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2018

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End of term

April 15, 2018 in Life as we know it | Permalink

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidWhen I wrote this piece back in June 2015 – on the occasion of the closing of the final term of my final academic year at the illustrious London boys’ school for which it was my privilege to have worked for getting on for a decade immediately prior to retirement – I certainly did not expect that I would find myself almost three years later experiencing yet another term-end.

Neither – of course – did I envisage myself ever working again. This post was to have signaled a final farewell to all that!

‘Never‘ (according to the wisdom of American football coach Jon Gruden) ‘say never to nothing!’. A swift perusal of the InterWebNet reveals that he is far from alone in offering this opinion.

So – my first term back at work finished last Friday, with just the final exam to come tomorrow (Monday). I then have some marking and course development to attend to before my term contract expires at the end of April. I have already been approached several times about doing some further teaching in the autumn (fall!) – which would actually suit me rather well. Indeed, I was asked if I would care to go full time – at which I happily drew the line.

My current thinking is to try for a contract for the autumn term and then see if I can also get one for the spring term of next year (the which Canadians somewhat pessimistically call the ‘winter’ term – though perhaps in other parts of Canada that is more apt!). By that time my state pension will have kicked in and I will probably feel that enough is enough…

But as the man says – “Never…!”

I have found myself enjoying this experience to an unexpected degree. I have always taken pleasure from teaching and with post-secondary students there are few issues of discipline or motivation. I only work two days a week and even then they are not consecutive. I am left very much to my own devices and have been pleasantly surprised by just how much knowledge I seem to have accumulated over the decades – even if I were not consciously trying so to do at the time. On top of everything, being in a unionised post (and I find myself almost accidentally in a union for the first time in my life) my qualifications and experience all count toward my remuneration – which is as a result not to be sniffed at.

Well – I will certainly not be doing any sniffing!

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A nonsense!

April 11, 2018 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidThe previous owner of of our beautiful peninsula home left us a number of unwanted gifts of the variety that keep on giving! Quite enough has already been said on the matter of sun-rooms, law suits and heart-stopping contractors’ invoices and I promise that no further mention will be made thereof. There is one other (very minor but most irritating none-the-less) ghost-like and continuing reminder of the past.

We did not actually ever meet the old lady (who shall remain nameless). All of our dealings went through her whack-job of a realtor. We do know that we she moved to Vancouver, but we know not where or even if she still inhabits that other place. She and her (deceased) husband clearly at some stage had a small bank account with the CIBC. We know this because we still receive – through the post –  monthly statements addressed to the departed owners.

Now – I am a patient soul and quite capable of playing the long game. For the last two and a half years I have been marking the envelopes “Return to Sender” and popping them back in the post box. Towards the end of last year, however, I finally got a bit fed up with this rigmarole.

I called CIBC…

As seems so prevalent these days with customer service departments the world across the conversation did not go well and, sad to report, satisfaction was not to be had. Apparently the only way of stopping these statements is for the account holders themselves to write to the CIBC to request such. I enquired of the young man who was not helping me what might be the outcome should the elderly person concerned have expired in the meantime. He was no help with that query either.

I have no means of contacting the vendor and am certainly not prepared to go to any great length trying so to do. I returned instead to my previous course of action. Then – a couple of weeks  ago – one of the envelopes that I had inscribed reappeared in our post box. Unimpressed I added a further curt missive and pushed it back into the post box.

Two days later it was back again!

I visited the post office. They informed me (most politely) that had I just crossed through the address and written “Moved” upon the envelope they would have been obliged to return it to the sender. Clearly adding more invective gave them an excuse to abrogate their responsbilities

Now – this is all very irritating and one begins to marvel at the dogged determination that all concerned have shown in generating an entirely wasted sheet of paper, stuffing it in an envelope, paying postage to send it across Canada – only for it to be sent back via the same route presumably to be simply shredded (one hopes!) and thrown in the recycling back at the bank.

This sort of situation simply must arise all the time. I find it hard to believe that no remedy can be devised for such madness…

Bah – say I!

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The spring is sprung…

April 8, 2018 in Life in BC | Permalink

Photo by Andy Dawson Reid…the grass is riz.
I wonder where dem boidies is.
They say the boid is on the wing.
But that’s absoid.
The wing is on the boid!

Anon (as far as anyone knows!)

Three signs that spring is actually already here – however much the weather might be doing its very best to suggest otherwise.

 

First – the hummingbirds are back at the feeders again. The Kickass Canada Girl calls them ‘the diabetics‘ and observing just how much sugar nectar these tiny creatures tuck away I concede that she has a good point. Anyway – great to see them back again.

