A better place to dwell

It's a chilly October evening (finally!), and the Resident Fan Boy is pulling a supper together, while we watch a performance of all six Brandenburg Concerti.  

The music is like a warm, firm but gentle massage.  Furthermore, it's a Doctor Who special night complete with several regenerations, and our cat, who is fourteen pounds and roughly the size of a lithe and lethal mini-puma, kneads and nestles into the crook of my arm.  By the end of the evening, I am so relaxed that my FitBit thinks I've been asleep for an hour and twenty minutes, even though the show was pretty exciting, and I stayed awake through all of it.

Then I remember what day it is.

Today is the fifth anniversary of our last day in Hades.  On an unseasonably warm afternoon, brilliant with fall colours, I took younger daughter on a last visit to the National Gallery and that evening, walked through the dark streets of Centretown with elder daughter and the Accent Snob, who would be staying behind.  Elder daughter had taken an apartment a few blocks from her workplace, and the Accent Snob was far too elderly to survive the trauma of a plane trip. The only pull on my heartstrings were for the separation from my elder daughter (whom I would see again for Christmas) and my dog (whom I never saw again), plus the trauma my anxious and autistic younger daughter experienced, being taken away from the only home she remembered.

Tonight, I pull myself back from the memories of that day.  Not because of the grief, but because of my shame at my lack of grief.

Some things are not improved by dwelling on them.

I have found a better place to dwell.

Same date, same place, a world apart

Rejoicing in our new neighbourhood 22 Oct 2019

Similar view, three years later

 

The year of eight months

This year, we didn't seem to have a May and a June.

I kept trying to put my winter coat away, then having to retrieve it.

Summer hit in July, and our usual yearly drought started about the middle of that month, and continued on, and September and October were subsumed into a three-month August.

Yesterday evening, it felt like autumn for the first time this year.  I needed a jacket, and looking west, saw the grey clouds swirling with the lemon-yellow light in a sky that finally looked seasonal.

This morning, I walked out with a furled umbrella under an expectant pewter-coloured canopy, but it was only after my early coffee shop visit, when I turned my toes in the direction of my mother's home, that I caught the first faint sounds: the crackling hiss of drops hitting the dry leaves in the trees and the dead ones on the sidewalk.

When I walked home after setting up Demeter's breakfast, the pavement was dark wet, and starbursts of fall burst left and right of my path.

In the evening, there were pockets of puddles, not seen for months.

We'll get tired of it soon enough, even after being cheated of a proper October.  Funny how long the year has seemed, with so few months in it.

 

One brief shining moment

Back in the "noughties", I was still relatively new to the internet.  We'd acquired our first home computer about six months after our arrival in Hades for a number of reasons, but mainly because it was clear that life, or what passed for life,  in Ottawa was not negotiable without one.  Unlike Victoria at the time, the vast majority of households in the Nation's Capital were online.  Cell phones were still not universal, and email was still a thing.

It was the era of listserves and forums.  Younger daughter had just been "identified", as the health professionals called it, and I found myself "lurking" and eventually chatting to strangers about childhood developmental delays.

To dampen the hurt, I began pursuing genealogy, which provided a crash course in computer literacy.  I got "flamed" (another term you don't hear anymore) on occasion, but I was learning.

In 2006, I stumbled upon the "blogosphere".  I'd become a David Tennant fan, along with a large chunk of the female UK population, and a Google search brought me to a blog by author Marie Phillips, whose writing style and followers were a good fit - witty and inclusive - it was rather like having friends again.

Many of Marie's followers and commenters had blogs of their own, including one "Belgian Waffle", an Englishwoman whose bleakly funny take on her life in Brussels with her husband and two young sons was very relatable to my own life in Hades with my husband and two young daughters.

The camaraderie of the blogosphere encouraged me to eventually start my own blog on the last day of 2007.  I mainly began it as a means to fill in the early months of every year, often neglected in my journals.  I continued because I found writing under a pseudonym freeing.  I could pretend to be someone not quite me, although a close friend, one of the handful of people who knew I wrote the blog, described it as being "you -- but more so". I took a cue from the blogs I followed, and never referred to my family, friends or acquaintances by name, and always wrote with the awareness that it was being read.

It wasn't being read by many, as I hadn't the talent or wit of Marie Phillips or Belgian Waffle, but I had a small steady stream of kind comments, and I continued with the camaraderie of the comment sections in the roughly half dozen blogs I followed.

