Category Archives: Opinion

Winter

16 Sunday Feb 2025

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Having spent the first fifty years of my life in the UK (except for three years in Belgium and Germany), I was a temperate man. That is temperatures lower than -4C and higher that +20C were somewhat of a novelty for me. I also had that English resistance to the damp, especially having spent fifteen years in the village of Blewbury, Oxfordshire, which was a mass of natural springs and chalk streams, and permanently moist. Then I moved from the coastal climes to Canada’s Great Lakes, and the continental weather systems that lurk there.

We’re sat here today, February 16th, watching the snow fall and having been experiencing sub-zero temperatures for weeks, probably six so far, I wasn’t counting. While this part of Southern Ontario doesn’t get hit with really cold weather, it did bring to mind a trip I made to Canada in 2008, when I was still living in England.

My intended had said, “Hey, come over for March Break”, for she was a school teacher, “We’ll rent an RV and have a drive around Quebec”. Now I may not be the sharpest knife in the box, but I looked at the calendar, and I looked at the prevailing weather in that fine Province, and realised that we were not going to experience fine, balmy, RV-friendly weather in March. We scotched the RV idea (a wise move as it turned out), and booked hotels in Montreal and in Quebec City instead. All very exciting.

But when my intended picked me up at Lester Pearson Airport in Toronto, with me just having flown over the frozen wastes of Quebec, the snow started to fall. My intended was driving, not her favourite pastime to be sure, and the weather started to get worse and worse. We were expecting to stay in downtown Montreal that night, but to be honest, we really should have stopped off on the way, but we didn’t. The run up the Ontario Highway 401, and the Autoroute du Souvenir, was 550 Km and should have taken about five and half hours. In the event, it took us nine hours, and we didn’t get into Montreal until at 1:30am. My driver was done in. Still, we did get there.

The following morning we ventured outside. I’d left London and it had been +12C, now in Montreal’s Old Town, it was -20C, and I could feel every one of those degrees below zero. The snow looked nice, and watching the skaters on the outdoor rink was lovely, but I wasn’t really prepared for that level of cold, especially given that the wind was wicked. While we had slept, the snow came in some more, and dumped on the city, making it look wonderful, but there was only so much snow I could take when feeling so, so cold. More snow fell, but we went out to a little restaurant that evening, walking between the shoulder-high mounds of snow, and I marvelled that the city seemed to be functioning well despite the white stuff, but then I realised that this was pretty normal for Montreal in winter. I made a mental note to never return to the city between the months of October and April!

The following day we drove along the St Lawrence River to Quebec City. Yet more snow had fallen and it was waist deep in parts of the old town. It was still seriously below zero as well, but I was starting to acclimatise. Quebec City, though, was a revelation. When we arrived the snow was deep, although paths had been cleared. But, by the following morning, the snow on the roads and sidewalks had gone, almost completely. No, we hadn’t experienced a sudden thaw, but the City Fathers had brought moving equipment in and trucked all the excess snow away. I asked the English speaking co-owner of the hotel what had happened, and he explained that the snow is carted off and dumped in a field on the edge of town. It can still be there in May, he said.

The run back to Southern Ontario was actually trouble free. We did it without an overnight, while sharing the driving, all 1075Kms. The weather had improved, and it was even a wee bit warmer, so my English bones were beginning to feel a bit happier. I learned a lot on that trip, not least that Quebec can be a very cold place in winter. I also learned that a short period of acclimatisation is a good idea if you’re coming straight from a temperate climate.

Fifteen years of living in Canada and I have become accustomed to the sharp winters, and the compensating warm summers of course. Indeed, trips back to the Old Country have had me making that most Canadian of observations about England, “Goodness, everything feels damp”. I reckon I have acclimatised now.

Oh Canada!

08 Saturday Feb 2025

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I was born and raised in England, and didn’t immigrate into Canada until I was fifty. As I have discovered, though, I’m not the first of my family to come here, not by a long shot.

On my dad’s side, originally from County Cork in Ireland, we had been generations Leeds, the centre of the industrial heartland of Yorkshire’s West Riding. In the early nineteenth century, a few of the Maynes had left England, one couple to the USA, and two couples to South Africa, but most remained in Leeds. A few generations later there was a small emigration to Alberta, Canada, of more than one couple, and into the twentieth century, Toronto, Ontario, was the destination for a Mayne or two.

