This time next week…

This time next week we shall be on the St Lawrence seaway, sailing east towards the high seas. The M.V. Flottbek only carries eight paying passengers in total and Chris and I shall be two of them! Who knows what’s in store for us? A young ‘cellist made a similar crossing in 2005 which you can find described here, but of course every one of these voyages is different. The M.V. Flottbek approaching Canada from Liverpool this week has been ploughing through extreme weather, a Force 11 “Violent Storm”, which according to the shipping agent has delayed her estimated time of arrival in Montreal by two whole days.

After watching the poor people lying on gurneys from the emergency wards for a couple of hours yesterday I consulted a handsome young doctor at the hospital’s Clinique d’orthopédie who prescribed me a smaller, lighter, neater ankle support than the boot I showed you on May 4th, an ankle stabilizing orthosis that can fit inside a normal shoe, so I think I shall be able to move around on board the ship without too much difficulty, once we go aboard. As long as the seas don’t become too violent again, anyhow.

Today I practised my new found skill of walking on the grass and taxiways at Rockcliffe airport, whence we flew to Lachute for lunch. The weather in and around Ottawa is still perfect.

My blog about the voyage will have to be written up in retrospect, as we don’t intend to carry a computer on board, but carry on watching this space if you’re interested.

Spring clean

The weather is perfect, Ottawa’s tulips wobbling their heads in the warm breeze, if the squirrels don’t get them first, and it’s Cleanup Day on the Rideau River, the day after tomorrow. I don’t know if I’ll be able to participate as well as I’d like to, but I could hobble over to the bank and cheer people on, perhaps.

Reconstruction

Faith and Mel gave me a novel birthday present this year, a silver quaich—a cup of friendship, or “loving cup”, for drams of whisky—engraved not with a Gaelic motto in this case but a Welsh one, Eni Newydd, which means “new birth.” Faith also chose a birthday card for me which pictured a birthday cake decorated with model workmen digging into the icing with miniature shovels and erecting the candles, because life is always under construction, she says.

So it is, though I would call it re-construction, rather. The city of Berlin is a good example of constant birth, destruction and reconstruction! They call it Umbau or Wiederaufbau, over there.

So while those bones in my foot are under reconstruction, I’ve been thinking about all this symbolism and of how life sometimes seems to have come to an end, when you think that what follows will be no more than a mere pretence at living. But after a while, you realise that it’s not like that after all; you’ve been somehow reconstructed so that you are truly alive again. Either that, or another self has taken over from the one that perished, perhaps… that idea comes into shamanism. Chris and I met someone calling himself a modern shaman last year who’d written about a man in a therapeutic trance whose various selves had all gone for a walk together…

Mournful goats

I’ve just finished a sad novel set in Ireland (North and South) by the very Irish poet Dermot Healy, entitled A Goat’s Song, from which I have learned a great deal.

Here’s a short extract from the book that explains its strange title:

“I pen songs of the buck. Billy tunes.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Goat songs.”
“Is that so?”
“That’d be the height of it.”
Catherine looked at him. “That’s all very interesting. But I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Tragedies. Tragos — goat. Oide — song. From the Greek.”
“I never knew that.”
“There you go. Every time you weep in the theatre you’re listening to a goat singing.”
“You jest.”
“Not at all. In the early days the Greek goatherds used to put the bucks on one island and the nannies on another. Then when the nannies were on heat their smell would come on the breeze to the bucks who rose a mournful cry.”
“The poor things.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“And why don’t they just jump in the water and swim across, if they were so frustrated?”
“Ah, but that’s the crux of the matter,” said Jack Ferris. “You see, goats can’t swim.”

Recovering a.s.a.p.

From John le Carré’s novel, Smiley’s People:

… somehow, by sheer willpower [...] Ostrakova became just another pale ex-patient, stepping cautiously and extremely painfully down the ramp of the great black hospital to rejoin the very world which that same day had done its best to be rid of her [...] ‘You’re on your own, you old fool,’ she told herself aloud. ‘You’ve nobody to rely on but yourself, so get on with it.’