After a couple of years, this began to change.  Marie Phillips changed the format of her blogs and used them less and less, as she wrote more books, and a wonderfully hilarious limited radio comedy. She eventually branched out into storytelling events.  Belgian Waffle started writing newspaper columns under her actual name, Emma Beddington.  Other bloggers faded away into other activities: some died.  The comments on my blog, never that frequent, drained away to a dribble.

I felt a major factor in the deflation of the blogosphere was the advent of Twitter, originally promoted as "micro-blogging", promising all the fellowship of the blogosphere, but with posts limited to 140 characters.  Later, they doubled it, but it's not a blog post.  It doesn't required the concentration required of someone either posting or reading or commenting on a blog post.  I've discussed my issues with Twitter before.  I rarely "tweet", but I still find the platform useful for finding out about a current news incident quickly, or being alerted to projects by my favourite journalists.

What I didn't know was what had happened to Emma Beddington.  She had accidentally "outed" herself, as she explains in this 2021 Guardian article.

I was quasi-outed too, years ago, when I wrote a (thankfully) positive review of a genealogy presentation.  The speaker approached me before one of my own presentations, and said quietly:  "Are you Persephone?"  We had a nice chat.

Well, I'm surrounded by family researchers, who know how to find stuff out.  I'd rather, however, not be stripped of my superpower, my anonymity - which is neither very super nor powerful, but I treasure it.  It's not important who I am, after all.  It's not like I'm writing significant or salacious or sensitive stuff.  I write for myself, as a record for myself, to force myself to process things.  Very self-centred, in other words.

I miss the heady days of the blogosphere, but it was a loss that happened gradually, almost imperceptibly.  I'm grateful I had it for a few of those lonely years at the foot of a hill in an Ottawan urban neighbourhood, where I never quite found a home.  

I'm home now.  Blogs are no longer a thing.  Emails are no longer a thing.  I still do both, of course; I'm stubborn that way.

No one can do the Evil Eye like a Welsh person

Ran out of day again.

I'm cheating and leaving you with one of my very favourite clips from the panel show Would I Lie to You?, based on the party game where you tell a story and the players have to guess whether it's true or false.

The story-teller is chief BBC newsreader Huw Edwards (who I know from his wonderful limited series The Story of Wales).  This episode of WILTY is from ten years ago, but the Resident Fan Boy and I are re-enjoying it on the new television.

"Family trees are not trees, but matted webs"

Years ago, I decided to treat myself to a course in the sociology of families and households.

Don't look at me like that; we all have different ideas of a good time.

Our professor asked us, as an exercise, to go home and work out how many fifteenth great-grandparents we had.  Math was never my strong suit, but I soon realised that if you double a number fifteen, sixteen, seventeen times, your calculator will run out of digits, and you will end up with a number greater than the number of people living on the earth five centuries ago.

Wow, I thought.  We may not actually be all brothers and sisters, but we really, really are all cousins.  My fascination with family history just grew.

So, this morning, I was delighted to run across this thread of rants from a genetics professor in response to an article expressing wonder that a (that's as in one, folks) descendant of the Cheddar Man could be living close by to where the remains of the 10,000-year-old man (give or take a few millennia) was found.  I haven't included the whole thread - it's easy enough to find, if you just search "Dr Adam Rutherford" on Twitter - just the bits that amused me.

 Clicking on the individual boxes will enlarge them for easier reading.

My favourite bit is when someone brings up Charlemagne.  

Never mind a genetics prof; if you want to exasperate a seasoned family researcher, just claim to be descended from Charlemagne.  (If we have any Western European blood at all, we're descended from Charlemagne.  If we have any English ancestry at all, we're descended from Edward I.)

As you can see, I'm now following this guy.

The raveled sleave of care

 I've reached a stage in my life when a reasonable night's sleep is not a luxury.

I simply don't function well without it.  I suspect I never did, but now I know it. Call it wisdom if you like; it really feels more like surrender and resignation, in my case.

So the Resident Fan Boy snores from time to time.  This past weekend, he snored big time.  Every time I felt my body relax and my consciousness drift down, a huge motor-like buzz pulled me back from the ocean of slumber.

The first couple of times, I was gentle and courteous:  "Darling, can you roll on your side and elevate your head?"

The response was a "Wha-a-a-?" and an audible slump.

The second couple of times I resorted to gentle pushes and pokes.

By one a.m., ninety minutes after bedtime, I was murderous.  I made my way out to the living room, setting up my pillows, water, and a herbal sleep aid.  The last time I did something like this (apart from when the RFB got COVID last summer), was after a fight early in our marriage, a couple of decades ago.

