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Into the unknown

July 4, 2024 in Life as we know it | Permalink

“Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,” said the Rat. “And that’s something that doesn’t matter, either to you or me. I’ve never been there, and I’m never going, nor you either, if you’ve got any sense at all.”

Kenneth Grahame – ‘The Wind in the Willows’

Today is the 4th July.

In the United Kingdom a General Election is taking place this very day which – should the pundits be anywhere near correct – will lead to a generational change in the governance of the country. Such changes by definition happen only rarely and there are those who believe that this one is long overdue.

I consider myself to be amongst that number.

Simultaneously (but without connection) in France President Macron has instigated a snap election which will this Sunday – unless an unlikely coalition contrives to prevent it – hand power for the first time to the hard right.

In the United States the presidential election has not yet begun, although it feels awfully much as though not only has it done so, but also that it may already be all over bar the shouting… and not in a positive direction.

The forth-coming election in Canada has not yet been called – and may not in fact happen until next year – but at the moment it looks as though Justin Trudeau’s Liberals will also lose out to the far right at whatever point the election takes place.

It would seem that we live in an age in which huge amounts of energy and (ill-gotten?) fortunes are being expended on dangerous political experiments and battles between cliques and cabals. Not since the end of the Second World War have we seen such re-alignments – or such struggles for domination between democracies and autocracies…

…and all of this at a time when – had we any sense at all – we would be pooling our resources to battle against the vastly greater threats to our continued existence on this planet!

It does make one wonder if we really deserve to have one…

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Season of… er…!

November 11, 2022 in Life in BC | Permalink

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidIt is a pretty extraordinary thing – particularly here on the west coast of Canada – but we do seem to have skipped a season this year.

Completely…!

I know…! With climate change so much of the world’s weather seems to have lost track of what were once familiar patterns. It has become the norm to read of unprecedented weather cycles or events. The ‘new normal’ is clearly that there is now nothing normal about anything.

What a strange and unsettling time to be alive.

Regular readers of this journal will already have picked up references throughout this particular year of weather patterns not occurring as expected. The spring here on Vancouver Island was wet and cold and dank – and seemed to be stuck in that state for ever, instead of flowering into spring and early summer as is usual.

It wasn’t until we packed our bags and  set off to Europe in July that the weather here in BC really picked up. One result of this was that exposure to the heatwaves that afflicted Europe throughout the middle of the year came as a considerable shock to the system for travelers like us.

When we returned to Canada summer seemed finally to have arrived. At the southern tip of Vancouver Island the season is usually warm and dry – with little or no rainfall for the three summer months. It was good, finally, to be able to get out into the garden to do some barbecuing and entertaining.

Come the dog days, however, when the temperatures usually fall away and the summer drought is broken by the first welcome showers of  the advancing fall, the temperatures remained stubbornly in the mid twenties Celsius and there was no rain in sight. Serious concerns about the lack of rainfall were voiced and gardens and agricultural lands alike began to shows signs of stress. An Indian Summer can be a wonderful surprise at the end of a disappointing season, but when one follows an already extensive dry period farmers and gardeners start to worry.

Naturally, when the weather finally broke in late-October it did so in true ‘wet’ coast style – with yet another Atmospheric River providing us with many days rainfall in a few hours, accompanied closely by the autumn’s first wind storm.

Then, as we crossed into November, the temperatures dropped abruptly – as did the first snowfall of winter. I know that some gentle readers will still – even after all this time – cling to the notion that the whole of Canada is a snowy wasteland for much of the year. There are indeed some good reasons for so doing. Here on the west coast, however, that is not the norm; winters in Victoria are not unlike those in the south east of the UK for most years.

So – we seem to have skipped autumn (fall) this year and gone directly from late-summer to winter. I’m not sure what Mother Nature will make of all this, but I have a feeling she will adapt to it with rather more sang-froid than do we.

Brrrrr!

