Possibly the best thing I've ever seen on television

In a week of losses, both great and small, I offer a jewel of comfort-viewing. 

I didn't necessarily love everything Dame Maggie appeared in.  (I loathed Downton Abbey; sorry, but I did.)  However, she was usually one of the best things in any production.  

In the following, she is the only thing in the production.  Aside from the crew, the director, and the writing of Alan Bennett.  Other actors have played this role, and beautifully, but this is definitive.  As she was.

If you have the fifty minutes, treat yourself.

Informed consent

The barista asks me if I want a pain au chocolat:  "So you don't look predictable."  (A lot of mornings, I arrive at the counter and the pastry is sitting there on a plate, because they saw me coming.)

"Well, getting consent is always a good idea," I tell her.  She's laughing so much, that she forgets to get the chocolate croissant and hand it to me, even though I've paid, and is momentarily confused to see me still standing there.

"You had my consent and everything!"  I declare in mock indignation.  

I get mock-indignant so often, that I think real indignation would go unrecognised.

Things change

It was my first attempt to run down to the shops on an errand, when I spotted the two neighbourhood boys strolling up my street, clad in almost identical black teeshirts with roomy black trousers billowing out from their long legs.

I've seen them several times over the past year; one of them lives in an apartment building around the corner, and I've seen his pal at the ancient glass entry door in the morning, before they head out to middle school.  (I've also seen them hogging the courtesy seats on buses and scattering ice cream packets on the sidewalk, but, heck, thirteen is thirteen.)

That's the thing.  They don't look thirteen this late summer afternoon.  They've shot up a couple of inches, and their shoulders have broadened.  High school for them, this year, I think.

Then I discovered I'd left my wallet behind, doubled back, and decided to seek a cooler way into the village.  The sun was just bordering on uncomfortably warm, but the shadows were deliciously pleasant, with a light breeze wafting up from the strait.

So I nipped around another corner, and skidded to a halt.

For years, the City of Victoria has covered the utility boxes with historical photos of the surrounding area: landmarks -- such as hospitals and schools -- shown as they were decades before, and houses that are no longer there.

This is startling different, and the reason for it is what had been there before:

That's Joseph Trutch, the first Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia, and on at least one list of "The Ten Worst Canadians in History", for his reprehensible policies toward indigenous peoples.

I had an inkling that the former utility cover wouldn't last long, so snapped this photo in 2022.  

That was the spring that Trutch Street changed its name.  The original idea, I believe, was to rechristen it "Truth Street", but then it emerged that the Lekwungen word for "truth" is "Su'it".

It's pronounced something like "SAY-it".  For over a year, the voice prompt on the #7 bus dutifully announced it, until a few months ago, when the name of the bus stop was changed to "Fairfield and Chester".  To be fair, that's the closest cross street to the actual stop.

Blossoming

Oh, I love younger daughter's watercolour paintings.

I know I'm her mother.  They're just so lush, and light years ahead of anything I can manage.

Younger daughter's art lessons ended yesterday, for another summer.  She's been taking them with the same teacher for the past dozen years, with a few exceptions for logistics and pandemics. 

As she left, she embraced her teacher.  The Resident Fan Boy told me the teacher seemed a little surprised, but that younger daughter scoffed, on the way to the bus stop:  "I always give her a hug when lessons are over!"

It's a rare thing just the same.

Just like her paintings.

What kind of music is "Pumpkin Spice", for pete's sake???

I have come to the conclusion that Spotify just makes stuff up. 

During elder daughter's last Christmas visit, she introduced me to Spotify's "Day Lists" (as opposed to "playlists" - naturally, it took me some time to pick that up).

They're often pretty nifty, based on rather random themes.  Some are simply wonderful mixtures of unusual folk-tunes, or bracing Broadway musicals, or soaring choral works, or really strange and spooky selections. 

I don't mind; it's the kind of music experience I'm looking for, in other words:  new to me, but listenable.  They often send me what they call "medieval music".  It's usually early Renaissance mixed in with Celtic folk.  As I said, they just make stuff up.

I get waaaay too many "day lists" with "Laurel Canyon" as a theme word, though.  Don't mind that type of music, but I've heard most of it, so I'm battling the algorithms again, by listening to the more-off-the-wall things in self defense.

However, what am I supposed to think when I turn on the Spotify app and am informed:  You listened to modern rock and pumpkin spice on Fridays in the afternoon.  Here's some:  father's day, labour day, jangle, heartland rock, and college.  

This was in July, by the way.  

Is it AI - or is it because Spotify is Swedish? (I think it's because they're Swedish.  I had one or two Swedes as students in my teaching days.  They were delightful enigmas.)

And then Spotify kept offering me "goblincore".  What the hell is goblincore?  A Google search seems to lead mostly to Reddit discussions.  They're not sure, either.  The playlist, which I saved, changes from day to day, and seems to be indie folk, with the occasional bit of jazz, classical music, and even British pop from the sixties.

I mean, it's fine, but what on earth, Spotify?