The Resident Fan Boy remained in blissful, noisy repose.  He also remained alive.  I am capable of self-control, in a crisis.

Fortunately, these snore-fests are usually far between.  I mean, the RFB has snored for years, but I can usually manage a decent rest.

But I need a head-start.

So I'll bid you goodnight.

I cannot get o'er

I've only just heard this song in the past few weeks, but it was making itself known just as the world was slamming down in the first wave of the pandemic. 

Down in the valley, the first of May

Gatherin' flowers, both fresh and gay 

Gatherin' flowers, both red and blue 

How little thought of what, what love could do 

Don't you break my heart 

I put my hand in, into the bush 

Finding the sweetest, sweetest rose 

I pricked my finger deep to the line 

And left the sweetest rose, sweetest rose behind 

Saw a ship sailin' on the big blue sea 

She sailed as deep as, deep as she could be 

But not so deep in, in love as I am 

I cannot whether I, I sink or swim 

Don't you break my heart 

Thousands and thousands all on this Earth

Pretty well all good art is achieved by stealing. The third verse definitely is; it's from the old Scottish ballad "Waly Waly", which is so beautiful that it turns up everywhere. 

I first heard it when I was housesitting for a couple who had ended up in Victoria to escape the draft during the Vietnam War, and decided to stay. Their house was a Sixties experience: a water bed, which I can't recommend, and pot plants in the garage which I innocently watered, until Double Leo Sister enlightened me. I continued to water them. They also had a huge vinyl record collection, which included a concert album by Peter, Paul, and Mary and this song.  As with my ignorance of pot plants, I didn't know this song is known as "Waly Waly".

Here's one of the many incarnations of The King Singers performing it in 1987:

The water is wide. Time to go wait for the ship that will carry me through to morning.

Running scared

This evening I walk into the twilight.  I'm taking an extra loop before returning home, which takes me through desiccated, drought-dry leaves. On Su'it Street, tiny red berries pop under my feet.  The yards are blossoming into Hallowe'en decorations, which seems fitting, because today is Election Day.

Municipal elections are notoriously ill-attended and our municipal elections, with the long confusing ballots filled with scores of names for four different categories: Mayor, City Council, Capital Region, and School District, are no exception.  Demeter tells me that the turn-out for the last municipal election in Victoria was something like seven percent. She's wrong; it was almost 45%, but that's still pitiful, considering the effect a municipal election has on the quality of life in a community.

As far as I was concerned, there was a new level of trepidation with this year's contest.  Amongst the candidates, three groups appeared to have emerged:  those stemming from the incumbents, and two groups which were hopping mad at them.  

The first of the two "hopping mad" groups ran as a slate in 2018, and were not doing so this year; possibly because running as a slate made it easier for citizens to avoid voting for them.  They seem to be running on the "law and order" ticket: talking about "public safety" and "good governance".  Admirable, but a bit vague. 

The last group is far scarier.  They call themselves "VIVA" (as in "Vancouver Island Voters Association") and they claim to be non-partisan -- except the candidates have ties with the People's Party of Canada.  Populism has come to municipal politics.  (Oh gawd.)

It seemed imperative to cast a ballot.  The Resident Fan Boy ordered mail ballots, and when they didn't show up, grabbed a bus to City Hall, where he found them being held.  He, younger daughter, and I had the luxury of filling out those ballots, chockfull of candidates, at the dining room table.  He ran them down to our polling station that afternoon, by which time the line twisted around the community centre, and was fashioned into a zigzag to save space.  He carefully asked at each checkpoint, fearful of being accused of queue-jumping, but was able to file our envelopes quickly.

Meanwhile, Demeter had failed to tell me that her voter card hadn't arrived in the mail.  She said that this had happened last time, and waved me off.  I went home and worried.  The RFB had told me the wait in line was 90 minutes.

I went over for the evening call to find her placidly noting the temperatures on the local weather report, as she does every day at 5:40.  Apparently the queue operated much in the same way as the Queue at Westminster to see the Queen's coffin.  Someone clocked her walker, and directed her through the front entrance, where she was streamlined through the process, even the registration required because of her lack of a voter's card.  Then she went grocery-shopping.  She bought cheese.

Tonight, the ballots are taking forever to count, but the local news has projected those for whom we voted, for the most part.  Not a populist in the bunch.

This time.

Hagrid bows out

And another piece of my children's childhoods falls away. 

To them, Robbie Coltrane is forever Hagrid, from the Harry Potter movies - although younger daughter is also re-watching a 1999 version of Alice in Wonderland in his memory. 

