Europa

Europa, in Ovid's 'Metamorphoses', sold to us as essential reading for anyone studying Renaissance French, was raped by Jupiter or Zeus disguised as a bull. In spite of this, someone saw fit to name a continent and one of Jupiter's moons after the poor woman. This story has really nothing going for it although Europa went on to have three lovely children, doesn't seem to have been too traumatised by it and married a Cretan. Ok, it was the King of Crete and he wasn't a Cretin. It was probably even a great honour to be raped by the chief god.

A rather sorry attempt at a lead-in with no particular sequitur to talking about some cool stuff going on in Europe right now. By cool read, 'stuff that might go on in the mind of someone who has been raped by a bull'.

Der Spiegel reported the day before yesterday, although I cannot now find the article to link it, that Prinz Henrik of Denmark, likes to eat dog. Why he would announce such a thing, let alone actually do it when there are so many other animals you can eat that don't necessarily sniff each others' bums is beyond me, but let's not judge. No let's, Prinz Henrik is apparently the president of the dachshund society, which the German newspaper found rather distasteful, but they were able to square it away by pointing out that Henrik was originally from France.

Yesterday in der Spiegel's video feed, we saw the longest bra in the world being put together for Breast Cancer awareness. It looked like quite a merry jape although everyone was taking it seriously. I imagine that no second hand store in the whole world any longer contains bras. The German for bra is Bustenhalter, or BH for short. Seems like a surprisingly appropriate word.

Dominique de Villepin, premier of France and with whom I have come to feel a certain kinship since he is daily tormented by a mad French person (Chirac), has refused to resign after allegations that he tried to damage his rival Sarkozy by telling lies about him. Well duh, like that was ever going to happen. I'm surprised it even made the news in France. Poor Dominique though, his hair is less perky these days, the stress is telling.

In Britain, a huge new study has revealed that British people are half as likely to suffer certain illnesses and indicators of poor health as their American counterparts. The researchers tried very hard to match living conditions, even race, financial resources, smoking and drinking habits. The scientists seem a little nonplussed by the data they have. They tentatively suggest it might be as a result of the 'footprint of childhood obesity' in which case, hold on to them horses, this is going to be a wild ride downhill for Brits.

And back to France, now that the French have done a study and concluded that male fertility also declines with age, and congenital risks increase, they are squawking about it and may start to believe similar British and American ones that have gone before and come to the same conclusions. The Guardian article does make some comments about this having implications for how women are perceived, and I certainly think those are worth noting.

Finally, far away from Europa, British Columbia's own bald eagles have made it to the pages of the Graun, but things are not looking too rosy, sadly, it seems as though whilst a watched kettle never boils, a watched eagle's nest may just not hatch at all. It's all gone a bit Pete Tong for the eagles, maybe we should turn the cams off.

Beltane

As I'm sure everyone is aware, the period that is roughly the 30th of April to the first of May is also Beltane. Lots of people think of Celtic practices as being very sexual,the Celts were very sexual people, but I think what lies behind that is the Celts' strong relationship with the Earth. Beltane is essentially a fire festival, a link was seen between fertility and fire. Possibly that might be a sexual connection. There is a cleansing that fire brings, just look at the examples of the forest fires we have here. Two summers ago they turned out to be deadly and many people lost their homes, but forest managers realise the need for controlled fires to clear out the forest floor, to enrich the soil. Fertility again.

There is also a testing aspect to fire. We talk about the assayer's fire, the fire that clears out impurities so that only that which is pure is left. I don't think we necessarily need fire to do this, but if we are to test ourselves, our beliefs, our strengths, then we need to subject ourselves to the same rigour, find something that peels away the excess layers, the baggage, the fat until all that is left is true.

That of course is what Descartes tried to do to find out what he could truly believe in. Anything of what he knew that could be doubted must be, and he found that almost everything he believed to be true could be doubted. Descartes, dead since 1650, continues to have his own work tested with the assayer's fire. The only thing that Descartes found he could not doubt was his own existence on some plane, because even if he were being deceived, in order to have mental processes, he must exist. When I was studying, there was a journal of Cartesian studies which appeared several times a year. Imagine if Decartes were still alive, would he be thoroughly pissed off that his ideas were still being challenged, or would he be immensely proud that his own method of scepticism is still causing debate? I think the latter.

One of the things I am finding about being outside of my own milieu is how much of what I believe in is constantly being assayed. But I think that was also true of being a teacher. I found the profession itself to be a process of constant testing, not simply by us but of us. And I think that out of that process comes strength and value.

I loved Descartes' work, I think his own education by Jesuits probably prepared him for the ideas and work he was to produce. But I love it also because it is like fire and like fire it has enriched the soil for so many other great thinkers.

Trial by fire, in its most literal sense, hardly something to be relished, but as a tool for personal growth, in the way that Descartes used it, one to be administered with honesty.

And the Celts, I think they knew what they were doing, fire giving rise to fertility not just of the body, but also of the mind and spirit. Not a Celtic myth, but an enduring one nonetheless, the phoenix rising from the ashes of a fire is a symbol that gives us hope.

Mayday

May the first, May Day, Bank Holiday in Britain, could be the whole of the UK for all I know. Not here though. Poo. I used to really like the May Day Bank Holiday because it was effectively the only one we got in education. All the others were hidden somewhere in our 'holidays'. Not May Day. That snook up on you and there you were with a four day week and a long weekend, meaning that you gained Sunday, a day normally spent in a blue funk.

It is excessively windy today, bright and sunny, but the trees in the Nature Park were leaning in towards one another and groaning. Three healthy-looking tomato plants that survived Saturday's cold rain have perished in today's wind, and cycling was almost impossible in places.

Yesterday though, we watched a LOT of TV. A new series that we have caught just a couple of episodes of, is 'Big Love' about a polygamous mormon family in Utah. Here lies insanity. The family has three houses joined together and the father, played by Bill Paxton, has three wives, one of whom he loves and actually wants to have sex with. His parents come to stay, but his father, played by Bruce Dern, has four wives. This bunch of people around the table at Easter is more nightmarish than anything that ever came from the mind of Stephen King. There is more tension than in Palestine, and all the younger wives keep trying to remind everyone that they must all get along and that it's Easter, yadayada, you know the drill. Paxton's character's brother secretly confesses that he loves his wife Wanda and doesn't want to take another wife,
'You're monogamous? asks Paxton, almost wincing.
To cope with all his obligations, Paxton's character has been taking four times the maximum dose of Viagra, several times a day, and he is having difficulty seeing and thinks he is having a heart attack.

Anthony Soprano junior is experiencing similar symptoms as the last series of 'the Sopranos' winds itself gracefully to an end, there must be maybe three episodes left. He passes out in a public toilet, like you do, and we wonder whether maybe he is experiencing the same anxiety attacks that introduced us to Tony and Dr. Melfi in the first series.
Vito is in self-imposed exile as a result of his homosexuality, and Tony, mellowed from the shooting, wondering where Vito might be, tells his Capos,
'Rear-ending, it's a victimless crime really.'
Anthony Junior has bizarrely swift growing hair in this episode, one moment short, next, on a boat with Tony, shoulder length again, then back to short. Convenient skill to have if you ask me.