But this movement pales into insignificance when compared to my mum’s side of the family, with the Baters and the Caters. Both families are from Devon, in the south west of England. The Caters were from south Devon, south of Dartmoor, and gravitated to the village of Kingskerswell, which lies between Newton Abbot and Torquay. The Caters married into the Hill Family, and the Hills married into the Bater family, but more of that later.

John Cater, born in Kingskerswell, took himself off at some point in the mid 1850s and settled in St John’s, the capital of Newfoundland. He married a local girl, Anne Murphy in 1857, and that started a most extensive dynasty of Caters around that great island. Successive generations lived and died as “Newfies”, but also migrated out into Ontario and into the USA. I’ve recently been in contact with a modern day member of the original John Cater clan, still living in Ontario.

Then there was the Bater family. The Baters come from North Devon, in and around the River Torridge area. To a man, they were all farm workers; some farm owners, some farm workers, but farming was their only profession. In the late nineteenth century there appears to have been a paucity of work for farm labourers, and quite a few of the young men, some with their wives and children, upped sticks and sailed from Appledore in North Devon, to Quebec City in the French-speaking province of Quebec. From there they made their way on the newly laid train network, to Guelph, a community to the west of Toronto. This wasn’t one or two people, it was many, and the period they emigrated stretched from 1870 to 1910. They all seemed to have headed for Guelph, but from there spread out to the farms of Bruce and Middlesex counties, and the industry of Galt, Cambridge and London (Ontario).

Using the number of deaths recorded for family members as a constant for those arriving but never leaving, and that is Caters and Baters, I have 197 in Ontario and 128 in Newfoundland. Of course many have moved on, largely to the USA, but also to other Canadian Provinces. There are many still alive, naturally, and populating modern Canada, but they’re harder to track down.

There was another emigration route from the fields of North Devon, and that was to Peoria in Illinois, USA. It looks like having crossed the Atlantic and arrived at Quebec City, these settlers have embarked on a second vessel (possibly from Toronto, avoiding the St Lawrence River and its shallows), and made the trip through the Great Lakes, Ontario, Huron and Michigan, to Chicago. Then they made their way up the Illinois River to Peoria, and the rich farmlands that were opening up there. Further migration took them down into Kansas and Missouri.

Quebec City Harbour at the end of the nineteenth century

All of this goes to show that I really am a latecomer to the Canadian party. The ease of my move, in a few hours by air, contrasts starkly with the sea voyage undertaken by my ancestors, many of who never made the trip back to England during their lives. These were brave people, setting our for a new life, and pretty much making a success of things, given that I can’t find a Cater or Bater who ever gave up and went back to Devon. I may be a latecomer, but I am in very good company.

The Seven Stars Inn in Kingskerswell

To finish, the link between the Caters and the Baters was facilitated by the Hill family of Kingskerswell. My maternal grandmother was a Hill, descended from the Caters of Kingskerswell. Her father married a Bater from Dolton, North Devon, and there the link was made. Families, all over the world.

Out Of Step

12 Thursday Dec 2024

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It’s mid-December and once again I find myself feeling hugely out of step with so many people as they start their Christmas early.

As I struggled into adulthood and realised that the end of year celebration was really just an excuse for commercial excess, I lost interest. I had a brief rekindling of enthusiasm when my son was little, but he was only five when he declared that Santa wasn’t real, so that put things squarely back into context. Now, when I see people lighting up their front yards in October (yes, October), I really start to squirm.

It doesn’t help that I’m not religious (that’s what attending Catholic school does for you), albeit that I have some sympathy for those Christians who really do see December 25th as a key date in their faith’s calendar, because their festival has been well and truly hijacked by greed, business and stupidity. I worry for the people who feel pressure to perform, to provide big meals for others, to entertain people they don’t much like, and to spend an awful lot of money they might not be able to properly afford. I really feel for those people who are told that they shouldn’t be alone at Christmas, and that if they are then there’s something wrong with them. Ultimately it’s just one day, and really it’s much like any other day other than the fact that the shops are shut. (Every year, though, on Christmas Day, Facebook is full of people asking if there’s a Tim Hortons coffee shop open – Moravian Town, on the Reserve, it’s open on Christmas Day every year).

Of course that all paints a very gloomy picture, and I’m not really a gloomy person, well not all the time. There is the fact that there are at least a couple of days off work for everyone, at least here in Canada, and New Year’s Day isn’t too far away. People use the time of year as an excuse for a party, and to have a drink or two, which is nice (although that really shouldn’t be limited to Christmas). And people do get off their bums to visit their families, which can be nice, mostly.

