Living in the Northern Hemisphere, as I have done all my life, I’ve become used to celebrating the midwinter in December. Of course, those annoying Christians hijacked my lovely Pagan rituals and made it all about them, but I fought back a little this year.
With a three-year-old in the house, we’re never going to escape Christmas completely, but we have been working on moving the emphasis away from a rotund fellow in a red suit who is linked to the virgin birth, and looked at the Solstice, the real midwinter. Just writing that down, I realise that there will be lots of people telling me that winter starts on December 21st, but that’s a modern construct and I think more tied into how shops stock themselves with seasonal items rather than anything to do with the rotation of the Earth and the Sun. The Solstice is when things begin and end, and I’m happy to celebrate it.
In less enlightened times, people went to bed when it got dark, and rose again with the sun. The Solstice for them was a key point in the year. They celebrated by trying to light things up, to chase away the darkness, and that’s what we did. White lights on a green tree, natural decorations made of pine cones and evergreen tree cuttings. We made lanterns and walked the dark streets, banishing the darkness and looking forward to longer and more productive days. It felt good, too.
Of course Christmas, with its ideal of family and gift giving, is not to be forgotten. Christians venerate the day, and non-Christians hang onto the good bits of the story, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But it was good to go back to earlier times, to more natural thoughts, at this time of year.
The one thing we lacked in the celebration of this Northern Hemisphere midwinter was some cold weather. It’s been very, very mild. Maybe next year.
I’ve never been much of a fan of Twitter, but seeing that so many influential people (as opposed to the pond scum known as “Internet Influencers”) like to put their thoughts out there on a daily basis, I thought I’d have a go.
I am left-leaning politically, maybe physically as well, I don’t know, so I have “Followed” some people who I think I might find tolerable. Among them Jo Biden and Kamala Harris in the US, and Justin Trudeau, Jagmeet Singh and Christia Freeland in Canada. All are centrists with a lean to the left, at least compared to the populists who occupy the news media these days.
People I don’t follow include Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor-Green in the US, and Pierre Poilievre and Marissa Lantsman in Canada, because they are all of that populist rightwing political genre mentioned above. It’s not that I don’t want to see stuff from them occasionally, but I don’t want my daily feed full of their nonsense.
Over the past three months I have had no posts at all come up on my feed from the politically friendly accounts I chose to follow. Not one. I go and look for their feeds and they’re churning tweets out daily. Hmmmm.
Over those same three months I have had daily tweets from all the people I don’t follow, all of whom have descended to the grotesque depths that Trump and Poilievre have been reaching into. I get updates from spineless fools like Ted Cruz, the Trump children, Mike Johnson, Dan Bongino and a host of other scurrilous US Trump apologists. From Canada I get Poilievre, Lantsman and even the vile trash that is the Toronto Sun. None of these accounts are people I follow.
I have resorted to blocking the worst of them because it’s the only way I can stop the flood. Are they replaced with tweets from people I actually follow? No, of course not, because now I get posts from other right-wing populists, all of whom I wouldn’t follow on Twitter in a month of Sundays.
If you’re ever in doubt that Elon Musk has seriously skewed the Twitter algorithms in favour of his favoured political stance, try it yourself, but be prepared for some awful, awful content.
I still dip into Twitter occasionally, search out people I follow (following is meaningless unless Elon approves, of course), and daily block more right-wing loons. Ah well, there are still the tweets from Canada’s foremost Trucking account to see, and I could watch bad driving videos all day.
I started up my daily walk routine again, and in an effort to avoid walking alongside busy roads, and to avoid crossing those busy roads too often, I tend to pound the residential streets close by. It’s boring, for sure, but I don’t need to get into the car at all, and I have an audiobook playing through my ear buds to keep my mind occupied.
The streets I use are quiet. I can walk hundreds of metres and not see a moving vehicle, except that is, when I want to cross one of those quiet streets.
Some days it seems like they lie in wait, and pounce when I position myself to leave the sidewalk. Like a London bus, you don’t see a moving vehicle for ages, then they appear, usually in packs. Today was one of those days, except that it was delivery trucks following me around. It was UPS and FedEx, and while I imagined fleets of those vans roaming the streets, because I walk in a fairly small area, it’s likely that it was the same UPS and the same FedEx van each time.
They have a job to do, and I don’t, so I’m not complaining about their presence, just that they only appear when I have to cross a road.
I just hope that none of these vehicles is called Christine…
I stand alone in the world of the telephone. Or so it appears.
I find the idea of people calling me at their convenience a total imposition. I routinely ignore calls, regardless of who is calling, simply because it’s not convenient for me to answer. My sense of annoyance is multiplied ten-fold when it’s a telemarketer.
Don’t get me started on people who stay on a cell phone call when they’re having their groceries scanned by the clerk.
