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Long live the king

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For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d;
All murder’d: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour’d thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!

William Shakespeare – Richard II

Out here on the far distant west coast of Canada it feels a long way away from today’s events in London. I was not of a mind to get up in the middle of the night to watch the Coronation events unfold, though I will no doubt catch up with the news coverage later.

I am a staunch believer in the monarchy, although this is as much for fear of there being something far, far worse in its place should the republican adherents ever get their way. They protest loudly that as a nation Great Britain should be able to choose an elected and accountable head of state; and that somehow not to do so infantilises us. I’m afraid to say that, over this last decade, we have done ourselves no favours at all through our wildly negligent choices and find ourselves as a result sadly diminished as a nation. Not exactly a good precedent.

I wish Charles the very best fortune in his long anticipated role. I can’t say that he looks exactly comfortable with it but I do believe that he still has some power to do good.

Back in October last – when writing about my Canadian Citizenship Ceremony – I wrote of the strangeness of being obliged to swear allegiance to the monarch – something I had never done as a Brit. Interesting to see that, as an optional element in the Coronation rituals, the population of the United Kingdom have now been invited to do the same.

Old Stock

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To the Belfry Theatre the weekend just passed to catch “Old Stock”, the last production of the current theatrical season there.

You may recall – should you be a continuing consumer of this random reportage – that The Girl and I are long(ish) standing season ticket holders at the home of Victorian fringe theatre. Each year at about this time we have to decide whether or not to renew our subscription for the coming season (the which commences in the autumn). We do this by contemplating just how impressed (or otherwise) we have been by the season just closing and by studying the advance notices of next year’s programme. No surprises there…

It has to be said that there have been years in which we have come close to giving it a miss; this coming year conceivably – until the weekend just gone – being one of them. It would be no exaggeration to say that, for the past couple of seasons, we have not been exactly enthralled by what we have seen. Whereas we must be fair – noting that the tail end of the Covid pandemic has made things a whole lot more difficult for theatre companies far and wide – we cannot ignore the fact that sitting packed together with others in a theatre audience (the majority these days going un-masked!) still carries a fair degree of risk. Should we choose to take that risk it really had better be for something worthwhile…

…which brings us neatly to Halifax-based 2B Theatre’s production of Ben Caplan, Christian Barry and Hannah Moscovitch’s musical play – “Old Stock” (which bears the subtitle “A Refugee Love Story“).

Let us not beat around the bush. This quite brilliant production has gone a long way towards restoring our faith in Canadian theatre. It is witty but sensitive, riotously risque but touching, beautifully performed by musicians and actor/musicians alike and splendidly directed and staged. The show made us fall about laughing one moment and blub like babies the next. It had plenty to say without being puritanical about it. Most importantly it took the sort of risks that theatre must take to be any good (in any sense!) without being mealy-mouthed about it.

Brilliant!

If theatre companies on this side of the pond really want to win the ongoing and unflagging support of folks like us then they need to do a lot more of ‘this sort of thing‘!

IMHO…

Matters musical – 1

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I am moved – every once in a while – to furnish the gentle readers of these digital digressions with an update on the progress that The Chanteuse and I are making on our musical odyssey. I hope that this is not too wearisome for those that have little interest in such matters.

Back at the end of January I posted herein a missive announcing the release of a new Anam Danu single – going by the soubriquet of ‘Perfect‘. The Chanteuse and I have been busy promoting this recording; with some small degree of success. The track was listed in a good number of playlists, reviewed by various digital media pundits and the release engendered the publication of several feature articles in online fanzines and the like. Should you wish to know more you can find details in the news section on our website.

Back in November we had a track from last summer’s album release – ‘Soul Making‘ – included on a compilation of independent music by a UK based e-Zine and record label – Aldora Britain Records. Tom Hilton – the Scot whose brainchild ABR is – writes thus:

“Aldora Britain Records is an independent music e-zine and record label. The e-zine produces interviews with unsigned and underground artists and reviews their music. The label produces compilations of these artists. The vision of AB Records is to create a go-to place for music lovers all over the world to discover great new stuff, an online platform for independent music. It’s much needed!”

