I’m a vegetarian and before you ask, no I don’t exist solely on nut loaves and lettuce and no I don’t hang out at airports wearing bright orange robes, socks and sandals, banging my gong – well – I do sometimes but that’s beside the point. I eat everything I always used to eat sans the dead flesh and in fact am now eating better and am healthier than I ever was before. My diet is light on Trans Fats, cholesterol, carbs, calories etc., and I don’t have to worry about those little extras in my burger such as antibiotics, growth hormones, red dye number 22, e-coli and salmonella.

Come on – look around you – have you noticed that everyone is getting taller? That kid that used to sit on your knee is now towering over you commenting on your bald spot. If you are over 45 and have recently spent any time at all at the local high school or university you will soon come to the realization that you are hardly more than a midget compared to the gangly 6 1/2 footers brushing you aside on their way to the Coke machine. Do you ever ask yourself why that should be when you yourself were actually once counted as tall when you attended the same school? I have a son who not only towers over me but wears size 14 shoes. Size 14! Unheard of when I was a kid. Come the next flood he can tie his shoes together and make his own boat. They say that we get shorter with age but this is ridiculous. Every kid I meet seems to be a foot taller than me, even the girls. Something is going on here and don’t tell me it’s just better nutrition in the affluent West.

It seems obvious to me that if growth hormones are being fed to farm animals to make them mature earlier then these additives must of necessity be passed along the food chain to us at the other end along with everything else that is pumped into their hides. If this is so then all meat-eaters are imbibing vast quantities of antibiotics too and this is truly terrifying. Have you noticed how many new diseases are running around nowadays? Diseases that didn’t exist when we were young? It can’t all be down to the US government experimenting with agents of biological warfare in their secret underground labs and testing it out on the local populace can it? Conspiracy theories aside antibiotics are no longer the wonder drugs they once were, and why? Because, I would say, bacteria are adapting and morphing into more and more virulent strains that are now drug resistant. When I was a young mum I was always told not to seek out antibiotics for my kids for fear of the very same thing; in fact doctors were very twee about handing out the prescriptions - but aren’t we doing the very same thing when we feed our kids meat? And I have been guilty of this too, I must admit.

If you don’t know what happens to that animal before it gets to your plate then you have some unpalatable surprises coming. If you haven’t read books like “Fast Food Nation” then I urge you to do so immediately. Run don’t walk down to the library and pick up Robin Cook’s “Toxin” as well. Either book is guaranteed to put you off eating meat for the rest of your life.

I used to eat meat, and I, like you no doubt, gave no thought to how that neatly packed and sanitized pink cut of meat actually got to the local Loblaws or Sainsburys or whatever. As long as it didn’t look back at me I could turn a blind eye to what I was eating. But then I got a job that involved a great deal of traveling. It was inevitable that sooner or later as I tooled up and down the highway I would be overtaken by a truck laden with helpless beasts on their unknowing way to the slaughter. If it was just one or two trucks I could continue to ignore the facts but when the trucks that passed me each month counted in the hundreds I had to take notice. It was an unpalatable truth that soon became unbearable, like watching those pictures of dying children in Africa. I wanted to turn away but I couldn’t.

If you don’t have any feelings for the animals at least consider this. We now have factory farms that corral and process cattle or pigs or chickens by the thousands like some sort of living conveyer belt. The droppings and waste from these enormous production facilities finds its way into the ground water and poisons our streams, taints our drinking water and strips our grazing lands. Small farmers cannot compete and are forced into what amounts to wage labour for the big conglomerates – they are no longer autonomous. No wonder that corners are cut and money is saved by ‘adding a few little things’ to bulk out the cattle feed – such as other dead cattle, possibly diseased. Cattle are not omnivores they are ruminants, meaning that they eat plants and grasses not meat. It is against the natural order to force an animal to eat such a diet. And what might the consequences be for us at the other end of the line?

Everything comes down to the almighty dollar – who cares what the consequences may be for tampering with nature if there’s profit to be made? And don’t get me started on genetically altered foodstuffs, including plants. When I was young a strawberry was smaller than a walnut, nowadays I could use one to wedge the doors open. These frankenberries load down the display cases together with melons the size of soccer balls rubbing shoulders with the perfectly rounded tomatoes and the bright red peppers. Speaking of tomatoes did you know that they are picked green in California and then sprayed with a chemical that turns them red while they sit in their boxes for the three day trip to Ontario? Did you think they were naturally that colour? Think again. Natural tomatoes don’t look like that anymore than ‘natural’ slabs of meat are that nice palatable rosy pink colour. Neither is salmon come to that. Which reminds me - did you also know that farmed Atlantic salmon are full of parasites due to overcrowding and pollution in their pens, parasites that have a habit of escaping and infecting the wild sea salmon. This means that sooner or later the wild salmon will be no more. They are already endangered. We’ll be left with the worm infested farmed stuff – oooh. Go to David Suzuki’s site and find out if you don’t believe me [http://www.davidsuzuki.org/].

Sorry to bring up such a topic – especially now that the weather is improving and it’s time to get out and fire up the old barbecue. But next time you are about to slap a slab of dead flesh on the Barbie why not try a veggie burger instead. It tastes pretty much the same, you’ll feel better for it and it won’t kill you – unless you choke on the genetically modified wheat in your bun that is.

This month I’m on an exercise kick. It’s about time that I shed all those unsightly pounds that have been piling up for the past ten years or more. Whatever happened to that sylph-like figure of yore? [yore kidding me right?]. I think the weight went on in inverse proportion to the sagging of my various bits [not to mention tits] and the lines that suddenly appeared on my face from out of nowhere. Don’t look now but some old lady has taken to following me around and appearing in my bathroom mirror early in the mornings. I don’t know who she is but I wish she would bugger off and be replaced by Catherine Deneuve.