 

 

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Playing it cool

June 20, 2022 in Flotsam and Jetsam | Permalink

I gather that the UK is currently experiencing something of a heatwave. Lucky you, say I to those that reside there. Of course, excessive heat – brought about by climate change – is not a good thing at all, but then neither is an extended, unfulfilled wait for summer.

Long-time followers of these postings may recall a missive that I uploaded at about this time last year (entitled ‘Head for the Hills‘) the which contained a description of the unprecedented ‘heat dome’ under which the west of Canada was then suffering. The Girl and I retreated into the basement of our residence for a week or so to avoid the worst of it, but it was not a pleasant experience.

In a second post, a month later, I reported that we had decided to have an air-conditioning unit added to our forced-air heating system – to protect ourselves against future such weather events. In these strange times all such projects seem to take an inordinate amount of time to be effected. We finally ordered the system at the very start of this year, but the first installation date that we were offered was not until June.

Well – I can now report that we have enjoyed the required visitation, the work has been most efficiently carried out and we are now the proud possessors of equipment necessary to enable us to keep our cool in any future such events. The installation was rendered much easier by our having considered this as a possible option when the furnace was installed back in 2017 – the necessary spacing and services having been left intact should we decide to go this route.

Inside the house there is nothing new to see – unless one looks really closely at our furnace room. Outside there is a small and elegant compressor, tucked away in a part of the estate that we normally only see when cutting the grass.

Now – of course – we are eagerly awaiting an opportunity to try it out! Here we are in the middle of June and the weather has still not caught up with the season. There are few cloudless days, temperatures are still struggling to get up to seasonal norms and – though I have fired up and checked out our garden irrigation system – it is still not running to its normal schedule because there has been no shortage of rain!

I have no doubt that this will all change abruptly in a couple of weeks, when we have set out on our travels and are no longer in residence.

Sigh!

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Aftermath

November 23, 2021 in Life in BC | Permalink

I am still sometimes caught out by the differences that I find living in a new land. Mostly such surprises are positive, but in times of stress and difficulty they may be less so.

When it comes to sudden and excessive rainfall (and any concomitant flooding and damage) you might think that a native of Great Britain would be pretty much inured to any eventuality. We are all too familiar with the possible outcomes and take such things in our stride. Further,  Canada is a huge country which is full of outsized natural features. There is a sense of solidity that suggests that the land (and its people) can handle anything that is thrown at it. Looks can sometimes be deceptive.

I was taken aback by just how quickly and easily Vancouver and other parts of BC were sundered from the remainder of the country by the Atmospheric River in which we have of late bathed. Other implications did not register at all.

When I set off for College last Wednesday – after the rains had ceased – I idly noted that I would need to get some petrol (gas) on the way home. As I drove down the peninsula on the Pat Bay Highway I found myself wondering why there was such a long queue of cars on the opposite carriageway tailing back from the first gas station there. Following a comedy cartoon moment the truth landed like a lead balloon. They were panic buying!

Sure enough it rapidly became clear that the only gas stations not to be inundated by desperate motorists were those that had already run out of gas. It turns out that all of Victoria’s petrol arrives by tanker down the Trans Canada Highway from the direction of Nanaimo – or it did until half of the Malahat Drive was washed away. I was forced to call upon The Girl to meet me after my class and to bring me the jerry can that we keep full of gas for our lawn mower, so that I could make it safely home.

The next problem was – of course – how to get some more petrol over the next few days. The police quickly started escorting convoys of tankers across the remaining Malahat carriageway after  the road was closed for the evening repairs, so we had to keep an ear to the ground as to where deliveries were being made. One station in Sidney had a delivery but by the time I got there there was already a queue of more than a hundred cars.

I swapped into The Girl’s Mazda to go shopping but as I reached our local grocery store I saw another tanker pulling up at the adjacent station. I scurried back home to get the Lexus and – after a relatively brief wait in the queue – came away with a tankful; the which should last for couple of weeks…

…which is a good thing because gas stations are now rationing gas, limiting motorists to thirty litres on any fill up.

