You are currently browsing the yearly archive for 2023.
“I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy”
C. S. Lewis
This post should have featured wild animals in their natural habitats in the Botswana bush – though perhaps not quite: “Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plains”… as John Cleese would have it.
Instead, here are some photos of the flora in our garden:
The Girl and I have always believed ourselves to be a lucky combination – a notion based largely on evidence drawn from direct experience. An example of this good fortune would be the sale of our Buckinghamshire apartment in the UK back in 2015, the year that we moved to Canada.
We had been trying to sell the property for nearly four years – without success – before finally doing so just a week before we emigrated. This might seem to stretch the definition of good luck were it not for the fact that the sale was completed just as the sterling/Canadian dollar exchange rate hit its most fortuitous level for the best part of a decade – a figure that has not been matched since.
It came as a considerable and most palpable shock, therefore, when our latest adventure – the African safari trip trailed in my last post – imploded spectacularly over the last week.
That is right… we did not get to Africa… we did not go on safari… we finally retreated to the west coast of Canada to lick our wounds in a state of considerable shock.
In short – we are not happy!
I am not going to catalog in detail the entire fiasco here, though I will undoubtedly be naming names in a subsequent missive. Those who live in the UK may well have seen the news items of a week ago which recounted the spectacular and catastrophic failure of British Airways’ IT systems that laid waste to much of the operation – ticketing – check-in – baggage handling – online services – etc, etc… On what was touted as being the busiest travel weekend since the COVID pandemic British Airways cancelled well in excess of two hundred flights and wrecked the travel plans of thousands of customers.
The ‘highlights’ of our particular experience include having one flight delayed overnight and a replacement finally cancelled at around midnight – after we had spent ten hours in the terminal. We were told that we must collect our checked baggage and leave the terminal building – to join an already extensive queue of folk trying to find a room in the airport hotels. This was the point that we discovered that BA had lost our safari luggage!
Over the following three days we spent many wearisome hours on the phone trying to reschedule flights (including connecting flights in Africa for which we will get no refund!) and to search for our missing bags. When it became apparent that there was no chance of both us and our bags coinciding in Johannesburg we finally gave up and spent another day trying to persuade BA to let us go home – the which they would not do without considerable further outlay.
Now we have to attempt to recover at least some of the cost of this ‘trip of a lifetime’.
This whole has been a deeply traumatic experience for us both and has left our confidence considerably shaken. We both had moments in which we could not see how the situation could be resolved – and I think it may take a while before we again attempt anything similar.
Tags: Africa, British Airways, bucketlist, Disaster, Holiday, safari, Travel
Back at the beginning of the year I announced that The Girl had decreed that this would be the year in which we finally achieved that long-dreamed of bucket-list item – the visit to Botswana for an African safari.
I recall also writing that I would be giving much more detail – chapter and verse – as the event approached. I feel quite guilty that I have not been keeping my part in that bargain. Sorry about that…
Well – here we are! I am writing this from a hotel room in the UK. We flew in yesterday and we are busy acclimatising ourselves to the time-zone change before heading south tomorrow to Johannesburg, from which we immediately set forth for Botswana. Once there we will be out of Internet range for much of the expedition, so further updates – and, of course, pictures – will have to await our return. Expect the full meal deal then, though.
It is a good thing that The Girl enjoys the planning process. Even in these high-tech and enlightened times setting up such a trip is a fairly major operation. Two matters in particular have complicated things. In Botswana the transfers between safari lodges will be effected in small planes. Small planes means small luggage, so we had to purchase really quite diminutive duffle bags and to pack with particular care.
The matter of what to pack was complicated further by the likes and dislikes of the wild-life. The big (and small) beasts do not care for bright colours, or for whites. The bugs and mosquitoes – on the other hand – really have a thing for blues and blacks. Clearly there is good reason for khaki being the colour of choice for African explorers.
All of this meant that an almost entirely new wardrobe of high-tech and lightweight clothing – in taupe and khaki – was required. Fortunately Canadians are passionate about the great outdoors and there are many outlets that provide just the sort of gear required.
When it came to packing we did the obvious; we packed our safari bags and then loaded them into bigger suitcases – along with the additional items that will see us through a few days in London once we get back. My brother will kindly look after all those items ‘not required on voyage’.
