In Canada
“If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today.”
E. Joseph Cossman
So very much has happened in the last year; it is difficult sometimes to ‘get one’s head around it’. These photos were taken a year apart! Where would I rather be?…
“Snow makes a soft bed, but no man wakes from it. That was the wisdom of the North”.
Mark Lawrence
I promised that I would cover a second sporting matter in addition to the encomium regarding Scotland’s excellent Six Nations achievement of last weekend that featured so prominently in my last post… and as I am (where possible) a man of my word – here it is…
When The Girl and I first became what is charmingly called ‘an item’ some decade and a half ago, one of the many things to which I determined to introduce her – as a means of binding our futures more closely together through mutual understanding and appreciation – was the supreme sport of cricket. Long time readers of these meanderings will be well aware of my enduring love for the game – as well as my complete mediocrity as a practitioner thereof.
I will not impose on the gentle reader at this point either an attempt to explain the game’s mysterious appeal, nor to exhaustive catalog our history with its regard. I will mention – however – the now legendary 2005 Ashes series between England and Australia… that being the year that England finally regained the Ashes after nearly two barren decades of trying. They did so – further – against one of the greatest of all Aussie sides.
Clearly this outstanding achievement – which was played out over five gripping five day test matches – was the perfect opportunity to introduce The Girl to the delights of the game. This was made all the more easy by the fact that – in those days – test cricket in the UK was given routine live coverage – for the whole of every one of those twenty five days – by the BBC. We would arrive home from work, switch on the TV and be immediately gripped by the sheer drama with which those encounters were completed. The Girl – who is a huge sports fan anyway – became a convert.
The timing was fortuitous, for the very next year the England Cricket Board (ECB) – in grevious pursuit of filthy lucre – sold it’s soul to the rebarbative Murdoch and the broadcast rights to Sky TV. Live coverage of international cricket disappeared from television over night for those unwilling to render their shilling to the appalling antipodean.
This state of affairs has remained the case ever since. Shockingly live coverage of the English national game cannot be seen on free-to-air TV by the youngsters who might some day play a part in its future.
Or at least – that was the case until this year. Finally, Sky grew tired of featuring the game and Channel 4 picked up – at the last moment – the broadcasting rights for England’s winter series in India. As things have only been put in place at the very last minute it all looks a little low-tech, but we can once again follow every ball in time-honoured fashion (even here in Canada).
Delightfully, the England team responded brilliantly to this development in the first test (which finished earlier this week) by playing a blinder and beating India in India for the first time in yonks. India are one of the very top sides and at home (this being a country that regards the game almost as a religion) they are virtually unbeatable.
Well done England!
“The only way to prove that you’re a good sport is to lose”.
Ernie Banks
I changed my mind several times as to the form that this post should take.
The early 1980s are relevant both to the immediate topic and to something else on which I intend shortly to write – the current Channel 4 TV mini-series – “It’s a Sin“. It rapidly became apparent, however, that trying to link these particular two topics together would simply not work – diminishing them both.
Concerned that I have English readers and that I do not wish to offend any of them (unnecessarily!) I could have chosen to tie my main topic in with another related sporting matter – thus giving everyone something to cheer about.
In the end, however, I decided – “What the heck!“. I should leave all other topics for further posts and just go for it! To that end… English readers of a sensitive disposition may wish to look away now:
Yesterday saw the start of the 2021 Rugby Six Nations Championship. The second fixture of the day (once the French had dealt harshly with the ever eager Italians) was the Calcutta Cup fixture between England and Scotland at the home of Rugby – Twickenham.
And here is where the 1980s come into things; the last time that the Scots beat the English at Twickenham was in 1983 (the year that the US invaded Grenada, the year that Thatcher was first re-elected Prime Minister in the UK, the year that BC Place was opened in Vancouver, the year that McDonalds invented the McNugget!) – thirty eight long years ago!
Two years ago they came close in what proved an extraordinary game – the English leading at one point in the first half by 31 – 0 before the Scots scored 38 unanswered points to lead the match with five minutes to go. The English finally woke up and squeezed out a converted try to tie the game.
This time was a much more straightforward affair in some ways, though perhaps no less astonishing in terms of the way the contest played out. The Scots might consider themselves a little unfortunate to have finally broken their hoodoo and won a famous victory by a mere 11 points to 6, particularly given that the game was actually pretty one-sided in almost every respect. Scotland had 65% of the possession, 70% of the territory, made 11 clean breaks to England’s 0 and missed only 11 tackles to England’s 29.
Yes – the Scots probably should have won by a wider margin and indeed they left a number of points out on the field because their goal kicking was below par. This was, nonetheless, a famous and wonderful victory and – given that this year the Scots have three home fixtures still to come – they really ought to be able to do something a little special in the remainder of the tournament.
Well… special in terms of their recent record in any case.
Come on you Scots!
“Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over…Death is not anything…death is not…It’s the absence of presence, nothing more…the endless time of never coming back…a gap you can’t see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound…”
Tom Stoppard – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
You would think that – given the unprecedented times in which we live – intimations of our mortality would be constantly lurking on the periphery of our minds… or at the very least intruding upon us – un-looked for – in quieter moments when the hubbub of the world dies away.
If it does not do so – and the behavior that we see on the news-reels suggests that it may indeed not – then that is probably because there is something in our makeup that makes us determinedly believe that – “it ain’t gonna happen to us“!
That may well be an essential mechanism for our very sanity…
There are – however – times when these things sneak up on us and give us a nasty fright.
The Girl was obliged to visit the Victoria General Hospital the other day for what is blandly labelled (so as not to frighten the horses!) – a ‘procedure’. This procedure was of the sort to which us chaps need never give a second thought, but that ladies of a certain age sometimes do. It was to be carried out in Surgical Daycare and was billed as a quick in-and-out – nothing to worry about…
…except that it was to be done under a general anesthetic…
…except that – because of COVID-19 restrictions – all I could do was to drop the Girl off at the front door and then pick her up there again later – once they had called me to let me know that she was ready to go.
The procedure was scheduled for 2:45pm and she had to be there two hours ahead of time. The procedure itself would be pretty quick but, of course, recovering from the anesthetic can take a wee while. We estimated that she could be ready any time from 4-ish to about 7-ish…
All I could do was to go home and wait.
The gentle reader will be well ahead of the curve by this point…
Yes – I did fine up until about 6:00pm, but I have to admit that as the clock ticked forward past 6:30pm – with no word at all from the Victoria General – a part of my normally satisfyingly logical mind started to run through the various alternative scenarios. However much one tells oneself that all is as it should be and that delays and diversions are to be expected with this sort of… er – operation – it became increasingly difficult not to start imagining the worst…
…and I have to tell you – that was not a pleasant experience.
All is good! Surgical Daycare called me at about 6:45pm. The Girl is fine and raring to go (within the usual bounds of taking things easy for a bit) and all gloomy thoughts have been banished once more to the outer darkness.
Strange thing – the mind…
Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.
Marcel Proust
I receive a sharp reminder once a year of the passage of time… and in particular of the passage of time since I started writing this blog. That reminder comes in the form of the renewal demand from my hosting company for the pleasure of supporting my various websites – of which this blog was the first, having been created back in 2012. I started blogging at the end of January that year so now is the time that I must stump up in order that I may continue so to do.
For those gentle readers who don’t really get this whole blogging thing – there was a time when blogging was all the rage. That was the few years before I took it up, naturally, and by the time had I started keeping this journal the youngsters were already saying – “Blogging?… Nah!”
Now, of course, I am nearly a whole decade further behind the times – and you know what? – I really don’t care that I am old-fashioned. I am sixty seven, for goodness sake. I am allowed to be old fashioned.
For those of you who like statistics – in the nine years that I have been writing this blog I have written 925 posts (averaging just over 100 posts a year – approximately two a week). If the internal statistics are to be believed I have written nearly 365,000 words in that time and uploaded some 2,590 images – many of them my own photographs.
Not bad, huh?!
I started blogging when I learned that The Girl was going to take up a good job here in Victoria, even though I still needed to work for a few more years in the UK before I could retire and move to Canada to be with her. Faced with the prospect of carrying on a long distance relationship with an eight hour time difference I figured that I would need to find things to occupy my time (other than working!). When her job fell through and she came back to the UK some ten months later I decided to keep the blog going – documenting our eventual move to British Columbia, which was rescheduled for 2015.
I could have stopped once we settled here but I decided to keep it going – as a way of keeping a foot on both continents. I am blessed to have regular readers on both sides of the pond who seem happy to keep up with my chunterings.
Has the blog changed much? It is certainly less verbose than it used to be and I don’t reach for the thesaurus quite as much as once I did. I enjoyed getting to explore the language and to play little games with prose, but as I have grown older so have I started to keep things a little more simple – more straightforward. I have noticed that I do the same with song lyrics – which is no bad thing…
Having made it this far I will, naturally, be shooting for the complete decade.
After that – who knows?
I have struggled for decades now with the fear of and resistance to change – mostly in the realms of technology, transportation, and the ways people choose to communicate. If I had a theme song, it would be that lovely song ‘I’m Old-Fashioned,’ as sung by Ella Fitzgerald.
Julia Glass
I have probably written quite enough on these pages in recent times about “Winter Blue and Evergreen” – the album (which I shall determinedly call that just to be even more old-fashioned) that the Chanteuse and I have of late let loose upon an unsuspecting world.
There was much talk of streaming and downloading and Spotify and YouTube and suchlike… all wonderfully modern concepts and jolly splendid for anyone in the business trying to make a name for themselves; or not in the business and just trying to listen to some music.
