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Flotsam and Jetsam

Vernon (n̓łəłt̓pmíw̓scin̓)

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In the Nsyilxcən language of the Syilx (Okanagan) people, “n̓łəłt̓pmíw̓scin̓“, means “jumping over place where the creek narrows”.

Before our recent trip to the Okanagan and beyond I really didn’t know Vernon at all. We drove through it once, as I recall, but that was the extent of my acquaintance.

The old friends in Vernon with whom we tarried a while on this trip were, by chance, the very first folks that The Girl introduced me to when she brought me to Canada way back in 2006. At that time these friends lived in East Vancouver. Some time later – having tired of the big city – they purchased a smallholding of somewhat more than twenty acres in rural Lumby in the BC interior. Here they enjoyed a bucolic existence until a couple of years ago.

Since then our friends have moved again – into a single-story dwelling in a ‘seniors’ village’ on the outskirts of Vernon. During the congenial couple of days that we spent with them they showed around the rural delights of this hitherto unknown (to me!) part of the province. Everything looked particularly verdant and prosperous and really most welcoming.


Photo by Andy Dawson ReidWe did not actually dine at this stylish bar/restaurant overlooking the town, but the menu looked good and the views (the which we had specifically driven up to see) are spectacular.

Photo by Andy Dawson Reid
Photo by Andy Dawson Reid
The few days that we spend in and around Vernon were filled with fascinating diversions – for which we thank our friends most sincerely. This post is not sufficiently expansive to do justice to all of the sights that we saw, but I do want to mention two stops in particular.

The first was at Planet Bee, the which – as you may rapidly have surmised – is a fabulous honey farm. We could not resist making some purchases, not least of some of their glorious ‘Nectar of the Sun’ mead.

Pure indulgence!

We also loved the Davison Orchards. I am going to leave you to their website, as they can sell themselves far better than can I. Both of these operations (along with the Okanagan wineries – about which more in a subsequent post) exemplify the cornucopian nature of this fabulous part of the world.

I think that it may be a good thing that they are not within daily reach of our humble abode.

Photo by Andy Dawson Reid
Photo by Andy Dawson Reid
Photo by Andy Dawson Reid
Photo by Andy Dawson Reid

Kamloops (Tk’emlúps)

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I have made mention on a number of occasions of The Girl’s heritage; of her birth and of her growing up in the city of Kamloops in the heart of British Columbia. Naturally our recent trip to the interior made that its starting point and a gratifying number of good folks – both family and friends – demonstrated their eagerness to re-unite with us and to catch us up with the various goings on in all of our lives.

Kamloops offers many dramatic vistas. This one is the view from the window of our room in the Coast hotel:

Photo by Andy Dawson Reid

In addition to our rendezvous with the living The Girl and I paid a visit to the cemetery in Kamloops in which her mother and the ‘aunt’ (who raised her after her mother’s early and untimely passing) had been laid to rest in their turn. We have made this pilgrimage a number of times and the experience it is always a moving one.

This year we were not alone amongst the memorials. Some very new and delicate creatures were also taking advantage of the peace and tranquility there:

Photo by Andy Dawson Reid
Photo by Andy Dawson Reid
Photo by Andy Dawson Reid
Photo by Andy Dawson Reid

What did we miss.

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Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash‘”What did we miss?” is a highly popular colloquial phrase often used as a catchphrase in pop culture, on social media, and in the workplace. The phrase gained massive viral traction as a specific recurring meme across TikTok and Instagram, where creators use the audio/caption “What did we miss?” to express shock or confusion when logging back onto the internet after a chaotic news cycle or viral drama. Furthermore, the exact quote frequently surfaces in everyday conversation, podcasts, and television recaps when individuals are returning to work meetings or group chats and need to catch up on what transpired while they were away’.

So…

What did we miss?…

Well – it has been a very busy year thus far. Unexpectedly so. Since ‘The Immigrant’ went offline (temporarily) last month you might have wondered if all that busy-ness had finally caught up with us and that we had retreated to our sun-drenched garden – non-alcoholic beverages in hand – to catch some serious ‘Zeds’.

Nope! Not a bit of it. We set out instead on a road-trip to the interior of British Columbia, with the intention of catching up with old and dear friends and family – of prying open the portmanteau of anecdotage – and perchance even scattering a few ashes of remembrance in the light of the developments in the first episode of 2026.

