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Flotsam and Jetsam

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.

Trust the process

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“Slow down. Calm down. Don’t worry. Don’t hurry. Trust the process.”

Alexandra Stoddard

In my recent missive concerning our plans for 2026 I included this brief note:

  • There will certainly be more music making this year and there are indeed already things upon which I should be reporting. Look for further postings soon.

Look no further.

The Chanteuse and I have been searching for some time for a guitarist to recruit to the Anam Danu cause. After what has felt like a long and intensive search (because it was!) we are thrilled to announce that Clive Scott is officially joining Anam Danu in that role. We have already been working together for a while on some new music and we cannot wait for you all to experience this new sound.

Clive previously played with the local Victoria band Aston Martini. We asked him to share a bit about himself and his musical background. Here is what he had to say!

“I grew up on a farm near Innisfail, Alberta. I remember always loving music and was first exposed to formal music training in grade 5 in the school band program where I learned to play saxophone and read music. At 16, I started learning the guitar and was immediately hooked. While I loved playing and jamming with others, for many years as a professional pilot, my irregular schedules precluded playing in bands. I was able to get back into bands in 2020 when I moved to part-time work. I am currently playing as the guitarist in Vanilla Riot, a popular Victoria-based band featuring two female vocalists and covering rock, post-punk, and alternative hits. I am excited to be playing in Anam Danu – the songs are beautifully written. I love the melodic structure and stories they tell. It is quite different from music I have played to date. What would one call it – ‘West Coast contemporary’? There are influences of jazz, folk, rock – all at once. Challenging and rewarding to play and wonderful to hear.”

Welcome aboard Clive – and thank you for your kind words.

There will be music to follow soon. As ever – stay tuned…

A Salty Dog

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“We sailed for parts unknown to man
Where ships come home to die
No lofty peak nor fortress bold
Could match our captain’s eye

Upon the seventh seasick day
We made our port of call
A sand so white and sea so blue
No mortal place at all

We fired the gun and burnt the mast
And rowed from ship to shore
The captain cried, we sailors wept
Our tears were tears of joy”

Gary Brooker – Procol Harum

One more song from the not so distant past…

…and one more anecdote concerning an aspect of our lives here in Canada.

There is an unattributed saying regarding boat ownership that runs thus:

The two happiest days in a boat owner’s life are the day you buy the boat and the day you sell the boat.

Now, a quick wander through Google reveals that being the subject of this saying annoys boat-owners considerably. Most refute the implication absolutely, eagerly extolling the joys and pleasures afforded by being able to get out on the water in short order. Such folk willingly accept the downsides (most of which are financial… author Kin Hubbard wrote “A boat is a hole in the water into which you pour money”).

So – is there some truth in these aphorisms? Do please read on – and decide for yourself.

Given the costs of maintaining a boat on the water we determined in advance that ours would live on the land. This restricted the type and size of boat that we could buy but also cut out considerable expense. The 20ft Double Eagle – with a hefty V8 and stern drive as power source – weighs a couple of tons on the trailer. One man on his own can float and recover this beast at the boat launch, but it is easier – and safer – should this happen to be a fit younger man. Such things become considerably more arduous as one ages.

For the first few years of ownership we adopted a compromise solution. Being unashamed fair-weather boaters we kept the boat safely on the driveway alongside our house during the winter and then rented a slip in one or other of the local marinas during the summer months.

At first this seemed to work out reasonably well. Then – around the turn of the decade – two things happened which interrupted our slow but steady boating progress.

Here at the southernmost extremity of Vancouver Island we do not get that much snow. Every now and again, however…! During early 2019 a fall of more than a foot of very wet snow split Dignity’s aging Bimini cover and dumped a huge pile of snow into the cockpit. The snow slowly melted over the next couple of weeks, but locating a company that could make us a replacement top took the next year and a half. It also took three different companies (one went out of business; one suffered an illness; the third did a good job!) and the loss of some hundreds of dollars in un-recovered deposits.

Then – no sooner than we were finally re-equipped with the necessary canvas – the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Now, one might not have expected the pandemic to have affected boaters that much, but several of our local marinas took the opportunity to close their gates to carry out renovations and upgrades whilst everything else was locked down.

By the time that we felt again inclined to mingle with our fellow men (and women) we were most of the way through 2021 and Dignity’s keel had not touched the saltchuck for nearly four years.

Things did not improve over the succeeding seasons. Several times I took Dignity to Seapower Marine for servicing – only to be informed that a variety of issues had arisen that also required fixing before the boat could safely be taken to sea. These issues naturally took time to fix – as well as time to accumulate the necessary funds. Amongst other matters that we dealt with were a cracked manifold, a dead alternator and starter motor, a sticking throttle cable, dead batteries and decaying high tension cabling.

By 2024 the cumulative effect of these various issues – along with the fact that I had now entered my 70s and must needs be aware of my physical limitations – led me inexorably to the conclusion that it was time to pass Dignity on to a new – and more enthusiastic (younger!) – owner.

As ever it took a while to get everything shipshape, but in the latter part of last summer – and with a heavy heart – I advertised Dignity for sale. I had serious concerns that the economic and political climate that now prevails would make this a difficult time to sell a boat; as it turned out I did so to the second potential purchaser who came to have a look. Dignity now resides in Port Alice – towards the north end of Vancouver Island – and I am delighted to report that the owner is a huge enthusiast for the Double Eagle.

I hope that it goes without saying that we were very sad to see the good ship Dignity depart – but I do know in my heart that it was the right decision.

As to whether or not I will ever own another boat (presumably a considerably smaller one!)… Who can say?

A Ship Called Dignity

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Photo by Andy Dawson Reid“And I’m telling this story
In a faraway scene
Sipping down raki
And reading maynard keynes
And I’m thinking about home and all that means
And a place in the winter for dignity
And I’ll sail her up the west coast
Through villages and towns
I’ll be on my holidays
They’ll be doing their rounds
They’ll ask me how I got her I’ll say “I saved my money”
They’ll say isn’t she pretty that ship called dignity”

Ricky Ross – Deacon Blue

This posting is long overdue and should really have appeared late last summer. The tardiness stems from the fact that the matter it concerns is something about which I feel perhaps unexpectedly emotional.

Let me explain…

My last post featured the rediscovery of The Waterboys’ classic track – “The Whole of the Moon”. This led – as such things often do – to the revisiting of another great Scottish song – Deacon Blue’s “A Ship Called Dignity”. Now, regular readers with long memories might just recall that this song has been referenced in these jottings before – the context for which was as follows:

Back in the day – way before we moved to Canada – The Girl and I had many a discussion as to what our new life might look like; where we would live… what we might get up to… what we would not… It was not always certain that we would end up in – or indeed near – Victoria but one of the things that finally swayed me – after a number of visits and the very great joy of getting married amongst friends and family on the Saanich Peninsula – was that I really loved the idea of living within sight of the ocean. Sweeping vistas of snow-capped mountains would just be the icing on the cake.

But that wasn’t all! To move away from the country of one’s birth – the place where one grew up – and to cross the sea to a whole different continent – is no small matter and the decision so to do was not taken lightly. I suggested that what might really seal the deal for me was to be able to fulfill a very long-standing dream…

…of owning a boat!

I couldn’t help but think that it would be a shame to live within sight of the sea but not to be able to play thereon.

Fortunately, The Girl is who she is – and operates the way that she does – and we agreed that a handy lump sum from one of my pensions should be used for that end.

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidIt took a year to find the right boat – an old but characterful 20ft Double Eagle – and I decided that she should take her name from Ricky Ross’s song. ‘Dignity’ seemed to me to be appropriate.

So – what is all this about last summer?

Tune in next time…

 

The Whole of the Moon

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Photo by Andy Dawson Reid“Unicorns and cannonballs
Palaces and piers
Trumpets, towers, and tenements
Wide oceans full of tears
Flags, rags, ferry boats
Scimitars and scarves
Every precious dream and vision
Underneath the stars

Yes, you climbed on the ladder
With the wind in your sails
You came like a comet
Blazing your trail
Too high, too far, too soon
You saw the whole of the moon”

Mike Scott – The Waterboys

 

The other day The Girl and I watched some of the coverage of the Winter Olympics opening ceremony from Milan and Cortina, courtesy of the mercifully still splendid BBC. The program was preceded by a short film featuring former AC Milan and Sweden footballer, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, on what it takes to become a champion.

The soundtrack of this diminutive opus included – amongst other musical items – a cover version of The Waterboys’ track – ‘The Whole of the Moon‘. Now, this is one of my favourite ever songs… in other words, I wish fervently that I had written it myself! To my intense frustration, however, I missed the credit for the piece (assuming that there was one) and realised that I had no idea whose cover this was – or where I might find a copy.

No matter! We are, of course, blessed (or cursed!) in these dog-days with a frankly incredible range of services that enable us to discover pretty much anything about pretty much everything. I spent the next couple of days pottering around the InteWebNet looking for clues and hoping to locate a source for the piece.

This I was duly able to do, of course, establishing that this particular version had been created by one Tom Hickox – an English singer/songwriter who is clearly worth taking the time to get to know better.

Whilst I was hunting down this fascinating link in the chain I found yet another cover version of “The Whole of the Moon” – this time by another unknown (to me!) singer/songwriter – this time a Scottish lady by the name of Karine Polwart. This considerably more delicate version comes from an album of covers of songs by Scottish writers – entitled “Karine Polwart’s Scottish Songbook” – the which I had immediately to snap up.

In amongst other versions of songs that are already well known I found another of my favourite tracks (yes – another one that I would have done pretty much anything to have written!). This song goes by the soubriquet – “A Ship Called Dignity“…

…but more of that next time.

Jumping the gun

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Those who follow these meanderings by gracing the occasional e-mail digest with their precious attention (as apposed to just clicking on ‘delete’) may have been puzzled over the last two days to receive what might at a quick glance have appeared to be the same posting in  duplicate.

A closer look would have revealed that the first version to arrive appeared to be strangely incomplete, as well as terminating somewhat abruptly. In this case the obvious explanation is clearly the correct one. I hit ‘publish’ accidentally and prematurely – but was unaware that I had so done until the arrival of the first draft alerted me to the fact.

Should you wish to catch up with the completed missive please do focus on the second email or follow this link in your browser.follow this link in your browser.

My apologies for the inconvenience…

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