That wasn’t exactly me emerging from the Montfort hospital yesterday, where, thanks to the help of my friends Elizabeth and David who drove me to and fro, I spent a fairly undemanding couple of hours in the Emergency Department (though it wasn’t much of an emergency) waiting to be x-rayed and diagnosed with a chipped distal fibula and base of 5th metatarsal and given an air cast or bottine moulée de marche—a protective boot for my left foot. With luck and caution I should have stopped hobbling about with the aid of this boot and my mother’s walking stick within a week or three, in time to board our container ship from Montreal to Liverpool without difficulty, I hope. The M.V. Flottbek, 16000 deadweight tons, accommodating 8 passengers, is due to sail on or around May 25th, so we heard this morning; Chris and I have booked ourselves into one of the two double cabins, the one on the port side. More on this later.

Imagining other people’s lives

On my way to an interesting event this morning, an exhibition of African artifacts and a talk by a lady from CIDA, I fell off my bike and bruised / sprained my ankle, so that I had to sit at the back of the hall for three hours and failed to catch most of what was being said. In any case I wasn’t able to take much interest in the proceedings because of my anxiety about my injury and the distraction of the pain. It just goes to show that self-centredness is hard to combat when we’re in any kind of trouble, however insignificant in the general scheme of things, and the longer trouble lasts, I suppose the more self-absorbed we tend to become. Chronically sick people shouldn’t be blamed for their self-absorption, according to my sister-in-law, a receptionist at a medical clinic, because there is typically little room left in their heads to imagine what other people might be suffering because of them.

On the other hand, with my German-speaking friends, I went to see a really powerful film last week (that German one that won the Oscar) about the Stasi, East Berlin’s secret police in the communist era: Das Leben der Anderen. That situation was just the opposite of self-absorption. The watcher becomes so engrossed in the life of the man he was spying on that he begins to think like that man, and becomes a better human being because of it.

Long time no blog again. Sorry.

At the moment we’re hosting two Adventurers in Citizenship from Edmonton, Canadian girls of Taiwanese and Ukranian / Scottish / American descent, one of whom tells me that in her class at school nearly everyone is a first generation immigrant. This must make for interesting debates in history lessons. What’s interesting to me is that this multinational mix is the norm for these kids, therefore, in order to fit in, you must (paradoxically) be different. I find this a refreshing change from the schools I used to know where you had to be the same as the others in order to fit in.

I have so far failed to blog my attendance at the National Arts Centre’s preview of dance performances for the 2007-2008 season—a reception that took place on April 17th, where I saw an eclectic medley of dancers on screen: flamenco, classical, weird and provocative, Asian, Maori, acrobatic, Israeli, German and Belgian, and some that looked like people desperate to get out of their clothes. My friend and I then stayed on at the NAC to watch that evening’s performance at the theatre, Incendies by Wajdi Mouawd, in its English translation, Scorched, a play about the horrors of being a middle eastern refugee. In fact, the conclusion turned out to be so shocking that the audience, like the dramatis personae, was reduced to silence. The playwright’s message seems to be that in order to break the cycle of violence and retaliation traumatised people must be prepared to forgive the unforgivable, and the only way for that to happen is for them and us to look through the transparent ceiling (as he puts it) above and beyond psychoanalysis, towards the place where poetry is born: the poetry that unites us all.

I think Tony Harrison’s notorious poem, V (written in 1985), might have been saying something like this too. In a BBC interview this poet said

… I have a pessimistic view of human history, but from day to day I have a sensual sense of the celebratory richness of existence, and sometimes it’s very hard to bring the one to the other, although sometimes you find that darkness is the best burnisher of light …

Easter weekend here having been too wet for us to accomplish much, Chris and I took to the air the following weekend for a day and a night in North Bay, where the ice on Lake Nipissing this winter had been a good metre thick, so despite the advent of warm air, it still hadn’t melted away. Finches were singing all the way along the lake-front, however, and the crocuses were out. According to our taxi driver, North Bay is the 15th most desirable place to live in the whole of Canada… especially if you’re keen on fishing, I should think. We learned a lot about the available fish in those parts, walleye, muskie and pike, and especially a hybrid variety of trout that grows a pound a year, so if you catch a 23 year old, you’ll have enough fish flesh in your freezer to keep you fed for months.