Ali-G last night, got Pat Buchanan to admit that Iraq had used BLT's on its Kurds. He wasn't sure whether mustard was involved, so Ali-G assumed it must have just been the plain ones. Borat accompanied a candidate for election to the House of Representatives round on the Hustings. His face showed more pain that you would believe a human face could register when Borat informed a voter that the candidate had never, ever 'done it with a man, not even a man dressed as a woman.' I guess he can't lead the British liberal party then. The guy looked as though he had a mouth full of those really acid sweets that always take you by surprise. Borat told the voter that the man had huge, 'how you say, khrumm,' - testicles - and invites the voter to feel them for himself. The candidate thinks that isn't appropriate in the United States. Really? Hrmmmph, maybe one or two people need to be held by the short and curlies.

Speaking of whom, what greater nightmare could there be than to go out to dinner and to discover that there are not one but two George Bushes. Oivey, that'd make you call out 'mayday, mayday!!!!'

New Moon

It was amazing last night that I was able to see the moon, all day long it had rained and been cold, then early evening, it just cleared up and the sun came out in order to give us a truly magnificent sunset. I was pretty glad, I had put my quite healthy looking tomato plants outside and they immediately started looking a little peaky.

The eagles are overdue with their egg hatching now, the world waits with bated breath. Personally I think they're waiting until my friend Canadian Karen leaves for England, which she does this evening, so then the little eaglets can relax and come out, safe in the knowledge that she won't be after adopting them.

During the new moon monsoon yesterday afternoon, Kevin and I went out looking for a receiver for our television setup. I abandoned him and made for the shop's pretend living room where you could sit in a comfie swivel chair and watch 'Revenge of the Sith' on a high definition plasma screen TV. Hayden Christensen's acting wasn't any better in hi-def, and people didn't get any wiser. For example, why, when you live really high up in the air in a city where passing Jedi are likely to come into your front room and fight with light sabres, don't you have windows made of something more than regular glass? Likewise, haven't these people ever heard of the saying, 'Don't put all your younglings into one basket'? Then they look surprised when a passing Sith lord comes and kills them all. And if you are some kind of psychotic lizard with not very much protection for your internal organs, why would you only half enclose said organs so that any old Jedi can come along, open your metal ribs a bit further and then send a quick phaser shot in to finish you off? Doesn't matter how many light sabres you can hold at a time, that's gotta hurt pal.

Why, I wonder, does John Prescott feel bad that the country knows he had an affair. No-one cares, it's between you and Mrs. P if there is one John. The whole point is that unlike when we had a Tory government, the Labour Party hasn't spent twelve years droning on about 'family values' and then being continually caught with its trousers down. So you had sex in your office and various other places. Duh, having sex is what people do when they have an affair, like I said, twixt you and the missus, not the country.

Jenny Colgan, in the Guardian this week, is sourly amused by the idea that FHM magazine had voted Keira Knightley as the 'sexiest woman in the world'. In fact, I was made aware of this earlier by the sound of a huge guffaw from Kevin who was equally unenthused at this choice. Colgan describes Knightley as "Beautiful of face, Keira Knightley has the body of a hungry nine-year-old boy." Kevin was even less complimentary, his comment was,
'Keira Knightley and sexy, you can't say the two in the same sentence.'
I must say, it is an odd choice, Knightley is pretty and looked promising in 'Bend it like Beckham', but her ability to deliver lines seems to have gone downhill, mirrored by an irritation factor in her need to be überenglish in every interview. Maybe her figure will develop when her acting skills do.

While the new moon raised one eyebrow at us, we watched the elusive Deepa Mehta film 'Earth'. The DVD shop got it in after my enquiry a couple of weeks ago. This is a snapshot of India at the time of its partition from Pakistan as the British left. I find the whole history of Britain's involvement with India interesting. Many modern sci-fi storylines predict a world governed more by mega-corporations than States and yet this is the India of the 17th Century. The East India tea company had its own armies and its officials were like rulers, in fact they were sought out as allies by warring Indian princes. But 250 years later, when India, now a unified country felt it wanted to rule itself, just as the British were welcomed in, they were asked to leave, and financially exhausted from the second world war, there was no option but to do so.

Mehta shows us in this film, the uncertainties and conflicts. We see families who do not want the British to leave, we see factions who do. Many Muslims had been campaigning for a separate muslim state since the end of the first world war. We see the strength of that separatism, but we also see the strength of long standing friendships between Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus who had seen diversity rather than division. The action takes place in Lahore, a city that was ultimately to be part of Pakistan. A debate around a dinner table focuses on whether Lahore will become Pakistani since the majority of its citizens are Muslim, or whether it will go to Hindustan (India) because the money in the City is mostly in the hands of Hindus.
The savagery perpetrated by the Hindus and Sikhs and the Muslims on each other is just horrific. One of the characters wonders whether they have learned anything in the 250 years of British stewardship. Another retaliates with the notion that before the British came, there was no syphillis.

I have found all three of Deepa Mehta's films extraordinarily thought-provoking. In 'Earth' we are shown how when dealing with matters that should be deeply spiritual, humans are so completely earthbound.

We needed so much expertise, time, money and energy to put humans on the moon, but the moon, well it just sits up there in the sky and pulls the tides. Who knows what other earthly things it meddles in.

Critters

So, I have run down the Time Trail flapping my arms like a hummingbird for the last time. Well, last time for this year, and although I would like to do it again next year, because I have really, really enjoyed that programme, if I'm still available, then something has gone wrong with the plan. You know, the plan where I get to resume my career. Not the plan where I infiltrate Stephen Harper's government and bend it to my will, although that plan would proclude me from being a hummingbird next year too.

There are two celebs in the global Big Brother house that have me scratching my head. One is, as you might expect, Dr. Traffic Management - head prefect for Iran. The only possible explanation that I can come up with for his bizarre behaviour is that he's trying to irritate the hell out of the U.S. OR...he may be trying a big old experiment to see EXACTLY how far you have to push the UN before you get chucked out of the GBB house. I am still hung up on this PhD he has in Traffic management though, you gotta feel that it informs his thinking, but for the life of me I can't come up with a traffic paradigm that accounts for his uranium enriching antics and his pissing off the head ayatollah by saying women can go to football matches. Even the 4-way stop can't explain it.

If a traffic specialist can become top banana in a country that was formerly great - ie when it was Persia - then I'm wondering how far someone with an MA in Education can go. Well, unless Battlestar Galactica is pure fiction, and I'm sure the Space Channel would tell us if it were, then the answer is President of the whole human race, or at least what is left of it. Right, but I wasn't really aiming for that. Bugging Stephen Harper appeals to me, but even Pres of the US doesn't - now that I have watched many episodes of Commander-in-Chief, I can see that it's not only a frelling impossible job, but your hair and make-up have to look flawless all the time, whereas I favour a more laissez-faire approach to grooming. Megolamania is just as tough a call as dieting, it's that knowing where to stop element that really gets ya.