I remember him for a string of character roles, long before he played the half-giant at Hogwarts, and for two memorable turns in Blackadder. Here's one of them, as Samuel Johnson in Blackadder 3:

The life stuff

"Things keep happening," Demeter said, shaking her head.

"Well, yeah, that's what life is," I replied.

What was happening?  Just stuff.  Y'know, life.

And all of us, Demeter, the Resident Fan Boy, and younger daughter, got our flu vaccinations this week, so we're tired.

Talk to you tomorrow.

Left hanging dry

 

A map of today's jet stream

Since mid-September, I have been rather unsettled by the quality of the daylight, particularly at dawn and dusk. 

It took me some time to figure how what the problem was.  Slowly, I realized that the light really isn't odd for the time of year.  The temperature has been.

The heat hasn't been oppressive in Victoria, but it's been warm, like a temperate summer day.  

Summer.  Not autumn.

It's been warm enough that local berries have been available for more than two months later than we would normally have them.  They were late, of course.  My journals are full of comments about how cold it was in May and June.

When I walk out in the evenings, I'm startled by how soon the sun sets.  It's setting at the normal time for just past the equinox, but my skin expects the light to linger into mid-evening.  The quality of the light seems unfamiliar, because it's not accompanied by rain.  Just as I couldn't put my fleece tops away in June, I cannot yet part with my summer cottons and linens.

I gather the problem is the jet stream.  For weeks and weeks, it has been hanging in a high loop at the top of the province of British Columbia.  When we're south of the jet stream, things get warm.

Now, according to the map, which I found at netweather.tv - it's pretty nifty; it's interactive - the dangling loop of jet stream will drop below us in about ten days, at which point, things will get recognizably autumnal.  

It may be too late for the salmon, though.

Evening, and I look to the south, as I walk our neighbourhood.  The sky is a light yellow colour above the purple peaks of the Olympic Mountains across the Strait of Juan de Fuca.  It's a colour I associate with winter, but without the damp and cold.  I shiver, anyway.

Certain as the sun

How I got the news at 12:48 this morning; elder daughter got it from BBC at 8:48 pm GMT

 To my daughters, she was the voice of Mrs Potts in Beauty and the Beast, the near-sighted aunt in Nanny McPhee, and the Balloon Lady in Mary Poppins Returns. 

 To me, she was the original Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd on Broadway, and the cool, cruel mother in the quirky 1964 film The World of Henry Orient.

And she was so much more.  In a career spanning about 75 years, she worked with practically every big name you can think of.  

As with so many people who stay active for so long, we fondly thought this would never end.

Pie-eyed

Elder daughter's British version of the family recipe

Ah, Thanksgiving Day in Canada.

This is our fifth back in Victoria, our fourth spent in our present home, and our third pandemic Thanksgiving, although you'd never guess it from the lack of social distancing and masks.

We keep hearing of friends, neighbours, and acquaintances coming down with COVID.  So far, no one seriously ill.

Thanksgiving is neither my favourite holiday, nor my least favourite holiday, but, as someone who suffers from a certain degree of introversion, and a deep dislike of cooking, it's not the best occasion for a celebration that completely revolves around food.

However, I have daughters for whom this is a relatively big deal. Younger daughter carefully notes any special day as a balm to her autism and anxiety, and Thanksgiving is the day she either makes bread rolls, or follows the family recipe (from an ancient edition of the Vancouver Sun) for pumpkin pie.

Pumpkin pie is also the order of the day over in Britain, where elder daughter has lead her only slightly nonplussed flatmates (one Welsh, one South African, and one Austrian) through the ritual, which involves navigating a meal shared by two carnivores, one vegetarian, and one vegan.

Today, she's braving the London transport system with a pumpkin pie in her lap, to join her second cousins on the Resident Fan Boy's side: one Albertan, and one American.

We will miss her, as we have for the past five Thanksgivings.

Throwing stones

For several months, I had only a vague idea of what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021.  I'm a Canadian, for one thing.  For another, I found it unutterably depressing.  I do remember thinking at the time:  Holy Cow, my cousin was right.

Said cousin lives in California, and was sending me distressed texts in late 2020, saying that democracy in the US was in severe danger.  

I have awoken deeply concerned. None of Trump’s many minions who now fill the seats in the Senate and House have in any way acknowledged the validity of the results of our free and fair election. Their silence is ominous. Ignoring the votes of the American people is outrageous.  He is calling for Civil War. Many of his most ardent supporters are heavily armed.

