The Imperceptible Immigrant

Early worms

June 20, 2026 by admin

I made reference in a posting further up the year to the (re)discovery – on the part of The Girl and I – of the importance both of exercise and diet as essential weapons in the war that we are obliged these days to wage against the powers of aging… and all that that entails.

I will be writing a post in the not too distant future on this subject which will doubtless be thoughtful, serious and measured – as befits the importance of the subject. For the time being – however – a recent smidgeon of anecdotage…

The year that The Girl and I arrived in Canada – 2015 – we both joined a fitness class advertised as being for those ‘fabulously over fifty!’ Shortly thereafter The Girl decided that it was far too soon to be retired and found herself a job – the which in turn obliged her to locate alternate routes to fitness and health that did not clash with her work schedule.

I remained in the class – and am indeed still a regular now. We are all considerably further north than the original fifty; in some cases by several decades, but we enjoy the class as much for the social elements as for the workouts – and good and enduring friendships have been established between us.

Now that The Girl has retired she sees no reason to be up and out of the house at shortly after 8:00am – particularly not to indulge in physical exercise. On my fitness mornings, therefore, I sneak out as quietly as I can in an attempt to avoid disturbing her. I set an alarm but aim to awaken before it goes off.

These good intentions do not always go to plan – as was the case on Thursday last. On waking I struggled to read my watch with misty morning eyes. I deduced that the alarm had yet to sound… cancelled it, got up, made my coffee, grabbed my gym kit, yoga mat and other accoutrements, tip-toed out of the house and departed as quietly as possible for Sidney by the Sea.

On arrival in town I headed for the gym – the which is held in an elders’ facility called the Shoal Centre. I was slightly surprised that there was no-one behind the reception desk, but figured that there might be some event occurring of which I was unaware. When I reached the gym door – however – and peeped through I was greatly surprised to find a group of exercisers preparing for their class… none of whom I recognised at all!!

In spite of the fog yet lurking in my brain I was finally able to figure out what had happened. It was, of course, an hour earlier than I had thought and this gym class was an even earlier one that that frequented by us only marginally crazy folks. Who can seriously do exercise at 7:00 in the morning (please don’t feel obliged to respond!).

I slunk back to the car and kept my head down for an hour – until it was finally time for our class.

This getting old thing has been seriously over-sold!

Dude!!

June 8, 2026June 8, 2026 by admin

I feel that some sort of explanation is called for with regard to the enigmatic and unexplained offering that was my last posting to these pages.

Fear not – there is a perfectly good explanation – and here it be!

Tech bit coming up… skip ahead if such things send you to sleep!

I started writing ‘The Imperceptible Immigrant’ back in 2012. For those interested in such things the blog is built on WordPress and hosted by a reasonably large North American hosting company. WordPress uses mySQL as its database and much of the coding which it comprises is done in a scripting language called PHP.

Now, all of the components of this system are subject to regular updates – both to add and refine the services offered, but also for security reasons. This latter is most important to prevent undesirables breaking into the systems. The trick to applying updates is to ensure that all of the WordPress components are running on versions that co-exist happily with each other. The timing for all this can be quite difficult.

I have for a while now been receiving warnings that I should upgrade the versions of PHP on my site. I finally did so last week. Unfortunately the theme that I have been using for the site (the template that defines how it looks and feels) has been in use virtually unchanged since the site was built. This upgrade broke it – and ‘The Immigrant’ disappeared in a flurry of error messages.

I was obliged to commence an urgent and time-consuming exercise to find a more modern template and to re-engineer the site – which, in InterWebNet terms, had simply ceased to exist. Even with assistance from some helpful technical support folk it took much of the week to get everything back up and running again.

OK – tech bit over…

The upside (apart from being less likely to break in the future) is that the site now has a spiffing new look and feel. If you get a chance do check it out and let me know what you think. Please do the same – naturally – should anything not be working properly.

Thank you

Testing, testing, testing

June 5, 2026 by admin

“I discourage passive skepticism, which is the armchair variety where people sit back and criticize without ever subjecting their theories or themselves to real field testing”.

Tim Ferris

As promised

May 28, 2026 by admin

Herewith some snaps of plant-life in our garden – enjoying the early summer weather. From what I hear Europe (and the UK) is currently burning up in an unexpected heatwave. Our sympathies. We do feel even more blessed than usual at simply enjoying normal May/June style weather.

I do hope that everyone is doing alright…

Playing catch-up

May 25, 2026 by admin

“In our frenzied attempts to catch up with life, we run right past it. Once we have run past it, what we are in reality attempting to catch is ourselves.”