Getting old is depressing enough but have you noticed that time accelerates in direct proportion to your age? Rather like the way time behaves when you’ve had a few drinks too many. One minute you’re standing at the bar talking to some blurry looking person and then they’ve gone to the loo only to return again nanoseconds later. How do they do that? It is my theory that time behaves the same way on weekends. It’s Friday night and then it’s Monday morning – woosh! I always wanted to expound my theories on the relativity of time to Einstein but unfortunately he went to that particle accelerator in the sky before I could tell him [still wearing the same suit no doubt].

Anyway – exercise I was talking about. I bought myself a nice new treadmill to put out in the sunroom so that I can commune with nature. With the windows thrown open I can hear the birdies coughing outside and they can hear me gasping inside. I gave up on The Gym primarily because 1. It’s expensive and 2. It’s inhabited by these buff young health freaks with rippling biceps and bulging muscles – and that’s just the girls. They all have bum cheeks they could crack walnuts with and they are all so perky. I hate perky. When you pull up to the drive-through at 7am in the morning for a double double expresso mocha just to get your heart started the very last thing you want is to be greeted by some young thing full of the joys of spring – don’t you agree? Be honest – haven’t you entertained thoughts of mashing your Boston Cream up her nose if it would just wipe that smug smile off her face?

But I digress. Exercise is good for you, exercise will melt off those unsightly pounds, exercise will prolong your life – or perhaps it will just feel like it. That’s another thing about health-clubs, they will insist on weighing you and wrapping you in blood pressure cuffs before they bring out this disgusting wobbly yellow thing and show you what a pound of ugly fat actually looks like… Then they enroll you in the kick-boxing class, the rowing clinic, the aerobics 40 minute work-out and Tai-Bo With Bruno and leave you to it – all guaranteed to bring on cardiac arrest within minutes but at least you’ll look better when they display you at the funeral parlor. “Oooh doesn’t she look wonderful”, relatives will coo over your dead, but firm, body.

The depressing thing is that fitness and health takes so bloody long. Why can’t you just run about for a few minutes and then shove off down to the pizza parlor for a well-deserved double cheese with stuffed crust washed down with a Coke? Life is so unfair.

How shocked and saddened I was at the news of the Virginia Tech shootings – I think all of us – students and parents alike – are horrified that such an unspeakable thing could happen, again. The shootings at Columbine also happened in April and it is said that many of these types of incidents happen in the spring. Why would that be? The only thing I can think of is that April is a very stressful time of year for all students. They are under immense pressure, having completed a hard academic year and now are faced with the usual round of final exams. They are broke, having long ago exhausted their student loans, they are probably depressed after a long winter – at least here in Canada – and they are tired. No wonder that every year there are reports of suicides amongst the student populations of many universities and colleges across the world.

When I was at university the older ones amongst us – the ones who had already raised their families and worked for years before returning to school – used to laughing joke that “come November that guy or that girl will be standing on the bridge looking longingly at the river once the reality of too little study and too many assignments neglected kicks in”. The same could be said of the spring. Those that survived the mid-terms in the winter and are still hanging in there have to face the finals. Most of the students at universities are young and haven’t yet learned to shield their emotions or to deal with stress quite as effectively as all of us so-called adults. They don’t have as heavy a fence around them as we do – the one that comes from having to fight against the hard-knocks and vicissitudes of life. It’s no wonder really why some of them just snap – fortunately not quite as badly as the shooter at VT – but many of them do indeed just jump over that bridge.

Many campuses – mine included – have counseling services and psychological treatment centers available at all times, but of course they are only useful if they are used. Not everyone even realizes they have a problem or tries to seek help. And then there are the people who may be beyond help, the ones who have somehow slipped through the cracks and are teetering on the high wire – any sudden event likely to push them off and down into oblivion. This may be what happened in Virginia. A seriously disturbed individual got through the system despite all the checks and balances. And there were some who tried to tackle the problem before it got too far. But no-one of course knew quite how far that would be. Teachers deal with violent and aggressive students every day, it’s a sad fact of life. Those students can usually be dealt with effectively, but legally we cannot just remove someone from the main stream because we think they are ‘odd’ or a bit ‘weird’ – that could only lead to profiling and all the social dangers that that entails. Unless someone makes a direct threat or exhibits some form of violent behavior our hands are tied. The battered wife can go to the police as many times as she likes and they will do nothing until she suffers real injury – sometimes even death. We use the language of violence every day – how many times have you said to your kid “I’m going to kill you if you don’t go to bed right now!” – or “I would kill to have that car/pool/new house - whatever”. The police can’t show up at your door every time you threaten to “knock someone’s block off”, can they? This is the price we pay - willingly - for a free society. We thankfully do not live in a police state - not at least in the Western world.

How do we know that someone is about to blow? Is there some sort of writing on the wall that says “that bloke over there is about to go postal, go get the butterfly net?” – No. I think we can only try to be more aware of what is going on in the lives of people around us and to act if we see something that is wrong. Too many of us are willing to stand by and do nothing. They say that there are three kinds of reactions in people faced with crisis – there are those who act, those who freeze, and those who panic. I guess we should all try to be one of those who act. Think about it – what would you do if a gun-man burst in your door? How would you react? Is there anything you could do? Would arming everyone, as the Americans believe, be the solution? The argument goes that if the kids at VT had had guns they could have ‘taken out’ the shooter before he got too far. Is this true? It might very well have had the opposite effect – arming everyone might also arm a few others who have contemplated the same sort of violence. People sadly commit suicide every day. We read about it in the paper. And of course if you’re going to kill yourself anyway who cares how many others you take with you? If you have a gun handy…

There are no easy answers – perhaps all this media coverage adds to the problem. Perhaps it inspires other ‘crazies’ to act out their dark fantasies, perhaps it’s just that there are so many barriers between people now that we cannot share our troubles anymore. Maybe ‘community’ is gone. Maybe the extended family and its support net is gone. Maybe talking about it, even in an anonymous blog, can go some way to easing the pain. My heart goes out to all those who have suffered this week.