Democracies around the world need to stand up for the sanctity of the democratic process. This slide towards authoritarianism  must be stopped. Globally, we cannot afford to lose American democracy. The American people have done our job and voted him out in a free and fair election. We urgently need our international partners to speak up.

Back in December 2020, I thought she was overreacting.

It was only when Home Box Office came out with a documentary entitled Four Hours at the Capitol, that I sat down to watch and listen.  It's still unutterably depressing, and I'm still a Canadian, although events in Ottawa earlier this year make trying to understand what went on in Washington DC more pertinent.  No country, after all, is immune to populism, and I'm getting worried about democracy in Canada, to tell you the truth.

Four Hours at the Capitol, which tells the story with no narration other than interviews, and follows events through phone footage (mostly by marchers and attackers), security cameras, and police vest-cams, has been criticised for giving screen time to insurrectionists, but I don't really see how a documentary on the subject can leave them out.  Besides, to someone like me, who has only a faint idea of the various factions involved, it was of some help, although I was quite confused at first.

Early on, I had to sort out just who the interviewees were.  They are identified, of course, as they speak, but the protesters are often described in rather vague terms. I was particularly interested in the testimonies of journalists, whom I ended up having to Google -- which also worried me, because it makes my search history look peculiar.

The three journalists that we hear the most from - mainly because they were in the thick of it - are Taylor Hansen (The Gateway Pundit), Brendan Gutenschwager (described as an "Independent Videographer"), and Ashley Gilbertson (an Australian photographer for the New York Times).  Hansen and Gutenschwager are youthful; Hansen looks as if he's only recently begun shaving.  Gilbertson has the air of a grizzled news veteran.  All of them give clear and articulate accounts - a relieving counterpoint to the mob's limited cache of simple slogans (ie. "1776!" "F*** Antifa!" "Stop the steal!", etc.) but it's only as the documentary progressed that I got a handle on Hansen's sympathies - I'd never heard of the Gateway Pundit.  He uses the words "patriot" and "patriotic" a lot, and he uses them as a synonym for "Trump supporter".  Gutenschwager is harder to nail down, he apparently has documented many demonstrations in the US, and sells footage to major news outlets.  Gilbertson just sounds incredulous, someone who followed the crowd into the Capitol, and couldn't believe what he was recording.

For me, the most unsettling witness is a guy called Nick Alvear, a young, pretty, bearded guy who looks like he could have stepped through a time portal from the late sixties and early seventies. 

He was filmed firing up a joint in the great hall of the Capitol, after members of the mob broke in. Apparently, it occurred to him that he had seven additional joints on him, so he passed them out. Months later, in his interview for this film, he beatifically contemplates this gesture, commenting on how he toned the energy down and perhaps stopped some serious s*** from happening. 

He looks like several of the young men I knew at the Unitarian church when I was a young woman (a hotbed of liberalism), so it's jarring to hear him earnestly declare that Trump is speaking out against the enslavement, rape and torture of children. 

He's referring to the truly bizarre "Pizzagate" myth, which has become part of the overarching "QAnon" conspiracy theory. Our soft-spoken alt-right quasi-hippy somehow misses the irony of thousands of children separated from their parents at the Mexican border under Trump's "zero-tolerance" policy towards illegal immigration (i.e. refugees) -- something that is actually documented, unlike Pizzagate. 

There's further irony: Alvear was born in Venezuela, under the name Eduardo Nicholas Alvear Gonzales.      

The violence is difficult to watch, and I'm not the first one to wonder how violent it would have been, had the crowd been anything but predominantly white.

Particularly gripping are the testimonies of those inside: the woefully outnumbered security personnel, the senators, and staff members.  A young woman on Speaker Nancy Pelosi's staff, who is clearly the same age as my daughters, describes the hours of hiding under a table in a locked room, not daring to text her parents for fear of weeping and telling them goodbye.

We see insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt shot, by a clearly terrified Capitol Police officer. (Taylor Hansen describes her as "so patriotic".) She died almost immediately. We see a policeman hauled out into the crowd, beaten and tasered repeatedly.  He survived, but was badly injured and traumatized. We hear of the four police officers who committed suicide in the weeks following the attack.

Mostly, I was left with an impression of lasting damage, both physical and emotional - and a frightening revelation of how much damage was there before this march got out of hand, and how deeply much of America is in the grip of delusion.

It's the long weekend of the Canadian Thanksgiving.  I could be grateful for being a Canadian - and I am - but, about the same time I first saw this documentary, the truck convoy invaded Hades.  I have a painful story about that, which will have to wait until I can bear to tell it.