Craig D. Lounsbrough

Looking back through the archives for this almanac I note that I have gotten into the habit of posting – during the late spring/early summer of each year – a succinct gallery of photographs taken in our garden here at the southern end of Vancouver Island.

As one might imagine, these analogous offerings look remarkably similar year on years. Given that much of the garden is furnished with mature shrubs, perennials and ancient (relatively speaking!) trees, this should come as no surprise. The true beauty of the garden in spring-time is that it is at once the same as it ever was – whilst also being ever new.

And how cool is that?!

The title of this post, however, is “Playing catch-up” – so there is clearly something going on here other than the mere uploading of a fresh instalment of an old favourite.

As indeed there is…

Those who follow these things closely might notice (should they care to put any effort into the thing) that we are almost at the start of June and – as yet – no garden images have appeared for this year.

Some reasons for this tardiness have been hinted at in earlier posts, but these reflect only a small part of the whole story. Whereas Mother Nature has been powering ahead with her usual vim and vigour, our attempts at getting the grounds of our abode into shape have been running well behind. These factors have been in play:

Executing an estate: I wrote near the top of the year of the sad passing of The Girl’s step mother. The Girl is sole executor of the estate and there has been much busy-ness, much driving to and from Nanaimo and much clearing out and putting things in order so that the will can be appropriately executed. She and I have already carried out well in excess of two hundred hours of work on the matter.
Garden machinery: The grass in our garden grows fiercely at the start of the season and is long, tough and very wet before I can even get a first cut in. On my second attempt this year our old gas mower finally seized and we have been obliged to purchase a new one. Since we acquired the old mower very much second hand when we came to Canada (eleven years ago) we can hardly complain. Our power-washer – the which we share with a dear friend – also refused to start the year in an orderly fashion. Fixing this was simply a matter of getting the carburettor cleaned out, but getting our local small motor specialist so to do set our power-washing – and by extension everything else – back by five weeks.
A week in hospital: A close family member suffered a blood and heart-related incident and ended up spending a week in hospital here in Victoria. This inevitably required us to make one or more trips each day to the hospital for the week concerned. This time lost delayed a surprising number of other matters that were already queuing up for our attention. Fortunately the family member concerned is now back home and improving day on day.

As you can see – the start of the year has gone considerably less smoothly than we would have hoped and we may be excused if some normally essential tasks have had to be delayed.

I will see what (if any) images I might have to hand from the world outside our windows…

Bump and grind

May 23, 2026 by admin

Herewith a follow-up to my last post… on the subject of the recent tree-work that we had carried out ‘chez nous’.

There follows a brief hiatus to allow for the cracking of any lumberjack jokes – as in:

“Paddy and Mick are walking along a logging road in British Columbia…” – and so forth!

All done? Thank you. Onward!…

The photos that I posted last time out should give an idea of just how much extra light we get at the front of the house as a result of the removal of the self-willed spruce. The images also suggest, however, that planting something more to scale is definitely in order to define more appropriately the interface between house and garden at that point. The search for the right arboreal embellishment may well take some time.

These photos show how the raised bed that had accommodated the spruce was left after the felling of the tree.

The photos also give an idea of just how much stump remains in the ground when a tree is removed. In other instances we have left the the protruding stumps as a feature (almost). In this case, because we want to plant another tree in the bed, we were obliged to hire the service of our arborist’s stump grinder, who – in command of his impressive array of machinery – made short work of the remains of the spruce.

This thing is definitely a bit of a beast!

One sizeable hole – tree-planting for the use of…!

A room with a view

May 10, 2026 by admin

“Choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine”.

E.M.Foster – ‘A Room with a View’

The Girl and I are fortunate enough to live in a home that is a fair bit more spacious than is strictly necessary for us. Now, it may well prove in the long run that we are no longer able to manage the ‘estate’ and down-sizing will become the order of the age, but in the meantime we are enjoying having the room to pursue our various interests without having to make too many compromises.

Before coming to Canada The Girl and I lived for a decade and a half in average sized apartments (average for the UK, of course) and are thus much relieved at not having to suffer the same constraints now. We have both worked from home a fair bit (particularly during the pandemic) and are most grateful for having the wherewithal so to do.

The Girl has an office at the front of the house which is of a decent size and is reasonably quiet. It faces south west, however, towards Mount Newton, so it doesn’t get the best of the day. The situation was made worse by the presence without of an unfortunately placed pine tree, the which had grown out of proportion whilst resisting all attempts to reign in its over-enthusiasm.

