The flight from Vancouver was short. The children and the staff were excited. Collingwood School was headed north to witness the Inuit Games. Traditional Inuit sports which brought in teams from the 11 or so regions of the High Arctic. None of us knew what to expect. Sara* the teacher had a contact who had helped to organise the event. She had seized the moment and kindly invited Pete and Richelle, her colleagues, to join her. We both jumped at the chance.  On arrival in Whitehorse we were to be bussed to an Outdoor Centre. It was February so temperatures were low although not as low as they could have been,

We were off the main road and winding a narrow trail to the centre. It seemed to be slow progress because we were not in Vancouver. We discovered that time and tide were different in the cold beyond. (Actually, Dear Reader, one needs an ocean for tide and there wasn’t one!)The students were young, 9 year olds and up. We arrived at the centre and met in the large building which housed the dining room and the recreational facility. We were met by a lady in late middle age. She quietly exuded warmth and welcome. She was delightfully calm and understated. I was grateful for the lack of energetic effusiveness.  We were shown the cabins in which we were to sleep. I was slightly perturbed with the pot belly stove in the middle of the boys’ cabin. I had images of children stumbling about and burning themselves .  I resolved to sleep next to the stove to prevent accidents. I also decided that when the boys were sent to bed then I would go to bed at the same time.  No way was I going to leave young boys unsupervised when there was a lit fire in the cabin.  

On the first night we had established that the washing facilities and toilets were about 200 yards from our cabin. The temperature dropped. At about 9.00 p.m. the boys and I left the girls in the rec room and trekked off to get ready for bed. All ablutions were complete. The children were in their bunks, in their sleeping bags. The lights were off and stories were being told. I was stretched by the stove, warmed by its heat, comfortable in its glow, listening to the chat.

“Excuse me, Mr. Davidson, I need the washroom.”

“No problem, just put a coat and boots on and pop around the outside of the cabin, do what you need and dash back in”.

Silence. 30 seconds pass. There is no movement from the wee lad who needs a wee.

“Excuse me, Mr. Davidson.”  The same polite voice from the dark.

“Yes. I thought you needed a pee.”

Silence.

“Excuse me, Mr. Davidson (hesitation), it is of the #2 variety”.

It took me a few seconds to understand what ‘the #2 variety’ was. Inward cursing. Head torch on, Rummaging for socks, hat and gloves, snow pants, winter coat.

“I have to come with you. Wrap up warm”.

So we left the cosiness, walked out into the chilliness, shivered the short distance to the washroom. I waited, my irritation abated, I chuckled at the ‘#2 variety” and knew that that would stay with me as a memory.

Before breakfast on the following morning, we ventured down to the lake with the children. A previous group had built snow shelters on the icy surface. The children played as children do. We were to go dog-sledding after breakfast. The meal was over and we went back to the lake to await the arrival of the sleds. We were scheduled for a time but we had forgotten that time was different up here. Eventually we heard snow mobiles and the barking of the dogs. And they were there. A husband and wife team and sleds. There is nothing like a canine invasion to excite children more. What an experience! Suddenly I thought of the verse of Robert Service and the poetic  picture he painted of the vast unpopulated wilderness of the Arctic. We were not long enough on the sleds but I was conscious of wanting to see what was round that next corner, explore this arboreal island, the wish to move onward for ever and up. But it was a wonderful  taster, Dear Friends . Added to that we had come to see the competition and experience the culture of the Inuit peoples. It was a trip to the far North which many people never experience. It was wonderful for me as an adult and I hope, Friends, the memory is still with the children who experienced it.

I was thinking about this amazing trip the other day when I was trekking down memory lane with some ex-colleagues.  Long back burner memories came to the fore, uncalled for but not unwelcome. For example, I remembered, the young mother requesting an urgent meeting with me after school. As with all such events I immediately went to the dark place which assumed I had done wrong although I did not know what. We all know, Friends, the lurking gloom at work when the untoward meeting appears from the distant unknown. The ‘terra incognita’ destined to darken our day. There was some trepidation when 4.00 p.m. arrived.  The mum arrived looking worried and concerned.