Yesterday’s flights from Canada were long and tiring. This is not the time or the place to vent about what used to bill itself as the ‘world’s favourite’ airline, but that will definitely come later. Suffice to say that I was not surprised when – the day before we set out – the airline contacted us by email to tell us that our flight from Seattle (don’t ask!) had been cancelled and instead of our business class trip into Heathrow we had been re-booked on a lesser airline in economy!!
The Girl, naturally, hit the roof! After an intense hour on the phone we found ourslves in business class again – this time on Aer Lingus – but with an additional stop-over in Dublin!
As I say… that whole sorry saga can wait until later. For now – let’s go… on safari!
Tags: Africa, bucketlist, Holiday, safari, Travel
Scarcely a fortnight had passed since our faith in Canadian theatre received a significant boost as a result of our attendance at The Belfry for Halifax-based 2B Theatre’s production of Ben Caplan, Christian Barry and Hannah Moscovitch’s musical play – “Old Stock” – before we found ourselves once again cheering on a Canadian musical production and enjoying ourselves hugely to boot.
In this instance the show concerned has already garnered a considerably reputation – being none other than the multi-award winning (including an Olivier Award for Best New Musical) – “Come From Away“.
That “Come From Away” (which tells the story of the 7,000 airline passengers who found themselves stranded in Gander, Newfoundland, following the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001) might be the most successful musical to have come out of Canada is arguable… but it wouldn’t be a very long argument.
The show is a fabulous ensemble piece, excellently staged and choreographed, which uses the music of Newfoundland and Labrador to paint vivid vignettes of many of those who were involved. Newfie music is, of course, fundamentally Celtic and, in particular, Irish. As you might imagine there is a fair bit of foot stomping and hand-clapping, delivered with a general all-round panache and enthusiastic energy.
The basic message of the work – which celebrates the kindness and generosity with which the communities concerned pulled together to provide comfort and shelter for those caught up in the tragic crisis – sits so centrally in the spectrum of what it is to be Canadian – that I found myself afterwards declaring to anyone who would listen that this was surely the most Canadian thing that I had ever seen. Further, I pronounced myself amazed that no-one had previously (to my knowledge, anyway) used Newfie music as the basis of a show.
I must admit that I felt slightly guilty that the show had been so successfully re-staged in so many places around the world (including on Broadway and in the West End) for so long before we finally caught up with the North American touring production at the Royal Theatre here in Victoria.
Still – better late than never…
Following on from my ‘Matters Musical – 1‘ posting a couple of weeks back… herewith the second and concluding part.
I mentioned in the aforesaid posting that Anam Danu had been featured on no less than three compilations of independent music made available through Tom Hilton’s ‘Aldora Britain Records‘ – in addition to being featured in an article in the associated e-Zine. The Chanteuse and I were most flattered by the attention and grateful for the coverage.
We were further offered a single release on the label during April. The advantage of this would be, of course, that our name and our music would be pushed in its own right and thus be all the more visible. We happily agreed to this proposal and offered our January single – ‘Perfect‘ – paired with a re-issue of a song from our first collection (‘Winds of Change‘) entitled ‘The Journey Home‘.
Having been written and recorded back in 2019, ‘The Journey Home‘ was one of our earlier experiments in working together. As one would expect, we have made a great deal of progress since then – both technically and artistically – so we decided that we should re-work the track, lengthening it and updating sounds and instrumentation. The original recording featured a fiddle part that I had played on a halfway decent sampled instrument, but – since part of our expansion plans for this year include starting to work with other musicians – we thought that this would be a good opportunity to experiment. We were introduced by a friend to Victoria violinist, Kate Rhodes, who agreed to play the session for us and thus became the first person other than The Chanteuse and I to appear on an Anam Danu recording.
The two tracks were duly released last month and can be found on Bandcamp here. We were most excited subsequently to find that the release had entered the Aldora Britain Independent Top 20 – the which records the tracks on the ABR Bandcamp site that receive the most plays. At the time of writing we are at number 13 on that playlist.
We will also be releasing ‘The Journey Home‘ under our own auspices to all the usual streaming and download sites during June. More on that come the time.
The Chanteuse and I have also been busy working our how we can play all of this music that we have been creating for a live audience. As mentioned above, this will inevitable entail finding other like-minded individuals who are keen to play with us. Reworking the material for live performance also requires a considerable amount of work – but we are making good progress.
Thank you for listening!
Tags: album, Anam Danu, Music, Perfect, single, The Chanteuse
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d;
All murder’d: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour’d thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
William Shakespeare – Richard II
Out here on the far distant west coast of Canada it feels a long way away from today’s events in London. I was not of a mind to get up in the middle of the night to watch the Coronation events unfold, though I will no doubt catch up with the news coverage later.
I am a staunch believer in the monarchy, although this is as much for fear of there being something far, far worse in its place should the republican adherents ever get their way. They protest loudly that as a nation Great Britain should be able to choose an elected and accountable head of state; and that somehow not to do so infantilises us. I’m afraid to say that, over this last decade, we have done ourselves no favours at all through our wildly negligent choices and find ourselves as a result sadly diminished as a nation. Not exactly a good precedent.
I wish Charles the very best fortune in his long anticipated role. I can’t say that he looks exactly comfortable with it but I do believe that he still has some power to do good.
Back in October last – when writing about my Canadian Citizenship Ceremony – I wrote of the strangeness of being obliged to swear allegiance to the monarch – something I had never done as a Brit. Interesting to see that, as an optional element in the Coronation rituals, the population of the United Kingdom have now been invited to do the same.
Tags: Coronation, England, The King, United Kingdom
To the Belfry Theatre the weekend just passed to catch “Old Stock”, the last production of the current theatrical season there.
You may recall – should you be a continuing consumer of this random reportage – that The Girl and I are long(ish) standing season ticket holders at the home of Victorian fringe theatre. Each year at about this time we have to decide whether or not to renew our subscription for the coming season (the which commences in the autumn). We do this by contemplating just how impressed (or otherwise) we have been by the season just closing and by studying the advance notices of next year’s programme. No surprises there…
It has to be said that there have been years in which we have come close to giving it a miss; this coming year conceivably – until the weekend just gone – being one of them. It would be no exaggeration to say that, for the past couple of seasons, we have not been exactly enthralled by what we have seen. Whereas we must be fair – noting that the tail end of the Covid pandemic has made things a whole lot more difficult for theatre companies far and wide – we cannot ignore the fact that sitting packed together with others in a theatre audience (the majority these days going un-masked!) still carries a fair degree of risk. Should we choose to take that risk it really had better be for something worthwhile…
…which brings us neatly to Halifax-based 2B Theatre’s production of Ben Caplan, Christian Barry and Hannah Moscovitch’s musical play – “Old Stock” (which bears the subtitle “A Refugee Love Story“).
Let us not beat around the bush. This quite brilliant production has gone a long way towards restoring our faith in Canadian theatre. It is witty but sensitive, riotously risque but touching, beautifully performed by musicians and actor/musicians alike and splendidly directed and staged. The show made us fall about laughing one moment and blub like babies the next. It had plenty to say without being puritanical about it. Most importantly it took the sort of risks that theatre must take to be any good (in any sense!) without being mealy-mouthed about it.
Brilliant!
If theatre companies on this side of the pond really want to win the ongoing and unflagging support of folks like us then they need to do a lot more of ‘this sort of thing‘!
IMHO…
Tags: Drama, The Belfry, Theatre
I am moved – every once in a while – to furnish the gentle readers of these digital digressions with an update on the progress that The Chanteuse and I are making on our musical odyssey. I hope that this is not too wearisome for those that have little interest in such matters.
Back at the end of January I posted herein a missive announcing the release of a new Anam Danu single – going by the soubriquet of ‘Perfect‘. The Chanteuse and I have been busy promoting this recording; with some small degree of success. The track was listed in a good number of playlists, reviewed by various digital media pundits and the release engendered the publication of several feature articles in online fanzines and the like. Should you wish to know more you can find details in the news section on our website.
Back in November we had a track from last summer’s album release – ‘Soul Making‘ – included on a compilation of independent music by a UK based e-Zine and record label – Aldora Britain Records. Tom Hilton – the Scot whose brainchild ABR is – writes thus:
“Aldora Britain Records is an independent music e-zine and record label. The e-zine produces interviews with unsigned and underground artists and reviews their music. The label produces compilations of these artists. The vision of AB Records is to create a go-to place for music lovers all over the world to discover great new stuff, an online platform for independent music. It’s much needed!”
Tom and ABR have been most generous to us, having now featured us on three different compilations – the most recent being titled ‘Street Corner Jive‘. ABR also produce an international independent music e-Zine at regular intervals and Anam Danu was honoured to be the subject of of a feature back in March of this year. Should you wish to discover more about us you can find the article here:
Now, in the interests of not overwhelming merely perfunctory perusers of this idiosyncratic anthology with a bombardment of minutiae – and finding that I have considerably more to say than first I anticipated…
…I am going to split this post into two installments.
Coming soon… part two!
“Every time I go to the dentist they say, ‘You really need to fix that gap of yours’. I’m like, ‘My gap is paying your dentist bills.'”
Lara Stone
I grew up in the UK during the late 50s and the 60s – at a point at which British dentistry was busy earning itself a seriously poor reputation. Fluoridation was still a matter for argument – our parents’ generation were busily making up for the difficulty of obtaining sugar during the post-war years of austerity and – in the case of dental health for children – the public policy was one of “drill and fill”.
A generation of kids – self included – grew up seriously traumatised by such dental experiences.
Now – I had at the time what I took to be a charming gap between my two front teeth. My dentist – immune to that charm – decreed (and in those days one just went along with such ‘expert’ opinion) that the gap should be closed and he duly ordered for me an implement of torture designed to slowly force my two front teeth together by the slow turning of a screw. The device was hideously uncomfortable and cumbersome and I naturally did what (mildly) rebellious youths were expected to do.
Yet another visit to the dentist left the man in charge puzzled as to why his hideous apparatus was not having the desired effect and he was clearly keen to come up with some even more fiendish device for my next visit.
Before this could happen my brother obligingly resolved the issue. We were both keen cricketers (he considerably more talented than I) and we were regularly involved in scratch games on our local cricket green. My brother was possessed of a decent arm and could generate a fair bit of pace. On this occasion a short delivery leapt from the pitch and caught me square in the mouth. One of my front teeth was broken in half and – as it later transpired – the one next to it left in a permanently discoloured state. I had to have a crown fitted to the broken tooth, which at least finally dealt with the gap.
And thus things remained throughout the decades. We Brits are nowhere near as keen on cosmetic dentistry as are our North American cousins and I had finally reached an age at which I could tell my dentist to get lost, so my oddly coloured teeth became a fixture. As a result my smile has always been somewhat guarded and this has contributed in no small measure to my distaste for having my photograph taken.
Until recently…!
Now that I live in Canada things have taken a turn for the better, without my really having had to do anything about it. Whilst having some routine work done last year my new dentist decided that I must really want my discoloured tooth upgraded and – by means of some modern magic potion – rendered it into an almost acceptable tone without a word being spoken. Then – this year – a small piece of my by now venerable crown broke off and I had to have a new one made. After some helpful consultation – and by means of yet more magic – I now have a set of front teeth that actually look as though they are meant to be together. I guess I now look the way my UK dentist envisioned that I should more than fifty years ago. Wonders will never cease!
There – that didn’t hurt a bit…
Time for some photos of plants growing in our garden. I know that I do this every year, but the garden is not the same from one year to the next so I don’t suppose that the images are either. Anyway – the nature of this journal is that there will always be something else along in a moment and there are no penalties for skipping ahead (I wanted there to be but couldn’t figure out how to do it!)…
The reason for my somewhat incredulous byline is that – no matter how much a part of it we all are – nature is still pretty much a riddle to me (wrapped inside a mystery etc, etc)… Take this Camellia for example. Some seasons back (maybe four or five) I pruned it back a little in the early spring. It was probably not the best time of year for such a treatment, but I was not too severe on the shrub; merely trying to persuade it not to stomp all over the ‘lesser’ plants around it.
The Camellia clearly took umbrage and refused to flower at all in any of the succeeding years – with the exception of the odd desultory bloom once in a while. This year – well, take a look for yourself:
Maybe I will post an update when all those buds burst into bloom.
Recent Comments