The Imperceptible Immigrant

Going home star

April 9, 2016 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

Last week the Kickass Canada Girl and I attended the Royal Theatre in Victoria for one of two performances by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet of a new piece – ‘Going home Star – Truth and Reconciliation‘ – which was commissioned for the Ballet by Artistic Director André Lewis and presented with the support of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.

The subject matter of this ambitious work – concerning the residential schools programme controversy and its effect on those of First Nations’ descent – attracted a heavyweight artistic team. Joseph Boyden – award winning Canadian author of ‘Three Day Road‘ and ‘Through Black Spruce‘ – provided the story. Mark Godden – whose list of credits and awards throughout North America is too impressively extensive to list here – choreographed. The excellent music was by Christos Hatzis – two time Juno award winner.

Those without Canada may not be familiar with the background of the residential schools programme. Herewith for your benefit (should you be at all interested) is a brief history lesson.

An amendment to the Indian Act of 1876 – intended to remove First Nations’ children from the influence of their families and culture to assimilate them into the dominant ‘Canadian’ culture – made attendance compulsory at day, industrial or residential schools. By 1931 there were 80 of these residential schools across Canada. The numbers declined thereafter, with the last federally operated school closing in 1996, but by then some 150,000 (around 30%) First Nations children had passed through the system. More than 6,000 did not survive the experience, dying whilst yet in attendance.

A new consensus emerged in the early 21st century that these residential schools had done significant harm to the Aboriginal children who attended them by removing them from their families, depriving them of their ancestral languages, through sterilization, and by exposing many of them to sexual abuse by staff members and other students. In June 2008 a public apology was offered by the then Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, on behalf of the Government of Canada. At around the same time the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to uncover the truth about the schools.

As might be gathered from the weighty subject matter, experiencing a work of conscience and of art such as this was no walk in the park. Though the music set the tone masterfully – being a highly intelligent blend of European classical, contemporary stylings, Inuit throat singing and traditional drumming – and the movement was both highly imaginative and at times exquisitely beautiful, the work was also inevitably harrowing at times. The Girl – whose grandmother and two of whose aunts were survivors of the residential schools – not surprisingly found it particularly difficult.

I think that it is fair to say that not everything came off – and the fact that the Royal Winnipeg Ballet includes not one dancer of Aboriginal origin left this attendee at least feeling distinctly ambivalent – but in general the avoidance of the obvious pitfalls and the bravery of the conception and the execution should be – and was – applauded unreservedly.

It is right that art should be able take such risks and sometime to make us feel less than comfortable by so doing. Long may it continue to do so.

Kudos to all concerned.

Tags: Art, Dance, Drama, Music

To dwell is to garden

April 4, 2016 in Flotsam and Jetsam, Photos | Permalink

“To dwell is to garden.”

Martin Heidegger

The weather has at last become more clement and it has been possible to get out into the garden and to start doing all that must be done to wake it from its winter slumbers. I am a gardener only in the sense that I have a garden. I do think – however – that it would have made my father happy to see me tending my (half) acre(s). Yes – you do detect a theme… my father’s birthday would have been at the start of April!

When I got outside these ‘guys’ were already there!

Tags: Fuji x10, Gardens, Photo, Spring

The gift of creation

April 1, 2016 in Life as we know it | Permalink

In the early days of these scribblings I ‘penned’ a piece on the mysteries of creativity. That I feel moved now to add something to that disquisition can only be seen as an indication of the continuing surprise and delight that the whole business affords me – as certainly must also be the case for anyone else who ventures into the realms of self-expression.

Thomas Edison famously declared that genius was “One percent inspiration, ninety nine percent perspiration” (though other accounts give the figures as ‘ten’ and ‘ninety’ percent respectively. I don’t suppose that it really matters much either way – the point is made!). The same could certainly be said of practically all forms of creativity.

A prominent playwright – sadly I forget which – opined that the art of writing might more properly be called ‘re-writing’. His point being, of course, that writing a play (or anything else for that matter) not only comprises the two basic elements (the inspirational phase in which ideas and musings are recorded as quickly as possible as they occur to the author/composer, and – following a suitable period of reflection – an extensive process of editing) but also – in order that the the piece might be rendered ready for ‘public’ appraisal – it will inevitably have gone through a considerable number of re-writes before anyone else is allowed to see it.

Much of this process is – of course – ‘craft’, and relatively few are sufficiently competent at it to be able to make a living therefrom. Inspiration is something else and the mysteries thereof are still not readily understood – especially by me!

The story of Paul McCartney waking one morning with the score for ‘Yesterday’ fully formed in his head might be thought apocryphal, were it not that it is attested to by the great man himself. Anyone who has experienced anything remotely similar will identify with McCartney as he – believing at first that he must have heard the song elsewhere – quizzed friends and colleagues as to what it might be.

My own recent experience was considerably more prosaic.

A few posts back I referred to a brief wave of melancholy that passed over me during the first few days of March, brought on by recollections of my Mother whose birthday would have been around that time. I felt moved to compose a song in an appropriately thoughtful vein. My Mother had slipped into dementia in the last year of her life and I felt the need to try to capture something of that elegiac mood. Sitting at the keyboard I rapidly found an interesting harmonic progression around which I started to experiment. An image came to mind – of a bonfire on a dark night. The dying embers swirling up into the night sky before fading into the blackness seemed to offer a possible metaphor for a mind slowly floating apart and a personality fading away.

It was at this point – however – that the subconscious part of the imagination took over. The more I worked the theme the more it seemed determined to evolve into something else entirely. I ended up with something that sounded more celebratory than melancholy. There is only one thing to do in such circumstances – and that is to give the imagination its head. Within a couple of days I had recorded all of the components of what had turned out to be a rather uplifting piece. Further – the image of the fire in the darkness had remained but had itself evolved and become a beacon fire lit on a hilltop to celebrate the end of winter. The song had changed from a lament over something lost to a celebration of something gained – in this case my recent recognition of my significance here.

That such a creative act is possible – and in such a brief period of time (a song can take me months to complete!) – is to me a thing of wonder and amazement and I am massively grateful that such occurrences still take place. Those of a spiritual or metaphysical bent might muse that perhaps this was a gift to me from my Mother. Maybe so.

I am content simply to enjoy the mystery.

Tags: Creation, Music, Writing

Island life

March 28, 2016 in Life in BC, Photos | Permalink

I liked this little sequence of images. The truck crane is used on the smaller islands for building projects and all concerned are so familiar with the procedure that the whole event took less than three minutes – following which tug, barge and truck disappeared in different directions.

Neat!

Tags: Boats, British Columbia, Fuji x10, Gulf Islands, Photo

The Night Manager

March 26, 2016 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

Those familiar with my oeuvre may perhaps be accustomed to my occasion panegyrics in praise of one or other of the BBC’s splendid drama productions – ‘Parade’s End‘ back in 2012 for example – or the more recent ‘River‘ of last year. Should you be one such you may be wondering (if you have nothing considerably better to do with your time) why I have not likewise registered my approval of the wondrous adaptation of John Le Carré’s ‘The Night Manager‘ which approaches its culmination this Easter weekend on BBC1.

I has indeed been remiss of me not so to do.

It would be fair to say that the show is in need of no such puffery from me or – apparently – from anyone else. Viewing figures started high and went up from there. This is one of those occasions on which both the BBC and the viewing public get it splendidly right. This is one classy production – based on a typically strong Le Carré novel but given an update and polish that not only takes nothing away (something of a rarity in itself) but in fact adds quite considerably.

Money has clearly been spent on this Anglo/American co-production – and spent in a way that makes this viewer at any rate purr with pleasure. The writing is precise and spare, the direction and camerawork would not be out of place on the big screen and the acting is sublime.

There is no getting away from the fact that the English public school thespist ‘mafia’ – out here yet again in force in the shape of not one but two Old Etonians – currently appears to pretty much have the monopoly on the cream of the TV and film roles going. Many commentators see Tom Hiddleston’s expertly judged performance as the brooding hero Jonathan Pine as nothing less than a Bond audition. He is – however – given a serious run for his money by Hugh Laurie’s ‘worst man in the world’ – Richard Onslow Roper – from whom it is difficult to drag one’s gaze. Add the wonderful Tom Hollander and Olivia Coleman to the mix and one is blessed with a heady brew of a cast.

It can only be a sad indictment of the failure to invest adequately in the state secondary education sector in the UK – not to mention the ideological interference in the running thereof – that so many of the new breed of actors have as their backgrounds the rarefied atmosphere of the public (UK sense here) schools. Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston, Harry Lloyd, Rory Kinnear, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, Benedict Cumberbatch, Damian Lewis, Dominic West, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rosamund Pike, Rebecca Hall, Emily Blunt… the list goes on. Of course these schools have wonderful facilities and can recruit teaching staff from the top drawer, but there is more to it than that. Whatever the reason, the top independent schools in the UK (as most likely in Canada and elsewhere also) ascribe an importance to the arts that is no longer the case in other parts of the ‘system’.

Flame off!

Anyway – though it may seem a little late to be recommending ‘The Night Manager‘ at this juncture do remember that it is an Anglo/American production that has to date been only seen in the UK. It will doubtless be appearing on a streaming service near you ere long.

Don’t miss it!

Tags: BBC, Drama, school, Writing

Welcome to the cruise

March 21, 2016 in Life in BC, Photos | Permalink

The Canadian Power Squadron ‘Boating Essentials’ course that is occupying a fair percentage of my time at the moment is fast approaching its culmination. This Sunday last found those of us taking the course – along with our proctors and other members of the Brentwood Bay squadron and of the Royal Canadian Marine Search and Rescue service – participating in the student cruise… an opportunity to put into practice some of the theory that we have been studying these past several months in the classroom.

Courtesy of those generous owners/skippers upon whose vessels we were guests, we started early from Tsehum Harbour, north of Sidney.

The morning was spent working our way slowly north west from Sidney round the head of the peninsula and on towards Cowichan Bay. The object was to enable the students practice navigation the old-fashioned (pre-GPS) way.

Our reward for washing up at the correct location? Hot dogs from the barbecue at Genoa Bay courtesy of the squadron, which – thanks to the excellent tuition we have received throughout – was reached in good time for lunch.

This most welcome repast was followed by an opportunity to learn how to recover an unconscious ‘man overboard’ from the icy waters of the Pacific (kudos to the brave dry-suit clad volunteer from Search and Rescue for allowing herself repeatedly to be pushed into the dock!) before heading for home.

Potential recruits – or just after a ‘dog’?

Tools of the trade!

Tags: Boats, Gulf Islands, Photo, Victoria

Swing, swing together

March 17, 2016 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

Jolly boating weather,
And a hay harvest breeze,
Blade on the feather,
Shade off the trees,
Swing swing together,
With your bodies between your knees,
Swing swing together,
With your bodies between your knees.

The Eton Boating Song

I have of late been thinking about my mother. This is not unusual for the time of year – she died six years ago at the end of February and her birthday fell within the first couple of weeks of March – but so to do does tend to leave me a little wistful and reflective regarding life’s strange twists and turns.

The regular reader might well at this point already be scratching his (or her) pate and wondering what this could possible have to do with the Eton Boating Song. That is, indeed, a good question – the which I will endeavor straightway to answer.

Before the war my mother was in the Sea Rangers and – I am pretty certain – rather enjoyed rowing, though I don’t know to what level she practiced it. As with many things that one thinks one ‘knows’ from childhood this may turn out to be a ‘false’ memory, but of one thing I am certain – on a number of occasions she expressed regret that I had not taken up rowing whilst at school. She was clearly somewhat enamoured of the notion of having a son who ‘rowed’.

My Alma Mater was a grammar school in north Surrey which was also my father’s school. It was – and remains – a good school, though it is now co-educational which it was not in my day. Whilst certainly not one of the ‘great’ rowing schools it has always been there or thereabouts. The school has its playing fields – complete with boathouse – on the banks of the Thames and it takes the sport seriously. The alumni include at least one Olympic gold medal winner in the shape of James Cracknell, of whom the school is understandably proud.

Much to my mother’s dismay I declined to join the boat club. I was a fairly stringy kid at that age – fast enough as a sprinter but without much in the way of upper body bulk. I have always considered myself far too much of a lightweight for such a physical sport. Besides – the rowers had to turn out for training at six in the morning – in all seasons! Since I lived a good hour’s journey from the school that meant getting up at an ungodly hour regardless of the weather – or of the fact that it was still the middle of the night! The final straw was that the master in charge of rowing at the time was the sort of petty tyrant fairly prevalent in grammar schools of the era. I had already had several unpleasant run-ins with him and I didn’t fancy making myself a target in yet another area.

Previous posts on this journal do attest – however – to my enjoyment of rowing as a sport. I was fortunate enough to work at two institutions which can truly be considered ‘great’ rowing schools – one of which built its own rowing trench (later used as the venue for the London 2012 Olympics) and the other of which is the current holder of the Princess Elizabeth Cup at the Henley Royal Regatta.

In light of all of this I like to think that my mother would have been looking down from god’s elastic acre on Tuesday last with a smile on her face. Had she done so she would have observed the Kickass Canada Girl and I – in the company of a couple of elderly (but most impressive) expat Englishwomen from the Victoria City Rowing Club – taking our first outing on Elk Lake in a quad scull!

How this came about is of itself something of a saga – featuring a conversation that the Girl had about rowing at a Burn’s Supper with a gentlemen who knew one of these redoubtable octogenarian athletes and who put her in touch with them. The ladies were marvelous… unbelievably fit and most wonderfully patient with the couple of complete novices. I don’t for a moment suppose that sculling in a four looks easy and I can assure you that appearances do not deceive. Balance – co-ordination – the ability to perform a sequence of contradictory actions simultaneously but independently… I was expecting muscular pain and shortage of breath. What I got was mental agony – from trying to stop my conscious brain from impeding the required subconscious rhythm.

Will we try it again? We may well do. For those brief moments when the four of us magically became as one and the boat flew across the water the sensation was magical – so who knows!

I think mother would be pleased!

Tags: Henley, Memories, Rowing, school

Pure dead brilliant!

March 13, 2016 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

At the risk of giving the impression that this journal has drifted off into that territory more commonly inhabited by rugby blogs I do just have to post something regarding the penultimate round of the 2016 Six Nations’ Championship.

Since I wrote somewhat despairingly a few weeks back concerning Scotland’s crablike progress since last year’s World Cup – with particular reference to the manner in which they surrendered the Calcutta Cup to the English – I have maintained a (reasonably) dignified silence. I have thought not to trouble the gentle reader either with the Scots’ further missed opportunity against the Welsh or indeed the occasion on which they eventually broke their recent Six Nations’ duck with an appropriately convincing win against Italy in Rome.

I cannot – however – let pass without comment today’s epic demolition of the French at Murrayfield, the first such victory for a decade. Brilliant! Quite apart from the historic nature of the victory – and the most satisfying manner in which it was achieved – it has been a considerable while since the Scots enjoyed back to back wins in the championship. This will do their confidence no end of good.

The result has had the slightly unexpected side effect of handing the championship to the English (who had an equally gratifying if much more tense win against Wales at the Cabbage Patch) with a fixture yet in hand. This has apparently not happened since the five became six back at the turn of the century.

The final round of matches next Saturday might thus at first glance appear to have little import, given that the tournament winners have already been decided. I do not, however, believe this to be the case.

Wales – up first – will doubtless want to put yesterday’s lacklustre performance behind them by savaging the hapless Italians, past whom the Irish put nine tries yesterday (some of them gift-wrapped and delivered by express courier).

The Scots would love to cap their recent renaissance with a win in Dublin which would give them their best finish in years, but the Irish – who have themselves suffered a dismal campaign – will doubtless be inspired by their antics against the Azzuri.

The English – having won the championship without actually being there to celebrate – will doubtless want to rout the French in Paris to win a Grand Slam – which would be the first such since their world cup winning year of 2003. Were they so to do a great deal of the hurt and misery subsequent to their dismal exit from the last world cup might be somewhat assuaged.