The idea had been – of course. – that updates to the blog would be posted as we proceeded upon our odyssey,  including – as is our wont – a plethora of evocative images designed to bring to those who have not been lucky enough to have visited the areas concerned a vivid picture of the terroir.

Well – better late than never… Watch out for exactly that over the next few posts.

Lost in the post

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My apologies to regular readers – and indeed to casual ones – for the recent deafening silence from these quarters with regard to the posting of updated missives to this forum.

I wrote a couple of months back about the software update to the blog platform that I use that had the effect of making the entire online journal disappear from the face of the InterWebNet.

That missive referred to the fraught week that I spent rapidly re-engineering the site. At the point of writing I had hoped that all had now been restored and that business could continue as usual.

It became fairly quickly apparent, however, that all was not well – at least for those stalwarts who depend on the mailed ‘new-post’ digests that have long been featured on the site. WordPress was attempting to send out the new messages in the usual manner, but they were disappearing into yet another void. The best intelligence that I could muster (not to mention the largely useless hints from AI) suggested that the tightening of online procedures to try to combat spam, hacks and other exploits had – in fact – actually prevented legitimate communications from getting through.

Finding a solution not affected by such restrictions proved a difficult enough exercise, for which there continues to be precious little online (or even old-fashionably human assistance).

It is with considerable relief that I can announce that I believe that I have finally found a solution.

This posting, of course, should prove to be the proof-of (or proof-against) this conjecture.

So – fingers (etc) firmly crossed!

Old dog… new tricks!

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I have been to my fair share of garage sales over the years – and have indeed found one or two items thereat that have proved to be of enduring usefulness. I had not at any point until recently, however, been involved with the organisation of one such.

Regular readers might recall that I posted a missive to this forum a couple of months back, explaining how a smooth start to the year had been disrupted by a number of unexpected events and occurrences upon which our attention had to be focussed. The most significant of these involved the sad passing of The Girl’s step mother and The Girl’s subsequent taking on of the mantle of sole executor of the estate.

The news on this front is that good progress has been made toward the granting of probate – and that the final stages of the preparation of The Girl’s step mother’s condo for sale are almost complete. It is this part of the process that led recently to our involvement in the setting up and operation of a sizeable garage sale.

The Girl has a very long standing friend who lives in Duncan – part-way between Victoria and Nanaimo. This excellent and most obliging friend volunteers at a charity shop that supports the local hospital auxiliary. A fair quantity of the contents of the condo had already been disposed of by means of this channel, but there were plenty of other items that we considered to have some appreciable value, the which might reasonably be offered for sale.

Thus it was that The Girl and I once again spent a weekend away from home – working hard to try to maximise the return on our endeavours for the benefit of the estate. Our Duncan friend owns a decent sized property with a huge garage and plenty of driveway without. On the Saturday tables were set up and sale items dated, sorted and displayed. This all took around six hours to complete on one of the hottest days of the year to date.

Unfortunately the heat was to be our undoing. The Sunday was, if anything, even hotter than the day before and the expected crowds of early shoppers failed to materialise. As the day grew hotter and hotter so fewer and fewer punters made the effort to drag  themselves around our table-loads of bargains. For us – once we had given up on the recalcitrant masses – we had but to re-sort, re-price and pack up all of the unwanted items, to take their turn at being shipped to the charity shop.

This second six-hour day in the blazing heat left The Girl and I (and our friend) completely exhausted. To make matters worse we barely covered the costs of mounting the extravaganza.

I think it is fair to say that if I never again have to help with the running of a similar enterprise… that would suit me just fine!

 

 

 

 

Early worms

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I made reference in a posting further up the year to the (re)discovery – on the part of The Girl and I – of the importance both of exercise and diet as essential weapons in the war that we are obliged these days to wage against the powers of aging… and all that that entails.

I will be writing a post in the not too distant future on this subject which will doubtless be thoughtful, serious and measured – as befits the importance of the subject. For the time being – however – a recent smidgeon of anecdotage…

The year that The Girl and I arrived in Canada – 2015 – we both joined a fitness class advertised as being for those ‘fabulously over fifty!’ Shortly thereafter The Girl decided that it was far too soon to be retired and found herself a job – the which in turn obliged her to locate alternate routes to fitness and health that did not clash with her work schedule.