The other celeb in the GBB house that has me watching curiously is the Headmaster of China. I'm quite surprised when celebs whose main claim to fame seem to be human rights violations come out of the House and play tea-parties. Last year I was struck by protesters against his regime standing in silent protest on Granville Street. We have a lot of people of Chinese origin in Vancouver, so I'm thinking they know what they're not talking about. Last week, Amnesty International told us that although China doesn't publish full figures, of the countries that allow us to know who they are killing, China executed 1,770 of a global total of 2,148. The organs of executed prisoners are frequently sold internationally and without the permission of either victim or their family.
Whatever you do, don't mention Tibet.
And yet this week, there he was, cosying up to Bill Gates and ignoring Bush, normally a sound option, but in this case, Dubya was trying to get him to agree to lay off the human rights violations for a bit and China being so bloody huge, he couldn't even poke him in the eye with a sharp stick for saying no.
Yesterday he was off discussing oil with Africa. Who the hell does he think he is, Angelina Jolie?

An interesting statistic reported in the Guardian this week. It seems that the more daughters there are in a family, the more likely the family are to vote politically left. It seems that reason alone doesn't make people want to make society more equal, it takes the birth of a daughter. I shouldn't be cycnical about this. In China they give daughters away.

Yesterday, Anne sent me a link to the site on Hornby Island, BC where the world is watching a daddy eagle sitting on his ...?... eggs. CBC last night reported that one had hatched, but it turned out to be just a bit of fluff. If you want to watch with apparently, 3 million others worldwide, then here is the link.

I started in the Park and I'll finish there today. On one of the walks I took this week, pantomime squirrels teased me. Everytime I turned round and faced the children, squirrels gambolled behind them, whenever I pointed, the squirrels scurried away. This just kept happening until I wondered why the squirrels were messing with my head, but in retrospect I guess they just recognised the wavelength.

My Name is Earl's.

A few years ago now I saw a cartoon in the paper that I found so funny that for days afterwards it would pop into my head and I'd laugh. No-one else thought it so hysterical so I guess it just found my funny centre. It was just a picture of two hippos swimming around in a river and one says to the other,
'I keep thinking it's Tuesday.'

A line from last night's 'My name is Earl' keeps coming into my head and tickling me. Joy - the absolutely brilliant Jaime Pressly - comes out to find the car being towed. Her forehead furrows and she shouts at the man,
'What you doin' towin' a car with the American flag on it? ARE YOU PART TALIBAN???'

So moving on, this is what happens when you don't pay attention. Kevin and I had 'discovered' Nando's excellent sauces for cooking chicken some time ago, and I think we had first found them in Sainsburys. After a while we realised we could buy them here. Last summer we went to a food event in Richmond, where local establishments come and bring samples of their menus and you go around trying them for some nominal sum of money. Once more, we were impressed by Nando's chicken. We had noticed a 'Nando's' restaurant every time we came back from Save-on, and it looked a reasonable size, so every time we went past it we'd say, 'we must go there sometime.'
Now, I had asked Kevin what he wanted to do for his birthday and he had maybe wanted to go out, just the two of us, but as close as possible, since he was likely to be quite tired after work. 'Nando's,' I said. It was agreed.
Well, we drew up in the parking space right outside.
'Restaurant doesn't look up to much,' said Kevin. We sit and look,
'In fact....ah...it's take-out...' BURNED. We went to Earl's.

I was a tad disappointed with Judi Dench's latest offering 'Mrs Henderson presents'. I had been looking forward to this, trusting Dame Judi as one does. The reality of the film was something less, the history of the Windmill theatre in London that never closed because of the Blitz. But if you can see past the fact that it's Judi Dench saying the words, what she actually said was the usual old woman-pimping rubbish. The programme had changed from Vaudeville to include tableaux of nude women. Mrs. Henderson tells us that this is because among her son's effects - he was killed in the Great War - she found 'French postcards' ie pictures of naked women and realised that he would have died without ever seeing a real woman naked. Well fucking guess what? Men don't have a RIGHT to see women naked. He probably also died without seeing a hippo swimming around in a lake wondering if it's Tuesday, or learned Russian or heard a nightingale or any number of things.
At a time when men and women couldn't be openly gay and married women didn't have the right to work and the school leaving age was 14, what does this over-privileged woman focus on? Making money pimping women to men. The women who were taken into the theatre were unable to make money any other way. That to me was something worth focussing on.
There are a couple of moments of tokenism in the film, yes we see some willies, but basically it's just about objectifying women for men. The politicians tell Mrs. Henderson that allowing the theatre to stay open represents an unnecessary risk since they are trying to minimise opportunites for German bombs to fall on assemblies of people. Somehow, in spite of, as you might expect, the theatre being full of servicemen, this is considered silly.
The only thing I found really worth watching in the film was the performance by Thelma Barlow, Mavis from long ago Corrie. How great that she was finally able to show her real acting talents. I hope this leads to more and bigger parts for her because she was just sensational.

And while I'm still on my feminist soapbox, where did Nepal come from all of a sudden? Yes, I know it has always been there, but for the past few weeks it has been in the news every day, rioting in the streets, demanding the head of their King on a plate. Well, not quite.
This week, I was intrigued by an article in the Guardian, showing how the disturbances may actually change things for women there.
As in the India of Deepa Mehta's film, 'Water', widows in Nepal are shunned and women in general we are told, 'stay at home'. Lily Thapa, a widow and feminist sees opportunity in the situation though. She looks ahead to peace and sees ways that it can and must be re-structured because it will by necessity be more female dominated. All power to her, I hope she achieves great things for the women of her country. Empowering women is empowering the country itself.

Lastly, I was not overly-impressed with Catherine Bennett's article about Sheer Hite's new book. I expect to be able to get a real flavour of the book from a Guardian review and all I get from this one is the distaste in Bennett's mouth from having to meet Hite. I can understand that Bennett may feel annoyed that Hite is still banging on about the female orgasm just as she was thirty years ago, but give us some credit, maybe if she had read the book a bit more thoroughly and passed some of it on to us we could see where Hite is going, after all, someone is still willing to publish her.

Quoting Hite, she says,
""Female orgasm is a metaphor for political change," she declares. "Changing our idea of coitus and 'how it should be performed' is key to changing the larger society.""

Well maybe what she is saying is something similar to the recent study that I have mentioned twice this week. People in more gender equal societies are more satisfied with their sex lives and gender equal societies are ones where women have been empowered. They are the societies where the debate is still open, where the difference between men's and women's pay is something that can be discussed openly and freely and where women are part of politics.

Personally, I don't ever want to NOT live in a part of the world where women can scream 'What's wrong with you, are you part Taliban?' and live to tell the tale.

Taurus

It's Kevin's birthday today and the first one we have ever been able to spend together. I have even flown out on the day before when Easter was as late as it was this year, but never been able to celebrate in the same country.

I've come to think that earth signs go well together, although it may be that only other earth signs can tolerate each other, I am Virgo, Kevin is, obviously, Taurus, I have other friends in successful partnerships where both are earth signs, but then, I know others still where both partners are fire signs, so perhaps any element combines well with itself. What I can't envisage is two Taureans being partners, but I'd be pleased to stand corrected on that one.

I did try looking up famous people who shared Kevin's birthday, but all I have been able to come up with is the US president Ulysses S. Grant and unconvincing pop star Sheena Easton. Oh well. Someone on the radio not so long ago said that in a room with 23 people in it, there is an 80% chance that two of them will share the same birthday. Sounds impossible? Yep me too, although sciencey people have tried to explain it to me - it's a statistics thing, probably better not to know. Another statistic that one of the sciencey people told me was that in every society where abortion had been legalised, there had been a significant reduction in the crime rate 18 years later.