“What can I do for you?” I tried my most ingratiating smile always a risk because the Davidson physiognomy  often musters the opposite of what is intended, poison coming to supper.

“Sometimes at night when he is asleep, I stand at his open bedroom door and for about 15 minutes I cannot take my eyes away from the beauty and innocence of my sleeping boy. I don’t think I should do that. What do you think, Mr. Davidson?”

I tried not to look confused. I tried to find the words.  Eventually.

“Mrs. ——–,  what’s the problem with that?” Another ghastly smile from Davidson

Of course it was what she had wanted to hear. Her smile showed relief and validation.  After she had gone, I was still confused  but, of course, relieved.

One afternoon many years ago, Dear Friends, I lost a 9 year old. I thought I had dismissed my class properly at the end of the day. Bus, daycare or parent pick up seemed to have gone smoothly. But  suddenly I was faced with a mother who was upset and panic stricken. I was having visions of an end to my career but could not understand what had happened. After searching the school to no avail, contacting the bus company, parents who were family friends, it was discovered that ‘Colin’ was at home. Mum and I were both relieved. We both sat down with him the following day. We discovered that he had decided to assert his independence by walking home.  I became teacherish and preachy and lectured him in mum’s presence about health and safety and such like. After he had left the room and I had stabled my high horse, Mum was still, I could see, upset but I could now sense that she was more angry with him than me.

“Hmmm, I see, Huckleberry Finn is alive and well and living in West Vancouver.”

I thought as I was blurting that this might not be received well but she laughed in relief and went out of the door to pick up ‘Huck” and take him home.

I am always amazed, Dear Reader, about how events long gone can suddenly come into view again, snowdrops after a long winter. I remembered these events out of the blue because of a conversation that I was having with a friend.  I had forgotten their existence.

Like all of you and often me, pulled along on the dog sled of life, wanting to see around the corner of the next frozen bay, I want to somehow understand how and why suddenly a blast from the past suddenly comes upon us, a memory that we had forgotten.  There are many mysterious ‘motes troubling the mind’s eye’ and that, Dear Friends, is the somewhat tenuous way in which I can justify the title of this blog! I leave you with Robert Service:-

“Thank God! There is always a Land of Beyond

For us who are true to the trail;

A vision to seek, a beckoning peak,

A farness that never will fail.”                          The Land of Beyond.

Thanks for reading.

*Thank you Sara, for including me in this trip. It was one of the highlights of my 20+ years at Collingwood School.

I left school in 1970 at the age of 18. I first set foot into the real world with a façade of confidence, five years at boarding school having taught me how to conceal the real me. Through a variety of connections and youthful laziness, I managed to find a job as an hotel porter in the village of Aviemore, an outdoor resort in the Highlands of Scotland. The staff accommodation was excellent so it felt like I was back at boarding school. But the work force was far different from anything I had experienced before.  Most of them were from Glasgow. They were definitely working class and had found it difficult to find work in their native city. The combination of alcohol and close living quarters often led to altercations of a physical variety, most of which I avoided.

In contrast the man who ran the stores was an upper class middle aged Cornishman called Arthur Trevenna.  He seemed to be an anachronism in the hard bitten  toughness of much of the workforce. One would have thought that this Englishman with the crystal glass accent  would be roundly despised and mocked by his workmates. But Arthur had a way about him.  Certainly he could walk with kings but he could talk with everybody.  He was blessed with twinkling eyes and a  weary wisdom. We all warmed to Arthur and, frequently he became our father confessor, our imparter of practical wisdom. I should mention here, Dear Reader, that Arthur had been a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. I knew little of this precursor to World War II at the time but have since learned through reading George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway what a nasty little war it was.

Life at the hotel was fun. Carrying guests luggage up to their rooms,  sticking Archie in the sauna because he had overindulged on his tips; helping Colin Campbell load his musical instruments and sound system back into the elevator because he had unloaded them on the 10^th floor rather than the first. All the floors looked the same. Being offered 3 pounds 40 pence per day on my days off to clear snow off the road to the ski hill on Cairngorm .  It was good to be young and healthy but, Dear Reader, I was so, so  naïve that the worldly wise exploited my innocence with merciless mendacity

“You’re a pheasant plucker, Davidson.”