Holy cow.  My cousin was right.

A tale of two memes

A year or so ago, I had a "Friend Request" from a woman whose name I didn't recognise.  I checked her profile picture, and she looked vaguely familiar, so I didn't delete the request.  After weeks, I decided, based on what little info I could glean, that she was connected with Victoria Hospice, where I was a volunteer for several years in my otherwise misspent youth, so I accepted the request, and she cheerfully "liked" my posts.

It was several months before I realized she was, in fact, the president of the student council in my graduating year at high school. Her surname had changed with marriage.  A perfectly nice lady, but I was at a loss as to why she would be "friending" me; it was a relatively small school, but we had not known each other well.  In fact, my most salient memory of her was from a rare encounter at university, where I had also seen little of her.

We were chatting and she mentioned something about her house, but added that of course, I would remember whatever it was.

"Well, no, I've never been to your house."

"Of course you have!  Everyone's been to my house!"

So her posts would show up on my Facebook wall from time to time, mostly references to other things about her life with which I was not familiar.

Then, a couple of months ago, she posted something called "Meeting Between Bread".  This is a meme that used to be called "Meeting Between Breadfruit", but the wording is exactly the same:

Click to enlarge - if you must

Oh gawd. 

First of all, this woman is a teacher. Next, we have the usual red flags of a meme designed for data-mining: the unusual name, the request to copy and paste rather than to share, and the manipulative meta-message that if we don't comply we are inattentive and uncaring.

Finally, one word I'd associate with this woman? The kindest one: "president", I suppose. Less kind: "oblivious".

The meme is undeniably effective.  Responses flowed in, to the point where I hid the post.

There are a number of links I could have shared, but painful experience has taught me that people don't like being corrected.  Fair enough.  I don't like being corrected either.  (However, I often learn a bit more that way, irritating as it is.)  I thought about it for a few hours, while I went about my business, mostly along the lines of what I have set down here.

And I unfriended her.  I doubt she noticed.

Two months later, another Facebook "friend", also a fellow alumni, posted pretty much exactly the same meme.  He too was getting a lot of gratifying responses.

This was a little more complicated.  This is a fellow I've known since elementary school, so we have a history.  In fact, my heart sank when, about 10 years ago, his "friend" request came in, but I couldn't think of any reason to refuse him.  He addresses me, and all other women acquaintances, as "Dear Heart".  A lot of the time, I want to smack him.  Luckily for him, he hasn't been within striking range for years.

He's a IT expert, so I was surprised to see this meme, and, once again, appalled at its effectiveness.  I sat for a few minutes, considering unfriending him (as I have for years), but decided to send this link instead.  He responded in a few minutes, on the post itself, expressing appreciation, then followed up with a further post, name-checking me, and saying that the problem was with the copy-and-paste.

Close, but no cigar.

Then he wrote on my wall.  "Lots of us", he said, had missed me at a recent reunion gathering, and could we meet in person?

Oh gawd, no. "Lots of us?" I said out loud to the screen.  "Who, exactly?"

I went away and did other things for a few hours.  Time and tussles have taught me to never respond immediately to things that irritate me.  Especially people.

When I answered, I went for the truth.  Not the whole truth.

I had an elderly mother and upcoming elective surgery, I told him.  I would be sticking to my bubble.

And then, I unfriended him.  It was his birthday - actually a sort of gift for both of us.

I doubt he noticed.

Almost immediately afterwards, I found this:

On Reddit

The Resident Fan Boy found me by the computer, doubled over with laughter.

Throw some seeds of your own

Sometimes when I'm not crazy about the playlist at the coffee shop, as was the case this morning, I retreat into my earbuds until the music gets better. 

I first heard this song while watching the 2020 documentary series The Comedy Store. The song comes up  over footage of the mourners, all famous stand-up comedians, leaving the 1977 funeral of Freddie Prinz.  All these people, who lived for laughter,  in floods of tears.  

Jackson Browne wrote the song in the early seventies. A friend, a dancer and figure skater whom Browne doesn't name, died in a house fire. 

It's a song about loss, of course, but the words turn towards hope of redeeming a life, even in the face of extinction.  With the headlines full of death, disaster, and downright foolishness, it was a song I needed to hear this morning.

Maybe you do, too.

Tapping into musical therapy

I tried to be so good today. 

I was patient, polite, unhurried. I planned ahead; I was ready to not sweat the small stuff. 

And it worked. For a while. 

