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.

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!

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.

What could the Canadian government want with me? Was I in trouble already? Did they want their citizenship back?

I need not have feared…

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…

“Good news is rare these days, and every glittering ounce of it should be cherished and hoarded and worshipped and fondled like a priceless diamond.”

Hunter S. Thompson

It is hardly feasible – no matter how hard our forefathers may have attempted so to do back in the bad old colonial days – to relocate to the far side of the world without making changes to the way one lives. Such modifications may turn out to be unexpectedly significant or even life-changing. Lesser amendments, on the other hand, might go virtually unnoticed in the moment – though perhaps acquiring greater import with the passage of time and with the benefit of hindsight.

I am writing this – for instance – on a Sunday. Back in the UK a key part of the Sunday ritual would have been the quick trip out in the morning to purchase coffees and a stack of Sunday newspapers. My personal and long standing favourite was The Observer – now part of the Guardian group.

When we came to Canada we looked around for a substitute; only to discover that there really isn’t one…  at least, not in a truly satisfying sense. There are some multi-part weekend papers to be sure, but they are very meagre fare by comparison to their British counterparts. They lack weight in all senses and are sadly not able – in my view – to  boast columnists or journalists of a comparable calibre to their UK equivalents.

It is, of course, quite possible to purchase British newspapers – including The Observer – in Canada… if one is prepared to wait for half a week and to pay a hefty premium for so doing. We are – needless to say – not!

It is further a fact of life these days that pretty much everything print-based has now been moved (or duplicated) online. It is certainly possible to read all of the titles with which we are familiar on the tiny screen, though some are protected by pay-walls to which I am not prepared to donate. Not all of these transitions online has been effected in an agreeable form. The Independent (my daily paper of choice in the UK when I had time to read such a thing) is now an online only journal that is sadly (but inevitably) beset by advertising. No big deal in itself were it not that the implementation in this case results in the screen constantly refreshing and jumping about as one tries to read – in the service of dandling fresh adverts before one’s weary eyes. The whole experience is so irritating that I was obliged to withdraw a routine contribution to their funds and to look elsewhere.

With the BBC website now a shadow of its former self – though still indispensable – I find myself now a subscriber to The Guardian – something that I had not anticipated. Though The Guardian‘s politics have always found favour in our household we have often thought them to be a little too po-faced to be likeable and their writers a little over-fond of the sanctimonious.

A year or so back I found myself searching furiously for a new source of cultural and current affairs analysis; a journal with its heart in the right place but still attractive to writers who knew how to turn a phrase and to frame a persuasive argument. I found just such in The Atlantic – that venerable literary magazine that has evolved into an influential platform for long-form storytelling and news-maker interviews. In addition to its monthly edition it produces a most useful daily digest of articles during the working week – and I would not now willingly be without it.

I recommend it – regardless of where in the world you reside.

Target – an indicator established to determine how successfully you are achieving an objective.

Goal – an indicator established to determine whether you have achieved your objective.

I had an email from an advisor at my bank just today. The lady responsible for it ‘reached out‘ to me (thanks for that!) to enquire as to whether (or not) I was ‘on track to reach all of my goals‘.

I pondered awhile as to how my career as a global music megastar was progressing – what the likelihood of a multi-billion dollar lottery win was – or indeed how my devious plans for world domination were shaping up…

I replied to the nice lady that – as far as I could tell – I was roughly on track to reach such goals as I had.

This did remind me, however, that I owe the gentle (and most patient) reader an brief list of our goals (and possibly targets!) for 2023. After all – we are now half way through February and my promise to deliver same is as yet outstanding.

OK – here we go.

So – after our big trip to Europe last year this will obviously be a quiet, ‘home-ish’ sort of a year – our aims and ambitions being not dissimilar to those to which we have aspired ever since the pandemic broke…

…except…

…such a lack of ambition simply does not sit comfortably with – The Girl. She argues – persuasively – that if there are places to which we might desire to travel, then the time so to do is now – before I move into another and even more expensive (particularly in terms of travel insurance) decade. Who can tell – she further reasons – how long we will be fit enough for such bold venturing?