I was sat in a group in the staff dining room in the bowels of the hotel. I did not know how to react to this statement but, I felt, that in such company I should at least show that I was able to stand up for myself. I foolishly mounted my high horse, I took offence. Arthur had voiced this statement with his usual twinkle and his inkling of a smile. I took all by surprise by becoming red in the face, standing up and storming out of the lunch room. Well I sort of made a stand, Dear Reader, but hardly a glorious exit  The quizzical looks of the group followed me on my way. Eventually laughter broke out as I exited. I spent the rest of the day inwardly upset and thinking how I should respond to this slur on my character, this verbal act of bullying.

A young long-haired fellow was in charge of the hotel plate wash. His name was Sinclair. I warmed to him. When I walked through the kitchens he would often be found chin on elbow resting on the metal work top waiting for the current batch of dishes to finish its cycle in his pal, Hobart. Hobart being the brand name of the  dishwasher.

“Ye niver can hurry Hobart, laddie.”

I was always ‘laddie’ to him despite our closeness in age. I would always acknowledge him when I passed   He would respond with a variety of incomprehensible grunted greetings, each of them unique.

“Correach aye, laddie”.

Working in the plate wash was neither challenging nor interesting, I guess that ‘Sinkie’ had to make his own entertainment.  Over a pint one night I asked him how he had found a job in the Strathspey Hotel plate wash being as he was from some obscure corner of South-Western Argyllshire.

“Where else would ‘Sinkie’ Sinclair work, laddie?”

Amidst laughter from the gathering in the pub. I did not understand. I was a great deal slower in those days. A further example of Davidson missing the point. Hiding Archie in the sauna because he was too drunk to work was a plan to save Archie’s job but we who conceived it did not realise that we could have seen Archie off from something far worse than his job. Drunk man in the sauna, quick dehydration, sleeping in excessive temperatures could have resulted in Archie’s demise.  Doesn’t bear thinking about, does it, mes amis?

Dear Friends, I was used to living with others through my school experience. But my upbringing had been comfortably middle class. I had mixed with the rich and famous. Two actors sons, in the shape of Michael Wilding and Nick Hawkins. A royal from the kingdom of Brunei.  Sammy Ashamu, son of a Nigerian magnate.  And here I was with a variety of characters from some of the rougher estates of Glasgow. I don’t know whether or not I was a snob then. I do know that my every day was filled with uncertainty. How would they feel about this spoilt rich boy working with them? I need not have worried. I was accepted very quickly.

After about a day or so of angst, wondering how I would handle Arthur’s slur on my character, he called me over to join him for lunch. He looked me in the eye.

“We’re all laughing at you, Peter.”

I must have reddened again. He chuckled.

“What do you think, a pheasant plucker is?”

“Something not very nice,” I muttered.

“Oh Dear, Oh Dear. JJ come over here and explain it to the laddie.”

John Jordan one of the hotel waiters came over.

“Arthur called you a pleasant f _ _ _ er.”

And that, Dear Reader, was what might be called, if not a ‘teaching moment’ then certainly a learning  one.

Like many independent schools, Collingwood hosts an annual Spring Fair as a fund raiser. It is a fun-filled joyous occasion. (Well, as I write this, I have the memory of the sickly taste of whipped cream about my features because young children used to pay money to put a plate of whipped cream in my face, so, Dear Reader, it is fair to say that writing ‘joyous’ caused a frantic twitching of my  eye tic.) The dunk in the water tank, Dear Reader, was a far better deal. Well marginally. What do you think, Lisa Evans?

The parent body is multi-cultural so the food for sale is magnificent. I always walked through the woods from the Cleveland Dam not wishing the chaos of parking at the school. I brought an empty day pack with me because I knew that I was going to buy food for our evening meal at home. Truth be told, like most of my life, I was only in it for the food. Herewith endeth the introduction.