See, I knew the day was not going to be easy. Demeter wanted to do some banking. She wanted to update some funds and investments. We agreed she could do this, while I nipped off for some quick errands. 

As a precaution, I left my phone number with the banking staff.  They called me while I was just completing the first errand.  My signature was needed.  That was fine; I'm flexible.  I hadn't planned anything important. And I was patient, polite, and unhurried.  The appointment took three quarters of an hour.  That was fine.  I rather suspected this was going to happen; Demeter is at an age where financial types look at her and think:  estate planning.

What I hadn't planned for was the snarky bus driver as I helped Demeter disembark on the way home after a long afternoon.  Or the large white truck making an illegal right turn inches from Demeter's walker as we crossed to her block.  Or the neighbour who followed us into the small elevator at the condo, and seemed hurt when I hastily exited to take the stairs instead.

I came home and the Resident Fan Boy wanted me to locate a photo from the eighties, and younger daughter was watching a Friends episode, for the umpteenth time, from one of the latter five seasons (which stank, frankly).

In self-defence, I slapped on the noise-cancelling headphones, and stumbled across this latest Postmodern Jukebox video:

 

I'm not a fan of either the British nor the American versions of The Office, but I like quite a few of the featured songs here, to say nuthin' of the fabulous tap-dancing.  In purple boots, yet.

My savage breast was soothed.  (Not a euphemism.) I was only slightly cranky by dinnertime.

Twin set

I'm trudging up the hill in the late afternoon, and am overtaken by two women. I'm barely registering them until I notice that one is clad in a "Canadian tuxedo": denim jacket and denim trousers, both, in this case, dark blue. 

 I haven't seen a Canadian tuxedo in ages, and then, only on men. I watch the women stride ahead and notice that they have matching hair, that straight chin-length bob - fresh from the hairdressers - which doesn't quite match their age. And they do appear to be of an age, anywhere from late fifties to early seventies. They also share height and build: medium and slim.  Both are wearing trainers, not identical, but the same type, though different colours.  The companion of the Canadian Tuxedo clad lady is wearing a jacket and trousers of a similar style, though not in denim.

I find myself wondering if they are sisters, and when I catch up with them at the light, discreetly glance sideways.  No, they don't look related.

As they briskly enter the crosswalk ahead of me, I remember pairs of girls in my high school, the ones who had evidently conferred by phone, either the previous evening, or in the morning before getting dressed.  They'd show up in outfits of the same style, with colours carefully chosen to go together.  I don't recall ever doing this with my friends, but then I was never known for my fashion sense.

Do those matching school chums continue to do this throughout their lives?  Is that what I was witnessing?  Do high school girls still do this today?  I'd set myself up by a secondary school to see, but I have neither the time, nor the inclination to seem creepy.

Animated dad humour

Tired. I'll leave you with this animated music video from the 1980s, that used to get a lot of play on MuchMusic.

Get lost

Elder daughter lives in South Wimbledon. At least, that's what she keeps telling me.

However, when I check Google Maps to place stories she tells me about her neighbourhood, it appears to be Merton. I don't like conflict, but I do like to be accurate.

Part of this is because I'm a family historian, and it's important to get place-names right.  Take a few weeks ago, when I was trying to convince a guy who has "manages" the grave of one of the Resident Fan Boy's distant cousins, that he had the wrong birth registration, and that the said cousin was born in Kensington, not Suffolk.

After some polite wrangling, my documentation convinced him, and I went to fill in the correct birthplace at Find A Grave, only to find that the only option that the automatic field would accept was "The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea" - which didn't exist when the said cousin was born a century and a half ago.

See, London has gone through many administrative changes in its long history, and the confusion isn't mitigated by the fact that many versions of the geographical, political, municipal districts/boroughs/what-have-you continue to co-exist.  Some disentangling is in order.

This is not a bad place to start. It's one of many, many videos created by Jay Foreman, on the many, mystifying aspects of the organization of London, and, indeed what is, and is not London. The videos have high production values, and are hilarious.  You also need to keep your finger on the pause button, because there are several jokes that appear in a flash. His latest YouTube video is tackling Tube maps.  You have to be very witty to make that sort of thing engaging -- and Foreman and his team are.  Even the ads at the end are funny.

But what if you have concerns beyond London? For example, my mother was born in Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, but many websites will only permit me to say that she was born in Wolverhampton, West Midlands.  

This "Map Men" video, presented by the afore-mentioned Jay Foreman, plus Mark Cooper-Jones, doesn't solve my fillable fields problem, but is a damn entertaining intro to the crazy world of English counties - and whatever happened to Huntingdonshire and Rutland.