A few weeks ago we went to see Casino Royale – you know – the new James Bond movie with Daniel Craig who is a bit too pretty if you ask me and seems to do an awful lot of pouting al la Angelina Jolie [those lips just *cannot* be real any more than any bit of Cher is real apart from her ear-lobes] – but that’s beside the point. What I really wanted to talk about was computer technology as shown in films. Have you noticed that computers, for example, not only in movies but in TV programs too, always spring to life the second you touch the keyboard; often when they are not plugged in. And have you also noticed that Internet access is available everywhere – even in the middle of the ocean in an open row-boat with villains swarming over the stern?

If you have ever watched CSI you will note that they have computers that explore parts of the body with anatomical and grossly gory accuracy complete with instant ‘zoom-ins’ and HD displays – not to mention maggots and saliva. And of course whenever crime-fighters need to pin-point areas on a map where the killer might be lurking it appears instantly complete with street names, pizza parlors, sound effects and people out walking the dog. I bet Google Maps can’t do that. There is no lag; there are no jaggies and no typing! Or at least there is some typing but it is never necessary to use the space-bar on the keyboard. And of course, if you want to access the hidden files all you have to do is type: ‘secret files’ to have the whole lot pop up, passwords not required. Or if they do have a password it’s eminently hackable like ‘Vesta’ [name of Bond’s girlfriend]. If you want to infect someone elses computer by the way all that is necessary is to type "upload Virus", whether you have a disk in the drive or not. Obviously all movie computers are still using a command-line language like DOS, which must be very irritating to Bill and is putting a crimp in sales of Vista.

Heroes always get a cell-phone signal first try wherever they happen to be – out in the jungles of Borneo or half-way up K2 or trapped in a submersible at 200 fathoms. They never get a low battery warning or a voice message that says “you have used up all your minutes please insert new card now”. Arch-villains all have technical innovations that work perfectly every time. When the bumbling henchman screws up he is plunged into the tank of angry piranhas at the mere touch of a button – the doors never get stuck half-open and have to be pried apart with a crow-bar and he never has the sense to jump out of the way. Guns never jam and are filled with an endless supply of bullets - well the hero’s gun frequently jams so that he is forced to take out the villains with a hastily devised rocket launcher made out of two toilet roll tubes, a cigarette lighter and some Smarties. Villains are always terrible shots despite their state of the art Glocks – they could machine gun the hero from three feet away and still miss while Clint or Bruce or Arnie merely have to pop off one shot to hit six bad guys right between the eyes. Helicopters take off the instant the pilot turns the starter key and radio-controlled nuclear bombs four miles deep in the secret laboratory immediately flash “4 MINUTES” on a garishly lit and therefore fairly easy to find red LED screen. As the klaxons blare and steam issues out of a zillion vents [even on the space station] said bomb is diffused just as a pleasant female voice informs you that self-destruct is in one second and have a nice day.

Laptop computers in the movies BTW are always Sony Vaios that never have to boot up have you noticed and wireless accessibility is a given. Of course if the Vaio fails the hero always has his handy Palm Pilot [also with wireless connectivity] with which to track the bomb on the real-time radar display and his exploding pointer pen from Mont Blanc – but that’s another blog [see Product Placement].

Ever noticed that as soon as you leave home you feel you should go back? Even as you get off the plane on that much needed holiday to Hawaii, or Florida, or Timbuktu, you start to worry about home. Did you turn the stove off, leave food for the cats, lock the front door, cancel the mail, draw the curtains, put the lights on – because we all know that burglars are entirely fooled by the fact that you left a light on in the bathroom. Do you ever wonder what they think of the fact that you’ve been in there for a week? Burglar one to Burglar two “Better not bust into this place Jack – they’ve been in that bathroom for a week and must be mighty pissed by now that they still can’t go. Let’s do number 14 instead. They’ve only been in the front hall since Monday.” Of course if you really want to foil burglars you leave the TV on as well. Then they know that there are at least two of you in the house; one in the bathroom and one watching endless reruns of Oprah – in French.

We had a break-in at our house once. They took some cheap knock-off jewelry and a pair of no-name running shoes. They were obviously of a more discriminating nature however as the shoes were later found abandoned in the middle of the downstairs sofa. The burglars were either frightened off by something – maybe the light shining from under the bathroom door – or else they were high-class thieves and would take nothing lesser than Nikes. Which leads me to wonder why they didn’t just break into one of the posh houses down the street? You know the ones – they have tidy lawns and no rusty cars or old bikes anywhere on the property. They even have flowers that grow [taller than 2 centimeters] in lovingly tended window boxes and beds, untrammeled by undisciplined dogs or pooped on by cats. And not a hastily discarded beer bottle or empty cigarette packet in sight. Now I bet they have stuff worth stealing. Mind you they probably attract a better class of thief too. On our side of the street they are out for cheap stereos and DVDs that can be palmed off quick down at the local pawnbrokers while the ones across the street are probably out for real paintings and not those ones of Velvet Elvis. Mind you I don’t think we have any upper class thieves around here. I doubt if they would even know a Picasso from a Pizarro. They would more than likely just go for the one of the dogs playing poker or James Dean chatting up Marylyn in the all-night diner.

I worked for a large property developer once who was also an avid art collector. He used to furnish his model suites with expensive Eskimo art. Not quite Picasso but valuable nonetheless. One day there was a break-in. The thieves took the fake potted palms and the petrified candies in the cheap glass dishes and left all the soap-stone polar bears behind. Just goes to show that the art-appreciation classes down at Kingston Pen ain’t working.

In the days when real-estate developers used to actually build new houses you could look at instead of tacking blue-prints to the wall petty theft and the odd break-in was commonplace. Too bad that the average Canadian thief is somewhat, shall we say, dim-witted, and is apt to leave clues. Like the guy who parked the moving truck outside the model suite, took all the stuff inside and then unloaded it two streets down into his own place. He was fairly easy to catch – especially since it was daylight. Then there was the fellow who took all the flashing construction lights to put in his bedroom window but forgot to turn them off again at night. There was even the chap who took all the redwood siding off the skids to use to refurbish his deck. Unfortunately for him it had been snowing hard the night he pulled off his raid and he had to drag the sheets about a mile down the road. It didn’t need inspector Poirot to figure out where he took them.