A conversation with our neighbours – who were looking to get some tree work done themselves – planted the idea in our heads that the best thing to do might just be to dispense with this tree entirely. This is not a thing that we do lightly – always endeavouring to honour living things – but in this case it was not possible to preserve this tree in a reasonable form. We will plant some more compact replacement when the works are finished.

Meanwhile – take a look at these ‘before and after’ images…

While we are on the subject…

April 29, 2026 by admin

…of music…

In a missive posted but a few weeks back I introduced gentle readers to the excellent guitarist – Clive Scott – who has recently joined the ranks of Anam Danu.

This has been most exciting period bringing – as it does – the prospect of the first live Anam Danu concert a little closer every day!

In turn this splendid new member has introduced us to a new musical inspiration – a scarcely believable phenomenon… arguably a true musical genius!

…the which is embarrassing, because none of us had even heard of him.

Now – you may already know the young man concerned – in which case ‘good for you’. If not – let me introduce Jacob Collier.

Before you accuse me of hyperbole – here is the start of his Wikipedia entry:

“Jacob Collier (born 2 August 1994) is an English singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer and educator. His music incorporates a combination of jazz and elements from other musical genres, and often features extensive use of reharmonisations and close harmony. He is known for his energetic live performances, in which he often conducts the audience to sing harmony or play percussion parts.

In 2013, his split-screen video covers of popular songs, such as Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ’bout a Thing”, began to go viral on YouTube. In 2014, Collier became friends with Herbie Hancock and Quincy Jones after they heard and saw his video cover of Stevie Wonder’s song. He decided to stay independent and produce his first album”.

Far better than anything I could write here would be simply listening-to/seeing the man in action. To that end herewith some links.

Here he is recording (live) the video for a new single, with accompaniment from an impromptu choir of fans:

And here improvising with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra:

Should you find this prodigy as fascinating as do we, you might be interested in this BBC documentary about him:

Should you choose to watch any of these clips I would encourage you to watch through to the end. Jacob has a habit of springing surprises throughout.

Enjoy!

Washing the Dust – 2

April 27, 2026April 26, 2026 by admin

A suggested in my last post, our dalliance with the arts over the winter months here on Vancouver Island has not been confined to the theatre alone. This follow-up missive takes us into the wonderful world of music in Victoria… and a surprisingly varied world that is. Herewith a few of the highlights from a wide spectrum of celebratory events. As chance would have it these all feature predominantly the human voice

First up – an event for which we had purchased tickets way back in the summer of 2025 – the extraordinary Ladysmith Black Mambazo at The Royal Theatre.

Now – just in case any gentle reader should be unaware of this legendary ensemble, herewith a brief extract from their extensive entry in Wikipedia:

“Ladysmith Black Mambazo is a South African male choral group singing in the local vocal styles of isicathamiya and mbube. They became known internationally after singing with Paul Simon on his 1986 album “Graceland”. They have since won many awards, including five Grammy Awards.

Formed by Joseph Shabalala in 1960, they became one of South Africa’s most prolific musical groups. Their releases received gold and platinum disc honours in both South Africa and abroad. The group became a mobile academy of South African through their isicathamiya music”.

At The Royal – on a virtually unadorned stage and behind a simple row of microphones – the nine members of the current choir quickly captivated the sell-out crowd with their infectious call-and-response routines, their silky harmonisation and their soulful melodies – the which were energetically underscored by their exuberant choreography. Our faces were wreathed with delighted smiles throughout.

(Sadly, we hear that Albert Mazibuko – one of the founders of Ladysmith Black Mambazo – recently passed away. Rest in peace).

At the opposite end of the spectrum from The Royal Theatre may be found the ‘Brentwood Bay Village Empourium’. This delightful meeting place bills itself thus:

“Welcome to Greater Victoria’s Favourite place to meet up with friends, enjoy great food and drink and browse our selection of merchandise – much of it locally and regionally procured. From apparel to dishware, greeting cards, candles, decor, jewellery and gifts – we’re your friendly neighbourhood general store and more”!

In addition to decent coffee and rather good snacks this hospitable cafe is also a live music venue. On Friday nights the display cabinets in the centre of the shop are pushed back to create an intimate 35 seat cabaret-style venue at which local musicians just love to play.