I remained in the class – and am indeed still a regular now. We are all considerably further north than the original fifty; in some cases by several decades, but we enjoy the class as much for the social elements as for the workouts – and good and enduring friendships have been established between us.

Now that The Girl has retired she sees no reason to be up and out of the house at shortly after 8:00am – particularly not to indulge in physical exercise. On my fitness mornings, therefore, I sneak out as quietly as I can in an attempt to avoid disturbing her. I set an alarm but aim to awaken before it goes off.

These good intentions do not always go to plan – as was the case on Thursday last. On waking I struggled to read my watch with misty morning eyes. I deduced that the alarm had yet to sound… cancelled it, got up, made my coffee, grabbed my gym kit, yoga mat and other accoutrements, tip-toed out of the house and departed as quietly as  possible for Sidney by the Sea.

On arrival in town I headed for the gym – the which is held in an elders’ facility called the Shoal Centre. I was slightly surprised that there was no-one behind the reception desk, but figured that there might be some event occurring of which I was unaware. When I reached the gym door – however – and peeped through I was greatly surprised to find a group of exercisers preparing for their class… none of whom I recognised at all!!

In spite of the fog yet lurking in my brain I was finally able to figure out what had happened. It was, of course, an hour earlier than I had thought and this gym class was an even earlier one that that frequented by us only marginally crazy folks. Who can seriously do exercise at 7:00 in the morning (please don’t feel obliged to respond!).

I slunk back to the car and kept my head down for an hour – until it was finally time for our class.

This getting old thing has been seriously over-sold!

Dude!!

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I feel that some sort of explanation is called for with regard to the enigmatic and unexplained offering that was my last posting to these pages.

Fear not – there is a perfectly good explanation – and here it be!

Tech bit coming up… skip ahead if such things send you to sleep!

I started writing ‘The Imperceptible Immigrant’ back in 2012. For those interested in such things the blog is built on WordPress and hosted by a reasonably large North American hosting company. WordPress uses mySQL as its database and much of the coding which it comprises is done in a scripting language called PHP.

Now, all of the components of this system are subject to regular updates – both to add and refine the services offered, but also for security reasons. This latter is most important to prevent undesirables breaking into the systems. The trick to applying updates is to ensure that all of the WordPress components are running on versions that co-exist happily with each other. The timing for all this can be quite difficult.

I have for a while now been receiving warnings that I should upgrade the versions of PHP on my site. I finally did so last week. Unfortunately the theme that I have been using for the site (the template that defines how it looks and feels) has been in use virtually unchanged since the site was built. This upgrade broke it – and ‘The Immigrant’ disappeared in a flurry of error messages.

I was obliged to commence an urgent and time-consuming exercise to find a more modern template and to re-engineer the site – which, in InterWebNet terms, had simply ceased to exist. Even with assistance from some helpful technical support folk it took much of the week to get everything back up and running again.

OK – tech bit over…

The upside (apart from being less likely to break in the future) is that the site now has a spiffing new look and feel. If you get a chance do check it out and let me know what you think. Please do the same – naturally – should anything not be working properly.

Thank you

 

Testing, testing, testing

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“I discourage passive skepticism, which is the armchair variety where people sit back and criticize without ever subjecting their theories or themselves to real field testing”.

Tim Ferris

Washing the dust – 1

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“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls”.

Pablo Picasso

There have been years – probably too many in all honesty – in which the winter and early spring months have seen life’s dust accumulate upon our souls just that little bit too briskly.

Exposure to the arts may not truly require that much of an effort, but those of us of ‘un certain âge‘ are doubtless sometimes guilty of hibernational tendencies when is comes to our artistic intake during these dark months.

Not so this year! We have already been out and about a fair bit – and the dust of daily life has been well and truly disturbed.

Herewith a few highlights:

The threatre season at The Belfry started in February with Tawiah M’Carthy and Brad Cook’s excellent ‘Maanomaa, My Brother’. The Belfry’s notes reveals this:

“Childhood friends Kwame and Will reunite in Ghana for the funeral of a loved one, and discover how much has changed since they separated 25 years earlier. Telling their story in a beautiful combination of dialogue and movement, the play is both fiercely personal and curiously abstract. It’s a meditation on grief and diaspora starring playwrights M’Carthy and Cook“.