Now, though she has already traveled pretty widely, her bucket list has for a long time included an expedition to Africa – in particular to go on safari to Botswana and to the Victoria Falls.

This, then, is what we are going to be doing at the end of May and into June this very year. Such a venture does not come cheap, particularly as we are no longer prepared to set forth on such a long haul faced with the relative privations of economy class. To help fund my part in this  lavish expedition I have had to take on the teaching of a double course this term at the College. As long as that in itself doesn’t do me in I figure I should be fit and ready to go by mid-May.

It is going to be an altogether wonderful, splendid (if somewhat unanticipated) venture and you, gentle readers, will be hearing and seeing a great deal more about it as we progress through the first half of the year.

Such is the mental magnitude of the undertaking that we don’t have much space left in our imaginations at this juncture to conjure up other aims and ambitions for the year – with the exception of a musical ambition on my part. The Chanteuse and I have decreed that this year we should prepare ourselves to perform live. Even should we not manage so to do before the year’s end – we will be ready and raring to go immediately thereafter. More on this also –  later in the year.

Well! Who saw that coming?

Burt Bacharach

1928 – 2023

RIP

I mentioned only the other day in this forum that it was deeply saddening that we seem in these times to be losing so many of those giants upon whose shoulders sit the artists, thinkers, creators, sports-folk and even (dare I say it) politicians to whom we turn in these troubled times.

Now another has gone – and this time one for whom the soubriquet ‘legend’ is surely inarguable.

I am not going to enumerate the many classics that Burt Bacharach penned throughout his lengthy career, not tell you any of the details of his life. That is for the hoards of obituarists who have already covered many miles of paper with appropriately glowing eulogies.

I am instead simply going to recall the one occasion on which The Girl and I saw Bacharach in concert – in Pergugia at the Jazz Festival. This was during his eightieth year; fourteen years ago. His voice had by that time passed its best and he very sensibly employed three different singers to cover his beautiful songs, whilst he played piano and led the orchestra.

To our surprise he started with a ten-minute medley of some of his greatest hits. Having finished this he set out on another. We observed to each other that it was a rare star who thus disposed of his major hits within the first twenty minutes of a show.

Bacharach simply played on… giving us a further two and a half hours of greatest hits. What a catalog – and what a fantastic show! The sentiment that came most frequently into our minds during this magical concert was: “I didn’t know he wrote that!”.

Well – he did!

We will not see his like again.

Rest in Peace

It is not often that one gets to celebrate happy occurrences two days running. This just happens to be one of those occasions.

In my last post I announced the long-awaited arrival last Friday of my shiny new Canadian passport.

“Hurrah” – says I!…

Then – on the very next day – Scotland triumphed at Twickenham over the auld enemy in the Calcutta Cup.

“Hurrah and twice hurrah” – I cry!…

Yes – it is that splendid weekend at the start of an otherwise gloomy February when the Northern Hemisphere’s greatest sporting event – the Six Nations Rugby tournament – kicks off. This year – being a Rugby World Cup year – promises to be particularly exciting, with the current top two sides in world Rugby – the Irish and the French – taking part. Both sides started with an away win – the Irish convincingly at the Principality in Cardiff – the latter rather more tenuously in Rome against the Azzuri.

The final match was the aforementioned Calcutta Cup clash between Scotland and England at Twickenham. There was a time – not so long ago – that the Scots routinely took a drubbing at the Cabbage Patch. Indeed, one had to look back a long way to find any Scots wins at all. Of late and for the moment, however, the worm has turned. Scotland have won the last three such encounters – including consecutive wins away from home. This is splendid stuff! Over the last six years the English have won once – there was a magnificent 38-38 draw at Twickers – and the remaining four wins have gone north of the border.

So far, so good. However, the Scots are all too aware that they have not, of late, been able to follow up these excellent wins with consistent results elsewhere. Now – no-one is expecting them to beat either the Irish or the French this year, but wins against the struggling Welsh and the greatly improved Italians would be most welcome.

Fingers – etc – firmly crossed and many pious invocations to the rugby gods duly rendered…

Clearly a day to celebrate!