So if you’re traveling anywhere this summer make sure to leave some lights and the TV on. And if you really want to be safe and secure in your mind as you trot around the globe just move to the posh side of the street and leave out some fake Rolexes and the broken CD player, secure in the knowledge that your limited print and your antique armoire will still be there when you get back. Mind you, the plastic apples in the wicker bin might not.

Today marks the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. 4 Battalions of Canadians across a 7000 yard front stormed the ridge from rat-infested trenches knee-deep in mud and filth and scrambled their way into history [literally] over the bodies of the French and English who had gone before. The battle began at 7:05am – mere hours later 3600 young men lay dead. More than 18000 of them were injured over the next few days but on the 12th of April the Red Ensign fluttered from the highest point over 4000 Germans held captive below. It was the first time that Canadians had fought together as Canadians, not merely as support troops. Some say that this battle therefore was a turning point, not only in the war, but as a symbol of nationhood, marking the Canadians for the first time as an independent people in their own right.

The First World War was a war of ‘alliances’ – a conflict that might have remained a relatively minor skirmish in the larger scheme of things had not nation been tied to nation and state allied with state through treaties so complex and inextricable that when war was declared they were each obligated to defend the other. The shot that killed Franz Ferdinand was indeed a shot that rang around the world. All wars are stupid and this was one of the worst. At the end of it millions of young men on either side were dead. I wonder how old they were when they died. In Vietnam they say that the average age of the combatants was nineteen. Nineteen, think of that, nineteen. I have a son who is 20 – in an earlier time he could have been one of them.

My family was largely unaffected by the First World War because the children were too young and the older relatives were too old but that didn’t help them escape the flu that came hard on the heels of the war and actually killed more people than the war itself. The next generation was more involved in the Second World War. It was a family tradition to work in some profession allied to the navy – likely since Portsmouth always was a naval town. My uncles and aunts worked in the naval dockyards or in the victualing yards and some were naval officers. My Uncle Bernard was a commando, or so he said, but he had a wicked looking knife with knuckle grips to prove it. He never spoke about his part in the war but I do know that the older male members of the family took part in the evacuation from Dunkirk, sailing their little fishing boats across the Channel to bring the army home. They were trapped on the beaches, the Germans at their front and the sea at their back. Old-timers like my uncles braved the winds and the currants and the mortar shells to go and get them. They were the ‘Cockleshell Heroes’ [an old movie about the retreat from Dunkirk, Uncle Bernard had a walk-on part].

Donald Ridley was my husband’s uncle. He had barely left school in the small northern town of New Liskeard where he lived when war broke out. He hastened to Toronto with his brothers to volunteer, like many other young Canadian men just like them. He was the lucky one – his brothers joined the air force and spent much of the war patrolling the western borders along the Pacific without incident while Donald trained as a machine gunner with the Toronto Scots Regiment and was duly embarked to England to fight. Then came two long years of anticlimax and frustration spent in billets in and around Aldershot in the south of England, chaffing at the news of things happening in Europe, in The Desert and in Italy. Finally – and he must have been so excited that the waiting and the endless training exercises were finally over – the call came down that the push was on to D-Day. The Canadian troops were mobilized. His company arrived in France a few weeks after the landings and found themselves immediately embroiled in the fierce and terrible fighting around Caen. He was attached to Tor-Scots D Company which in turn was attached as support gunners to the Saskatchewans. In driving rain and an ear-shattering thunderstorm they were formed up along their start line close to Verriers Ridge at 3 o’clock. Then these untried volunteers fought their way through the wheat fields and up the slopes in the pouring rain and the mud while the Germans stalked them, picking off the dying and the wounded with their guns or running them down with their tanks. Donald was killed within hours of the start of the battle, he was just 23. He is buried at Bayeux.

Let’s not any of us forget all of our veterans on either side – especially not today.
Roll of the dead and wounded [D Company Tor-Scots] July 20th 1944:

Killed: Lt. George Gregg age 25, Pte. Clyde E. Johnston age 23, Pte. Don Ridley age 23

Missing: Pte. Willam H. Young, age 24

Wounded: Pte. L.A. Boustead, Pte. R. Brown, Pte. F.J. Finlay, Pte. D.C. Haigh, Pte. J.H. McCarthy, Pte. F.H. McConnell, Pte. T.A. McDowell, Pte. T. Davidson, Pte. J.I. Campbell, Pte. J.B. Morgan

As I get older like many people I have developed an interest in genealogy. I think as the years pass you feel less inclined to be entirely engaged in the moment and more inclined to hark back to earlier days when life was simpler somehow. Or maybe it wasn’t any more than furniture from Woolworths was made lovingly by hand and the knobs didn’t fall off the stove the minute you switched it on, but you know what I mean. I started to wonder who my forebears were some years ago when I was unemployed [again] and casting around for something to do of a morning rather than watch Oprah. Typically I had waited a tad too long – many of the older relatives had passed on to that great pub in the sky by the time I got around to wondering where it all began so I had to resort to cajoling the younger ones to rummage through dusty photograph albums and moldy boxes in the attic without much hope of success. Being four thousand miles away from my ancestral home [Portsmouth] I soon discovered that residing in Canada was something of a hindrance too. And since the exchange rate between pounds and dollars reduces our bills to Monopoly money it’s not all that easy to just hop on a plane and go look for yourself.

For the savvy online searcher there are many available databases and indexes [http://www.cyndislist.com/] not to mention reasonably detailed census returns, at least up to 1901, but you soon run into the proverbial brick wall or some such stumbling block as the amount of fees you have to pay to access some of these resources. And sadly many of the local church and library holdings are not digitized collections which means you have to send endless snail-mail enquiries hoping that someone at the other end will put down their cup of tea long enough to look up your great aunty Agnes from 1872.