I'm not sure if the following video answers the goblincore question - I gather it's a spoof on "Cottagecore", something I don't quite get either, never having had a cottage - although this song may explain how people in Ottawa obtain their cottages....

   

The deer canter

Stepping out into the cool of early(ish) morning, I reach the sidewalk, and a trio of deer dash across Fairfield Road, their hooves hammering the pavement.

This is the first time I've seen our usually laidback urban deer running.  

They're fast.

They bound.  They bounce off the grass, and over shrubbery.  I turn, to see them vanish into the bushes that encircle the east end of our building.

Another cluster of clattering rings out behind me.  I wheel around, and a fourth deer sails by me, only a foot or so between us.

I never see what has spooked them.

Sideswiped (write of passage number fifty-six)

I don't enjoy riding sideways on the bus, and avoid it whenever possible.

This particular afternoon, the bus is fairly full, so I find myself fighting momentum sideways while clutching a rail with two full cloth shopping bags dangling from my wrist, and an ice cream birthday cake balanced precariously on my lap.

Across the aisle, a plumpish young woman is curled up in a corner, her bare knees pressed against a bar, chatting nonstop on her phone.  Next to her, a young man with odd colouring - pale, pink, and washed out - is gazing into space.  He's wearing earbuds.  There's something about the proximity between the two that suggests to me that they're travelling together, just not quite in the same universes.

Every now and then, he sings out a snatch or two of whatever is playing in his ears.  I don't recognise anything, of course. Knees Up Phone Lady glares at him when he does this for the fifth time.

"I'm on the phone," she hisses, and plunges back into the other conversation.

"I was answering the question," he shrugs.

Cramped and crippled, I juggle my packages, struggling to keep the cake upright, and leap gingerly down to the pavement, wondering what the question was.

Got distracted

Now I gotta get to bed.

If, like a crab, you could go backward

The top of her brightly coloured bike helmet is only a few inches above the top of my table.  She's moving steadily, but not particularly quickly, backward, so I have time to reach out to steady my tall glass of iced mocha.

She bumps gently into my table, smiles beatifically at me and steps to her left to continue her reverse trek into the back of the legs belonging to a tall elderly gentleman standing in line for his morning cup of coffee.

"Walking backwards is a thing these days," I inform my neighbour on my left.  "I've been trying it myself; it's supposed to improve your balance."

The mini-back-pedaller reappears, this time walking forward, having retrieved her grandmother, and they return to their seats at the table to my right, where a tiny bike has been stashed.  The lady tells an inquiring fellow grandmother that the little girl is "just three".  The child knows she's the topic of conversation, and takes off again, sans helmet -- sideways.

Bread and circuses

In early 1992, I was in my second trimester, and addicted to cream of wheat with frozen raspberries, which may have accounted for my frame of mind when I turned on the television.

It was the Albertville Olympics, and it was the first time that I remember the opening ceremonies as being absolutely whacko.  The teams were lead in by women dressed as snowglobes, for one thing, and someone kept reciting twee little couplets, in French, of course.  It was artsy beyond belief.

So, when I tuned into the opening ceremony of this year's summer Olympics, I kept in mind that this was Paris, and likely to be even more off-the-wall.

And it was.  It was also, by turns, baffling, boring, and sometimes, moving.

The baffllement could be helped, in some cases, with a little background in French history, which I don't really have, but was supplied this morning by Greg Jenner, who hosts the You're Dead to Me podcast for BBC.  I follow him on Instagram, so he posted a quick explanation of why the heavy metal group Gojira was performing with a decapitated Marie Antoinette, perched on various outcroppings of the Conciergerie.  The song they were playing was "Ça Ira", a song associated with the French Revolution, and the Conciergerie was the prison where many people destined for the guillotine were held.

So now I know.  Still have no idea why Snoop Dog was a torch-bearer.  (Perhaps because the torches resembled giant spliffs?)

Three things I found moving:

 1) The haunting spectacle of a mechanical silver horse with a masked rider charging down the centre of the Seine.  I haven't found a definite explanation of why, of course.  Some news agencies decided it was Joan of Arc; the CBC commentators, who didn't seem that well-informed, were mentioning something about a river goddess.  

 

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Anyway, the rider, a retired member of the Gendarmerie, eventually switched to a real horse, lead the flag-bearers to the base of a platform shaped like the Eiffel Tour, and then delivered the Olympic flag, which was promptly hoisted upside down. Can't win 'em all. (A reasonable motto for the Olympic athletes.)

2) The remarkable Olympic torch, in the shape of a hot air balloon (very Parisian!), which rose after it had been lit, and hung, suspended in mid-air, above a fountain in the Tuileries. 

3) Céline Dion, looking very well and remarkably like Eva Peron in Evita, powering out Edith Piaf's passionate "L'Hymne à l'Amour" from the Eiffel Tower, as a finale. She had a pianist next to her, sitting at a piano with water pooling on top of from the teaming rain.

So we have a distraction. A circus, if not bread, to take our minds off the rest of the world.

I couldn't help but think how nice it would have been to relieve Paris of the rain, and bring it to Jasper, Golden, Barkerville, and California.