In one particular academic year I had a keen and enthusiastic mother in my class. Actually I had many such characters on my daily round. They were sort of intimidating because I didn’t effervesce to match their fizz.  My enthusiasm was there but at a deep seated cavernous depth, a sort of abyss of lurking demonstrativeness whereas theirs was all bounce and bubbles, a surface of excitement.  I had one mum who took energy to a new exhausting level. She was into everything Collingwood, a gem of a volunteer, probably wanted by every politician vying for power,  certainly needed  by every advertising agency striving for sales.  I remember her with tired affection, glad for her presence, feigning disappointment at her absence. She had a heart of gold, her generosity of time and spirit permeated the hallways of the school, molten lava down a mountain side. Were there no bounds to her eagerness, Dear Friends?

 I remember flinching one morning when she walked towards me down the hallway flanked by three other formidables. Friendly wave from a cohort of intimidation.

“Mr. Davidson, Mr. Davidson, a quick word.”

Every exit escape route blocked off. No point in pretending I was late for somewhere else. Bite lip, force friendliness, glib welcome.

“We are having a parent coffee morning. Anything you would like us to bring up?”

“Not offhand but I’ll think of something”.

Feeling of dread, a parent coffee morning could ruin my whole week. Nothing I wanted less, Dear Friends, than a raft of new ideas, innovation snapping at the heels of the Davidson equanimity, my life-jacket of peace hopeless on a vast ocean of well-intentioned seas.

“And another thing, no more sad novels.”  Four waving of fingers, shaking of heads.

I was reading ‘Shiloh’ with my class, a heart-rending dog story about a mistreated beagle.

“It has a happy ending,” I pleaded pathetically.

Walking through the door that night after work, Irene had laid out about 10 of my old rugby jerseys which she had decided were to be donated to the used clothing section of the Spring Fair. I was to deliver them to the senior campus in the morning on my way to the junior school where I worked. She never wanted to see them again.  We all know, Dear Friends, the lie of the land when our partner in life decides on a purge. I was to be rid of that which was second most dear to me, my rugby jerseys, on the instructions of she who was and is most dear to me. I searched for ‘buts’ with which to rebut but I could see the look that brooked no but-ing of buts. My rugby jerseys were doomed.  An unstoppable force of nature had spoken. I dropped them  off for the fair.

As a favour to staff and select parents such as those who helped organise the event of which Mrs. High-Energy in my class was one, on the Thursday before the Saturday we were allowed a preliminary visit during which we could purchase that which we wished. Wonderful for Collingwood teachers with young children to clothe, methought, but Davidson in a clothing store? More likely to find a polar bear in a sauna.  We were allowed in before the ‘great unwashed’ arrived on the Saturday. I could never be a part of the ‘great unwashed’ Dear Reader, because I was often in the dunk tank.  (Ha! A puerile joke from the woeful wit that is Davidson!)

The Spring Fair, as ever, was uplifting. I left with a smile on my face, a bounce in my step and drooling with anticipation at the mealtime goodies in my backpack. I had showered off the chill waters of the dunk tank or soaked the whipped cream from my face. I can’t remember which particular of those two traumas I had experienced that year. The curry and rice mingled with the forest fragrances as I walked down through the woods. Dogs sniffed the air as I passed.

Monday morning came. I always arrived at school early. As usual Viktor and the maintenance department had opened up. One of my early morning pleasures was my brief chat with Viktor before the day began. I was surprised, however, when some 20 minutes before the main bulk of children arrived, the aforementioned  enthusiastic mother was knocking at the door of the classroom. She had done so much to help with the Spring Fair that I thought she would be heavily involved in counting the takings or a dawn debrief with her Parent Council cronies over a cuppa Jo. But there she was in my classroom with her child in tow. I congratulated her on the success of the event and all the hard work she had put in. But she could not contain herself she was on to other things. She had a large kit bag in front of her. She was keen to show me its contents.

“Mr. Davidson, Joanna and I have something for you..”

She unzipped the bag with a flourish.

“I saw these at the Fair. I thought to myself, “I know just the person who would appreciate them.” We bought them for you. They’re XXL so we know they will fit.”

(Beaming smiles from mother and child)

“Ta-da”.”