The archives of the Latter Day Saints [http://www.familysearch.org/] are an invaluable resource, largely because they tend to be free. They were busy little beavers back then collecting a wealth of genealogical data on their converts on the supposition that if they could bring you into the fold they could grab all your relatives too. They were diligent in chasing down family trees back to the year dot to add to their armies of the converted. The downside of these sources is that you have to squint your way through reams of eye-boggling records contained on scratched microfilm and accessed only with a dim lamp and an old viewer. And many of them of course are still contained in vaults in Salt Lake City. Nevertheless it is possible to obtain copies of the films if you can wait long enough; there are even people who will go and search the vaults for you and make copies of documents, for a fee. There are even some very sweet souls out there who will search their own indexes and the local records offices for you for nothing and sometimes you can find sites where you can barter and trade. In this way I discovered that my family forebears weren’t all cab drivers, stay makers, and needlewomen – one of them at least actually lived in a big house with acreage on the Isle of Wight; sadly passed over to some other family when first wifey was traded for the young model and it was off to the workhouse with her - damn.

Strangely enough I was more successful in tracing my husband’s family than I was my own. It appears that his lot has resided up on the Northumberland border since 1066 where they engaged in lots of border raiding, Scots baiting and no doubt a bit of sheep shagging on the side – or the back. They also have ties to former glories in the shape of one Bishop Nicholas Ridley who was burned to a crisp alongside Cranmer and Latimer at Oxford one sunny morn for siding with Lady Jane Grey and refuting the legitimacy of Elizabeth and Mary. A fine example of the perils of coming down on the losing side. The Ridleys obviously had a history of this because they lost most of their lands, great halls and manors for siding with Cromwell, leaving later Ridleys to tend gardens and cobble shoes or in some cases to just bugger off to Canada instead. They took to the new world with gusto, becoming trappers and foresters, Mounties and railway men, forging their way across the land, leaving little homesteads and log cabins in their wake. They were real pioneers, clearing the old growth forest and wresting a living with just a few oxen and a plough. They had many adventures. One of them, the trapper, was murdered while on a hunting trip out in the deep woods. We have a picture of him taken the summer before his early demise standing proudly outside his cabin a hundred miles from nowhere wearing his leather fringed jacket and worn cowboy boots, long gun at the ready. Great great granddad and his son narrowly escaped being drafted into the American Civil War sneaking across the border on foot from North Dakota to Saskatchewan just in the nick of time. Later, several of these intrepid Ridleys became Americans, some even became Australians, which only goes to show that they were still a bit confused. They were alive when Custer made his last stand, when Sitting Bull sought refuge in the Great White North, they must have followed the news of the Indian Uprising and knew of the Crimea and Old Queen Vic. They saw, and bought, the first cars, trading in their horse and cart for a Model T. They must have seen the first talking pictures and had their photos taken with the first grainy film and a sooty flash.

You should try looking into your own family history – what you find there may surprise you. And it’s not such a bad thing to be firmly connected to your roots.

Cats are very funny creatures. Opinionated and [sometimes] bad tempered, food faddists and dog baiters – they each have their own unique personalities and little quirks and foibles. Much like us you might say. I had a cat once that would refuse to speak to me for days if I made any sort of change to the living arrangements. He once moved out almost entirely and lived in the field behind the house for months after my daughter and her brood came to stay, only venturing back over the doorstep at mealtimes. Then he would take off again, tale high in the air and ears at the alert with what distinctly resembled a sneer on his face. You could almost sense him giving us the finger as he left.

I had another cat many years ago that would follow me half-way to work each day and wait on the corner in the bushes for me to come back at lunchtime. He would always be there, rain or shine, until one day he disappeared only to be found days later trapped in the chimney and covered in soot where he had been hunting birds. Good thing it was summer. Our present cat Tiddy also likes to go for walks. Every morning he accompanies the dogs on their morning perambulations around the block – making sure to keep just out of striking distance of Minnie the Rescue Dog who still hasn’t quite got the idea yet that family cats are not for eating.

Teddy, before he got old and sedentary, was a champion bird-catcher. He would lay hidden in the long grass waiting for them to land on the bird-feeder, then would rush out, spring a full five feet in the air and knock them off with a swift right hook like a prize-fighter. As they lay momentarily stunned in the grass he would pounce them and take off in a blur. The Blue-Jays got their own back one morning though. As he was lying in his usual spot in the grass by the feeder two of them appeared in formation out of the sun and dive-bombed him, giving him a good peck on the bum as they did so. He did a complete somersault and a triple-salco before racing off in all directions.

Henry also came to grief chasing birds. He was tight-rope walking around the outside edge of a 4th floor balcony when a likely catch of the day cruised by. He leapt up to grab it, missed, and parasailed, paws spread, to land on the concrete deck below. That resulted in metal pins in both legs and an eight hundred dollar vet bill. That’s another thing about cats, they’re expensive!

Henry II also went over the balcony but instead of plummeting to the ground he landed on the balcony below. The pot smoking occupants were mystified by his sudden appearance and were considering conversion when I showed up to collect him. They were sitting in a circle discussing it. “It’s a miracle I tell you man”. Henry II also had a liking for elevators and would sometimes escape along the corridor and pop into one if he was lucky enough to find the doors open. I could spend hours chasing the elevator up and down trying to guess which floor he might appear on next. I swear he was pushing all the buttons…

Henry III [Yes I have a liking for cats named Henry] was a bad-tempered cat who would brook no nonsense from the neighborhood kids, unlike Tigger who could be pulled along the carpet by his tale merely wearing a resigned expression on his face. Henry however had committed the cardinal crime and had scratched a small child for whacking him with a stick. The animal control inspector was duly summoned by the hysterical neighbor and Henry was called to account. “Does your cat go out much?” says the inspector ‘No – not much” says I, fingers crossed behind my back, “and does he hunt at all?” “Never” says I emphatically, at which point Henry sallies forth through the open window carrying a large dead mouse in his blood-stained jaws which he drops at the Inspectors feet with a PLOP. “Ten days quarantine” says the inspector.