I did notice however that there had been a number of freedomy type of things happen on April the 27th.
In 1960, Togo gained independence from France, followed the year after by Sierra Leone becoming independent from the UK. In 1994, South Africa was able to hold its first free, multi-racial elections and thus the day has become Freedom day ever since.
In some unspecified year, but on this day, Slovenia rose up against occupation. Today, in China, the first panda raised in captivity is to be released into the wild. Yep, I can see a theme emerging.

Although we are, I'm relieved to say, past the annoyance of having to buy presents for each other, we have chosen to acquire a new cable box that allows us to watch HD TV on our set. This gives a very clear and wonderful picture, but I really do wonder how someone who doesn't have a degree in electrical engineering - well me for example - can ever set these things up.

Later, we will be dining out and raising a glass in honour of the occasion. Happy Birthday Kevin, I hope we will spend many more together.

Two Brits

Two Brits who get gold stars from me this week are Helen Mirren and Jamie Oliver.

We have been watching the drama 'Elizabeth the First' with 60 year-old Dame Helen playing the Queen from her late 40's through to her death. Even though if you say the name 'Helen Mirren' you expect excellence, I have still been just spellbound by her performance. There are no cracks, no seams, no smudginess about it, you can't see the acting, it is as though she has become Queen Elizabeth the first and you have actually travelled back in history and are watching the state of mind of the real queen. You can see her thinking, her torment, her uncertainty. She is tortured by the decision of having to sign Mary Queen of Scots' death warrant. You feel the cold shock with her as she realises she has been misled into putting to death her physician. I love all the skirt kissing too. I wonder if just being in her presence could improve the skills of some of Hollywood's overpaid and overhyped, the rest of the cast with her in Elizabeth the first are flawless too, I'm sure due to good casting and directing, but I'm thinking a little bit of 'just being in her presence'. I've run out of hyperbole, but Dame Helen truly deserves more.

Jamie I know, is not every Brit's favourite. I think the reason he has never annoyed me is that I hadn't ever seen one of his cooking shows before coming to Canada, and well, I just liked his little chirpy cockney-ness when I saw it on Food Network Canada.
I had of course met his entire family through his Sainsbury's ads, marvelled at his nan on a motor scooter. When you've met someone's nan and they are that much fun, well you can't not love the person.
My respect for him went through the roof when he did Jamie's school dinners. Whichever way you dice it, editing, whatever, that programme changed the Burrough of Greenwich's academic results and it affected government policy. It was also compulsive viewing.
Now we're watching 'Jamie's Italian Escape' which I think he started during the filming of the School Dinners show, and so I'm sure has already aired in Britain.
It's not that we're learning too much about Italian food, but I am tremendosuly impressed at Jamie's willingness to speak Italian. Not in that British 'terribly sorry, I know I'm rubbish' kind of way, but in the way that other Europeans approach English. Jamie throws in all the words he knows, he lets his hands speak, he asks for words, and over the course of the episodes we have watched, we have seen him being able to understand more and use more Italian. I have no doubt that he has a translator with him, but what we see is Jamie listening and learning and then using the language.
I was equally respectful of his anxiety over having to kill an animal. He goes through on camera the kind of worries that any of us might in that situation. Meat isn't made in a factory by Sainsbury's, it always starts as a living creature. Jamie helps to select and carry the sheep to where it is to be slaughtered. The killing happens off camera though, I don't think Jamie did it,
'I've never killed a sheep before, not with a knife,' he said. We understood what he meant when he was about to shoot a wild boar.

Two Brits, quite different, both experts in their fields, but I'm sure if you spoke to them both would assure you they were still learning, and believe it themselves and that in itself is so very British.
Gold stars all round.

Privacy

My daughter - in - law, Sue, has been understandably annoyed by a recent intrusion into her and others' privacy by supermarket giant, Tesco. Tesco has been allowing microchips to be implanted into the packaging of certain products and as customers who buy the item leave the shop, the chip triggers a camera which photographs the customer. This is apparently then used for customer profiling. I assume they have some kind of experts like the fab five who can work out which people are wearing Gucci to shop. I can just picture Carson Kressley shaking his blonde hair, setting his mouth to 'stun' and saying something mordant about sweatpants.

Brits are pretty used to the all-seeing eye, if you are in a town or city centre you are probably rarely outside the range of a camera. Likewise if you are on a main road. This is going to feature even more heavy artillery soon as cameras will be increased in range and number to stop people from drinking and using mobile phones whilst driving.

I have never had any problem with this. I think partly that is because when you are brought up as a Protestant and I've no doubt this is also true for Catholics, you know that God is watching every small thing you do and in fact even knows your thoughts. Compared with God's omniscience, the camera does sweet Fanny Adams.

There have also been a number of high profile cases where security cameras have caught the guilty and this serves to make us feel safer. You would be amazed at how much of the school where I used to work and where Austen still works, could be seen on camera and the clarity of it. The parents were always whingeing that we had cameras in the toilets.... yeah...no. There were limits.

Canadians do NOT feel the same way. There are privacy laws here which stop most of the camera spying. Since I am really not actually aware of the cameras in Britain, I hadn't really missed them. Even the speed cameras have gone the way of all things. I personally think that it would be a great help to the police and the public to have a few security cameras around the place, but people get quite agitated about the whole topic. Schade.

Austen passed on to me a story that had been in the press recently about a man who was caught on a security camera having a bit of one-handed self-fulfilment. The police tried to prosecute him for indecency but the judge threw it out, saying that you couldn't offend a camera. Quite right too.

Now some Canadians might feel quite threatened by the idea that it could be possible to be caught on camera having a quick J Arthur ..... not the ones who live within driving distance of the Nature Park however.

Last Friday, and this is far from an isolated incident, two of the Park's staff were astonished to see a naked rump giving it the the old pump action in broad daylight in the car park. After trying to get the attention of the rump's owner by more subtle means - revving up next to the vehicle, loudly banging doors etc. - one of them went to speak to the occupants of the car. By this time Mr. Rumpie-Pumpie was doing up his flies but his rumpee was lying fully UNclothed across the seat. Let's just say the RCMP were mentioned, there was fluster and bluster and the couple left. Personally I think we should install a camera in that corner of the car park. Damn the privacy laws, we could make money for the Nature Park and the stars of the show could enjoy some celebrity.

Summer Breeze

The Nature Park's school programme 'Signs of Spring' ends this week and the new one, 'Bees in the Bog' will start next week. I went in for training this morning, always a lot of fun. And my goodness isn't the outside world obliging, over the weekend and today it has been like full summer, the temperature outside the Surrey Arts Centre yesterday was 23º although the radio was only claiming 18º for Vancouver.

And the bees were out in the bog, honey bees, bumble bees, I have lots of bee stuff to learn. I also found out what a Douglas Fir smells like and wow, it is citrusy and fragrant, not at all like the good old antisceptic scent of pine we're used to in Europe.

Back in Blighty I have two toiling offspring, Alex is wrestling with an A-level history project that had to be prepared thoroughly and then written up over three days under exam conditions and Ben is knocking his head against deadlines for GCSE coursework and practicals. In my head, good weather and public exams are inextricably linked.

