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Memory

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Repeating myself

November 27, 2025 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

“There is no harm in repeating a good thing”

Plato

My last post to this forum was entitled ‘Making a Spectacle’- and related the tale of the efforts that I had been obliged to make throughout the year in order that I might make use of the shiny new pair of spectacles that I had purchased back at the top thereof.

Should the gentle reader have seen that post he or she will be aware that the loss of a tiny screw had rendered the glasses unusable – and that it somehow took four visits to the optometrist to obtain a replacement.

Subsequent to that posting I found myself looking back over my missives from this time last year. This I do from time to time – to remind myself of all the things that we have achieved as well as the various things that we have not. I am repeatedly reminded that my decision to continue blogging – even since so to do fell deeply out of fashion – has endowed us with a truly useful archive of arcana covering the last decade and a half.

Anyway… what should I find in the archive from the middle of December last year – but yet another post also entitled ‘Making a Spectacle‘. What are the odds?

Now, last December’s post was not on the subject of the state of repair of one of our many pairs of glasses (why does one require so many as one grows older?). It was more concerned with whether or not we could actually find the said item at the point at which we needed them (and indeed whether or not we were in fact already wearing them upon one or other of our heads!).

I feel that I should probably be apologising for the inevitable repetitions that seem to go along with advancing years. I am rather hoping that – since those surrounding us are also getting on a bit now – they in turn will be forgetting that we have already covered much of this ground – and treat each new adventure as though it were the first time.

Cheers!

 

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Making a spectacle

December 20, 2024 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

There are cultures in which age, experience and seniority are acknowledged and valued. The elders of such societies are, by and large, respected and taken seriously; their advice being much sought after and their wisdom cherished.

In other cultures old geezers are regarded as merely being a nuisance and a ball and chain upon the ankles of the coming generations. These older folk are – often as not – the butt of all manner of jokes, particularly as they grow older and become more forgetful.

Who hasn’t fallen about laughing at the old codger who can’t find his (or her) glasses – only to to be informed by the mocking youths that he (or she) is actually wearing same upon his (or her) head!

Laugh? I nearly didn’t!

So – a few weeks back The Girl and I both had our own experiences of this phenomenon.

One day The Girl could not find her glasses – in spite of having just recently been using them. I helped her to look for them, carefully minimizing the application of such unhelpful queries as “Where did you last have them?“. We looked everywhere – particularly around our drawing room, where she was sure that she had recently been using them. Her glasses were nowhere to be seen… just mine – sitting on one of our coffee tables.

It was I that found them. They were perched on top of my head! I had picked her glasses up, mistaking them for mine – and put them straight onto my head.

No chuckling there at the back, there…!

Scarcely a couple of days later I couldn’t find my glasses – just as I was about to drive into College to lead a class. I could have sworn that I had been using them just a few moments before, but upon preparing to leave I could not find them anywhere. I searched all the obvious places three times, before breaking out a spare pair and heading off to work. When I returned from college and started to disrobe – the glasses – to my surprise – suddenly fell to the floor.

What happened was this… I was wearing a hooded sweat shirt. When I put on the sleeveless jacket that I often wear outside these days, I flipped up the hood to accommodate it. The glasses had clearly been on the top of my head already and when I lowered the hood again the glasses went with it. They had been with me all of the time in College – tucked into the hood. When I reversed the procedure upon returning home they fell out at the appropriate point.

Well – even I had to laugh at this…

Getting older – eh? What’s that all about?

 

 

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Dame Maggie Smith

September 30, 2024 in Life as we know it | Permalink

Dame Maggie Smith

1934 – 2024

RIP

Kebl0597, CC BY-SA 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5>, via Wikimedia CommonsThe British thespian profession has always punched well above it’s weight – from the secularisation of drama that followed the Reformation onward. This extraordinary tide has shown no sign of abating; long may the trend continue.

In recent times the Brits have furnished the dramatic universe with an abundance of fierce talents, particularly when it comes to those great ladies of the dramatic arts. We have been blessed with more than our fair share of ‘national treasures’.