Tom and ABR have been most generous to us, having now featured us on three different compilations – the most recent being titled ‘Street Corner Jive‘. ABR also produce an international independent music e-Zine at regular intervals and Anam Danu was honoured to be the subject of of a feature back in March of this year. Should you wish to discover more about us you can find the article here:

Now, in the interests of not overwhelming merely perfunctory perusers of this idiosyncratic anthology with a bombardment of minutiae – and finding that I have considerably more to say than first I anticipated…

…I am going to split this post into two installments.

Coming soon… part two!

Mind the gap

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“Every time I go to the dentist they say, ‘You really need to fix that gap of yours’. I’m like, ‘My gap is paying your dentist bills.'”

Lara Stone

I grew up in the UK during the late 50s and the 60s – at a point at which British dentistry was busy earning itself a seriously poor reputation. Fluoridation was still a matter for argument – our parents’ generation were busily making up for the difficulty of obtaining sugar during the post-war years of austerity and – in the case of dental health for children – the public policy was one of “drill and fill”.

A generation of kids – self included – grew up seriously traumatised by such dental experiences.

Now – I had at the time what I took to be a charming gap between my two front teeth. My dentist – immune to that charm – decreed (and in those days one just went along with such ‘expert’ opinion) that the gap should be closed and he duly ordered for me an implement of torture designed to slowly force my two front teeth together by the slow turning of a screw. The device was hideously uncomfortable and cumbersome and I naturally did what (mildly) rebellious youths were expected to do.

Yet another visit to the dentist left the man in charge puzzled as to why his hideous apparatus was not having the desired effect and he was clearly keen to come up with some even more fiendish device for my next visit.

Before this could happen my brother obligingly resolved the issue. We were both keen cricketers (he considerably more talented than I) and we were regularly involved in scratch games on our local cricket green. My brother was possessed of a decent arm and could generate a fair bit of pace. On this occasion a short delivery leapt from the pitch and caught me square in the mouth. One of my front teeth was broken in half and – as it later transpired – the one next to it left in a permanently discoloured state. I had to have a crown fitted to the broken tooth, which at least finally dealt with the gap.

And thus things remained throughout the decades. We Brits are nowhere near as keen on cosmetic dentistry as are our North American cousins and I had finally reached an age at which I could tell my dentist to get lost, so my oddly coloured teeth became a fixture. As a result my smile has always been somewhat guarded and this has contributed in no small measure to my distaste for having my photograph taken.

Until recently…!

Now that I live in Canada things have taken a turn for the better, without my really having had to do anything about it. Whilst having some routine work done last year my new dentist decided that I must really want my discoloured tooth upgraded and – by means of some modern magic potion – rendered it into an almost acceptable tone without a word being spoken. Then – this year – a small piece of my by now venerable crown broke off and I had to have a new one made. After some helpful consultation – and by means of yet more magic – I now have a set of front teeth that actually look as though they are meant to be together. I guess I now look the way my UK dentist envisioned that I should more than fifty years ago. Wonders will never cease!

There – that didn’t hurt a bit…

 

Nature! What’s that all about?

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Time for some photos of plants growing in our garden. I know that I do this every year, but the garden is not the same from one year to the next so I don’t suppose that the images are either. Anyway – the nature of this journal is that there will always be something else along in a moment and there are no penalties for skipping ahead (I wanted there to be but couldn’t figure out how to do it!)…

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson Reid
The reason for my somewhat incredulous byline is that – no matter how much a part of it we all are – nature is still pretty much a riddle to me (wrapped inside a mystery etc, etc)… Take this Camellia for example. Some seasons back (maybe four or five) I pruned it back a little in the early spring. It was probably not the best time of year for such a treatment, but I was not too severe on the shrub; merely trying to persuade it not to stomp all over the ‘lesser’ plants around it.

The Camellia clearly took umbrage and refused to flower at all in any of the succeeding years – with the exception of the odd desultory bloom once in a while. This year – well, take a look for yourself:

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidMaybe I will post an update when all those buds burst into bloom.

In between

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“Reality is not always dark or positive. It is somewhere in-between”.