People other than me really enjoy lighting up their yards (in October), and buying gifts (Amazon helps), and they just like the season. Some really do enjoy their Christian festival by going to church and generally being more attuned to their faith, and others just like the feeling of well being. It’s all good, I guess.

Me, I still feel out of step, and I feel more out of step with every passing year. Maybe, just maybe, one day I’ll have a Dickensian epiphany. Maybe not. Bah, humbug!

We Travel Afar

29 Friday Nov 2024

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My family tree, or at least my knowledge of it, continues to grow.

But I’ll start with the headline. Before I started this family tree thing, I wasn’t aware of any of my relatives having lived their lives outside the United Kingdom. Now I know that my relatives lived in Australia, South Africa, Canada, and above everywhere else, the United States of America. Across my mother’s and my father’s sides of the family, we have had relatives die (that’s the measure I use because quite a few returned to England) in forty-eight of the fifty States of the USA. Only Hawaii and South Dakota don’t hold my family’s DNA. I haven’t done a count up, but I’m sure it’s a few thousand or so.

My dad’s side has a sizeable dynasty in the US, centred in Ohio and Indiana, but spread across continental America. Sizeable groups lived and died in Washington State and Oregon, Kansas and Colorado, and down into Texas. Much of the wider spread is Twentieth Century mobility, with sixty-six deaths in California, and thirty-six in Florida leading the way, but the roots have stayed in the Midwest. It started with one couple arriving in New York in 1822, but has been supplemented by relatives arriving in Chicago, Illinois from Ontario, and Montana from Alberta.

Now I find a whole other group of British escapees from my mum’s side of the tree settled in the Peoria, Illinois, area. It seems that they moved rural North Devon and sailed to Montreal in Canada. From there, they caught another ship that sailed down the St Lawrence River, through Lakes Ontario, Huron and Michigan to Chicago, then down the Illinois River to Peoria. They swapped their Devon farms for new land in the Midwest, and established themselves and their communities in the middle of the Nineteenth Century.

Let’s not forget those who stayed in Canada and set themselves up in Newfoundland, Ontario, and Alberta; not as many as in the USA, but still more than I had reckoned on.

I saw a photograph of a bumper sticker today, coined after the recent 2024 US election, that said “This Country Was Built On Immigration”. My family have certainly played their part in that construction.

More Computer Stuff

24 Sunday Nov 2024

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My old PC, an HP all-in-one with a 34″ curved screen, was showing signs of imminent failure. Microsoft Blue Screens of Death started happening with WHE (Windows Hardware Error) codes, and the screen started to get intermittent yellow lines on it, from top to bottom, and none of that looked good. The old girl had to have been at least seven years old and didn’t really owe me anything, so I thought I’d pension her off before she turned up her digital toes. It’s a bit sad because I’d done some good upgrades, including replacing the original 150GB Solid State Drive (SSD), that was supposed to be the boot drive with a 1TB upgrade, and I swapped out the old 1Tb mechanical hard disk for a 1Tb SSD. That upgrade on the mechanical hard drive was a bit of disaster because I managed to damage the LCD screen when putting it all back together, and lost an inch of visible screen on the left side, and suffered a growing dark stain over about a third of the bottom of the left-hand side of the screen. It was still useable, especially as the screen was so big, but the problem was getting worse.

The HP all-in-one cost me an arm and a leg when I bought it, and right now I don’t have the cash to lay out for a similar system, so I downsized. Now it’s an HP all-in-one with a 27″ screen, but with a bit more memory and slightly faster processors than the old PC. Happily, it cost less than one third of the old machine, which pleased me greatly. My needs are fewer these days, so I’m quite content with the downgrade. Anyway, I can see my desk again, now.

Buying a new PC is quite easy. I shopped around, checked out a few early Black Friday deals and settled on the new HP, direct from HP Canada. I managed to get nearly $700 off the list price, so that was the clincher. I ordered it on the Tuesday night, and I had it in my grubby little hands on Friday afternoon, which was pretty much Amazon speed. Alarmingly, HP Canada proudly boasts Canadapost and Purolator as its partners, which was a quite concerning given that Canadapost is on strike right now. However, it didn’t appear that Purolator was involved in the strike, even though it’s the parcels arm of Canadapost, and I was mightily relieved to see the Purolator van pull up outside my house.