As are strawberries. In Britain, although we start getting Spanish strawbs a lot cheaper around now, the finest ones, the English strawberries are not generally in the shops for about another month, June is strawberry month in Britain, culminating with strawberries and cream at Wimbledon.
Here, we have been getting good, reasonably priced Californian strawbs for a couple of weeks now, so even more summery feelings.

At Kevin's parents' house yesterday afternoon, we were able to sit out on the deck and watch the finches in the trees, a pair of Canada geese on the golf course, and as you might epxect, the golfers had all come out to play.

I can't remember the last time I was able to appreciate this part of the year, not when I was, like Ben and Alex, preparing for summer exams, and not all the time I was in teaching. Summer started at the end of July and until then, hot weather and sunshine were just factors to be contended with, not always a battle that could be won.

My friend Dawn, an alternative high school teacher in New Hampton, finishes towards the end of May and I was forever being caught out by that. Around Easter she'd be looking towards the end of the school year, whilst I was thinking about the new term. And then when school finally finished for me at the end of July, Dawn would be starting to plan for the new school year.

In the house, I have to have the doors and windows open to let some air in, we have bug screens so it's only air that can get in. At the Nature Park where the doors also have to be open, we now have a curtain, strips of yellow plastic with solid diamond shapes at intervals, to stop the hummingbirds flying in and killing themselves. It reminds me of the one we used to have over the back door when Amanda and I were little, ours was black and red plastic strips like a big curtain of liquorish strips that rippled in the summer breeze.

Summer breeze makes me feel fine, blowing through the jasmine in my mind...yesterday dragons, today jasmine and the only herb involved is coriander. Odd, must be the weather.

George

St.George, the mystery saint. Even the BBC website advises caution, it offers a few tenuous details about some Turk who upset Diocletian and was then beheaded - there were far more unpleasant ways of being martyred - but then tells us we should treat it as myth. Ah, so the Harry Potter version then.

Nonetheless, I think that Saint George is a damn fine saint for the English to have. I mean dragon slaying is one of our specialities, always has been, although I can see that in the heydays of the celts, when things were as Simmi might say, a bit more herbal, the dragons may have appeared to be more ..well...dragony.

In the film Excalibur, Myrddin conjures up a mystical fog that will allow Uther Pendragon to shapeshift. Arthur's army fights under the banner of a dragon, the two armies red against white, both dragons. Pendragon - dragon's head. Our own mythical creature.

Not entirely our own of course, many cultures have their own dragons, not least of all the Chinese. But the significance of the Chinese dragon is quite opposite to our own. The Chinese are the dragon's race, and the creature symbolises wisdom and kindness to them. Those born under its sign are fortunate.

But we do still fight dragons, isn't that what Harry Potter does even though the dragons come in many guises? Isn't that what the Christian soldiers still do ? Is Satan not still depicted as having dragonlike qualities? Don't we all fight our own dragons, just that we call them demons now....

We used to sing the hymn, 'Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before....'
Saint George's flag, a red cross on a white background is just like the bloody cross on which Christ was put to death. And this summer you will see Englishmen, mostly men, wrapped in that flag. Like in the Greenday track, 'Holiday' 'there's a flag wrapped around a score of men'. While the World Cup is on, Englishmen will all own flags, in the backstreets of Portmouth, grubby St. George's flags will occupy upstairs windows, maybe they never left, and suddenly, whilst Tesco removes St George's flag from their products, everywhere else will be draped with them.

The dragon this summer will be the football teams of the rest of the world, here be dragons, but they can be slain on the pitch. Not since 1966 has England actually won the World Cup, but the important thing is the slaying and the playing and the running around town wearing the flag.

But I favour the dragons of Uther and Myrddin's time, the dark shape that you just catch out of the corner of your eye, that casts a shadow as it swoops above you. England's dragons are real and plentiful enough, you just have to know where to look, and you need to play with them a bit before you dispatch them, you learn more if you don't raise your sword until you can feel their fiery breath on your neck....we can all be St. George if we choose.

Ghosties

Kevin and I look forward to Friday evening not just because it is..Friday evening...but also because at 20.00, 'Most Haunted' is on. This turned out to be a phenomenon in Britain and is carried by the W-network here, god bless them.

When MH started out, Yvette Fielding and husband Karl Beattie had taken their idea for the show to several of the mainstream TV networks and been turned down. Living TV must have blessed the day that Yvette came into their lives though, it has been a runaway success, putting Living on the map and is now their flagship show. The several times a year three-day live events draw millions of viewers, sadly we don't yet get to see them.

The original spiritualist medium with the show, Derek Acorah, a true showman has been 'discredited' by the show's parapsychologist Kieran O'Keefe. Kieran set up a couple of made-up ghosts and Derek took the bait. But all this says to me is that some of the time Derek reads the minds of those around him. This explanation seems far more logical to me than that Derek would risk national humiliation - because a lot of people watch this, by using something he'd overheard.

Kieran O'Keefe always appears at the end of the show and tries to give a 'normal' explanation for whatever has happened. Last night however, even he was stumped. On camera we have a stone flying through the air passing two members of the team horizontally. The only other person in the room was the one holding the camera and was standing parallel to them. Bats can't really throw stones horizontally. Nor can he really explain the 'light anomalies', a phenomenon formerly known as 'orbs'. And last night, one of the team using his own night vision camera in a room on his own is freaked out by a loud groan in his ear which we could hear clearly.

Being quite reflective, I am amused by how we have picked up the language of the show, the language of mediums.
A couple of Fridays ago, sitting in our living room, Kevin and I were both overwhelmed simultaneously by the smell of cigarettes. Not smoke exactly, but the smell as on a heavy smoker's clothes. We checked the windows and none were open. As far as Kevin was aware, neither neighbour smokes, but of course they could have had visitors, I'm just not sure how the smell of it gets through solid walls. There was no-one outside. When we told Kevin's parents about the odd incident, it was suggested, tongue-in-cheek that maybe we had a ghost. Kevin's thought was that we hadn't ever witnessed this before. My response was, 'but maybe they were in visitation.'

On the show, 'spirit people' or 'entities' are either in visitation or sometimes they are 'grounded'. They can draw energy from those in our world in order to interact, which is why the MH team often feel very cold or very hot during an encounter.

At my flat in Old Portsmouth I had several unusual things occur. The television just turning itself on during the night can be explained as could the lights flickering, but I never managed to explain how all the gas taps were turned on all at different angles without a human touching them.
I am convinced that my seeing purple lights has a very normal refraction of light type explanation. My optician didn't agree. I have woken in both of my Portsmouth flats to see hovering lights.

The flat in old Portsmouth was just a few doors away from a house where the Duke of Buckingham, not a very popular fellow, was murdered, so you wonder.... Portsmouth itself is in parts a very old city and I posted previously about the Ghost Walk and the Garrison Church, so it's not impossible that my flat simply was being visited. But from watching MH I also 'know' that people have ghosts attached to them. Goes without saying really.