This is an extraordinarily beautiful and moving piece of writing, brought fiercely to life by its authors. The writing and performance are excellent and I for one was delighted that the production did not shy away from the theatrical – something that to my mind is all too prevalent these days.

Neither The Girl nor I care for the west coast habit of leaping to one’s feet at the end of a show to award a generous ovation. We cleave to the British view that standing ovations should be reserved for the truly exceptional.

In this case, however, we were both on our feet!

At the opposite end of the theatrical scale The Girl and I travelled with dear friends, one weekend in March, to the mainland for the ‘Broadway Across Canada‘ touring production of ‘Les Misérables‘ at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver.

Now, The Girl and I – separately and together – have both seen ‘Les Mis‘ on many occasions, stretching right back to the show’s transfer to the West End in London from the RSC’s home at the Barbican in 1985.

That we have done so should not be taken as a sign of obsessive reverence for the piece – though we have always enjoyed it. The reality is more prosaic. In the decade that we lived together in the UK we were visited on a pleasing number of occasions by travellers from Canada. When asked what they would like to see in London, ‘a musical‘ was always near the top of the list. ‘Les Mis‘ proved to be a reliably satisfactory way of fulfilling that desire.

With regard to the Vancouver touring production – the show provided its accustomed magic, but we did miss the full-stage revolve that had been such a integral and bold feature of the original show’s staging.

On the other hand – it was good to hear a full 16 piece orchestra featured in this production. Many modern presentations save money by utilising a heavily stripped down pit band.

On which subject – next time, music!

Doing new things

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“The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create men who are capable of doing new things”

Jean Piaget

 

Gentle readers may recall (said he optimistically!) that in a post entitled ‘Safe Harbour‘ and uploaded to this site during the grim depths of February, I drew attention to the presence in my customary New Year anthology of some of the choices that The Girl and I are now making in relation to our general (and specific) well-being.

Diet and exercise were certainly mentioned – and will be returned to as the year progresses. Down (or, sadly more accurately ‘right‘) sizing, along with ‘getting our affairs in order‘, were also on that agenda. Hmm!

None of these tasks is, however, is the subject of this note. That distinction belongs to this cryptic announcement – from the above-mentioned posting:

“I have now done two productions with the Peninsula Players (as Musical Director) and I am into my second year on the Executive Committee. I have a new venture to report in this space – so look out for that also”.

What strangeness might lurk behind that by that enigmatic pronouncement?

Read on…

I have been fortunate enough – during my days upon this planet – to have been involved in many capacities with the true amateur worlds of music and the dramatic arts. I have written plays and composed musicals. I have many times been the director or musical director of productions. I have been a pit musician and I have also stood on the stage in my own right. I have taught drama and run a youth theatre.

What I have not done – and am adamant that I am not equipped to do – is to tread the boards as an actor myself.

Until now!

At the first executive meeting of the year of the Peninsula Players the assembled company were canvassed for interest a different sort of production. Our local radio station, Radio Sidney, has been granted federal funding to create a radio drama – in the form of a ten part serial – concerning a topic of interest to this and many other communities… that of financial fraud as perpetrated upon the elderly.

The dramatisation that has resulted is drawn from an actual case in which an elderly English ex-pat living in Canada was preyed upon by unscrupulous fraudsters and ended up losing his house. The serialisation of this sorry tale is to include discussion segments with appropriate experts – producing over all a most valuable and timely resource.

The reason for its mention at the Peninsula Players meeting was that those recording the drama were in need of voice-actors to play the various parts… including one reasonably well brought up Englishman of a certain age who is the main victim of the criminals.

I feel sure that I have made mention before, somewhere in these postings, of my personal philosophy that is to say ‘Yes!‘ as much as possible if and when new challenges arise. Though I had not previously done any voice-acting I have done a great deal of recorded reading over the years. I therefore submitted to the audition process, was offered the part and as a result enjoyed the fascinating experience of playing a less fortunate version of myself.

In truth I have no idea whether or not I did a good job – though those in charge seemed satisfied. I was, however, most grateful for the opportunity.

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