But then again… there are some folks (like me) who really are just old-fashioned about such things and prefer their music still to be on a physical CD. Let’s not get side-tracked at this point by those who prefer vinyl or – heaven fore-fend – cassette tape or even (shudder!) 8-track!
I played CDs myself in the car until very recently – when the CD auto-changer in the Lexus stopped reading them properly. I did look for a replacement but the cost was prohibitive so I had to switch to a Bluetooth receiver and my phone instead – which is actually way more efficient…
Ahem!
No – the point is that some folk prefer CDs and when it comes to “Winter Blue and Evergreen“… CDs we have got! You can’t order them through the website (at the moment) but you can just drop me a line and I will send you one.
Can I say fairer than that?
I think not…
You’ve got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don’t mess with Mister In-Between
Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters
Songwriters: Johnny Mercer / Harold Arlen
The Girl was talking on the phone this morning to a dear friend (the same dear friend who lived with us for a while last year and now resides in Vancouver). As do many such conversations in these days much of the talk concerned the vicissitudes and restrictions of life under lock-down.
This is hardly surprising given the circumstances.
The Girl did – however – perhaps for the first time since this whole thing began (and I am referring here solely to the pandemic) venture the opinion that there was finally some light at the end of the tunnel (and that it was not an approaching… yada, yada, yada… hopefully the gentle reader will already have eagerly consumed this recent post!).
The point is that – to the ‘reasons to be cheerful’ outlined in that post can now be added another and perhaps even more important one – the Government of British Columbia has revealed its COVID-19 Immunization Plan.
Hoorah! Hoorah! and thrice… Hoorah!
If nothing else this finally gives a rough shape to how the pandemic will be rolled back and normal life given a chance to commence its revival. This is the broad sweep of things:
…and this is the phase into which we both fall:
Timeline: April to June 2021
Now – this means that if all goes well we will have been fully immunized by the end of July. Further it perhaps means that by the time the nights start drawing in and it becomes infeasible to socialise in the open air – we might actually be able to do so once again in the old-fashioned way – indoors and round the dining table…
…and that is bloomin’ good news and reason enough to celebrate (safely)!
“From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached”.
Franz Kafka
I predicted in my recent ‘Review of the Year‘ post that this effort (a look ahead to the year just started) would either be dealt with in short order (there being nothing much to which to look forward) or really rather difficult to write.
We shall see which turns out to be the case…
Now – I could write a very simple list of things that we would like to achieve this year. It would look something like this:
I do realise, of course, that these objectives may well be very similar – with minor variations – for many, many people this year. In the spirit of making a proper effort, however, I will see if I can do a little better in terms of our particular situation.
Extremely blessed as we are financially with the relative security of our pensions (who would have ever thought to be able to write such a thing) and our on-going part-time jobs, the one positive side-effect of not being able to do any of the things on the list above is that we do not currently have any major outgoings. For this reason we have decided to invest a little further in renovations to our home.
Readers may recall that in the spring of 2017 we had our new deck built on the back of the house. In the winter of 2017/18 we tackled the greatest challenge, with the wholesale renovation of the main floor of the house. In 2020 we had the exterior redecorated.
All that remains is for us to do some upgrades and tidying up in our basement. Our main guest bedroom is down there and needs a proper bathroom in place of the lashed-together affair that it currently has. The small kitchenette needs remodeling and upgrading and the family room – that which we re-painted in 2019 – needs to have its purpose properly defined and to be re-jigged accordingly. We are thinking that we may turn some of it into a small fitness room.
This is all currently in the planning stages with a view to being effected in the spring/summer.
As I say – we are both expecting to carry on working – at least part time. I am not teaching this term (too small an uptake) but may instead teach a condensed version of the course in the spring (summer) term. The Girl will continue three days a week at her volunteer agency and is still seeing clients with her other hat on. I too will continue to make and promote music with The Chanteuse – following whatever course that may take.
As things stand I don’t think we can look further ahead than this. Like everyone else – we wait and watch…
The gentle reader will probably not need me to point out that tomorrow (for I write this missive on Sunday 17th January!) is known in some circles as ‘Blue Monday’… the most depressing day of the year!
It will also hardly be necessary for me to enumerate the more obvious reasons why this year in particular this January day already has a head start – even before taking into account the financial pressures of the festive season just passed – the generally grim weather throughout the northern hemisphere – the dis-incentives to indulge in exercise or to get out and about – the premature failure to keep up with any of the New Year’s resolutions that one was careless enough to make – the glacial pace with which the days grow longer – the seemingly endless wait for spring…
As suggested – I have not even mentioned the pandemic – the disturbing political situations in all too many places – the dismal fallout of Bre*it!
…and so on…
…and so on…
Is it any wonder that many of us find ourselves feeling a little – er… blue!
So – let us consider one or two cheerier things to raise our spirits a little:
OK – enough of that. In my next post I will look forward to the year ahead – something I have been putting off…