Antara Mali

It is Easter weekend and here on the west coast of Canada we are once again caught in between. Winter has tarried over-long and though we have had occasional glimpses of spring it has to be said that we have not yet truly broken though thereto. Even the garden seems unsure as to whether or not to really ‘go for it’ – or to wait for things to warm up a bit. Most of our daffodils took one look at the weather and decided not to bother with flowers this year. The tulips boldly unfurled themselves but are now looking as though they wished that they had not bothered. I have mowed the lawns a couple of times but even the grass seems to be in two minds as to where we are in the seasons’ cycle.

A quarter of the year has gone. The clocks are wondering if they made a mistake with ‘summer’ time, but the planetary movements are relentless and we are already more than half way to the longest day. Hardly seems possible, does it?

Our exciting trip to Africa looms ever closer but the whole thing still seems more like make-belief than reality. It will be real enough, soon enough! We (in truth, mostly The Girl) have focused our minds on the expedition to come by carefully equipping ourselves for the sort of adventure that I don’t believe either of us has encountered before (well – I certainly haven’t). Will it be a life changing experience? Time will tell (and so, of course, will I)!

I am just finishing a fairly tough term at the College, during which I have been teaching not one class but two. I feel sure that the mental exercise of maintaining overlapping schedules has been doing wonders for keeping my ageing brain sparking; a sort of fitness class for the intellect. I have certainly detected a fair bit of grumbling from that quarter – the which is pretty much how I am when it comes to physical exercise also. Ah well – at least the remuneration goes some way towards paying for our sojourn south of the equator.

Well – let us hope that things change for the better and that the year begins to feel as though it has truly sparked into life.

 

Failing better

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"This work" is licensed under CC BY 4.0“Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Samuel Beckett

A handful of posts back I gently mourned the lack of a decent (IMHO!) Sunday Paper here in western Canada and breathed an authored sigh of relief at the discovery of The Atlantic magazine – by way of compensation.

As it happens I had not originally intended the subject of that missive to be my quest to find an agreeable journal here on the island, but rather an appreciation of a particular article that I had come across within the digital variant of my new favourite source of commentary.

The piece concerned is titled “The Fine Art of Failure” and is by the Canadian novelist, Stephen Marche. In fact, the article was adapted from the Marche’s slim Field Notes volume – “On Writing and Failure” (the which is also apparently subtitled – “On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer”). I was so taken with the article that I Amazoned forthwith and purchased the real thing.

Marche’s premise is that it doesn’t matter how famous or well-respected one becomes as a writer – the main focus of one’s existence is exactly the same as for the complete beginner… that of being continually rejected (albeit at a somewhat elevated level). Marche writes:

“Failure is the body of a writer’s life. Success is only ever an attire. A paradox defines this business: the public only see writers in their victories but their real lives are mostly in defeat“.

Much of this slim tome is made up of the sort of anecdotes that should be taken to heart. A few pages in Marche discusses the “cruel species of irony [that] drove the working life of Herman Melville“:

“His first book was Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, pure crap and a significant bestseller. His final book was Billy Budd, an extreme masterpiece he couldn’t even manage to self-publish. His fate was like the sick joke of some cruel god. The better he wrote, the more he failed”.

For those dreaming of literary success Marche is clear-eyed:

“The internet loves to tell stories about famous writers facing adversity. … What I find strange is that anyone finds it strange that there’s so much rejection. The average telemarketer has to make eighteen calls before finding someone willing to talk with him or her. And that’s for s*** people might need, like a vacuum cleaner or a new smartphone. Nobody needs a manuscript”.

…or a song …or a play …or a screenplay …or a painting! Marche acknowledges that his thesis is not restricted to the literary arts. It is the same all over.

I cannot recommend this slender volume enough to anyone who harbours the creative urge. It is strangely and contrarily reassuring to all those of us who had – at some point – to choose between keeping the stacks of rejection letters or throwing them away (or indeed burning them!) and giving up the whole idea.

You know who you are!

 

Wow!

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I posted – back in February – a really quite excited missive celebrating a Scottish Rugby triumph over the auld enemy on the opening weekend of this year’s Six Nations tournament – at Twickenham! Those who don’t follow such things may not be aware quite how big of a deal this was. The Scots won consecutive victories at the Home of Rugby for the first time in a very long time.

Subsequent to that post – in which I also looked ahead hopefully to at least two more wins in the competition – I kept fairly quiet, so as not to jinx the team. Well – the tournament finished last weekend and I need keep silent no longer.