And there, in all their wear worn splendour, Dear Friends, were my tattered old rugby jerseys.

Thanks for reading.

A few years back I blundered into a local coffee shop and before I could think about ordering, the young barista asked me, out of the blue, what I would do if I won the lotto. We had never met so I was somewhat confounded by the question but not so confused that an answer  did not spring from some cobwebbed corner of the Davidson mind,.

“I wouldn’t want to win the lotto because it would change my life.”

I didn’t really know where that came from but the young woman was nonplussed by my answer. I was thinking, Dear Reader, about this incident when I was out for a walk the other day. I suppose it sort of came about because I was pondering the amount of money people were prepared to shell out for the Taylor Swift experience.

As I have said frequently in my blog posts, I have lead a pretty happy go lucky existence over my life. So what would I want if all of a sudden millions of dollars landed in my lap? I know more about what I would not want.

Irene and I have lived in our house in Norgate Park here in North Vancouver since 1991. I would not want to leave it for somewhere else.  I love the niches and nooks around the house, the cosiness of my reading chair, the back garden. In many ways it is a dishevelled old house; it is dry inside but there are bits that have seen better days. So what! I too have seen better days but would not exchange every wrinkle on my brow; every groan when I make an effort to stand; nor my arthritic right knee; not the tic in my left eye. Every one of these wee ailments represents something I have done in my youth, something which I do not regret whether or no it went wrong or right. I feel , probably wrongly, that I have worked  hard for every wrinkle, every wince, every stress that has contributed to what I am today. The house too has worked hard, we who live here respect its wrinkles. We and the house have grown old together.

Our Mazda 3 vehicle we bought as new in 2009 and it still runs as it did 15 years ago. It gets us from A to B locally and I am confident it would get us from A to Z if we decided to barrel off into the wild blue yonder aka the Coq. Irene and I frequently pop back to the UK for visits to meet with family.  It is an expense but it doesn’t break the bank. We stay in the cheapest accommodation available and none comes cheaper than when we stay with family. Neither of us needs to pay a lot of money to put our heads on a pillow and sleep. I can sleep leaning against a wall if the time is right.  We are not sun seekers.  The weather  is an irrelevant aside.  But, don’t get me wrong, I do have an hankering to visit interesting places and feel  the nuances of different cultures.  But we can already afford that, we don’t need a sudden blizzard of money to reach that particular goal.

However I have heard the argument about the good we could do if we had a lot of money. A charitable legacy to a worthy cause is indeed laudable. We do donate to charities close to our hearts already but obviously our enough is never enough and our enough if we were able to contribute more would also not be enough.  We have two adult children who work very hard in their professional lives,  they are well paid yet struggle to pay the rent every week. One of them really has no alternative but to live in his parents’ house and pay us rent. It is fine to have him here, really no problem at all but the fact that a good wage earner is priced out of the housing market, rental or otherwise, does not bode well for the health and wealth of the area or, indeed the country.  Would we like to give lotto winnings to our adult children? The answer to that is that of course we would.

I don’t really know where I am going with this, Dear Reader, My blurting to the barista was in response to her left field question. But in my heart of hearts, in W.B. Yeats’ “deep hearts core”, I have probably embraced the struggle. Whenever things have been difficult or things have gone awry and I have moaned and complained and whimpered and wimped my way through professional or personal crises, I have come through the other side, puffed out my cheeks, taken a deep breath. If I have not thought that the experience was fun then I feel still strong enough to stick my head above the parapet for the inevitable next time. I know that the ‘next time’ will not be a visitation from a long lost friend but, in the words of Michael Caine, I will feel equipped to ‘embrace the difficulty’. Not for the first time will I notice that the Greek word for ‘crisis’ also has the nuance of ‘opportunity’. If I have to gain another wrinkle in the process hopefully I can regard such as nothing more than an honourable notch to my gun. And what we all know, Dear Friends, is that there will be a next time even if we suddenly have loads of money.  “All that glisters is not gold’ as the poet would say. As J. P. Cavalluzzo used to tell the children during his time as an Head at the junior school at Collingwood School, “Character is destiny”.