Back in May 2012 The Girl was about to pay a visit to the UK so that she could attend her citizenship ceremony…

Those who have not been following this saga since I started blogging back in January 2012 may start scratching their heads at this point and wondering about the chronology… Actually, it is all quite simple. The Girl came to Victoria in March that year to take up a job opportunity that was (or appeared to be) too good to miss out on. I remained in the UK and the plan was that I would retire early in the summer of 2013 and join her in Canada at that point. Quite apart from the fact that living – er! – apart, was actually itself a very silly idea – as it turned out so was her taking the job. Later in the year it all went spectacularly tits-up and we ended up back in England for another couple of years.

However, back in May 2012 she had already applied for – and been granted – British Citizenship. The ceremony at the end of May was the end of that little chapter in this long and complex story.

The reason that I mention it at all is because her citizenship ceremony provided me with a suitable trigger to initiate my first attempt at applying for Permanent Residency for Canada – an essential prerequisite to moving here. How that process – and the whole move itself – panned out is the very basis for this online journal. Safe to say that it turned out to be quite a saga. If the details are of interest (perhaps you are contemplating such a more yourself) then searching the archive for posts in the category ‘Moving to Canada’ will reveal all – and then some!

Two rounds of PR applications (her return to the UK put the first attempt on hold) – retirement and the move to British Columbia in 2015 – a five year period living here before I could apply for citizenship – that lengthy process itself, culminating in my Citizenship Ceremony in the fall of last year – and finally, the slightly bumpy ride of applying for a Canadian passport to add to my UK one. All this has taken somewhat more than a decade to come to fruition, but today… today…!

…my passport was finally delivered!

Whooo-hoo!!

There it is at the top of the page, nestling up to my British passport. So – we are now both fully ‘citizened’ up and documented to travel…

…of which more in the next post!

In my recent ‘review of 2022‘ post I mentioned – amongst other worthy achievements – that Anam Danu (the musical vehicle created in conjunction with The Chanteuse) had had a good year – in that we released our third album, Soul Making, to general approbation and contrived to hold a rather splendid reception to celebrate the fact.

What I didn’t mention was that we shortly had a new single coming out…

Well – ‘shortly’ has morphed into ‘now’ and our newest composition – ‘Perfect‘ – hit the major streaming and download sites just today.

Reaction thus far from those who have heard the song has been exceedingly positive and I urge all music fans out there to give it a listen. If you don’t have a preferred music site please allow me to recommend Bandcamp to you. ‘Perfect‘ can be found here:

We thought we might take the opportunity to create a video to accompany the single, using nothing but freely available stock clips. Doing so proved a fascinating experience and we will certainly repeat the exercise. You can view the results here:

As ever, should you find yourself enjoying what you see and hear – please do share it…

David Crosby
1941 – 2023
Jonathan Raban
1942 – 2023
RIP

Such is life… and death.

This week two huge figures in my personal pantheon have gone beyond this place:

David Crosby was a major musical figure for much of my life and, whereas CSN(Y) were maybe not quite in my premier league of immortal bands, I found myself coming back to them again and again as the years passed. What drew me in were, of course, the sublime harmonies… to which I still routinely refer whenever I have a harmony of my own to write. For this – and for the bittersweet songs – much respect. ‘Helplessly Hoping’ indeed…

Jonathan Raban was a year younger than was Crosby but, I suspect, hailed from a very different world. The Guardian’s obituary starts:

“The British author, who lived in the US, blended memoir and travelogue in books that were often inspired by the sea”

Another Guardian piece is entitled:

“Jonathan Raban: his travel writing could pierce your heart”

What’s not to like?

Raban’s best book – for my money – is “A Passage to Juneau“. What appears on the surface to be an account of a sailing trip from Seattle, up the Inside Passage to Juneau in Alaska, is actually a disquisition on the death of Raban’s father and the slow-motion wreck of his own marriage. It is also a revelatory and sublime introduction to the Pacific Northwest – and thus not to be missed.

David Crosby – Jonathan Raban – Rest in Peace…

Ah! January…

‘Tis the time of year to reflect on the one that has just passed. Did it measure up to our hopes and expectations? Given the state of the world, did we have much in the way of hopes and expectation for it to live up to?