As predicted, the Scots were unable to beat either the French or the Irish (currently numbers one and two in the world) – the latter completing a fine Grand Slam in Dublin on St. Patrick’s Day (many congratulations!). The Scots did, however, win their other two games, finishing with three bonus point victories and third place in the tournament.

Even more impressive is what those results have done to the current world rankings (see below) – a matter of considerable import in a Rugby World Cup year.

Let it be said at once that Scotland are in a fierce group in the World Cup. They will have to face to both the Irish (again) and the South Africans in the group stages and they would need to beat at least one of them to stand a chance of progressing to the later stages of the tournament. This is extremely unlikely – but we Scots are by nature infeasibly optimistic, so who knows?

…and, of course, nothing will stop us celebrating in the meantime.

Stuff happening

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Last Friday The Girl and I had a telephone consultation with the Travel Medicine and Vaccination Centre here in Victoria. Our purpose was to establish that which would be required for our forthcoming trip to Africa.

Now, The Girl has a rather splendid written record of her previous vaccinations and it was a breeze to determine what (if anything) is in need of updating and what additional precautions should be taken to keep her safe on the basis of our detailed itinerary.

I – naturally – presented a rather different challenge. I feel sure that all in the UK must now be effected in a considerably more rigorous manner than ‘when I were a nipper’; clearly I must have had the usual round of immunisations for a child growing up in the UK in the 60s – but I as far as I can recall I have never possessed a written record thereof. With the memory of a man heading rapidly towards his eighth decade there was no chance that I could categorically state that which I had had and when I had had it.

The lady from the TMVC cut through all the cr*p. I mattered not a hoot what jabs I had had back in the day; with the exception of HEPs A & B (which I had somehow contrived not to have thus far) everything would need to be updated anyway.

We thus presented ourselves the following day at the TMVC to be stuck like pin cushions. Tetanus, Typhoid, Polio, Diphtheria, HEP A & B… It is a good thing that we each have two arms !

Anyway – ’tis done and all we need to do now is to pick up our Malaria medication. Things have apparently moved on since my last experience of these vile tinctures – the which saw me through a visit to India back in the 80s. Then – having failed to read the instructions for the tablets with adequate care – we experienced several distressing nights of psychotic reactions – waking at 4:00am, sweating profusely with pounding hearts and the conviction that we were about to die in our beds. Not nice!

Preparations for the Africa trip are proceeding apace. Travel in Botswana on small planes necessitates the toting of only very limited luggage. We not only had to purchase soft bags small enough to fit into the cargo hold of a Cessna, but also to equip ourselves with a new safari wardrobe. The limitations are not solely to do with weight. The wildlife in Africa doesn’t like whites or other bright colours. The mosquitos – on the other hand – do like blues, blacks and other dark colours.

As we are travelling in the African winter we must be prepared for cold 5:00am starts, but also for 30C days. Layers it is then – and of suitably lightweight clothing. It is a good thing that Canada – being a nation in love with the great outdoors – has plentiful supplies of high-tech gear that is just the job (though at a price, of course).

Well, I think that is about enough of an update for now. More – of course – to come!

Coda

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When I wrote a post recently raising a cheer for the culmination of the long process towards adding Canadian citizenship (and a matching passport) to my existing British variants of both – I assumed that that was the last I would hear of the process. Indeed – what else could there be to say?

Imagine my surprise, then, when an important and most official looking package arrived for me just the other day in the post. The envelope indicated that it had originated in the Canadian House of Commons – the Canadian parliament – and when I extracted this rather swish folder from within the impression was confirmed.

Photo by Andy Dawson Reid
What could the Canadian government want with me? Was I in trouble already? Did they want their citizenship back?

I need not have feared…

Photo by Andy Dawson Reid
The folder contained a rather splendid certificate, signed by our local MP – Elizabeth May – welcoming me as a new Canadian citizen.

How splendid!

Now – I don’t want to draw comparisons, but when The Girl was awarded her British citizenship back in 2012, no-one from the UK parliament sent her an equivalent welcoming memento.

Hmmmm!

Elizabeth May is a resident of our local town – Sidney by the Sea – and is (joint) leader of the Green Party. She has long served the peninsula and the Gulf Islands as member of parliament and is one of the few Green Party representatives there. We like her!

Even more so now…

 

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