And if your geography problems are global (and whose aren't?), the Map Men can distract you from those too.

All clear, then? Good.

Lullabys for grown-up children

I'm a grown woman.

You'd think by now, after years of my husband going off on business trips, and my own seventeen summertime flights from Hades, that I would be able to sleep in a house or other dwelling by myself without nervousness.  However, the awful truth is, I'm scared to be alone at night.  It's not the reason I got married, but it's definitely a perk.  (The real reason I got married was to be able to tell my left hand from my right.)

In the earlier years of our marriage, if the Resident Fan Boy was away, I'd tune the television or radio to a news format, and leave it playing in the living room.  If I stirred to wakefulness, it was like the RFB was watching something before going to bed.

After children, this became less feasible, so I'd play a radio softly in the bedroom.  It meant not sleeping as deeply as I'd like, but it got me through the night.

Later, when troubled by occasional insomnia when the RFB was home, I tried earbuds with music, but the RFB could hear the music, and the earbuds were not comfortable anyway.

In the past year or so, they've come up with sleep-bars.  You tuck them under your pillow and use the BlueTooth function to choose what you hear.  My particular sleep-bar is called Sonisleep, and they also sent a link via email for ten sound-scapes, which include lapping waves, birdsong, waterfalls, quiet city traffic, and white noise.  They run for thirty minutes and when they end, the sleep-bar switches off.  

I also designed a "Sleep" playlist on Spotify, comprised of my favourite songs and instrumentals that remind me of night, or are connected with happy memories.  I can use the timer function for an automatic turn-off after 30 minutes.

It took a month or so of experimentation, during which I didn't tell the RFB of my purchase, because I wanted to see if the claim that the sounds Sonisleep makes cannot be heard by your bed partner are actually true.

During the month, I discovered three things that surprised me; 1) my sleep playlist actually slows my descent into sleep, because I want to listen to the music;  2) when I had to sleep in the living room during the four nights that the RFB was recovering from COVID last summer, I played the sleep playlist all night, because I found the living room, which is steps away from our bedroom, spooky and lonely.

And the third thing?  My favourite soundscape turns out to be "Heavy Rain and Thunder".  It's quite loud, but makes me feel cozy, and makes my pillow into a thundercloud.  I keep thinking of that scene in Fantasia when Zeus, tired of throwing thunderbolt, rolls himself into the clouds, like a man pulling an eiderdown about him, to go to sleep.  Maybe I should add the final movement of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony to my Sleep playlist.

Oh, and the Resident Fan Boy tells me he doesn't hear a thing.

Cutting it fine

The Tea Table (1920) - Harold Harvey

I had a pretty lousy night last night, and found myself blearily scrolling through social media early this morning, having tried, unsuccessfully, to get back to sleep.

This was how I stumbled upon this tweet from journalist and art historian Richard Morris, asking for feedback from his followers on the practice of buttering the bread loaf before slicing it.  It seems that he was aware of the practice (it's mentioned in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations), but thought it might have been a more local tradition, limited, perhaps, to the West Country, where he had documentation.

Wha-a-a??  I said to myself (silently, so as not to disturb the Resident Fan Boy -- which was damned nice of me, considering that it was his snoring that was partially responsible for my sleep deprivation).

First off, it's not that clear from the painting how this buttering was managed.  Fortunately, Morris got hundreds of replies, which you can read if you follow the link.  The followers writing in were remembering mums and grans from all over Britain, but especially the West Country -- and Wales. Many said that it was for economy; the butter made it easier to slice the bread thinly, and that today's bread, made by the Chorleywood method, would fall to pieces, if buttered or sliced in such a way.

I quizzed Demeter when I went over to set up her lunch.  She didn't remember her Welsh grandmother or her Wolverhampton grandmother buttering a loaf in that fashion, but did say that the Welsh loaves were startling:  large with rounded tops.

I went home and questioned the Resident Fan Boy, because I wondered if the technique made it to Canada, and if his grandmother, a farmwife in Alberta, buttered the bread this way. Not only did he not recall the women in his family doing such a thing, but, damn his eyes, he refused to believe such a thing was done!  Showing him the painting did not convince him, but when I had him read some of the Twitter replies, pulled up the passage from Great Expectations, and googled "buttering loaves before slicing", he came around.  (How very dare he!  He knows me well enough that I would have checked!)

I came to the sad conclusion that the generations of our respective families who would have known the answer have slid beyond our questions.  If yours haven't, ask -- and write it down.