We've both come to love Yvette and Karl, Richard Felix the historian with the team, David Wells and Derek Acorah, also now Gordon Smith, the spiritualist mediums. (maybe that should be media? ;) We love little fat Kath, the hairdresser who doesn't seem capable of getting Yvette's hair into a sensible style. We love Yvette's red leather trousers because they look so silly. We love Yvette for being such a scaredy cat. We, no I, love to cringe every time 'Ivvie' mispronounces something, which she does frequently, it's as though she has someone else write her litle monologues but no-one goes through them with her beforehand.
We don't trust Stuart or John the sound man, we discredit phenomena that happen around them. And now we feel betrayed by Kieran O'Keefe who denounced Derek to the press.

Most of all though, we love that this show deals with things that can't be explained, because that fulfills a need but it also opens up a huge universe of possibilities.

Queen Bee

Today is the Queen's 80th birthday, 80 is of course the new 60 so she's now just entering her senior years. I haven't really ever given much thought to the Monarchy, they were always just there, in the news, doing what they do. I did experience some annoyance however when the Queen Mother died and the school where I was working simply ignored this, whilst they had stopped lessons for the World Cup. What message did that send to the pupils?

Now that I am living in Canada, I think of the Queen more, because she is also Canada's Queen and I find it especially nice to see pictures of her sometimes in people's houses. We share a Queen, we have something in common. Something from back home that'll keep me going until Sainsburys comes to Canada.

I also read a couple of days ago that a Canadian octogenarian, who I think shares her birthday with the Queen, was over having lunch with her, and this too made me feel a connection, not that I personally know either. I do know Barb of course who will be 89 this year and gunning it.

If the Queen's mother is any indicator, we can expect Elizabeth the second to be around for at least another 21 years, and if she should decide to come and live in Vancouver, she might fare even better, Vannies have the greatest longevity amongst Canadians (real statistic) and Canadians live longer than Brits. I am basing this outrageous statement on my usual scientific sample of one. My Aunt who lived in Toronto developed the exact same medical complaints as my mum, but when she was ten years older.

So where does this leave Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, up the creek without a paddle? Not at all, she's a spring chicken at 50-something, and as we know, 50 is the new 37¾. She's a woman who can bide her time and as gracious as her current Majesty.

It has also now occurred to me what a good feeling it is to have a woman as our ultimate Head of State. I adore Tony Blair and loathe Stephen Harper, I am a woman with two Prime Ministers, the Queen has even more of them to cope with, since she has to oversee New Zealand and Australia too and a bunch of other places that don't make such good TV programmes, and they of course all have to defer to her. I'm not sure she really gets to tell any of them what they can and can't do.

Austen tipped me off about a documentary celebrating the Queen's life, which he said was quite thought provoking. It is called, provocatively, the Queen at 80,it can be seen here on Channel 27, KCTS tonight at 22.00.

So let's hear no more of this not getting along with the Queen nonsense, since I imagine she reads my blog religiously, 'Happy Birthday your Majesty'. May she reign for as long as she feels able until it's time for the wonderful Camilla and her husband Charles to take over.

Of wallabies and other bees

There is something comical about the idea that wallaby milk is going to save us from superbugs. And yet it's not one of those 'how the hell did they ever find that out?' deals, it is logical that scientists in Australia would be testing the properties of all of their flora and fauna. And an antibiotic 100 times stronger than Penicillin is jaw-dropping rather than funny, the natural world just keeps on giving. And we...well we just keep on taking.

The article from Netdoctor that I mentioned yesterday, has since been reported in the Guardian, but with a different emphasis, there is less stress on the gender equality aspect and more on the 'over 40' side of things. But what caught my eye in the Guardian's write-up, was the honourable mention for Canadians. Apparently they come in at number two on the 'satisfying sex and relationships' scale. I'm not sure why Nicholas Lezard feels that randy Canadians make him feel like Philip Larkin, we did read a lot of Philip Larkin at school, although of course the only line from his work that everyone knows is I think from a poem called 'High Windows',
'They fuck you up, your mum and dad, they may not mean to, but they do,' oddly the one poem we didn't study.

Somewhere on TV last night, an advert for a National Spelling Bee flashed up. I can think of little more insane than a spelling bee. If you went into it with your mental faculties intact, spending any amount of time watching children spell words out loud must surely sap the will to live. Any teacher can probably relate to this. We are the only people that I know of who continually ask other people questions we already know the answer to. I can remember being fed this statistic during some early stage of my MA studies. The average time that a teacher gives a child to answer a question is three seconds. I immediately tried to make sure my pupils had longer than three seconds to answer questions, but too long and it becomes counter-productive because the child becomes more self-conscious. It also, like watching children spell things, becomes mind-numbingly tedious.
Spelling bees.....what the hell is the point? There has to be some hidden agenda. Why don't we have them in Britain, or Spain, Italy, Germany and most especially France? For goodness sake, the French have an organisation for protecting the French language.

The best thing on TV last night however, was the excellent 'Bones'. I love Temperance Brennan and I love this show. It embraces everything I admire about detective work and eschews everything I detest about the way TV depicts the same.
I hate the police or forensics shows where women supposedly do professional jobs but have to dress like sex workers to do them. I find this insulting. You can work out the token lesbians in these programmes because they have their blouse buttons done up, which kind of indicates that only lesbians can be professionals, although I think I implied previously that this was in fact the case, so maybe I am shooting myself in the foot there.

In SVU, where the female lead, who in my opinion is far and away one of the most attractive women on TV, does wear clothes that you might wear at work, even so, the police officers, supposedly the cream, are always smirking and looking smug. Real police officers, from the bobbies who tread the beat up to ...whatever they go up to, don't smirk. They are trained, as are teachers, to use neutral body language, neutral facial expressions, and this helps since when you do react in a neutral way to situations and conflict, you more often than not do not become emtionally charged by it.

Temperance Brennan is a real scientist and she simply states facts, I love that about her. David Boreanaz's character despairs of it because she doesn't hold back. But she is a complete professional at all times. In yesterday's episode, where Brennan was helping to identify bodies in New Orleans, and of course, why would TV use New Orleans without a voodoo theme, it is that objectivity that serves to heighten the creepiness factor. If Temperance Brennan can lose a day of her life through voodoo magic, not a trace of any drug in her body, then it makes you feel that there's something more than just belief in the power that is at work, because you know without any shadow of a doubt that Temperance doesn't believe in it. She is an anthropologist, she knows about everyone's beliefs. When discussing voodoo with Boreanaz, a Catholic, she baldy states that she cannot see the difference,
'They have the same saints, you have miracles, they have spells,' she says,
'But they have zombies,' says Boreanaz,
'And your Christ was resurrected after death,' she states, no smirk, no smugness, just fact, bam.

Towards the end, there is a scene that was just pure Temperance. The superb Giancarlo Esposito starts to weave a spell, no melodrama, just total creepiness. Temperance watches him and there is a moment of real tension when you wonder what the outcome will be when suddenly she appears to flick him in the face and he stops just like that.
'I've noticed that no-one's really scary after they've been poked in the eye,' she says.
There's no answer to that.

All kindsa Shizzle

So it turns out.... this'll amaze you.... that people who live in societies with more gender equality have better sex. Ok, ok, in fact this study is talking about older people but I don't see why it should be any different for younger ones. You'd never have guessed that would ya?
I mean just as an extreme example, who, without doing a properly funded study on it, could work out that in societies where female circumcision, or castration as it really is, is carried out, that less and not such good sex was going to be available for both parties.