Can you tell me why neighbors of a certain ‘low’ sort have to conduct their family arguments in loud screeching voices out in the middle of the back yard or on the street where everybody within a hundred miles can hear them? What is it about what the Brits would call ‘people of a certain class’ that encourages them to air their dirty laundry out in public as it were?

When I was a kid in England we lived for a time in neighborhoods that were not of the best – well to be honest, neighborhoods that were downright slums. After the Second World War there were pockets of these neighborhoods left standing – precariously – all over Portsmouth. Since Portsmouth is and always was a large naval town it was a prime target for the Luftwaffe on their way to Coventry or London, meaning that much of the city was reduced to bombed out craters and mounds of rubble where buildings once stood. The remaining old Victorian slums hard up against the dockyard wall housed people displaced from jobs or the aged or the infirm or the bone idle, or the ill-educated or bloody minded, or the drunks, or ‘ladies of the evening’ or just about anyone really who was down on their luck. When we were also down on our luck we lived there in one room on the top floor of a rambling old house with peeling wallpaper, rising damp and a lively collection of bugs that scattered as soon as you turned the light on. Down at the bottom of the stairs lived a man who plied his trade as a ‘rag and bone’ man. You don’t see them anymore, just as you don’t have ‘knife-sharpeners’ or ‘peddlers’ selling pots and pans pushing their carts down the middle of the road, or even home deliveries of milk for that matter. Of course when I was a kid they also had such things as brewer’s drays – carts with horses attached to deliver the beer, or similarly a man with a horse and cart coming around to fill up your cellar with coal.

The ‘ladies of the evening’, or prossies as they were called, would congregate down at the local public lavatories where my old auntie once worked as the attendant. She would give change and keep the place clean while the prossies smoked a quick fag and applied a pound or two more makeup before sallying out to meet up with the latest batch of sailors out on the town. One of them whose nickname was ‘Pompey Lil’ had no teeth and a false eye. The customers were abundant in Portsmouth, fresh faced young lads from distant ports around the world who evidently had not paid much attention to the training films and could be found all around the downtown area, especially around the Guildhall where they would have a skinful at the local pub and then try to feed fish and chips to the concrete lions on the steps. MPs the size of houses could also be found in great abundance bursting into public houses and tossing silly sailors out the back and into a waiting jeep before they could scatter. Fights were frequent, especially between the Brits and the Yanks. It was a matter of honour to defend the size of your guns, the length of your boat, the number of your lifeboats, the cut of your jib, just about anything really and none of it made all that much sense. All that mattered was that someone gave the rest an excuse for a right old punch-up hugely enjoyed by all until the MPs arrived to spoil all the fun.

Before the slums were all knocked down and were replaced by endless blocks of flats with urine in the stairwells and graffiti on the walls it was also hugely enjoyable to listen to a couple of ‘fishwives’ going at each other hammer and tongs out in the street while the neighbors stood around and gave points for the most creative insults. My own mother had a voice the size of a dockyard laborer despite the fact that she was only a little over 5 feet tall. I would cringe into a doorway when she got started over some real or imagined slight while watchers nodded in approval and occasionally joined in the fight with a few loud comments of their own. If you’ve ever watched ‘Coronation Street’ you can imagine the scene with lots of screaming and name calling loud enough to empty the pub on a Saturday night, which is quite some feat.

People of a more ‘refined sort’ don’t engage in such behavior – it’s all drawn curtains and closed doors and muffled voices. Pity really. Before people spent all their time indoors watching the box we made our own entertainment – much of it out in the middle of the road.

Well it’s that time of year again – or at least it is in some places on the Earth, not necessarily here in Southern Ontario where it’s still snowing and looks like it will keep on going until September. I’m talking about Spring – you know, that time of year when flowers pop their heads up and the grass turns green and the birdies start singing and making nests for baby birdies to fall out of and be fodder for the cat and all that life-renewing stuff. It is also the time when the garden is revealed in all it’s awful messy post-Winter glory reminding me that I really have to do something about the awning that collapsed under the first snow fall because we didn’t take it down in time [we never do] and those branches that fell off the neighbour’s tree into the pond during the last wind storm. And the pond, the pond – oh urg! It’s full of brackish slimy black stuff liberally sprinkled with floating rotten leaves because we also forgot to drain it before the temperature plunged to sub-zero and stayed there. There were a couple of large frogs in there last summer – I wonder what became of them? There is a dark mass of some sort embedded in the deepest ice block down near the bottom…

Last Spring we decided to go all ‘Alan Titmarsh’ and clean up the jumbled mess that is attached to the back of our house. In a momentary fit of enthusiasm we put in boxed flower beds. Unfortunately we made them slightly too large and were forced to make four hundred trips to the garden centre to haul back dozens of floppy black bags of soil to fill them with. The pile of stuff with bricks in it that I found down by the fence didn’t seem like a suitable growing medium somehow. After hauling about two hundred bucks worth of bags and still barely covering the bottom of the biggest flower box [I told you they were a tad large] we decided to ramp it up a little and take a trip up to the sand and gravel pit with the old van. We took the seats out, spread tarps all around the floor over the carpet and shoveled in a yard of dirt and manure. Now I don’t know if you know what a yard of dirt looks like but it appears somewhat smaller than it actually is when it’s sitting in a heap on the ground. When it’s shoveled into a Chrysler Caravan it assumes monstrous proportions something akin to the alien predator from all those horror movies of the fifties. It moves and shifts, it writhes and pulsates, it spreads itself into every nook and cranny, it grabs you around the neck, it creeps up the windows, and it stinks. It also shifts every time you go around a corner and washes up against your feet like an incoming tide. Then of course we had to shovel it out again. Suffice it to say that it was one of the hottest summers on record, the temperature soared into the high thirties, and we were shoveling cow poop – for days… I still get flashbacks. The van of course has, shall we say, a lingering ‘earthy’ aroma that refuses to leave despite all efforts, and the springs are shot.