The packaging of the computer was quite ingenious, and the way it was all fitted into the box, meant that because I followed the instructions properly, I didn’t have to handle the screen while getting it out from all the padding. Take it from one who has manhandled a 65″ thin screen TV onto a wall, that’s a real bonus. The keyboard and mouse were both wired models, actually perfect for my needs, and battery-free, but they are very cheap and cheerful, so it hasn’t taken me long to replace those with better models that I had knocking around at home.

Then I began the set up process. Years ago when I was in IT support, I installed hundreds of software packages onto hundreds of PCs, and all using boxes full of floppy disks. It was a slow and painful business, and done at a time when very few PCs had an Internet connection, or even a Local Area Network. Compuserve was our friend back then, but only on the PC that had a modem and telephone line attached. Today, all I had to do was plug a network cable into the back of the PC and let it do its thing. The PC came with Windows 11 pre-loaded, but that all has to be updated and tweaked, but even then I had the thing working within a few minutes and was downloading all the paid software I have collected over the years. I could have cloned the boot disk from my old machine as it was the same size, but doing it the long way, by treating it as a first-time set up, I’ve been able to leave things out and make a few adjustments. A clean start is a good start, even if it takes a little longer.

Early impressions of the new PC are good. The screen resolution isn’t as tight as I’d like, and I could probably tighten it up a little, but I’ll leave it as it is because I’m sure to get used to it. I did hang a second monitor from the PC, and marvelled at how easy it is to do these days with an HDMI cable and Windows 11. The boot up is fast, and the response is good, although as so much is done through the Internet these days, it’s as much about having a decent connection as it is about the speed of the computer. I am slowly switching off all the little things that Windows likes to add, the bells and whistles as it were, that I have no need for. The very first thing I did was revert the right-click context menus to the Windows 10 version. The newer iteration of Windows uses little pictograms for Cut, Copy, and Paste, and if you want a full context menu you have to select it from the top menu, a retrograde step in my view. It seems that there are many Windows users out there who think the same as I do, though, because when you Google “Windows 10 Context Menu”, there are thousands of hits showing you how to achieve your aim. Perhaps Microsoft should take note and offer a choice of context menus at startup?

It’s probably an age thing, but I don’t get the use of so many pictograms in place of the written words. The Windows symbol for “Crop”, for example, means nothing to me. Sure, use the symbol, but put the word “Crop” underneath it for those of us that can read. It’s not just Microsoft, though, smartphone-based Millennials have been brought up on using pictures rather than words, and it’s they who are writing today’s software. Won’t anyone think of the old folk?

Time will tell if the new PC is up to the job, and I do intend to work it quite hard. For now, though, I will sit back and reflect on how all those years of setting up computers at work have proved to be very useful in retirement, even if I don’t need floppy disks anymore.

Family

30 Monday Sep 2024

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I started to trace my dad’s family tree using Ancestry.com, and discovered far flung dynasties, originating from one Irish descendent and his wife leaving Cork in 1801 for the industrial clangour of Leeds, in England’s county of Yorkshire. Joshua Mayne flourished in that city, but his sons were restless. One emigrated with his wife to the United States in 1822, and another in 1849 taking his young family to South Africa. Both of these emigrees sparked vast, and I mean vast, dynasties of Maynes in two different continents. Other family members moved away from Leeds to Canada and Australia to establish other branches of the family.

Looking at my mum’s family, it seemed very much like they were firmly rooted in England’s county of Devon, concentrated around a couple of villages close to Okehampton, and in Kingskerswell in the south of the county. But I discovered the Canadian connection. In the latter half of the nineteenth century there was a steady flow of my mum’s relatives heading to Guelph in Ontario, then fanning out across that Province. None started a big dynasty like the Maynes did in the USA and South Africa, but their descendants live on in Ontario. Then I found John Cater, a Great-Great-Great Uncle, who moved to Newfoundland at around 1855-56, and married a local girl in St. John’s. He sparked another dynasty, one that centred itself in Grand Falls/Windsor, but had connections around the island. I’m certain that I have many, many living relatives who are “Newfies”, and that makes me immensely pleased.