Last week I was equally amazed to find out that a study had shown that stress causes eating disorders - who'da thunk huh?

Now I have a number of very good friends who are American and two in particular that have been friends for a long time, in Dawn's case a very long time indeed. R, I know, worries a lot about how the world perceives the U.S. because of Bush (though personally I think she should worry just as much if not more on account of Cruise). Well, American journo Tim Dowling tells us that the U.S. State Department has issued a 16-page leaflet telling Americans how to act and how to avoid acting, when travelling abroad. He tells us that the pamphlet advises people that "it is inappropriate to tell people about the Bible "unless you are a professional missionary identified as such." "
He also says,
"Finally, ask yourself: do you hate George Bush enough to travel? You may think you hate him a lot, but once abroad your denunciations of the man and his policies will have to be forthright and tireless. Every time you want to say, "So you guys say crisps for chips, and chips for fries, right?", stop, think, and then say "George Bush - what an asshole" instead."

It has been my intention never to mention celebs, but sometimes, well, I just can't control it, I just have to. If you look at 'go fug yourself'
and scroll down about four pics, you will see Katie Holmes as she was yesterday. She presumably looks quite different today. Now I would not wish post-natal depression on ANYONE, however, if the hand of some supervillainous being appeared from the sky with a card on which was written 'PND' and the other hand gripped me by the throat and a voice said, 'tell me who to hand this to or the planet perishes,' I wouldn't have even a moment's hesitation before pointing at KH. Having been mean, I really do hope the poor woman doesn't get it because as if having to sleep with Tom Cruise weren't enough, then tortured by the little ferret about the birth, not to mention the afterbirth - did I say not to mention that? I did, she should be spared the horror of PND.

And last, but by no means least, our very own Stephen Harper, what a Mensch, was threatening to throw all his toys out of the pram and even call another election if his ridiculous child care proposals don't get passed by the House. Go on Stevie, make my day.

Flipper pie

I have been trying to get my head round the issues involved in the seal cull, and yesterday, the Guardian's Canadian correspondant, Anne McIlroy gave an account of at least some of the concerns and I have asked a number of Canadians.

The first question I suppose that needs answering is whether the seal cull is necessary. There are two arguments for it that I have been made aware of.
One is that unchecked, the seal population becomes large enough to deplete fish numbers. This might mean that levels are unsustainably low and the fish are unable to repopulate, or that the fishing industry cannot make a living because quotas have to be reduced.
The second reason is that Newfoundlanders rely very heavily on the seal cull for their livelihood. This argument presents Newfoundlanders as using every part of the seal, meat, blubber, oil and even the flippers, yes, flipper pie is a real dish on the East coast of Canada, in the same way that plains First Nations people used every part of the buffalo.

When the Canadian seal cull is reported in the popular press, it is generally done in a very emotive way, showing old pictures of white coated baby seals being clubbed to death. Whenever an argument has to be presented in this fashion it immediately makes me think that there is a weak argument being advanced. As Anne McIlroy points out in her article, it is no longer legal to cul the nursing pups, ie the ones with the white coats, nor the mothers. She also states however that the pups only nurse for a few weeks, they are therefore legally fair game at only a few weeks old, but again the other side of that is that at a few weeks old they are independent animals and their life cycles must not be judged in human terms.

For me personally, the central question is how the seals are killed. I feel that McIlroy doesn't deal adequately with this.
I have been told that they are no longer clubbed, they are shot. I would have no problem with this, I do after all eat meat, in doing so I have to accept that someone kills them on my behalf, I even eat the flesh of mammals, there must be blood involved. I would NOT eat meat if I thought it had been killed or raised in an inhumane way, so it is important to me that this information is available and that I am aware of it. I know for example that these are concerns of both Alex and Hazel and I understand that Hazel is a vegan because she doesn't feel that animal husbandry is humane.

In the article, McIlroy alludes to concerns about whether seals are skinned while still alive and there is a reasonable response to this, however I think that this does make the process less clear cut. The argument that animals do have automotive responses post mortem is true. But it could also be that the animals have been skinned alive, in which case it implies that they are not in fact shot. A difficult one and I think individual opinion on this is going to be based on whether one has confidence in the food and fishing ministries of the country. I haven't been here long enough to make that call.

There are observers to the cull and I feel it would be helpful to both sides if those observers were not hindered. So-called activists on the other hand, anger the people who are doing the cull and achieve little except to garner support for those they are trying to stop. There needs to be more transparency so that there can be no argument that guidelines are being followed and if they are not, then there must be prosecutions and this too must be seen.

Mushy peas

Now Kevin is getting decidedly fed up of my going on about this, but yesterday, he was cooking a ham and I thought the perfect thing to go with it would be mushy peas, or squashy peas as we used to call them in our family.

I had managed to find a small box of quick soak marrowfat peas at Superstore and I remembered from when my mum used to make them (although my sister insists that it was my dad who used to do them) that you had to rinse them well after soaking and then watch them carefully when they were in the pan because they could quickly overboil spreading pea mush and froth all over the stove.

Soak the peas, tick, rinse, tick, add lots of water, tick, watch carefully and catch them in time as they are about to boil over, tick. All seemed to be going swimmingly, lovely smell, no mess on the cooker, plenty of liquid. And then I realised... there were no actual peas in the pea mush. I boiled them more rapidly, reduced the liquid, thinking that at any time they would suddenly form a delicious mush. It never happened. Well, it did technically but not until the what could only be now described as soup, had spent the night in the fridge.

Kevin searched the British recipe sites to find out what had gone wrong. Nigella, I thought was particularly unhelpful. She advocated mushing up ordinary peas with garlic and crème fraîche, which does indeed sound yummy. HOW....ever, it bears no resemblance whatsoever to mushy peas.

The actual mushy pea how-tos seemed to indicate that I had used too much water, but I know how much water used to go into that big old saucepan at home. Same difference as it were, but I guess I used not enough peas. Maybe even the quick soak have been pre-treated in some way that isn't helpful for long cooking, but whatever. We live and learn.

The way I like to see this culinary debacle is that since I'm not a Northerner, I'm not born with the way of the mushy pea. I will prevail however. The mushy pea will not get the better of me.

Kevin didn't miss a beat in rescuing the meal. He had cooked the main course and pudding in any case.

Tis Easter Monday, and apart from the schools and I believe some government establishments, everyone's back at work today. Shocking. Easter Monday is like Boxing Day, everyone needs it. Oh well, just one more thing to add to my mental list to bother Stephen Harper about.

Resurrection

I'm not a big fan of the Wizard Whitebeard approach to either the miracles or the Resurrection. What works for me is some phenomenon that can be explained by science. The four Gospels show us some version of Mary Magdelene going to Jesus's tomb and finding the stone rolled back and the tomb empty. In the three synoptic Gospels there are just a few verses after this discovery that witness Christ's return from the dead, even in St. John's Gospel there isn't much, and in all, Jesus is only seen by his closest friends and followers.

So what are the possible explanations? That Jesus died completely, stone cold, rigor mortis and all, then literally got up and everything starts working, business as usual. Or that maybe he wasn't completely dead when he was cut down from the cross, that his followers knew that and came back and helped him out. Or that the followers saw him in the way that people do see their dead. All of those explanations can be described as resurrection, depending on what your mind can accept and wants to believe.