As ever, the best way to find out is to locate the equivalent postings from this time last year and to see exactly what – if anything much – we were hoping for…

…then we can see if any of it actually happened!

…and after that we can repeat the exercise for yet another year!

Hang on a sec while I have a shufti…

OK – here is our basic wish-list from last year – with progress reports in red:

• To get to see family and friends – …yes we did… see below!
• To be able to entertain again – …there was indeed some entertaining – and not all of it outdoors
• To dine out – again – …hoorah! We can once again eat out (and on occasion, somewhat splendidly!)
• To see some live theatre – …well, yes.. but not so much in Canada. See below:
• To enjoy some live music – …once again – one event only – Barney Bentall’s Cariboo Express in November
• To attend a live sporting event (preferably Rugby!) – …sadly not
• To be able to travel… anywhere – …well – speaking of which…

In addition:

• It is our fervent wish that we get to travel to the UK during the coming summer. Whether or not this happens will depend entirely on the course that the pandemic takes on both sides of the pond over the coming months. We are not holding our collective breaths.

…and this we duly did – emboldened by visits in the spring from good friends in the UK and from an old and most dear friend from New York. The expedition was most enjoyable, even though we did not get to see everyone that we would have liked to have seen. We got to the theatre in London and Bath – we dined splendidly and well – we finished our trip with a lovely sojourn in Paris. The downside? We came back with COVID. Oh well!

• We will carry out some further domestic upgrades – air-conditioning to guard against future ‘heat domes’ – a new hot water system so that we can console ourselves with even longer baths when things don’t work out as we would wish.

…well – we did the air-conditioning – and just in time for a hot spell too. An excellent notion which works well. The hot water tank replacement is still on hold – but will get done…

• Normalised work! The Girl would like to be able get back out into the wider world and to visit clients face to face again – not to mention paying a nostalgic visit to her office! I would like to teach students who can actually see my face as I do so.

…pretty well normalised as it turns out. The Girl is back doing (somewhat cautious) home visits and going into the office two days a week. Last spring I was teaching in an N95 respirator and a headset (for streaming purposes). Not much fun. By the autumn I was back to face to face teaching without a mask – even though I wore one when around the enclosed bits of campus.

• More music! One positive over the last year is that I have been able to write more than enough new songs for the Chanteuse and I to put together another ‘album’. We are currently recording her vocals on these tracks and we are making good progress. Look for further pronouncements in the coming months.

…Last year was indeed a good year in musical terms. The Chanteuse and I finished our third album and at the end of August Anam Danu released ‘Soul Making‘. We were even able to have a lovely reception in our garden to celebrate the release and – for the first time – we played a few tracks from the album live to the assembled friends and supporters. The feedback we have had regarding the music has been overwhelmingly positive and we both have a very real sense of achievement.

So – in spite of all the many troubles in the wider world, 2022 was a good year for The Girl and I. What will we hope to accomplish in 2023?… Check back in a few posts’ time to find out.

Jeff Beck
1944 – 2023
RIP

Very sad to hear of the passing of yet another rock legend – the great Jeff Beck. Along with Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, Jeff was one of those towering figures who defined what was possible on the electric guitar back in the late 60s/70s/80s and beyond. If it feels as though he has somehow always been there then that is because – for my generation – he always was. Even if at times he was not directly in the spotlight (the music business being the fickle creature that it is) he continued recording, playing and touring until the summer of last year.

Many obituaries and retrospectives have appeared in a broad cross-section of the media and I commend such to any gentle readers unfamiliar with the great man’s oeuvre.

Rest in Peace

“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending”

C. S. Lewis

Well – 2023 has started somewhat shakily – in all sorts of ways. That on which I will particularly focus here concerns the ‘small’ matter of a Canadian passport.

Back in October last year I wrote – in a post entitled “A pat on the head” – about the really most exciting and unexpectedly rapid arrival of my Canadian Citizenship Certificate – following my Citizen Ceremony but a few short weeks beforehand. One significance of this happy occurrence was that I could then crack on with my application for a Canadian passport – without which I would be able to leave – but not return to – the country.

This I duly did!