I am slightly embarrassed to admit that – in the decade since we came to Canada – we had not until recently attended any of these shows. This omission was corrected a few weeks back for the visit of Victoria legend, Louise Rose. This from the BC Entertainment Hall of Fame website:

“Musical from a very early age, Louise’s capabilities and interests haven’t exactly been restricted to making music. A native of the United States, she has, among other things, been a police officer, a Baptist missionary and a sociology teacher. But all that changed after she arrived in Victoria in the early 1970’s and fell in love with British Columbia’s capital city. A pianist, vocalist, and actress, she was formally trained in piano, organ, voice, conducting and arranging. Her teachers included Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington and Leonard Bernstein. She is host of ‘Let’s Sing Again’ – and leader of the Louise Rose Trio. Louise is also conductor of the highly successful Victoria Good News Choir, which specializes in blues, gospel, semi-classical and jazz”.

We have seen Louise before and can attest to the fact that she truly lives up to her legend. She improvises on the piano with an extraordinary harmonic sense and is a character very much larger than life. At the Empourium she declared that she did not hold with breaks between sets – and that she would simply play until she had run out of requests.

Finally in this eclectic smorgasbord of musical treats is one that I had not expected to experience. The Victoria Symphony Orchestra (VSO) were closing out their season with a performance of Mozart’s Requiem at the Royal – the which event was sold out long before we heard about it. In part this was because the VSO was to be joined for the performance by the choir of King’s College, Cambridge.

When I did finally hear the news it came in the form of a flyer advertising the availability of a very limited number of seats at one of the final rehearsals for the concert. This would take place at the Farquhar auditorium at the University of Victoria and only one hundred and seventy five tickets would be issued. The choir and the VSO would be led through the Requiem by the King’s College Director of Music, Daniel Hyde, with his instructions amplified for the edification of the fascinated attendees.

I have long had a tangential interest in the King’s College Choir – and not just because I was a boy soprano back in the day before my voice broke. I grew up listening to the recordings of the King’s College Choir (in particular those of their Christmas choral music, the which I still reach for come the season). Also, my penultimate employment in the UK was at a very well known school that not only had its own excellent choir but was also blessed with strong links to Cambridge. For a number of years I sang in impromptu Christmas Eve choirs in the chapel there and can attest to some of the magic involved.

Washing the dust – 1

April 17, 2026 by admin

“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls”.

Pablo Picasso

There have been years – probably too many in all honesty – in which the winter and early spring months have seen life’s dust accumulate upon our souls just that little bit too briskly.

Exposure to the arts may not truly require that much of an effort, but those of us of ‘un certain âge‘ are doubtless sometimes guilty of hibernational tendencies when is comes to our artistic intake during these dark months.

Not so this year! We have already been out and about a fair bit – and the dust of daily life has been well and truly disturbed.

Herewith a few highlights:

The threatre season at The Belfry started in February with Tawiah M’Carthy and Brad Cook’s excellent ‘Maanomaa, My Brother’. The Belfry’s notes reveals this:

“Childhood friends Kwame and Will reunite in Ghana for the funeral of a loved one, and discover how much has changed since they separated 25 years earlier. Telling their story in a beautiful combination of dialogue and movement, the play is both fiercely personal and curiously abstract. It’s a meditation on grief and diaspora starring playwrights M’Carthy and Cook“.

This is an extraordinarily beautiful and moving piece of writing, brought fiercely to life by its authors. The writing and performance are excellent and I for one was delighted that the production did not shy away from the theatrical – something that to my mind is all too prevalent these days.

Neither The Girl nor I care for the west coast habit of leaping to one’s feet at the end of a show to award a generous ovation. We cleave to the British view that standing ovations should be reserved for the truly exceptional.

In this case, however, we were both on our feet!

At the opposite end of the theatrical scale The Girl and I travelled with dear friends, one weekend in March, to the mainland for the ‘Broadway Across Canada‘ touring production of ‘Les Misérables‘ at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver.

Now, The Girl and I – separately and together – have both seen ‘Les Mis‘ on many occasions, stretching right back to the show’s transfer to the West End in London from the RSC’s home at the Barbican in 1985.

That we have done so should not be taken as a sign of obsessive reverence for the piece – though we have always enjoyed it. The reality is more prosaic. In the decade that we lived together in the UK we were visited on a pleasing number of occasions by travellers from Canada. When asked what they would like to see in London, ‘a musical‘ was always near the top of the list. ‘Les Mis‘ proved to be a reliably satisfactory way of fulfilling that desire.

With regard to the Vancouver touring production – the show provided its accustomed magic, but we did miss the full-stage revolve that had been such a integral and bold feature of the original show’s staging.

On the other hand – it was good to hear a full 16 piece orchestra featured in this production. Many modern presentations save money by utilising a heavily stripped down pit band.

On which subject – next time, music!

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