The huge hole in my argument, of course, is that I have a (sort of) landline, and a cell phone.
I don’t often make calls myself, though, and will usually communicate by text. Texts are the ultimate in convenience communication as they may be read, or not, by the recipient, but I never expect a reply, at least not until it’s a good time for them to reply, and that may be never.
I was trying to discover the source of my telephone antipathy, and traced it back to (perhaps) someone I once worked for. He would break off any conversation, without a word, to answer a ringing phone. I could not count the number of key conversations relating to work that were instantly lost because his phone took priority over everything. Then there was another boss, getting mad at me for not answering my cell phone to him when I’m instructing a new driver, on the road, while they’re new to a very large chunk of metal travelling at speed. I know who I would rather pay attention to in that situation.
I am, as you will have guessed, a cantankerous old fart, who is getting more contrary by the day. If you have any issue with that, drop me a text to let me know.
P.S. This diatribe isn’t to be taken too seriously.
In just a few days It’ll be forty-three years since John Lennon was murdered. Yes, I can remember exactly where I was when I heard the awful news.
I was born early enough to remember the early Beatles singles hitting the charts, but too young to be out buying records or going to concerts. I was only eleven when they broke up, and yet they form an indelible mark on my life, and I listen to their music regularly. Indeed, with the advent of YouTube I have been able to enjoy recordings of them playing live, and in adulthood have really come to appreciate the energy those young men put into their work. But then I’m an old fart, so you’d expect it perhaps.
I am amazed, though, how my step children, and my three-year-old grandson, are similarly smitten with the music that was created decades before their birth. The three-year-old can name each of the Beatles when he sees them on TV.
Oddly, I don’t think you can’t blame me or their mother for the youngsters’ enjoyment because they picked up their interests from their peers, not us. What is it that makes teenagers today not only take the time to listen to The Beatles, but actually buy their music, and listen to it repeatedly? I’m darned if I know, other than for the fact that The Beatles were the right people at the right time.
As for us old farts, well I listened to the entire Sergeant Pepper album while I was tidying up, just a few days ago. It’s timeless, and I knew all the words to all the songs, and yet I found myself reexamining the lyrics to Within You Without You and marvelling and how good they are. See, they still move me.
We visited Liverpool a couple of weeks ago and were just very slightly wrong-footed at the continued commercialisation of the Beatles story. That didn’t stop us taking Beatle photographs and buying Beatle gewgaws, though, us and many others. It’s an oft used cliché, but what a time to be alive.
On Friday I will give the great John Lennon some extra respect, listen to some of his work and continue to be amazed at just how good he and his friends were to have endured like this.
Today I fitted a new tap, or faucet, to our laundry room sink. The old, very cheap Home Depot offering had snapped off at its plastic base, so this slightly more expensive model is at least metal.
I only mention this because while I’m a passable DIYer, I am no plumber.
But this tap should have been easy to install. The existing water lines had been finished off with isolator valves so surely it was just a case of joining everything up? Well, it was, only the manufacturer made a simple job quite difficult.
There is a sleeve that fastens the tap to the sink, through which you have to pass all the water lines. Hot and cold, obviously, then the one that extends, that you have to part in order to fit the tap, so that’s four lines, and it’s a tight fit. However, the extending line has a quick release valve on it, the component that allows you to part the line, and it was so big that it had to be first line through the sleeve. The problem was that while the extending line was really long, the connection was on a short line, which meant having to push the lines through the sleeve while working behind the bowl of the sink. I looked at the instructions and of course the installation was demonstrated with a sink that was free of any walls. If only the quick release valve had been on the longer line.
Anyway, the job was completed and so far without any leaks. I even managed to connect hot to hot and cold to cold, despite the feed lines not being marked. The tap’s spray head gives out a groovy net-like spray, too, so it was worth all the effort. I’m not sure when my hands and fingers are going to forgive me, though.
One of our reasons for going back to the UK recently was to look up some Mayne family tree things, chief among them the last resting places of some of my relatives.
We visited three cemeteries in Leeds, all of which held the last mortal remains of a few of my direct ancestors. We started with Lawnswood, still very much a cemetery in use, and found my grandparents’ grave marker, as well as the grave of a Great-Uncle and his family. I didn’t know either of my Grandparents as they both died before I was born, but it was an interesting thing to do anyway.
Then we visited Beckett Street Cemetery (formerly known as Burmantofts), opposite the famous St. James’ Infirmary (sometimes known as Jimmy’s). Beckett Street was one of the big public cemeteries built in the nineteenth century to cope with the dead of a rapidly expanding population of Leeds. This cemetery is closed for new burials and is in a bit of an overgrown state, now that Leeds City Council have disowned it. The thing is that it is a wonderful place and absolutely stuffed full of Victorian grave markers and monuments. We didn’t have too long to look around but it would be a fantastic place to spend a day exploring. We found two more grave markers with my ancestors names inscribed upon them, which was excellent.