After all that the boxes were still only a third filled so we said bugger it and gave up before we all died of heat stroke and anyway, bountiful mounds of sweet smelling herbs and masses of Pansies and Flocks and Sun-Flowers would soon be overflowing the edges so what did it matter? How much dirt do flowers need anyway? I’ve seen pictures in National Geographic of lichen clinging to bare rocks out in the middle of no-place for God’s sake and looking pretty chipper so surely a few coddled Pansies could manage to survive in four or five inches – well – centimeters - couldn’t they? An aromatic trip up to Canadian Tire yielded stacks of little packets all bearing encouraging photographs of flowers en masse, herbs in abundance and pumpkins in profusion. I looked forward to having the garden of the century, provided the undesirable neighbors at the back stopped flinging empty bottles of Labatt’s Blue and cigarette packets over the fence that is.

Too bad that nothing came up except for a lively patch of weeds that resisted all efforts to dislodge it including being bashed with a spade and dumped on by the dog. Tell me this- how come the weeds could thrive like crazy with no attention and no water and no sun and my Pansies and Flocks and Sunflowers poked their spindly heads up for about a nanosecond before expiring in a shriveled brown lump? Hmm – sun – could it be that building the flower boxes under the shadiest tree in the darkest corner of the garden overshadowed by the highest section of the fence had something to do with it?

Flying in air-planes is unnatural. So is jumping out of them, or falling off a bridge on the end of an elastic band, or base jumping, which I take it is some form of sport whereby you jump off a cliff into a black abyss below and hope your parachute opens before you make a ‘you shaped’ impression on the rocks four miles down. It reminds me of the old adage “if God wanted us to fly we would all have propellers and a Boeing engine strapped to our butts”. I mean – how bizarre is it that we willingly ascend to 36,000 feet [the height of Everest without the snow, ice, Yetis and frozen bodies] and sit there watching a movie with a drink in our hand while we whiz across the continent held up only by air. Think about it. At least in a boat you will keep on floating even if the engines cut out, but a 747 out of gas over Gander – oh my.

I was on a flight from Oahu to Maui once listening to the flight attendant extol the virtues of the airline and the fact that in all of their 20 years flying between the Hawaiian Islands they had never had a crash. Now – I’m no mathematician, in fact I have to take my shoes off to count to twenty, but doesn’t that mean, statistically speaking of course, that we were just about due to plunge in a flaming ball into the sea at any time now? Too bad planes can’t fly ten feet in the air – or at least no higher than the nearest telephone pole. I don’t know about you but I would feel a whole lot safer. And if they could put an automatic vodka dispenser in the back of the seat in front of me that would go a long way to calming my nerves too. Mind you, I once got my nerves so fortified with alcohol combined with Gravol [please don’t try this at home] on a flight to St. Lucia that I had to spend the first four days of my holiday hovering over a Caribbean toilet and the second four laying in the sand under a palm tree groaning.

There is also a big difference between commercial pilots of the ‘Air Canada’ type and commercial pilots of the ‘Caribbean Island Hopper’ type, many of whom were no doubt trained on float planes with one float missing over the jungles of Brazil. One such pilot carried me and a dozen others across the sea to an island off Barbados once. The plane itself was painted bright purple with orange flowers and the pilot was dressed in a t-shirt with a picture of Che Guevara on the front. This should have given me some pause but I was in a holiday mood brought on by several large rum and cokes. Now, if you have ever flown in an Air Canada jet you will know that the pilot taxis the aircraft carefully out to the end of runway seven left and politely waits his turn to rev up the engines and proceed at the correct speed to achieve lift-off. Not so with Caribbean Queen Airlines. We were barely in our seats before the pilot gunned it down the taxi-way, popped a wheelie onto the runway and roared off into space vertically. And the minute the wheels left the tarmac and we were ascending at an angle of 85 degrees the flight attendant hopped out of her seat and started liberally dispensing drinks from the trolley that she pushed ahead of her up the incline with outstretched arms and heels dug into the carpet. There were lots of takers.

Airports in the Caribbean don’t bear much resemblance to LAX or YYZ either. Many of them, because there’s not a lot of room for runways, cross the islands diagonally and have open sea at either end sometimes combined with steep hills and cliffs, with the result that the pilot has to navigate at near stalling speed and just the right angle of attack through what appears to be a very narrow opening. There is not much room for errors in judgment because the reef waits at either end. The airport on the island of Contra Dora is like that [off the coast of Panama] and so is the airport at St. Lucia. The other problem is that relatively few aircraft use the runways unlike La Guardia for instance that handles hundreds of aircraft arriving and leaving every 30 seconds or so day and night. In St. Lucia when I was there, which was admittedly quite a few years ago, the locals used the main runway as a thoroughfare to get from one side of Castries to the other. There were kids and adults, sheep and goats strolling here and there among the palm trees and the hibiscus until a warning klaxon started blaring and everyone scattered scant seconds before the island hopper appeared and screeched to a halt in a cloud of dust beside the terminal. I didn’t find that all that disturbing but what I did find slightly unsettling was the sight of the rusty old pump-action fire engine with the flat tires parked in front of the cemetery handily located on the edge of the cliff right before the runway dropped off into the sea.

At one time I worked at a major airport and therefore was witness to a number of ‘incidents’ that the general public would never know about. These usually involved leaking jets of the ‘Russian Airlines’ type that were made to park well away from the main terminals surrounded by very large yellow fire-trucks with their hoses at the ready just in case. In general however working at the airport gave me a great deal of confidence in the safety procedures and protocols that exist in Canada. Did you know for example that there are vast underground operations rooms that track and monitor each and every aircraft landing and taking off in addition to the state of the art control towers and the air and ground NavCan systems. Always practicing and prepared for any emergency there are people working around the clock to make sure no disaster ever occurs in Canada. The knowledge makes ‘white knucklers’ like me sleep better the night before a flight but it still can’t beat the odd rum and coke – or even better – a large dose of Valium. If God had meant us to fly and all that….