We did not have Christmas lights along the front of our house this year, since the upstairs was still in the hands of our contractors when the festive season rolled around. As a result there was no question of the lights being left up late – and thus no possibility of the hummingbirds using the strand again for their nesting ground as they did last year. Apparently hummingbirds like to stay pretty close to previous nest sites so we will see what they do this year.

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidSecondly – the dogwood tree is in bloom. The Girl has apparently long hankered for a dogwood tree and we now have one. This makes her happy – and that makes me happy.

I read that dogwoods often suffer badly from lawnmower and trimmer cuts if they happen to be adjacent to lawns. If the bark is damaged at a low level the trees can become prone to infestation. Ours is a big tree as set so far back from the grass that it is actually in next door’s yard, so it is not in any such danger. If anything the reverse is the case. When the flowers drop on the lawn they do so in the form of hard husks which very rapidly take the edge off one’s mower blades!

Final sign of spring? The return of the Anacortes ferry! During the winter months of January, February and March the little green and white car ferry – a familiar presence during the rest of the year and regular viewing from our windows and deck – voyages no further than the San Juan Islands, eschewing the last leg of the trip into Sidney. There is always a little quiet celebration in downtown Sidney when it is back on its usual route.

Good to see that spring is here again. Now let’s have some sunshine!

 

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Wet coast

April 6, 2018 in Life in BC | Permalink

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidOne of the joys of living on the west coast of Canada – with its moderate oceanic climate and in what the World Wide Fund for Nature defines as the Pacific temperate rain forest ecoregion – is that we inhabit a verdant paradise of lush and abundant vegetation.

One of the drawbacks of living on the wet coast of Canada – with its moderate oceanic climate and in what the World Wide Fund for Nature defines as the Pacific temperate rain forest ecoregion – is that we inhabit a verdant paradise of lush and abundant vegetation!

Though the summers here on the tip of Vancouver Island tend to be dry and delightfully temperate, the winters incline to the aqueous. As I write this post I can gaze out of my studio window at a landscape that is undeniably ‘socked in’. I believe that the landscape is still there – but I cannot actually see any of it.

The result of all of this humectation is – naturally (see what I did there?) – that during the late winter and early spring all of that lush vegetation grows and grows and grows –  as though there were no tomorrow! It grows upwards – it grows outwards – and it presumably grows downwards as well!

Nature reveals itself to be the epitome of the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, with each species striving voraciously to overrun its neighbour in the ongoing quest for sunlight, water and nutrients. Left to its own devices the wonderful variety of plants in our delightful garden (yard!) would doubtless whittle itself down to just a couple of bigger, stronger brutes as all the weedy (there I go again!) specimens are trampled underfoot (I think I just stretched that particular metaphor a little too thin!).

The bottom boundary of our compact but decidedly highly-desirable estate is bounded with splendid trees and dense foliage. This latter is mostly – as far as I am aware – laurel of one type or another. Now, apparently the Schipka Cherry Laurel – which appears to form the bulk of this hedge – has the following qualities:

  • Hardy to minus 10 degrees
  • Fresh, glossy evergreen foliage attractive all year round
  • Easily grown even in difficult urban conditions
  • Can be clipped into hedges and screens
  • Drought and deer resistant

It also grows around 2 ft a year up to a height of 18 ft! As this boundary growth had not been pruned back for at least two and a half years – and most likely rather longer than that – it was in serious danger of taking over the smaller shrubs in the bed in front of it, not to mention cutting off our view of the sea whilst simultaneously advancing on my croquet lawn!

Fortunately it can also be pruned really hard. Apparently it simply shakes itself off and starts growing again.

I do now have a huge pile of clippings to be disposed of. Any takers?

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Here I am

March 30, 2018 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

By Walter Albertin - This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3c14346.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information. Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30034723This post is the second in what will be a very occasional series (the first such having been contrived back in March 2014 on the subject of The Who’s ‘See Me, Feel Me‘!) on fleeting moments of musical genius.

When I heard a short while back that Paul Simon was about to retire from touring at the conclusion of his current expedition I realised that – though I am an enormous fan of the man – I have never seen him perform live. I was, fortunately, able to acquire tickets for the Vancouver concert in May and thus to avail myself of an opportunity to rectify this anomaly before it is too late.

Now – few would deny that Simon is a songwriting genius. As I have pointed out previously, a lyricist who can use words such as ‘misconstrued’ and ‘pertains’ or phrases such as ‘doggedly determined’ and ‘arc of a love affair’ without coming over as precious, is quite clearly walking a considerably better walk than are the rest of us.

In this instance, however, the subject is not the lyrics. As was the case with The Who’s perfect palimpsest this post concerns a musical moment, one which occurs in that quintessential Paul Simon solo contribution to the ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water‘ album – ‘The Only Living Boy in New York‘ – a song written in reaction to Simon’s being left alone in New York on the occasion of Art Garfunkel’s trip to Mexico for his acting role in the filming of Joseph Heller’s ‘Catch-22‘.

The song is a magnificently wistful meditation on Simon’s solitary state, greatly enhanced by the gorgeously sinuous bass playing of the great Joe Osborn. Two verses in it hauls itself into the first of two vocal renditions of one of Simon’s brief but typically splendid tension-raising bridges. As it cascades back into the verse Simon’s solo voice is replaced with a distant ethereal choir which matches – wordlessly – the delicate acoustic guitar chords that give structure to the song. For the third line of the verse the ‘aaahs’ sweetly follow the descending bass figure, pausing momentarily before swelling into the final cadence with a heart-tugging “Here I am” that makes the hairs stand up on the back of this jaded hack’s neck.

The empyreal choir (actually Simon and Garfunkel themselves tracked a dozen or more times) reprises its verse twice more in the playout to the song – each time with a little greater intensity and drowning a little deeper in reverb. This delicious effect was achieved by recording the harmonies actually inside the echo chamber at Columbia’s LA studio.

For those who must know such things I believe that the harmonic progression for the phrase concerned can be annotated thus:

|Emaj7 Emaj9|B Abm7#5/E|

Pure magic!

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(Melo)dramatic melange

March 28, 2018 in Life in BC | Permalink

Photo by Andy Dawson Reid This is, clearly (in theatrical terms at least) a busy time of the year at the southern end of Vancouver Island. The emergent springtime has germinated the fresh green shoots of a new festival season which will now run (with – admittedly – occasional pauses for us all to catch our breath) right through to the end of the summer…

…and if it is Spring Break (which it is!) then it must be time for the Spark Festival at the Belfry.

This year The Girl and I attended what can only really be described as a vocal workshop (though that doesn’t even remotely get close) which went under the title “Why We Are Here” and was led by Toronto-based company ‘Nightswimming‘. This peripatetic parade of improvised chanting and movement was not to everyone’s taste, but I quite liked the atmosphere elicited by this fair sized group of assorted souls on finding themselves in a darkened workshop backstage at the Belfry, propagating a constantly evolving and distinctly dreamlike tapestry of minimalist harmonic sequences.

Considerably more down to earth (not to mention being on a different planet in terms of quality) was Daniel MacIvor’s “Who Killed Spalding Gray?“. Daniel’s disquisition on the subject of the American monologist, who killed himself in 2004 by jumping from the Staten Island ferry in New York, was thoughtful and touching by turns and is certainly a work of a very high order. Daniel was also in town last May to deliver the keynote address at the launch of Intrepid Theatre’s ‘Uno Fest‘ and I was lucky enough (wearing my Board of Directors’ hat) to have had the opportunity to drive him back to the airport afterwards. A very interested and talented man…

The Spark Festival closed – as it usually does – with a short performance on Sunday last by the youngsters taking part in the Belfry’s 101 program. Wearing a different hat (quite a lot of millinery going on here) as an educator of young thespists I like to attend such events to steal ideas see what other talented young folk are up to. The group had spent the whole second week of Spring Break putting together this divertissement and clearly had loved working together as a group, which is – when it comes down to it – why we all do this thing in the first place.

Finally last Thursday evening to the Chemainus Theatre (my first visit) for the dress rehearsal of Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux’s jukebox musical “Million Dollar Quartet”, which takes as its subject the legendary session at Sam Phillips’ Sun Records Studio in Memphis on December 4th, 1956 that brought together Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis.

For those that have never heard of the charming Cowichan Valley town of Chemainus a little light reading on the InterWebNet might be instructive. A short crossing (on the Mill Bay ferry) and forty minute drive up island from our neck of the woods it is a bit of a trek for a weekday evening, but we were fortunate on this occasion to have been gifted complimentary tickets by an acquaintance of The Girl’s who is a benefactor of the festival theatre there – hence our preview seats.

Now – not unlike some repertory theatres in the UK the cute and hugely successful Chemainus Theatre knows its audience well and goes out of its way to keep them happy. If that meant that this particular production somewhat sanitised some of the wilder characters and outpourings of 50s American rock and roll (not to mention enabling us to get home early enough for a good night’s sleep) then that took nothing away from a most pleasant evening.

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Coming soon…

March 20, 2018 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

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Celtic cousins

March 18, 2018 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

Image from PixabayBack in the icy UK the Six Nations championship achieved its annual climax on a thrilling final day of gripping rugby matches. As is the way with this epic challenge some of the participants had reason to be well content with the progress of their campaigns whilst others did not. This year some of those who ended up in the latter camp were not, however, the sides that had been predicted so to do at the outset of the tournament. Nor – clearly – did they themselves expect such an outcome.

For the first time in many a year the Celtic cousins – Ireland, Wales and Scotland – finished the tournament in first, second and third places (respectively). I say ‘many a year’ – I’m not actually sure if this has ever happened before. All power to them, say I!

Many congratulations to the splendid Irish, who not only won the championship on the penultimate weekend but went on to record what is only their third ever Grand Slam. The Welsh may have been slightly surprised to have lost two matches but still to have ended up second in the table (or – knowing them – maybe not!).

For the Scots – third place from three wins represents their best finish for some years. They will not be content with their away record nor with the lack of precision which resulted in a fair number of points being left out on the field. They have made great strides, however, and play an attacking brand of rugby which is admired by supporters of the game of all hues. The manner of their victory in the Calcutta Cup in particular was to be cherished.

As for the remainder of the sides – well, perhaps we will draw a discreet veil over them for now…

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Seventh heaven

March 16, 2018 in Life in BC, Photos | Permalink

As disclosed in my last post The Girl and I were in Vancouver last weekend for the Canada Rugby Sevens – and a thoroughly good time was had (and not just by us!).

Weekends away inevitably involve the taking of photos and this one was no exception.

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidHere is the UFO fleet over Saltspring! No – not really of course… just a shot taken through the ferry window on the way to Vancouver on the Friday evening.

BC Place always looks pretty after dark:

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidWhat of the rugby, I hear you cry! Well – it was a great tournament with some excellent rugby, played in a fabulous indoor stadium which engendered a lively party atmosphere throughout. There were some surprising results: Spain beat Samoa 25-0 in the knockout stages, for example. The final was – quite unexpectedly – between Fiji and Kenya. The Fijians won, which was a truly good thing as it appeared that some 25% of those present in the stadium were from the south sea island and their support was fervent throughout.

Most surprising team to watch were the US who put the All Blacks out to make it to the semis, largely on the back of a couple of the fastest sevens players I have ever seen; one of whom – Perry Baker – is an ex pro-(American) football player who retired at 25 because of a knee injury. He is now one of the best sevens players in the world. Extraordinary!

Current  championship leaders, South Africa, could not get past the semis and Australia bowed out in the quarters – as did England. The Scots did not make the knockout stages but made up for it by winning the Challenge Trophy:

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidOnce the show had ended on the Sunday evening we headed once again for Tsawwassen – tired but happy – to catch the late ferry. I snapped this sequence from the car:

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson Reid

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Island life – part 2*

March 12, 2018 in Life in BC | Permalink

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidOn the 9:00pm ferry from Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay – en route home after a weekend in Vancouver at the Canada Rugby Sevens (of which more later)…

Though clocks have already gone forward in Canada it is yet early in the year and the light has gone completely by the time we and a hoard of other contented rugby fans are ensconced in the cafeteria, snarfing down much needed victuals after a long and rousing day of cheering ourselves hoarse and singing lustily.

We have not even noticed that our moorings have been slipped and that we are heading out across the Georgia Strait when the purser comes the Tannoy:

“Would the owner of a black Chrysler 300, licence plate xxxxx, please return to the car deck. You’ve left your lights on.”

BC Ferries run a tight ship (see what I did there) and do not care to have their schedules imperiled by a car or truck with a dead battery holding up the unloading.

We all snigger a bit at the poor sap who has left his lights on…

Five minutes later the purser is back on the horn:

“Correction to my previous announcement concerning the owner of the black Chrysler 300, licence plate xxxxx. The lights aren’t the problem. The engine’s still running!”

Incredulous guffaws fill the cafeteria. How embarrassing is that?

Five minutes later the purser is on again. In spite of the previous announcements it is clear that forgetting to turn his car engine off is only one of this particular driver’s shortcomings. He is, perhaps, deaf as well – or at least has his head wedged firmly where the sun don’t shine!

Full of sympathy for the poor schmuck we naturally all fall off our chairs laughing…

There are no further announcements. Either the recalcitrant owner has finally engaged his brain and put in a belated appearance or BC Ferries have simply decided that enough is enough, broken into the car and silenced it!

I guess we’ll never know…

 

*Part 1 here, by the way!

 

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