Beckett Street Cemetery
After that we visited the site of the old Leeds General Cemetery, now a park in the grounds of the university. Most of the marker stones have been cleared and the walled space is a wonderfully quiet place to visit. Some of the grave markers have been laid down to act as footpaths, but we didn’t find one with any of my family’s names one them, despite there being at least twenty of my ancestors recorded as having been buried there.
The former Leeds General Cemetery at St. George’s Field
We missed a few churches in Leeds where my ancestors lie, but the cemeteries were certainly worth us visiting.
Later on in the trip, we walked through Brompton Cemetery in west London and managed to find the family plot for yet another of my ancestors. Brompton is still in use and is run by the Royal Parks organisation. It’s the final resting place of a fair few famous people, and while the family plot we found was certainly quite grand, I don’t think the people laid to rest there count as famous. I have been past Brompton Cemetery many times, but I never knew of the family connection. I have no doubt that a bit more research would have me discover a few more graves in London, but I’d need months to look around them all.
The plot in Brompton Cemetery, London.
Cemeteries are such fascinating places to mooch around it, and there’s an added interest when you see your family name on the stones.
Next year it will be Huntington, Indiana, and it’s environs, as there are a whole heap of Mayne graves to find there.
I’m famed for not much liking Christmas. I’m not religious, so while I understand the relevance of the event to Christians, it’s the seven or eight weeks commercial mayhem leading up to Christmas Day that bothers me. And the pre-Christmas shenanigans start earlier every year.
When I was a kid, Christmas was a time for presents, coloured lights and interminable church services. My mum refused to put a Christmas tree up until about a week before the day, and she didn’t really fully decorate the house until Christmas Eve, normally when the rest of us had gone to church. Then the decorations stayed up until Twelfth Night, by which time we were heartily sick of them. As time went by, people in the UK seemed to have adopted December 1st as decorating day, far too early in my view, but less than a month, and they’ll normally come down on January 1st, not quite Twelfth Night, but a natural time to bring them in.
Arriving in Canada, I was appalled to see for some that Christmas started on November 1st. Most, though, held out until after Remembrance Day on November 11th, which is absolutely a good thing to do. The reason offered by people of my acquaintance was that the weather can get a bit squirrelly in December, so external stuff has to go out earlier. The other shocker was that people with take their decorations down, sometimes, on Boxing Day. Gasp! Mind you, when they’ve been up six or seven weeks, they are beginning to lose their appeal.
In the UK in mid-November this year, I noticed a lot of people were already hauling out the decorations. I guess they’re following the lead of the shops, most of whom start Christmas in October. I did hear people say it was a way of cheering up folk as the nights draw in and the weather worsens, and that is understandable, and it leads us back to why Christmas is celebrated at all. The Christians hijacked many older mid-winter festivals which had been established exactly to mark the shortness of the day and the change to the days getting longer again. I still say that weeks ahead is too early, but the real reason for celebration in mid-December goes much further back than the upstart newcomer Christian festival.
Not quite how we do it, but you get the idea…
Because we have a toddler in the house, we’re not going to get away without at least some Christmas festivities. But we’ve decided to go educational and we’re having two sets of decorations. one for Christmas, coloured lights and all, and the other to celebrate the Solstice. The mid-winter tree has just white lights, and we’ve brought greenery into the house, all those lovely Pagan ideas about banishing the dark, and seeking the green shoots of renewal. I’d love a big Yule log, burning for a week, but I’m not sure the Fire Department would be too happy about that. Hopefully, though, young Charlie will grow up with an idea of why we do what we do in December, and not just see a big fellow in a red suit dishing our presents.
On our recent trip to England, we enjoyed some British Pub Life.
Pubs in the UK are primarily places to socialise. Yes you can get drunk if you want, and yes you can often sit down to a meal, but you don’t have to do either, because you can simply go to a pub to enjoy a drink and spend time with friends. You don’t even have to sit down, you can remain on your feet and be socially mobile, free of the strictures of sitting in one place.
Pub Life
This kind of pub life doesn’t really exist in Ontario. There are plenty of places that are called pubs, even places that claim to be authentically British, but they do not contain pub life, at least not as I know it.
The first thing an Ontario pub will make you do is sit down. The vast majority are table service, and the clue is in the name, there. Yes, you can go to the bar to order, but you’ll end up sitting on a stool there because in most Ontarian pubs, you don’t pay until it’s time to leave, and they do like to keep track of you until then.
Then you’ll find that most people in an Ontarian pub will be there to eat. Again sitting, obviously, but it’s more restaurant than pub at that point, only the presence of alcoholic drinks will give the game away. Of course there’s nothing wrong in going to a pub to eat, but it doesn’t do much for the socialising aspects of pub life.