For now, though, congratulations to the English on the championship – and even bigger congratulations to the Scots for their magnificent win against the French.

Tags: England, Rugby, Scotland

Bambi!

March 10, 2016 in Life in BC | Permalink

One would think – given the degree of commonality in the respective backgrounds of our two cultures (by which I am am referring of course to those of Canada and of the UK) – that there would be relatively few instances of incomprehensible difference. There are, however, perhaps more than one might expect.

I have mentioned before, I know, my astonishment regarding the bathing habits prevalent this side of the pond. For a nation that virtually fetishises the outdoor life – regardless of the best attempts of weather to curtail it – I simply cannot understand the lack of proper bathing facilities. The ‘foot baths’ with which most Canadian bathrooms seem to be equipped scarcely allow one to wet one’s backside and a good long wallow is out of the question. A side effect of this sorry situation is that it is also nearly impossible to find in the stores the sort of unctuous bathing lotions without which any self-respecting British bathroom would be considered ill-equipped. Little chance of a good long muscle-relaxing soak in some suitably aromatic bath foam here.

I have also previously referred in these postings the strange habit of the owners of what Canadians call ‘stick shift’ automobiles (‘manual’ to the rest of us) of leaving the vehicles in gear when parked, in preference to using the handbrake. Canadians themselves might be less aware of this quirk since the great majority seem to drive automatics anyway.

These random examples were brought to mind by the latest incomprehensibility to which I have been exposed. Now, this has been on my mind for a while but was brought into sharp focus last weekend by a visit to the splendid ‘Beagle‘ public house in Cook Street Village, to which we repaired on Saturday for a spot of lunch. The excellent menu included – and of which the Kickass Canada Girl availed herself – a venison burger! Not just any venison burger, but quite the best that we have encountered.

This splendid treat, however, starkly highlighted the strange fact that – in a land where the animals abound and in a city parts of which suffer a wild deer ‘problem’ – it is simply not possible to purchase venison in any form from any of the puveyors of comestibles. Even the specialist butchers refuse to stock it – though they do carry the somewhat inferior bison. The Girl and I have taken to eating a great deal of venison over the past couple of years. It is a splendid, low-fat and extremely healthy meat, to say nothing of being easy to cook and jolly tasty.

When taxed as to why a country scratching its head as to how to deal with the plethora of unwanted deer doesn’t bow to the obvious and eat the damned things, a bizarre range of explanations are offered – from suggesting that any self respecting Canadian who fancies a haunch simply goes out with his (or her) rifle and blows one away, all the way to a trembly-lipped evocation of Bambi. Get a grip, guys!

We did ask our most helpful server at ‘The Beagle’ as to where they sourced theirs but apparently they buy in bulk from a wholesaler, possibly from outside the country.

Had we a freezer big enough it might just be worth purchasing a truck-load!

Tags: Canada, Culture, England, Food & Drink

…or studio?

March 5, 2016 in Flotsam and Jetsam, Photos | Permalink

As promised in my last post – herewith some images of how my studio/study has turned out. Needless to say – I am pretty dashed pleased with it.

The black things in the corners and on the side walls are bass traps, which I made from six inches of acoustic insulation covered with felt following one of many guides available on the InterWebNet. For those unfamiliar with such matters the idea is to try to produce a room that is as acoustically neutral as possible. No parts of the frequency spectrum should be exaggerated or diminished, reflections should be kept to a minimum and the layout of loudspeakers and listening position should be carefully calculated to avoid standing waves.

The little desk was already built in. I added the shelves.

Having lived for nearly two decades in apartments – however splendid they may have been – and thus having been restricted both in the amount of space available and the level of sound that could be produced without complaint, this is pretty much heaven! I have never before been in possession of a space large enough that I could dedicate it specifically to this end, and my gratitude that I finally am so knows no bounds.

The icing on the cake? This is what I see through the window from my desk!

Tags: Music, Studio, Writing

2016

Going home star

To dwell is to garden

The gift of creation

Island life

The Night Manager

Welcome to the cruise

Swing, swing together

Pure dead brilliant!

Bambi!

…or studio?

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