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: