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Jonathan Raban – David Crosby

January 23, 2023 in Life as we know it | Permalink

David Crosby
1941 – 2023
Jonathan Raban
1942 – 2023
RIP

Joe Mabel, Jonathan Raban 07, CC BY-SA 3.0
Eddie Janssens, David crosby-1547297410, CC BY-SA 4.0

It is a sad fact that the passing of those who have shaped our lives – those who have, in some form or other, become our heroes through the years – should occur with increasing frequency as the years go by. It is also the case that these sad occasions come thicker and faster during the winter months.

Such is life… and death.

This week two huge figures in my personal pantheon have gone beyond this place:

David Crosby was a major musical figure for much of my life and, whereas CSN(Y) were maybe not quite in my premier league of immortal bands, I found myself coming back to them again and again as the years passed. What drew me in were, of course, the sublime harmonies… to which I still routinely refer whenever I have a harmony of my own to write. For this – and for the bittersweet songs – much respect. ‘Helplessly Hoping’ indeed…

Jonathan Raban was a year younger than was Crosby but, I suspect, hailed from a very different world. The Guardian’s obituary starts:

“The British author, who lived in the US, blended memoir and travelogue in books that were often inspired by the sea”

Another Guardian piece is entitled:

“Jonathan Raban: his travel writing could pierce your heart”

What’s not to like?

Raban’s best book – for my money – is “A Passage to Juneau“. What appears on the surface to be an account of a sailing trip from Seattle, up the Inside Passage to Juneau in Alaska, is actually a disquisition on the death of Raban’s father and the slow-motion wreck of his own marriage. It is also a revelatory and sublime introduction to the Pacific Northwest – and thus not to be missed.

David Crosby – Jonathan Raban – Rest in Peace…

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Looking back

January 19, 2023 in Life as we know it | Permalink

Ah! January…

‘Tis the time of year to reflect on the one that has just passed. Did it measure up to our hopes and expectations? Given the state of the world, did we have much in the way of hopes and expectation for it to live up to?

As ever, the best way to find out is to locate the equivalent postings from this time last year and to see exactly what – if anything much – we were hoping for…

…then we can see if any of it actually happened!

…and after that we can repeat the exercise for yet another year!

Hang on a sec while I have a shufti…

OK – here is our basic wish-list from last year – with progress reports in red:

  • To get to see family and friends – …yes we did… see below!
  • To be able to entertain again – …there was indeed some entertaining – and not all of it outdoors
  • To dine out – again – …hoorah! We can once again eat out (and on occasion, somewhat splendidly!)
  • To see some live theatre – …well, yes.. but not so much in Canada. See below:
  • To enjoy some live music – …once again – one event only – Barney Bentall’s Cariboo Express in November
  • To attend a live sporting event (preferably Rugby!) – …sadly not
  • To be able to travel… anywhere – …well – speaking of which…

In addition:

  • It is our fervent wish that we get to travel to the UK during the coming summer. Whether or not this happens will depend entirely on the course that the pandemic takes on both sides of the pond over the coming months. We are not holding our collective breaths.

…and this we duly did – emboldened by visits in the spring from good friends in the UK and from an old and most dear friend from New York. The expedition was most enjoyable, even though we did not get to see everyone that we would have liked to have seen. We got to the theatre in London and Bath – we dined splendidly and well – we finished our trip with a lovely sojourn in Paris. The downside? We came back with COVID. Oh well!

  • We will carry out some further domestic upgrades – air-conditioning to guard against future ‘heat domes’ – a new hot water system so that we can console ourselves with even longer baths when things don’t work out as we would wish.

…well – we did the air-conditioning – and just in time for a hot spell too. An excellent notion which works well. The hot water tank replacement is still on hold – but will get done…

  • Normalised work! The Girl would like to be able get back out into the wider world and to visit clients face to face again – not to mention paying a nostalgic visit to her office! I would like to teach students who can actually see my face as I do so.

…pretty well normalised as it turns out. The Girl is back doing (somewhat cautious) home visits and going into the office two days a week. Last spring I was teaching in an N95 respirator and a headset (for streaming purposes). Not much fun. By the autumn I was back to face to face teaching without a mask – even though I wore one when around the enclosed bits of campus.

  • More music! One positive over the last year is that I have been able to write more than enough new songs for the Chanteuse and I to put together another ‘album’. We are currently recording her vocals on these tracks and we are making good progress. Look for further pronouncements in the coming months.

…Last year was indeed a good year in musical terms. The Chanteuse and I finished our third album and at the end of August Anam Danu released ‘Soul Making‘. We were even able to have a lovely reception in our garden to celebrate the release and – for the first time – we played a few tracks from the album live to the assembled friends and supporters. The feedback we have had regarding the music has been overwhelmingly positive and we both have a very real sense of achievement.

So – in spite of all the many troubles in the wider world, 2022 was a good year for The Girl and I. What will we hope to accomplish in 2023?… Check back in a few posts’ time to find out.

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Jeff Beck

January 13, 2023 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

Jeff Beck
1944 – 2023
RIP

Marco Rosanova (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jeff_Beck_(56341210).jpeg), „Jeff Beck (56341210)“, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcodeVery sad to hear of the passing of yet another rock legend – the great Jeff Beck. Along with Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, Jeff was one of those towering figures who defined what was possible on the electric guitar back in the late 60s/70s/80s and beyond. If it feels as though he has somehow always been there then that is because – for my generation – he always was. Even if at times he was not directly in the spotlight (the music business being the fickle creature that it is) he continued recording, playing and touring until the summer of last year.

Many obituaries and retrospectives have appeared in a broad cross-section of the media and I commend such to any gentle readers unfamiliar with the great man’s oeuvre.

Rest in Peace

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Changing the ending

January 10, 2023 in Moving to Canada | Permalink

“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending”

C. S. Lewis

Well – 2023 has started somewhat shakily – in all sorts of ways. That on which I will particularly focus here concerns the ‘small’ matter of a Canadian passport.

Back in October last year I wrote – in a post entitled “A pat on the head” – about the really most exciting and unexpectedly rapid arrival of my Canadian Citizenship Certificate – following my Citizen Ceremony but a few short weeks beforehand. One significance of this happy occurrence was that I could then crack on with my application for a Canadian passport – without which I would be able to leave – but not return to – the country.

This I duly did!

So, I was somewhat disappointed when – in the middle of last week – I received by registered post a form from the passport office detailing a rejection of my application.

WT actual F!

So – it seems that the Canadian passport office had objected to the item of identification that I had provided – I thought as per the guidance. For clarification, this is what the instructions on the application form actually say:

“You need to provide at least one (1) document to support your identity. The identification document (ID) must be valid and be issued by a federal, provincial, territorial government authority (or local equivalent abroad). The ID must include your name, date of birth, signature and photo“.

I had sent them an appropriately witnessed copy of my British passport!

It seems that was not what they had in mind – in spite of the fact that the instructions seem to me explicitly to allow this.

Now – I could grumble here about how we all still (currently!) share the same monarch… ties to the Commonwealth, etc, etc… but as we are dealing with the powers that be this would just be a waste of time. Rather than just posting off a second attempt I thought I might visit one of the Service Canada offices at which one can deal with such matters. I drove 40 minutes over to Langford and waited in a queue for more than 10 minutes just to speak to the receptionist. She entered me into the long queue that was waiting for the main event, but warned that it might take an hour and a half or so to reach the front of it. She also pointed out that the office closed in a couple of hours time.

“So” – I ventured – “I could wait here for a couple of hours and still get booted out without being seen?“.

She agreed that that was entirely possible. She also very kindly looked over my application and checked that all was now likely to be acceptable, before I gave up and returned home.

So – the application has now gone into the post for a second time – and I await once again with all body parts firmly crossed.

Sigh!

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A little late…

December 26, 2022 in Flotsam and Jetsam, Photos | Permalink

…this year – for which my humble apologies:

…to friends, acquaintances and gentle readers…

…from the Kickass Canada Girl and the Imperceptible Immigrant…

we wish you a safe and peaceful Christmas and a Happy Hogmany!

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

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Today’s forecast…

December 23, 2022 in Life in BC, Photos | Permalink

…Holy Moley – I can’t feel my face degrees!

The winter weather is doing its bit to make the run in to Christmas something of a challenge! Notice that I didn’t qualify that with: “Here on the west coast of Canada“. I am well aware that we are not alone in experiencing exceptional climatic conditions. We have had quite a lot to do of late (as of course have many people at this time of year) and needing to keep a constant eye on the weather only makes things more exacting.

Here are some ‘highlights’ – complete with pictures:

Last weekend we made a overnight trip up island to Nanaimo – for a Christmas visit with The Girl’s mum – stopping on the way back on the Sunday for lunch with a dear friend in Duncan. As ever we took the Mill Bay ferry to avoid traversing the Malahat (always a good idea when there is snow in the air).

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidWe figured that the snow would start to fall at some point during this trip and sure enough it did – whilst we were in Nanaimo. We stayed overnight in the Coast Bastion hotel overlooking Nanaimo harbour – with which we are very familiar from previous visits.

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidPhoto by Andy Dawson ReidWe had a lovely visit with both family and friends – dined splendidly at the Nanaimo Golf Club, the Minnoz restaurant at the Coast Bastion – and, of course, with our lovely friend in Duncan. Happy Christmas to you all.

Once back in Victoria the winter storm really swept in and soon everything disappeared under about a foot of snow. This was the view from my studio window by Tuesday.

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidThe Girl had taken most of the week off as well-earned pre-Christmas break, but the weather put paid to any notions of a relaxing run in to the festival itself. The Volunteer Agency of which The Girl is one of the mainstays delivers meals to elderly folk every week – with teams of volunteers driving routes around Greater Victoria to make deliveries to more than seventy locations. Given the weather it would have been totally unreasonable to expect these excellent volunteers – many of them elderly themselves – to be out on the roads in such treacherous conditions. It fell to a number of us folk with 4x4s equipped with snow tyres to get the food parcels out to the elderly in time for Christmas. This is – of course – is just the sort of thing at which Lorelei excels and she did not let us down. Here we are en route…

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidI guess the big question now is – will we get a white Christmas? Today is the 23rd and temperatures are starting to rise – though to this point they have only reached the ‘freezing rain on top of compacted snow‘ phase – so today we are going nowhere! We will see how things pan out tomorrow.

 

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Making your bed

December 20, 2022 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

“If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed”

William H. McRaven

When The Girl and I started living together – many moons ago now (and long before this online journal was even a glint in the eye) – one of the first things that she suggested as a means of improving our life together was that we should purchase a new bed. Her reasoning was that – since sleep is such an important restorative for both the body and the mind and given that we spend a considerable percentage of our lives between the sheets (perchance in the land of slumber!) – we should ensure that we had nothing but the finest of tools with which to work. This – naturally – appealed to me as being an admirable ethic, so out we set to purchase a bed.

We were fortunate enough to find a really good deal (end of line for this particular model!) on a splendid hand-made Vispring bed, the which we have enjoyed over the years since – dragging said item halfway around the world with us to our new Canadian home.

Now, the bed has a thirty year warranty and would doubtless go on serving us well for some time to come – were it not for a couple of factors that we had not previously foreseen.

The first is that even really good mattresses do decline over the decades. Our mattress was split between a firm side (mine) and a soft side (The Girl’s). Her side had become less supportive over the years and was eventually not doing enough to keep her comfortable and ache-free throughout the night.

I made reference to the other matter in a couple of posts earlier this year. It involved something of a sleep issue that I was experiencing and – if you really must know the details – I recommend those musings to you in preference to re-hashing things here now. Anyway – one of the outcomes of that episode was that The Girl and I decided that it would be a good idea to purchase a bigger bed.

Something I did not know before moving to the land of ‘Big‘ (but which in retrospect should have been obvious) is that bed sizes here are very different here to those back in the Old Country. Our Vispring bed was a UK King size. Here the same sized bed is but a Queen! Standard King-sized beds here are a whole ten inches wider than was ours!

Long story short… we are now the proud owners of a rather lovely wooden Canadian King-sized bed, complete with a splendid multi-layer latex mattress (the which is a first for us both).

The down-side of up-sizing one’s bed is – of course – that one’s duvets and bedding no longer fit and must at some point be replaced. In the short term we are managing with a couple of UK King-sized duvets, but the question is – how to deploy them. Does one go for the (apparently) European approach of having an overlap in the middle of the bed (which looks rather odd and tends to leave far too much duvet hanging over the sides of the bed)? We may well adopt this approach when we get around to purchasing new duvets, but utilizing a couple of twin-sized duvets rather than the UK Kings.

In the meantime we have opted temporarily to sleep Burrito-style – the which is somewhat restricting when it comes to contact but is oddly effective in all other ways.

Oh well! First-world problems, of course!

 

 

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Troy ‘Bubba’ Cook

December 12, 2022 in Life as we know it | Permalink

Troy ‘Bubba’ Cook
1969 – 2022
RIP


The Chanteuse and I were greatly saddened to hear over the weekend of the passing of Troy Cook. Troy was a creative force who was a writer, artist and musician and was born, lived and worked in Fernie, BC.

Earlier this year, in spite of his illness, Troy agreed to create the artwork for the recent Anam Danu album – ‘Soul Making‘. He most generously refused to accept any payment for his work – saying:

“I like to promote original music and this is my way of helping other musicians”.

Troy was a long standing friend of The Chanteuse’s husband – they having known each other for 37 years – and he was much loved by the whole family.

In this video clip Troy explains how his art helped him to deal with his illness.

Our sympathies and thoughts are with Troy’s family.

Rest In Peace

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On the other hand…

December 8, 2022 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

In complete contrast to the experience described in my last post – “Every exit“…

Regular ingesters of these random(ish) gobbets will no doubt feel completely familiar by now with Barney Bentall’s Cariboo Express – that charitable roadshow of assorted musicians and other performers that makes a three night pitstop at the Mary Winspear Centre in Sidney each November – raising much needed cash for the Sidney Lions Food Bank. We have been in Canada for over seven years now… we have traveled on the Cariboo Express at least six times since we arrived… I have written posts about it at least five times!

I was not intending to pen another post this year, in the wake of our annual pilgrimage a couple of weeks back. I thought that I had pretty much covered the subject in previous years and the last thing I would want to do is to bore you – the gentle reader…

However…

…each time we surrender ourselves to the oncoming Express – regardless of how tired we may be or how weighed down we are with the burden of the world’s (and our own) problems upon our shoulders – a couple of hours spent in the company of this exuberant assemblage of musicians of all ages… and we find ourselves once again rejuvenated by the spirit of bonhomie and love.

In short – the music and dancing weaves its magic spell and we are once again recharged with a joyous zest for life and all that is good about it.

Those who know me well would never have expected me to be so taken with this particular genre of music (sort of country-ish) and yet I take great delight each year in attending the show and having my faith in live music emphatically restored.

It helps, of course, that the Cariboo Express crew so clearly love doing the whole tour themselves. The ensemble seems to grow larger each year. This time round the cavalcade winding its way around BC comprised some nineteen performers who – at various points – assembled together on the Charlie White Theatre stage.

Good thing it is a particularly wide stage!

To Barney and to the whole crew – thank you again for this year’s fabulous show. See you next year!

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Every exit

December 5, 2022 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

“We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”

Tom Stoppard, ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’

This weekend just passed The Girl and I finally got to see a play again at The Belfry here in Victoria (for the previous failed attempts – see here).

Actually – that should more accurately be: ‘Half a play’!…

Oh dear!

In all of my (and latterly, our) many years of theatre going I can count the number of performances out of which I have walked on the fingers of one hand… and still have had spares! It is not something that I like to do and nor is it something that I feel comfortable about doing. As a thespist myself I think it is jolly bad form to give up on any creative performance at the interval (it is no co-incidence that a fair amount of theatre for and by young people has no interval – thus reducing the opportunity for audience members so to do).

I have very occasionally ducked out of a school production – usually because the whole thing has been a huge error of judgement on somebody’s part and well beyond the capabilities of those involved. I have equally occasionally removed myself from adult (and professional) productions when the piece itself has turned out to be deeply disappointing – though this has happened but extremely rarely.

In this case we found ourselves at a loss to know what to make of the play – which is an even more rare occurrence. I would feel guilty that we had not prepared ourselves adequately in advance to know what we might expect, except that our frantic visits to the InterWebNet at the interval did not really turn up any rationale for boycotting the piece.

I am not going to name the play – or the author (though he is Canadian). It is not a new play; having been around for several decades. Previous reviews from elsewhere in the world seemed reasonable. The work is billed as a Black Comedy, though it seemed to us to lack a basic requirement of a comedy – namely the delivery of laughter. The first act seemed to me to essentially consist of the same ‘humourous’ twist repeated over and over.

We found it impossible to empathise with, or to believe in, either of the characters presented to us, or indeed with their situation. Even once we realised that the second act must contain some sort of plot/character twist that would somehow justify the inertia of the first act – we did not feel that the piece (or the characters involved in it) had done anywhere near enough to have earned our continued engagement.

We thus absented ourselves for the second half, went across the road for a coffee and struck up a fascinating conversation with someone whom we had not previously met…

Much more entertaining!

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