So, I was somewhat disappointed when – in the middle of last week – I received by registered post a form from the passport office detailing a rejection of my application.

WT actual F!

So – it seems that the Canadian passport office had objected to the item of identification that I had provided – I thought as per the guidance. For clarification, this is what the instructions on the application form actually say:

“You need to provide at least one (1) document to support your identity. The identification document (ID) must be valid and be issued by a federal, provincial, territorial government authority (or local equivalent abroad). The ID must include your name, date of birth, signature and photo“.

I had sent them an appropriately witnessed copy of my British passport!

It seems that was not what they had in mind – in spite of the fact that the instructions seem to me explicitly to allow this.

Now – I could grumble here about how we all still (currently!) share the same monarch… ties to the Commonwealth, etc, etc… but as we are dealing with the powers that be this would just be a waste of time. Rather than just posting off a second attempt I thought I might visit one of the Service Canada offices at which one can deal with such matters. I drove 40 minutes over to Langford and waited in a queue for more than 10 minutes just to speak to the receptionist. She entered me into the long queue that was waiting for the main event, but warned that it might take an hour and a half or so to reach the front of it. She also pointed out that the office closed in a couple of hours time.

“So” – I ventured – “I could wait here for a couple of hours and still get booted out without being seen?“.

She agreed that that was entirely possible. She also very kindly looked over my application and checked that all was now likely to be acceptable, before I gave up and returned home.

So – the application has now gone into the post for a second time – and I await once again with all body parts firmly crossed.

Sigh!

…this year – for which my humble apologies:

…to friends, acquaintances and gentle readers…

…from the Kickass Canada Girl and the Imperceptible Immigrant…

we wish you a safe and peaceful Christmas and a Happy Hogmany!

…Holy Moley – I can’t feel my face degrees!

The winter weather is doing its bit to make the run in to Christmas something of a challenge! Notice that I didn’t qualify that with: “Here on the west coast of Canada“. I am well aware that we are not alone in experiencing exceptional climatic conditions. We have had quite a lot to do of late (as of course have many people at this time of year) and needing to keep a constant eye on the weather only makes things more exacting.

Here are some ‘highlights’ – complete with pictures:

Last weekend we made a overnight trip up island to Nanaimo – for a Christmas visit with The Girl’s mum – stopping on the way back on the Sunday for lunch with a dear friend in Duncan. As ever we took the Mill Bay ferry to avoid traversing the Malahat (always a good idea when there is snow in the air).

We figured that the snow would start to fall at some point during this trip and sure enough it did – whilst we were in Nanaimo. We stayed overnight in the Coast Bastion hotel overlooking Nanaimo harbour – with which we are very familiar from previous visits.

We had a lovely visit with both family and friends – dined splendidly at the Nanaimo Golf Club, the Minnoz restaurant at the Coast Bastion – and, of course, with our lovely friend in Duncan. Happy Christmas to you all.

Once back in Victoria the winter storm really swept in and soon everything disappeared under about a foot of snow. This was the view from my studio window by Tuesday.

The Girl had taken most of the week off as well-earned pre-Christmas break, but the weather put paid to any notions of a relaxing run in to the festival itself. The Volunteer Agency of which The Girl is one of the mainstays delivers meals to elderly folk every week – with teams of volunteers driving routes around Greater Victoria to make deliveries to more than seventy locations. Given the weather it would have been totally unreasonable to expect these excellent volunteers – many of them elderly themselves – to be out on the roads in such treacherous conditions. It fell to a number of us folk with 4x4s equipped with snow tyres to get the food parcels out to the elderly in time for Christmas. This is – of course – is just the sort of thing at which Lorelei excels and she did not let us down. Here we are en route…

I guess the big question now is – will we get a white Christmas? Today is the 23rd and temperatures are starting to rise – though to this point they have only reached the ‘freezing rain on top of compacted snow‘ phase – so today we are going nowhere! We will see how things pan out tomorrow.

“If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed”

William H. McRaven

When The Girl and I started living together – many moons ago now (and long before this online journal was even a glint in the eye) – one of the first things that she suggested as a means of improving our life together was that we should purchase a new bed. Her reasoning was that – since sleep is such an important restorative for both the body and the mind and given that we spend a considerable percentage of our lives between the sheets (perchance in the land of slumber!) – we should ensure that we had nothing but the finest of tools with which to work. This – naturally – appealed to me as being an admirable ethic, so out we set to purchase a bed.

We were fortunate enough to find a really good deal (end of line for this particular model!) on a splendid hand-made Vispring bed, the which we have enjoyed over the years since – dragging said item halfway around the world with us to our new Canadian home.

Now, the bed has a thirty year warranty and would doubtless go on serving us well for some time to come – were it not for a couple of factors that we had not previously foreseen.

The first is that even really good mattresses do decline over the decades. Our mattress was split between a firm side (mine) and a soft side (The Girl’s). Her side had become less supportive over the years and was eventually not doing enough to keep her comfortable and ache-free throughout the night.

I made reference to the other matter in a couple of posts earlier this year. It involved something of a sleep issue that I was experiencing and – if you really must know the details – I recommend those musings to you in preference to re-hashing things here now. Anyway – one of the outcomes of that episode was that The Girl and I decided that it would be a good idea to purchase a bigger bed.

Something I did not know before moving to the land of ‘Big‘ (but which in retrospect should have been obvious) is that bed sizes here are very different here to those back in the Old Country. Our Vispring bed was a UK King size. Here the same sized bed is but a Queen! Standard King-sized beds here are a whole ten inches wider than was ours!

Long story short… we are now the proud owners of a rather lovely wooden Canadian King-sized bed, complete with a splendid multi-layer latex mattress (the which is a first for us both).

The down-side of up-sizing one’s bed is – of course – that one’s duvets and bedding no longer fit and must at some point be replaced. In the short term we are managing with a couple of UK King-sized duvets, but the question is – how to deploy them. Does one go for the (apparently) European approach of having an overlap in the middle of the bed (which looks rather odd and tends to leave far too much duvet hanging over the sides of the bed)? We may well adopt this approach when we get around to purchasing new duvets, but utilizing a couple of twin-sized duvets rather than the UK Kings.

In the meantime we have opted temporarily to sleep Burrito-style – the which is somewhat restricting when it comes to contact but is oddly effective in all other ways.

Oh well! First-world problems, of course!

Troy ‘Bubba’ Cook
1969 – 2022
RIP

The Chateuse and I were greatly saddened to hear over the weekend of the passing of Troy Cook. Troy was a creative force who was a writer, artist and musician and was born, lived and worked in Fernie, BC.

Earlier this year, in spite of his illness, Troy agreed to create the artwork for the recent Anam Danu album – ‘Soul Making‘. He most generously refused to accept any payment for his work – saying:

“I like to promote original music and this is my way of helping other musicians”.

Troy was a long standing friend of The Chanteuse’s husband – they having known each other for 37 years – and he was much loved by the whole family.

In this video clip Troy explains how his art helped him to deal with his illness.

Our sympathies and thoughts are with Troy’s family.

Rest In Peace

In complete contrast to the experience described in my last post – “Every exit“…

Regular ingesters of these random(ish) gobbets will no doubt feel completely familiar by now with Barney Bentall’s Cariboo Express – that charitable roadshow of assorted musicians and other performers that makes a three night pitstop at the Mary Winspear Centre in Sidney each November – raising much needed cash for the Sidney Lions Food Bank. We have been in Canada for over seven years now… we have traveled on the Cariboo Express at least six times since we arrived… I have written posts about it at least five times!

I was not intending to pen another post this year, in the wake of our annual pilgrimage a couple of weeks back. I thought that I had pretty much covered the subject in previous years and the last thing I would want to do is to bore you – the gentle reader…

However…

…each time we surrender ourselves to the oncoming Express – regardless of how tired we may be or how weighed down we are with the burden of the world’s (and our own) problems upon our shoulders – a couple of hours spent in the company of this exuberant assemblage of musicians of all ages… and we find ourselves once again rejuvenated by the spirit of bonhomie and love.

In short – the music and dancing weaves its magic spell and we are once again recharged with a joyous zest for life and all that is good about it.

Those who know me well would never have expected me to be so taken with this particular genre of music (sort of country-ish) and yet I take great delight each year in attending the show and having my faith in live music emphatically restored.