We are hearing reports of shortages of other essential goods and foodstuffs also, though thus far we have not been inconvenienced. The forecasts are for further heavy rains in days to come, however, so we must continue to be on our toes.

Never a dull moment here in the ‘new’ world!

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Weather update

November 17, 2021 in Life in BC | Permalink

Monday’s post – whilst touching on a serious subject – did so in a manner which might, on reflection, seem to some to be a little on the flippant side.

When I wrote that post I had certainly been looking at some of the images from the interior of BC and checking in on the news coverage – but there had at that stage been no reports of injuries and certain none of fatalities.

A day and more later the situation is slowly becoming clearer and the extent of the flooding and damage to property and to the transport infrastructure is becoming more apparent.

There have also – of course – now been the first reports of fatalities and of missing persons. The tone of this post is accordingly considerably more sombre and our thoughts and best wishes go out to those affected.

British Columbia has come in for yet another climate related battering. Mud slides and washouts on major routes have effectively shut Vancouver off from anywhere further east in Canada. We watched the news reports come in as each of the major routes was cut one by one. Some of the damage is significant and will take many months to repair.

The lower Fraser valley at Abbotsford is badly flooded and there have been many evacuations in that area. On Monday the entire town of Merritt was evacuated as the flood waters rose. Those who are familiar with Merritt will understand entirely how this happened. Merritt lies in a bowl surrounded by mountains and the runoff from two days of rain had nowhere else to go.

Victoria was cut off from the rest of Vancouver Island on Monday as the Highway 1 route over the Malahat mountain was flooded. A single lane has since been reopened but it will take a week of night-time closures for the damage to the formation to be repaired sufficient to re-open the whole road.

We are blessed here on the peninsula. There had been no shortage of surface water in our neck of the woods (it runs off Mount Newton behind us) but the water cascades down the slopes in all directions and into the sea – so within 24 hours most local routes were once again navigable.

For these small mercies we are infinitely grateful.

 

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Weird weather

November 15, 2021 in Life in BC | Permalink

Photo by Andy Dawson ReidIs it really – I wonder – an inevitable effect of apparently unavoidable climate change… or does the west coast of Canada just suffer from wacky weather as a matter of course?

I ask because – as gentle readers may (or may not) recall – back in the summer we here in British Columbia suffered the most unpleasant and tragic effects of a ‘Heat Dome‘.

I will be completely honest here – I had never heard of a Heat Dome. As a climatic phenomenon it was a complete unknown. As it turned out I would have been happy to have made it through this existence without ever having encountered such a beast.

Why do I bring this up now? Because as I write we are heading towards (hopefully) the tail end of another weather phenomenon of which I have never heard. This one is called an ‘Atmospheric River’.

A what!?!

What the heck is an Atmospheric River? Well – Wikipedia can, of course, give us all the details – and here they be! To be honest, however, you will not really need to read up on this unpleasantness to have a good guess at what such a thing entails. It is wet… very wet… and it is in the atmosphere – until it falls on your head!

So – since sometime yesterday morning the rain has been hammering down pretty much constantly – and doing so with the sort of fierce determination that ‘gets things done’ (in this case flooding, mud slides, road closures, accidents and so forth). We have essentially been living on the inside of a cloud for the last forty eight hours and it is getting difficult to tell where the cloud ends and we begin. The situation is what might best be described as… wait for it… fluid!

Anyway – I have to drive down to College later to deliver a class and I am not really looking forward to that too much. it may be a bit of a hazardous journey.

Wish me luck!

 

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Cold and Hot – 2

July 20, 2021 in Life in BC | Permalink

It will surprise the gentle reader not one iota to be informed that the worst time – the very worst time – to seek to purchase an air-conditioning system (be it portable or fully installed) is when a ‘heat dome’ is camped on top of one’s home town – when temperature records are a-tumbling day on day – when wildfires are breaking out faster than they can be brought under control…

…and when the forecast is for more of the same.