There are also the people who go to Ontarian pubs to get drunk. Usually loners, propping up the bar and being a long way from any social situation. There is something called Safe Serve in Ontario, where bar staff are trained, and certified, in dealing with people who drink too much. Safe Serve came about after an individual successfully sued a bar for selling them too much alcohol, after that individual has caused mayhem elsewhere while under the influence of the booze. Most bar staff where we live don’t worry too much about the heavy drinkers, but a place in Waterloo we visited had notices up to say that no one would be served more than two drinks. Again, hardly conducive to a social setting.
Sitting! A pub in Michigan.
There are clubs, with music and dancing, that are far more pub-like that actual Ontarian pubs. But they have a different vibe altogether, and you lose the social aspect when you have to shout to get even the most basic conversation heard. Not pub life, in my view.
We were in a pub in Whitehall, London, on the day of the Cenotaph Remembrance Parade, and it was packed with people who’d been parading. So many were standing in groups, clutching drinks, and enjoying just talking with one another. Drink were bought and paid for at the bar, and taken to the standing huddle, so that the socialising could continue. Now that’s pub life.
We also visited a pub in Wapping, where most customers were sitting to eat, but there was a group of friends at the bar, standing and drinking, and getting really quite noisy. That, though, was pub life too; people enjoying themselves and their group laughter was infectious. No one was drunk, for sure, but they were all enjoying that social freedom that you can achieve with a couple of drinks – although of course alcohol isn’t necessary if you don’t want it to be.
The Duke of Sussex in Waterloo, one of our pub life stops
I’m never going to find pub life in Ontario because the culture is different, despite claims to the contrary by people who run pubs here. I’m certainly not going to give up my easy North American lifestyle just for a bit of pub life, but when we go back across the Pond, the pub is one of our first ports of call.
A couple of good choices helped us have a really good time in England this year.
First was choosing British Airways for the flights. They were cheaper than Air Canada and offered a better seat. They use the far superior Terminal 5 at Heathrow, which aided transit significantly. Oh, and they gave us a free, and un-requested, upgrade on our seats for the flight home. Well done BA!
Then it was choosing Sixt car rental. They’re physically located in Terminal 5, which is a massive plus, meaning no bus trips off site. Their price was all inclusive, no extras unless I asked for them. Yes, I was upsold a better car, which pushed the rental price up by quite a lot, but the car, an automatic Audi A3, was the mutt’s nuts, very comfortable and very easy on the juice.
Our next success was the choice of cottage in Yorkshire. It was an outstanding rental and suited us a couple perfectly. Being November, it was also very reasonably priced. I had my doubts about its location, but as it turned out we were ideally placed to do the city trips, Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds, and keep the mileage to a minimum.
Booking public transit ahead of time was good. We’d ordered Tourist Oyster cards (pre-paid travel cards) for London, which was essential, but we also booked trips to Liverpool and to Birmingham on mainline trains, and the Heathrow Express in London, getting good deals along with the discount travelcard (£30 for a Two Together card, giving 33% off most train fares) that we’d also ordered ahead of time. We didn’t get to do the Liverpool trip by train, but because I’d booked online, the train company emailed the night before travel to say that trains had been cancelled, and offered a refund. That gave us time to rejig our plans, and I did get the fares back.
We’d kept looking to see if ITV’s Coronation Street Experience in Manchester would be available while we were in England, and just a week or two before we set off, they opened up a few days and we were able to book a couple of places on that. It was a seriously mad experience, but really worth doing.
The London accommodation was a good pick, too, although there is a lot of choice and I’m sure there were many other good places we could have chosen. We were wise to stay a little out of Central London and use the excellent and inexpensive transit systems to travel in each day, not just from a cost point of view. Travelling home on the bus at night was a joy to behold, to see the (other) city that never sleeps.
We did a fair bit of walking, in London at least, and while tiring, it was wonderful to see so much in such a small area. Public transit is OK, but Shanks’ Pony worked well for us on a couple of occasions.
I think England, and London particularly, is a great place to eat and drink. Yes, we searched out those foods that are familiar to us, but dropping into pubs for pints of beer, gins, and football, is a great way to spend a rainy afternoon. The vegan choices on pretty much all London menus kept SWMBO very happy indeed, and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that we gorged ourselves the whole time.
If there was one negative thing, it was being in England in November. The weather we knew, but I’d clean forgotten just how early it gets dark there, being considerably closer to the North Pole than our little home in Canada (we live on the same latitude as Milan). In London it wasn’t so important as everything stays open late there anyway, but any outdoor activity has to be completed by 4pm at the latest. Still, you live and learn.
It’s a shame, but I don’t think we’ll be heading back to the UK for a while now, unless family matters arise. We need to start saving again!
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