as he had warned ? No. Did I suffer ? Oh dear, dear Lord yes. I will draw a line under that episode. Too much detail can be bad.

But I will say one more thing. My interest has been piqued this week by reports of a huge storm on the planet Saturn. I love weather, I love planets, what better combination? But most of all I loved the final observation,

"Dr Baines said that storms could help scientists understand what goes on deeper in planets. "When you have storms they tend to dredge up materials from deep down below, and so if you want to see what's in the deep part of a planet then you can look in a storm system and see tracers of the material deep down." "

How interesting, and how very Saturnine.