The belief of Jesus's followers and their own ministries and acceptance of martyrdom meant that his teachings were spread through the civilisations of Greece and Rome and the countries that they colonised. What made them so successful? Quite possibly it was exactly that, the story of Jesus having conquered death, executed in the Roman way and then alive again three days later. It's compelling, it beats the last minute reprieve hands down. And not only did it offer evidence of life after death, but the promise of forgiveness.

Yesterday I watched a Discovery channel docu-drama about the first emperor of China, the one who united the various cantons. He didn't do that by giving away sweeties, he did it by having a vision and then setting out ruthlessly to achieve it, cut, slash, tear apart. After a while when he had unified China, he suddenly started worrying about all the people he had killed waiting to torment him in the afterlife. He had the terracotta army constructed, gave them real weapons, used in battle and these spirit warriors would protect him.

Now contrast this with the option where all are forgiven because one man died and was resurrected. As I said, compelling. Life was brutal and short for many for a very long time in history and the idea of an assured good afterlife, well most people would say, 'yep, I'm in.'

Ghandi was a great man because he captured people's imagination, he had power over people but unlike many of history's other charismatics, he didn't exploit that - in a bad way - he felt deeply for his people and he did everything he could within the boundaries of his own interpretation of his religion, to improve their lot. To me, that makes Ghandi a truly, truly great teacher. Had he had access to Harry Potter's powers, that wouldn't have made him a greater one in my book, in fact it would have lessened him.

If the way the miracle of the loaves and fishes worked was that the crowd were caught up in the message and teaching of Jesus and that as baskets were passed around the crowd, so much was given that the whole crowd was able to be fed, then that for me is the greater miracle.

I accept that some people need to believe a literal translation of the Bible, but if I had to do that, I wouldn't be able to take communion.
Resurrection, symbolic, literal, it offers us consolation, for our loss, for our misdeeds, and hope, renewal.
Easter, new life. Happy Easter to all.

Shellshock

It's the time in between, just that we know that Easter Sunday will be coming, and we can spend the day preparing for our guests tomorrow. For Mary and Jesus's disciples and friends it would just have been the day after, the shellshock day, the day when you can do nothing because the world has changed forever, when the suffering of the person is over but you will never see them again in this world. And you cry and you can't eat and the pain is unbearable and yet even so, you don't want time to move forward because this moment is the closest you will ever be to them. That's today.

Yesterday, we watched a Canadian film, Saint Ralph, an absolutely beautiful story of a 14-year old boy who fixates upon winning the Boston Marathon because he believes it will be the miracle needed to bring his mother out of her coma. The main character is wonderfully written and portrayed as are the priests at the catholic school who both encourage and discourage him from his dream. They seem convinced that believing you can bring about a miracle is blasphemy. I cried the whole way through it.

So the Pope, wearing his cloak of infallibility, has decreed that historians who have long debated the role of Judas in the arrest of Jesus, are all wrong. Why Lord bless us sor, how lucky we are to have such a man as yeself to tell us what to think. I can see it all spiralling downhill from here. Simmi pointed out to me yesterday that one of the first things Benedict the sixteenth got rid of on taking office was the department at the Vatican responsible for promoting good relations with the Muslim world. Lest we forget, 'Arbeit macht frei' so we all need to just get to work and not bother our silly heads with such unimportant world matters.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the traffic specialist who runs Iran, is still cheekily refusing to stop enriching uranium to weapons grade level whilst continuing to threaten and condemn Israel. He feels that Israel should be part of Europe, which many of us might agree with, just we might have different views on how that might be brought about. Say, for the sake of argument, if Europe stopped just the other side of Persia.....

And speaking of traffic, another short Canadian film we saw last night, was 'The Delicate Art of Parking'. Two of the main characters were played by Hank and Wanda out of Corner Gas. It almost had me blubbing again since it started in the very compound that our car had been towed to. But it was a very funny, very dry humoured film, very, very Canadian.

Crucifixion

I have always found the crucifixion fascinating and I guess that's part of the deal. The man we had learned about in church being nailed to a wooden cross. From that cross we see his whole life, all his teachings. The method of execution becomes the symbol for the religion. What other faith can boast that? And as a child that's what we saw, a man on a cross, a little bit of blood dripping from the nail holes, maybe a small amount around the thorns on his head, but mostly he gazed out at us, sorrowful but peaceful.

It was actually a great many years later, when I was teaching at my previous but one school, that I learned exactly what crucifixion meant. Our Headteacher, a large, bluff Geordie, did an assembly about the crucifixion. He was an historian, so this was his thing, he had held us transfixed below the walls of the old city in Boulogne where he told us about the killing fields. Now he was going into minute detail about what you would suffer with each terrible thing that happened to Jesus, how it would feel to drown slowly as your lungs filled up with your body's own fluid, unable to breathe properly and clear the water. How it was a slow and excruciating death. How if your relatives could afford to pay for your legs to be broken, that time could be shortened considerably. How the occupied populace were terrified at the sight of these crosses with the dead or dying on the high ground. He made our blood grow cold, he made us start to realise for the first time what it meant to die like that.

Mel Gibson's film, 'The Passion of Christ' received a lot of criticism and from many quarters, but I was mesmerised by it. The scourging was insane, but I have no doubt extremely realistic. For pity's sake he was actually criticised for using animal flesh for some of the effects, what the hell was he supposed to do, have a real actor scourged to the point of death? Well, ok, I'd be up for him doing that to Tom Cruise, nasty little ferret who shouldn't be allowed near a woman, but in general, well....
What he stopped short of however, was any realism in the actual crucifixion. It was as though phew, finally, up on the cross, now we can get this over with, that was a bit of a nasty few hours. Oh yes it was, but far, far worse was yet to come.

Crucifixion was a truly horrible way to put a living, sentient creature to death. But in some ways, it was almost a challenge to humans to think up more awful ways of killing people. So-called witches, of whom something like 90% were women, were burned at the stake, although so were heretics...and then Catholics. Incomprehensibly awful. When Anne Boleyn's cook, at the instructions of some high up, was caught putting poison in her food, he was boiled to death. Can you even begin to imagine? In the film, 'The Last of the Mohicans' we see a traditional Native American form of execution where the victim is tied by the legs to two horses who are then startled so that they run off in opposite directions. Makes you shudder. We saw Mel Gibson himself as William Wallace in the film 'Braveheart', being very stiff upper lip as he is about to undergo that most British of tortures known as being hung, drawn and quartered. Evil.

The horror of Jesus's execution must be what enthralls us. Pilate did not want to make a martyr of him - and how very sensible he was - even though in the Creed we say, 'he suffered under Pontius Pilate', there was a lot of misrepresentation in this story.

And yes, I know, I KNOW that the story doesn't end there and that the important bit was what happened next, but this was the human bit. This is what we think about today, Good Friday, because this was an HORRIFIC passing from life and at the hands of other human beings. These are the creatures we are, ones who suffer courageously as individuals through all kinds of horror, and ones who as a crowd are capable of the greatest evil.

Through all of this, I also think of the suffering of the woman who had to watch it happening to her son. How do you survive that?