I’m very happy that I have followed the footsteps of all those descendants of mine who crossed the ocean to start new lives. For me it was immeasurably simpler to leave England, but for those nineteenth century Britons branching out around the world, it must have been daunting and exciting in equal measure. Ironically, when I set out for Canada I had absolutely no idea that I was following others in my family, nor that I was joining many, living, members of my family in the New World.

Family, who knew how vast they could be?

The Internet and the Advertising

17 Tuesday Sep 2024

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I may have been here before, but I was reminded of the scourge that is Internet-based advertising when a letter dropped into my real, physical, mailbox inviting me to join the Nextdoor app. Being the introvert that I am, the idea of joining some social media corral filled with neighbours immediately put me on the defensive. I didn’t think “What is this?”, I thought “Who’s making money from this?”.

Nextdoor, as the blurb goes, is a way of using social media to connect with your neighbours. It’s not like a Facebook group in that it’s limited to a set range of people, most of whom have been invited. They touted one of the benefits as “Finding lost pets”, which to me seems a bit of low priority, even for pet owners. Anyway, back to the meat of it. I Googled it, of course, and once I’d sifted through the glowing testimonies (sorry, no “free” app is that good), I came to what I wanted to find, that is who is making money from it.

Of course, revenue is derived from advertising, broad-based and local.

The thing is, no matter how many pets I want finding, I think I already get far more advertisements through my computer than I need, and I take significant steps to prevent them, too. The Nextdoor app is Android (or Apple) based and therefore not as well shielded from advertisements as things on my PC, so should I wish to avail myself of the app to find my lost pet, I’m going to have to suffer an onslaught of advertising.

Yes, I’m aware that much of the good stuff on the Internet is funded by advertising, and I’m sure lots of people get lots of good information from commercials. I’ve even responded to one or two Internet ads myself, but it’s their volume and their relative intrusiveness that bothers me. A few fewer ads, sorry many fewer ads, and I might feel differently, but there are apps out there that are virtually unusable thanks to the advertising overkill. Less is more, people.

I also understand that living in North America now that there’s a different culture around advertising, and by that I mean people are far more tolerant of it. I mean, seriously, how can anyone get excited by advertisements at the Super Bowl? Some will tune in to the game just for the commercials. It’s madness. I went to a summer soccer match in Ohio between two teams from the English Premier League, and they were even sponsoring the damned corner kicks! I know that’s not Internet advertising, but I am pointing out that North Americans clearly have a higher advertisement threshold.

Anyway, I won’t be using the Nextdoor app, mostly because I get too many ads already and I genuinely don’t need any more. As I said in an earlier paragraph, perhaps instead of chasing revenue with higher volumes, which in my case have a negative effect, they could do fewer but make them less intrusive and more interesting. Did I say interesting? Given that North America is the home of modern advertising, I really think ad agencies should be looking at quality before quantity, because right now it’s all quantity and no quality.

A Park In The Sky

29 Thursday Aug 2024

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Last week we visited the St. Thomas Elevated Park, in St Thomas, Ontario. Essentially it’s an old railway bridge that has not only been refurbished as a pathway, but it’s also an outdoor art gallery. What a great thing to do with a massive bit of railway infrastructure that’s no longer needed for it’s original purpose.

Of course it’s been done before, with New York’s High Line snaking through that metropolis, but this little bit of modern reuse is much smaller and much more intimate, and a touch easier to get to for us!

The Elevated Park is a walk along the bed of part of the old Michigan Central Railroad that ran between Buffalo, N.Y., and Detroit, Michigan, through southern Ontario. St Thomas, the Railway City, was about the midway point of the line and served as a major centre for the railroad. The walk stretches a couple of kilometres, east-west, out to the western side of the city, but the key part is the bridge that spans Kettle Creek. The bridge that stands today dates to 1929, was a double tracked structure and stands ninety feet above the river below. It’s been paved, and equipped with unobtrusive modern safety fencing, which doesn’t alter the look of the bridge, and among the benches placed there is artwork by local artists. The whole pathway has been created with public donations and private sponsorship, and is free for anyone to use. I note from the Park’s website that they will take donations any time, so I’ll be sending then a few dollars, I think.

The view from the bridge is spectacular, and dizzying if you look down, albeit that you do look right into the yards of a few houses in the valley. Looking down to the top of the tree canopy is always a joy, and you can do that from ninety feet up. It was very warm when we visited, and while the lead up to the bridge is shady, out on the structure it was a wee bit too exposed to linger without getting sunburned. Not great at the time, for sure, but it does mean that we’ll head back in the cooler weather, and maybe walk a couple of kilometres of the track bed beyond the bridge.