I wonder if anyone ever reads this blog? Probably not. I get the feeling that I’m writing in a vacuum – well not a *real* vacuum because if I was my head would explode and my eyeballs would soon be on their way to China. Not to mention that the rest of my body would resemble something that arrived on the deck of the Enterprise when Data pressed ‘Scramble” instead of ‘Receive’. But is there anyone out there who is remotely interested in the ramblings and largely unintelligible rants of most of us bloggers? Don’t know why we do it really. I suppose we do it as a creative outlet or an attempt at our fifteen minutes of fame. Some of us of course are frustrated novelists, or unemployed journalists, or exhibitionists, or idle youth with nothing better to do. And some of us actually have something meaningful and intelligent to say – not that you’ll find much of that here. I just like nattering to myself while it’s raining outside.

It must be extraordinarily difficult to write an entire novel with more than 10 pages, and all that twaddle like characterization, drama, suspense, and a story arc etc. I can’t see how they do it. I’ve often been tempted to try but have never actually had the guts, or a good enough story-line to do it. Of course an entire novel need not be 200 pages – perhaps there’s room for a ‘bloggers version’ of the next great Canadian novel. A sort of ‘Readers Digest’ condensed mystery that takes under ten minutes to read – which after all is the attention span of most of us anyway. You only have to think of followers of ‘Survivor’ to figure that much out. So here goes:

Scene: a ruined monastery garden somewhere in Scotland, stream running down the back, flowers, birds, bees, and a red-faced furtive looking native riding by on his bike on his way down to the Horse and Feathers for a quick one. In his hand he has a mysterious scroll with strange designs etched into it. A shot rings out followed by a THUD. PC Plod investigates. “Allo Allo – what have we got ‘ere then? Looks like something from Dantes Inferno”. Cut to a similar scene beneath the Eiffel Tower with crowds of French persons dressed in long scarves shrugging to each other and waving their arms around. Detective Rene Renois has arrived in a post chaise post hast to investigate the gruesome murder of a can-can dancer from the Moulin Rouge, tutu up around her neck in a position that resembles the Vitruvian Man, clutching a bottle of absinthe that points towards the Louvre. ‘Alors – regardez le gruesome murder. What can possibly have gone on ‘ere? Something to do with the Holy Grail I’ll wager or my name is not Bridget Bardot.” Across the courtyard Sergeant P. Casso sketches a quick cubist drawing of the crime scene. “I can only surmise that Madame Lefarge here was brutally murdered by a mad monk who was a member of a secret order sworn to rid the world of Leonardo da Vinci, or maybe it is Leonardo di Caprio, I cannot be sure” points to note clutched in dead woman’s hand which reads ‘I was brutally murdered by a mad monk who is a member of a secret order sworn to rid the world of Leo urg argh uk’ “Hmm” says Renoir “ What is this urgh ag uk? I’ll warrant this is something to do with the Illuminati or my name is not Avril Lavigne”. Suddenly a dark cloud obscures the sun and the bells of Notre Dame ring out over the Seine. The inverted glass pyramid over by the Louvre is momentarily lit from within by flashes of light that seem to pulsate with an ominous green glow. The crowd falls silent. To Be Continued…

That’s it for today’s episode – feel free to add some more. That’s if there’s anybody out there that is.

I hear that members of the SAS will eat anything in order to survive, according to the SAS Handbook and Survival Guide I was thumbing through today. Good thing you’re not a member because if you were you would have to exist for long months in the jungles of Borneo on a diet of dirt, leaves, frog bellies and spiders. That’s if you weren’t chewing the bark off trees and strangling little indigenous [and unsuspecting] animals to eat raw or boiling up a few grubs in a hot spring in the same water you used to wash your feet in this morning.

What accounts for our unique food tastes? I had a cat once that went wild for pickled onions, another [current] cat who just loves Portobello mushrooms, and a dog who likes spicy stuffed olives in hot sauce.

Brits, like me, have long had an affinity for Marmite, which is an evil smelling yeast-based black concoction that you spread on toast and eat with your eyes closed and a peg on your nose. Chip butties are also very tasty [that’s a large handful of fries stuffed inside two hunks of bread with lashings of butter] and so are sarnies [sardine sandwiches]. When I was a kid one of the highlights at Christmas was to lather congealed turkey drippings straight from the roasting pan on to toast – or even, as a really special treat – to lather turkey drippings straight from the roasting pan on to several rounds of fried bread. This is why if you were to conduct a study, you would probably find that there are no Brits left alive over the age of fifty. They all died off from heart disease long ago before Jane Fonda and Twiggy decided that we should all be thin. We Brits just loved our fat. All recipes started off with the words ‘Take one pound of Butter’, even the ones for soup.

When I lived in England it was quite normal to eat about seventeen times a day – breakfast, elevenses, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner and supper – with very possibly five pints of lager down at the pub and a take-out curry just before bed. And yet I don’t remember ever seeing overweight Brits. It must be rapid metabolism or very possibly they just shrink in all that rain.

In Japan I believe they like to eat jelly-fish but I don’t know if they go for the tentacles because of the tripping hazard and Japanese restaurants tend to be small – just a few tables and a karaoke box. They also like to eat fish that contains a poison sack that kills you stone dead if you eat it. In order to counter the low attendance of patrons who want to try this there are special chefs who are trained in the art of cooking the fish in such a way as to render the poison innocuous – you hope. They also have people who are solely employed to massage best beer into the rumps of Kobe cattle to make them tender. “And what do you do for a living Mitsubishi san?” “I’m a bum massager you Gaijin”.

Of course we all know of those tribes in Africa who eat locusts. It’s called getting your own back for all those lost crops. Na Na Na Na Na – take that, little flying buzzard thing [I don’t know the word for it in Swahili but it probably has several loud glottal stops]. And in the Middle East people sit around in the desert talking about the weather, “Do you think it’s going to rain this century effendi?”, and popping sheep’s eyeballs like gumballs.

So if you’re going to join the SAS better start now and educate your palate. You never know when you will be dropped into the jungle with nothing but a shoelace and a rusty pen-knife and called upon to whip up a quick batch of ‘worm surprise’ for you and your mates as the sun goes down over the swamp.