Oddly enough one is never the only person in such circumstances seeking to obtain said items or systems.

Nonetheless, on the first day that the temperatures soared unpleasantly towards the stratosphere (as documented in my last post) and we decamped to our basement, I called our heating/ventilation engineers and – when I eventually reached a real person rather than a voicemail box – asked to be added to the list (the long list) of those who would like to talk about air-conditioning. A week and a half later I had a call back and an appointment for a visit was set up – in the middle of August.

Well – we knew that it would not be quick – and also that by the time anything were to be installed it would probably be the middle of winter… whatever that looks like these days!

Now – as detailed in that last posting – when our inherited heat pump gave up the ghost some years back we replaced our furnace but went no further. We did – however leave in place the duct-work and necessary services such that a heat pump or air-conditioner could be added at some point in the future. Well – that point is now – and we are pretty certain that we are going for the latter – though our engineer may well try to sell us the former.

Our rationale is this: The house is good and warm during the winter and the gas bills are very reasonable. During the temperate parts of the summer we like to be able to throw our windows wide without having to worry about interfering with whatever a cooling system is doing. If we have an air-conditioner (which would be much cheaper to install than a heat pump) we can leave it turned off except for those exceptional periods when it will prove a life-saver.

If we only run it when absolutely required it will not only cost considerably less to run, but it will also last a whole lot longer than if we run it all the time.

That, at any rate, is our plan at the moment. I will, naturally, issue an update in due course.

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Hot and cold – 1

July 15, 2021 in Life in BC | Permalink

A few short posts back I was regaling ever patient readers with a description of life under the great North American ‘heat dome’. My intention to develop that thought into something related (but slightly off-topic) was overtaken by the tragic events in Lytton.

With (as ever) the reader’s kind permission – and given that I am always loathe to leave a notion only half-considered – I will just dot back to that thought now…

OK? Good!…

When we purchased our home here on the peninsula some six years ago it came with a heat pump. For those who do not know what a heat pump is, Wikipedia offers this explanation:

“A heat pump is a device used to warm and sometimes also cool buildings by transferring thermal energy from a cooler space to a warmer space using the refrigeration cycle, being the opposite direction in which heat transfer would take place without the application of external power. Common device types include air source heat pumps, ground source heat pumps, water source heat pumps and exhaust air heat pumps”.

A heat pump, then, is a sort of air-conditioner that works in both directions – taking heat out of the air during the summer and adding it in during the winter. Heat pumps are all the rage in these parts because they can offer considerable potential savings on heating costs in this sort of climate.

I say ‘potential savings’ because the amount of heat that such a pump can produce depends greatly on the type of device that has been chosen – and on that also depends the cost. Air source heat pumps are unable to deal with very low temperatures but are the cheapest to install. The other types do better with lower temperatures but cost a great deal more.

Systems such as the one we inherited use the relatively inexpensive air source pump but supplement it with a backup furnace – ours being an electric one. The problems that can occur with this sort of system became apparent a year or so after we moved in. The refrigerant circuit sprung a leak which went unnoticed until the electricity bill for a couple of months of electric furnace heating showed up, causing us to fall off our chairs with the shock.

We were advised that the old heat pump was not economical to repair (quelle surprise!) so we set about looking for an alternative. This was at about the same time that we were starting on the major renovations that were most fully documented within these pages. Being uncertain as to whether or not a straight replacement for the old heat pump was the best solution we chose instead a sort of halfway-house. We replaced the electric furnace with a modern efficient gas furnace and left space to add either a heat pump or an air conditioner should such prove necessary in the future.

Since then we have enjoyed a lovely toasty warm house during the winters for very reasonable gas costs – helped considerably by the replacement of most of the windows and the upgrading of the insulation during our renovations. Until this year the summers had not called for anything more than throwing the windows wide and turning on the ceiling fans.