It helps, of course, that the Cariboo Express crew so clearly love doing the whole tour themselves. The ensemble seems to grow larger each year. This time round the cavalcade winding its way around BC comprised some nineteen performers who – at various points – assembled together on the Charlie White Theatre stage.

Good thing it is a particularly wide stage!

To Barney and to the whole crew – thank you again for this year’s fabulous show. See you next year!

“We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”

Tom Stoppard, ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’

This weekend just passed The Girl and I finally got to see a play again at The Belfry here in Victoria (for the previous failed attempts – see here).

Actually – that should more accurately be: ‘Half a play’!…

Oh dear!

In all of my (and latterly, our) many years of theatre going I can count the number of performances out of which I have walked on the fingers of one hand… and still have had spares! It is not something that I like to do and nor is it something that I feel comfortable about doing. As a thespist myself I think it is jolly bad form to give up on any creative performance at the interval (it is no co-incidence that a fair amount of theatre for and by young people has no interval – thus reducing the opportunity for audience members so to do).

I have very occasionally ducked out of a school production – usually because the whole thing has been a huge error of judgement on somebody’s part and well beyond the capabilities of those involved. I have equally occasionally removed myself from adult (and professional) productions when the piece itself has turned out to be deeply disappointing – though this has happened but extremely rarely.

In this case we found ourselves at a loss to know what to make of the play – which is an even more rare occurrence. I would feel guilty that we had not prepared ourselves adequately in advance to know what we might expect, except that our frantic visits to the InterWebNet at the interval did not really turn up any rationale for boycotting the piece.

I am not going to name the play – or the author (though he is Canadian). It is not a new play; having been around for several decades. Previous reviews from elsewhere in the world seemed reasonable. The work is billed as a Black Comedy, though it seemed to us to lack a basic requirement of a comedy – namely the delivery of laughter. The first act seemed to me to essentially consist of the same ‘humourous’ twist repeated over and over.

We found it impossible to empathise with, or to believe in, either of the characters presented to us, or indeed with their situation. Even once we realised that the second act must contain some sort of plot/character twist that would somehow justify the inertia of the first act – we did not feel that the piece (or the characters involved in it) had done anywhere near enough to have earned our continued engagement.

We thus absented ourselves for the second half, went across the road for a coffee and struck up a fascinating conversation with someone whom we had not previously met…

Much more entertaining!

Doddie Weir
1970 – 2022
RIP

Very sad to report that the much loved Scottish and British and Irish Lions lock forward, Doddie Weir, passed away at the end of last week at the age of 52. Doddie was a fixture in the Scottish squad at around the time that Rugby turned professional in the 1990s and was a fan-favourite with the Murrayfield crowd. He turned out sixty one times for his country, played for the Barbarians six times and went on the 1997 British and Irish Lions tour to South Africa.

Weir is known just as much, however, for the time after his retirement from the game. It was announced in 2017 that he had been diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease (MND), with the prediction that he would be unable to walk within a year. Instead of sitting back to await the inevitable Weir threw himself into campaigning and fundraising to help find a cure for MND, setting up the “My Name’5 Doddie” foundation which had, by June 2022, raised in excess of £8 million.

The “My Name’5 Doddie” foundation website obituary includes the following:

“Since making his condition known, Doddie has championed the campaign for more to be done for sufferers of the disease, both in terms of finding a possible cure, and with the treatment and welfare of patients and their carers.

Doddie’s work over the past five years saw him recognised with several honours and accolades, including an OBE, presented by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to rugby, MND research and the Borders community. He also collected Honorary Doctorates from both Glasgow Caledonian and Abertay Universities, as well as becoming a recipient of the prestigious Edinburgh Award. Within sport, a trophy named after him is now contested between Scotland and Wales, and he became recipient of the Helen Rollason Award at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year ceremony in 2019.

He also became a best-selling and nominated author, oversaw the design of his own distinctive tartan, and was captured on canvas by artist Gerard Burns, the painting now hung in the National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh.”

A giant of a man in every sense and a Rugby legend, Doddie Weir will be sadly missed.