This, of course, ties in with the Grandson’s current obsession with trains. He wasn’t with us on the visit, but I’m not sure we’d have been there at all had we’d not taken him a couple of months ago to visit the Elgin County Railway Museum in the centre of the city, from where trains would have departed to cross the bridge we were enjoying as a park.

Anyway, if you’re ever in the area, I can recommend a visit.

Family Trees

27 Tuesday Aug 2024

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At the outset, let me say that I’m a huge fan of Ancestry.ca (or .com, or .co.uk). The software and it’s underlying data has its detractors, not least because it’s very expensive, but it’s enabled me, and countless thousands of others, to document our families in ways that were simply not possible even just twenty years ago. I’ve met distant cousins, visited graves that I didn’t know existed, and even had them analyze my DNA, so I think the whole thing really is the Bees Knees.

But here’s the “but”.

Because the data entry isn’t controlled, the range and format of what people enter is never ending. All capital letters, no capital letters, abbreviations, codes, misuse of fields, it’s all there. I know it’s true that if you give fifty people a form to fill, it’ll be filled in fifty different ways, so I guess this is something similar. But what, you may ask, does it matter?

Well, it matters a lot. I don’t know if some of the users of Ancestry realise that other people get to see the data they enter; that’s rather the point of Ancestry, that we share information. But including a person’s nickname in the Name field helps no one, and like many of the other data input issues, really screws up sorting and searching. That the nickname is often accompanied by quotation marks or parentheses just adds to the confusion.

Then there are the people who invent their own coded method of data entry, including mothers’ names and spouses names in a person’s First Name and Surname fields not only confuses the database and makes reading the data hard, it’s all unnecessary because these nuggets of information are held elsewhere and linked by the system.

Perhaps what I’m really complaining about is having to go through and re-enter data when it pops up in my family tree, not just to keep it consistent and workable, but to make it look reasonable.

Anyway, nothing will change and I’ll spend a good proportion of my time righting wrongs, in data entry at least. In between times I can happily discover 164 people in my tree who were born in Newfoundland (a week ago I hadn’t heard of any), and realise that a long-lost cousin lived two streets away from where I lived in North London, albeit twenty years earlier. It’s nothing if not interesting in the world of Ancestry.

Things to be grateful for…

13 Tuesday Aug 2024

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Yesterday we went to the flag raising ceremony that marks the start of the local Pride Week, at the Civic Centre. I’m grateful that we have a sympathetic and caring Municipal administration that supports these things, and I’m grateful that the Council, the Fire Department and the Police were all there in support. In a town that can be deeply religious, it’s good to see that Pride Week is seen as positive.

We walked on down to Turns and Tales, a café and bookshop which is a friendly space for all minorities. I’m grateful that such a space exists, and absolutely loved to see the events night schedule that included many curious things, including a Bridgerton Trivia Night; who knew that was a thing? While we were enjoying our lunch, we watched the people on King Street, the town’s main street, and ruminated on the idea that it should be pedestrianized. The shopping has been killed off by the out of town stores and strip malls, but the space is slowly being taken up by cafés and restaurants, and we thought how much nicer it would be to be car-free. Then we watched a youngish woman rifling through the bins in an alley. She had picked up a discarded cigarette butt, but she appeared to be mostly picking up plastic and padded envelopes. She didn’t look like she lived on the street, although she likely did, but she was either high on something, or mentally ill. I’m grateful that no one I know is suffering from mental illness, at least not to that extent, or lost to drugs and homelessness, because I can’t imagine how awful that could be. I’m grateful that my parents imbued me with sufficient common sense and a sense of how to survive. We should, all of us, be doing more to help those who are not so fortunate, and we should be pressuring those in charge to adjust their priorities so that official help can be available. It’s frustrating to hear just this morning about the movement to prevent our City Council from trying to get an affordable housing scheme running, on the grounds that they’ll need tax payer’s money to do it, but I’m grateful that the City is trying something.

I’m grateful that I live in a comfortable home, with people I love, and that I really want for nothing. Certainly, a lifetime of mostly good decisions, and a big slice of luck, has brought us to where we are, but I’m still grateful.

I’m not a believer in a god, or a higher authority, but it does me the power of good to sit and reflect sometimes, on life in general and how lucky we are to be here. Have you tried it?