Sadly, this weekend saw the passing of one of the greatest of those treasures – the brilliant Dame Maggie Smith. I saw her first many decades back in the film adaptation of the Muriel Spark novel – ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie‘ – in which she was, naturally, excellent. That has been the case, of course, with pretty much everything to which she turned her hand.

In the few days since her passing much has already been written in her praise. Rather than re-hash any of these eulogies here I recommend that you search out some such. The Guardian obit would be a good place to start.

Dame Maggie Smith will surely be most sadly missed by us all.

Rest in peace.

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Apology

April 3, 2022 in Kickass Canada Girl, Life in BC | Permalink

Last year – in mid-June – I posted a couple of items regarding the appalling discoveries of unmarked graves at a number of the former Residential Schools across Canada. The first of those pieces was an acknowledgement of the terrible discovery at Kamloops. The second was a heartfelt and affecting piece written by The Girl, who has good reason to be extremely well informed on such matters and concerning which she elaborated therein.

A month subsequent to those postings I made further reference in these pages to an overnight visit that we paid to Kamloops, though I did not, for a variety of reasons, elaborate at the time on the purpose of the trip. Since then The Girl has been spending a good deal of her time furthering existing connections with her First Nation, as well as making new ones. Just a few weeks ago we spent a weekend in Vancouver (the which will feature in my next post) so that she could be present at a conference also attended by a number of her cousins. This process is difficult but, I believe, also rewarding for her and and is something that she has wanted to do for a while.

I asked her – naturally – about how she felt regarding the events of this last week at the Vatican, during which the Pope issued an historic first apology for the part that elements of the Catholic Church played in the abuses that took place at the Residential Schools. She told me that it is a start – but that there is much more to be done.

Let us fervently hope for further necessary progress in short order.

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Residential School

June 10, 2021 in Life in BC | 2 comments

Those of you who know me well know how I can stand up for other people – wade in and have my voice heard.  Less so when it is very personal or if it is about me.  Although never said to me explicitly, I always sensed that I should stay quiet, hide, just in case.  In case what?  I didn’t know.  Being raised by a residential school survivor and a parent who spent time in a French Catholic orphanage I think it was bred in the bone.  Stay quiet – don’t cause anyone in ‘authority’ to pay attention to you because that never turns out well.  I am grateful I grew up loved and wanted and cared for and I love and admire my grandparents and parents and relations for who they are, all that they did and accomplished.   We are a family of survivors.

But when we are reminded, again, of the genocide of the first people and the children found buried at the same residential school where my grandmother and two aunties were forced to go, it is not a time to be quiet or hide.

Canada does not want to pay compensation to the remaining residential school survivors of St. Anne’s.

This school had the electric chair that they used to punish children and also to study the effects of electricity on the human body.

The information in the Canada Food Guide was informed by scientific studies on children in residential schools.  That is how we learned the minimum requirements of what a person needs to eat without dying or succumbing to disease.  It is not a surprise that my grandmother did not talk much about life at the residential school, but she did talk about always being hungry.  Always, always hungry.  Imagine in a land of plenty growing up starving, surrounded by people who treat you as if you are less than human.

There can be no question that children in residential schools were abused in so many ways.  They did not get to live with the people who loved them, who wanted them, and they watched their friends die and they were forced to dig their graves.

For all of these reasons, if you are moved to, I invite you to write an email or a letter to the Prime Minister of Canada (who, along with his cabinet, abstained from voting in a motion put forth by the NDP that Canada drop it’s ‘belligerent and litigious approach to justice) – that you don’t approve of these actions, that indigenous people are people.  That Canada drops all lawsuits against indigenous peoples.  That the millions of dollars spent fighting in courts be used to provide all reservations with clean water.  Stop arresting those who are protecting unceded territory, pay compensation to St Anne’s survivors.  It won’t undo past actions, but it is a meaningful act of reconciliation.  Every letter makes a difference.

This is not meant to make anyone feel badly – too many people do not know about this, or the extent of the horror.  We cannot change the past but if we do not face this, together, we, all of us, cannot heal.

All my relations

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