This year – of course – has caused us to think again…

…but more on that next time…

 

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The cruel hand of fate

July 1, 2021 in Life in BC | Permalink

Two days ago I started a relatively light-hearted post on the subject of having to move into our basement to avoid the worst of the recent heatwave. By the time that I had finished and posted it yesterday the mood and tone of the piece had changed. News of the tragic sudden deaths of an unexpectedly high number of  the elderly and infirm of British Columbia certainly put into perspective the trivial inconvenience of having to transfer our sleeping arrangements into our basement.

My post had also made reference to a visit that I paid back in the 1980s to the hill station of Ootacamund in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. I included a quotation by the first Lord Lytton concerning the ‘English’ nature of the rain and the mud at Ooty. This Lord Lytton was the very same (though I had not noticed the fact at the time of writing) for whom the small settlement (less than 250 inhabitants) in the Fraser valley in BC was named – the which was coincidentally also mentioned in my post yesterday as being the town that had – over the past three days – set three successive all-time heat records for Canada.

It is doubtful that many outside the country had even heard of Lytton – though some may have seen items in the international press on this new and unwanted record.

Today Lytton is gone!

On Wednesday afternoon a wildfire swept through the town so quickly that there was no time to issue evacuation orders. Residents grabbed what they could, took to their cars and fled. Within two hours ninety percent of the town had burned to the ground. Though loss of life is thought currently to be mercifully light, the loss of homes and property is not.

Our heartfelt thoughts are with all those who have suffered and those who will continue to suffer as a result of this climate-related episode and should any others wish to suggest that now is not the time to be raising such matters I can only say:

“Now is exactly the time!”…

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Head for the hills

June 30, 2021 in Life in BC | Permalink

I have only visited India once – and that was a long time ago, back in the 1980s. We went – very sensibly – during what is, I believe, called the ‘post-monsoon’ season. This period – from October through November – is usually fairly dry but also considerably cooler than are the summer and monsoon seasons.

Such things are understandably of concern to the Brits, who, for some hundred of years, insisted on venturing to parts of the globe for which they were (and are) not really equipped.

We went home, of course, before the weather became too extreme for us. The Brits who were stationed in India during the British Raj were obliged (by their masters) to stay. To avoid the more unpleasant (to them at least) aspects of the climate they established settlements between two and three thousand metres up in the foothills of the Himalayas and in other elevated parts of the sub-continent, to which they might retreat when the heat on the plains became intolerable.

These Hill Stations – as they became known – were frequently modeled on aspects of the Old Country, such that the ex-pats might pretend that they were back in good old Blighty! Lord Lytton said of Ootacamund (Ooty) in the 1870s – “Such beautiful English rain – such delicious English mud!”. This does, of course, beg the question…

As it happens, I did visit Ooty. I had long nurtured a fascination for the place having seen images in one of my father’s old railway magazine of the steam rack railway (the Nilgiri Mountain Railway) that still connects (and is still operated by steam) Ooty to Mettupalayam on the plains below. The excursion from Bangalore to Ooty and back was quite an adventure and not one I could contemplate undertaking now – but I am very glad that we did so then.

“But why?” – the gentle reader might reasonably ask – “Are you reminiscing just now about your travels in the sub-continent some decades back?”

Good question!

Here in Canada we have for the past few days been sweltering under the influence of a heat dome. You may have read about this because it has become an international news story – and not for positive reasons. Such has been the intensity of this heatwave that the record for the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada was broken not once, not twice but three times within the last few days – each time at the small settlement of Lytton in the Fraser Canyon right here in BC. Yesterday’s maximum was in excess of 49°C! Tragically this heatwave has led to a spate of sudden deaths amongst the elderly and infirm across the country. Our thoughts are with those who have lost loved ones.

Given the changes in the world’s climate it is very likely that we will have increasingly to adapt to such conditions. Having no hill station to which to retire The Girl and I did the best that we could – we retreated to the guest bedroom in our walkout basement, where the temperatures have been a good few degrees cooler.

Clearly this is not an ideal long-term solution to ever rising temperatures. My next post will explore the matter further…

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