I am not against betting. I used to bet on an horse at the Grand National every year in the UK. I have bet on Scotland to win the 6 Nations rugby championship, a forlorn hope indeed. Irene and I will occasionally buy a lotto ticket and I cross my fingers in the process in the wish that we should never win it, a wish that has been happily fulfilled so far.

So what is my point? I am not a stoic. I don’t think I am a prude. I embrace all kinds of wee peccadilloes.  I am very happy to cavort my way into the odd sin or two.  But, Dear Friends, sloshing along on a rainy walk with millions of dollars in my pocket would be a burden too far. I would likely be wracked with guilt for having it in the first place. I would unburden myself of it amongst local and international charities.  I would pay a visit to my local bookshop. I would despatch Irene to our local spa treatment centre. But, Dear Friends, it would be a burden. It would not relieve me of worries. It would, no doubt, make me lazier than I already am.  It would have me pontificating louder than usual and, believe me, nobody I know wants that.  The idea of Peter Davidson Elon Musking his wealth as an arrogant gung holiness produces a shiver down my spine and a good reason for anybody walking  towards  me suddenly to give a body swerve in a different direction.  

 Dear Reader, as we all know, riches do not begat happiness.

Thanks for reading.

The river and the riverbank needed each other. Without the bank there would be an inundation and a lake, without the river there would be no wet and an arid desert.  They were two different worlds but, of necessity, linked.  The tadpoles, the frogs, the ducks and the swans made the river their own. In the holes on the bank lived the voles, the rats, the otters and the occasional muskrat. Each went about their business and, of necessity, the twain ever met. The river was a calm, gentle, meander until the rains rushed and the cascades cavorted.  The banks were a haven of holes, a mine of dungeon darkness but with pathways and order, nests and homes, protected from the river but needy of what it offered.

This particular river was a happy place. The wildlife realised its place in the circle of things. It provided and was provided for. It was balanced and at peace. But, of late, there had come unusual ripples, eddying disturbances. The majestic swans who glided effortlessly with peaceful pride through bulrush and reed, through still waters and rough were noticing something untoward amongst their number. The trumpeter swan who had always lurked on the edge of popularity, was now more frequently paddling intrusively into the equanimity of his peers .He was becoming an unwanted incursion. As he aged he was becoming more and more aggressive, not only that, but his beautiful white complexion was ripening into orange.  There were whisperings on the river that he was stirring things up in a less than subtle manner.  For example, he thought there were too many salmon appearing during the spawning season and thought that they were useless anyway because all they did was give birth and die. He wanted to ‘drain them  from the swamp’ as he so crassly put it. On the other hand, he didn’t like that the eagles were swooping from nowhere and taking ‘our’ fish and ‘our’ frogs. He particularly didn’t like the fact that the neighbours who lived in the river bank were ever more frequently encroaching on our river and stealing our jobs and bringing in their diseases and eating our  young. He rallied together a group of his fellow swans and riled them into a frenzy so that they agreed that they ought to build a dam between them and the bank. “Y’all need a wall” was his catchy slogan.

Meanwhile in the bank Muskrat was burrowing and talking and raising banners and putting forth ideas. He had ruled the tunnels, the enclaves, the niches and the nooks ever since his grain supply had far outreached, by many billions, any storage that any other creature could hope to attain. He watched Trumpeter Swan from afar and saw in which direction things were going. He knew that as a native of the river bank he could never be a ruler of the river because foreign born rodents could not rule in such an environment. But he thought he could  influence and edge his way into some sort of power . Muskrat arranged to meet Trumpeter Swan.

Muskrat was invited to Trumpeter’s nest, a luxurious waterfront property in some reeds to the west of the river. It was named ‘Far-il-legal’.  Muskrat set off early one morning to swim the short distance.  He was a little bit annoyed that Trumpeter was not there to greet him but, it was explained, that he was attending a flock of swans and that, as he had elected himself their leader, it behoved him to stay as long as possible. The reason he gave was  that they could not get enough of his orange tainted oratory.  When eventually he did arrive, Trumpeter gave Muskrat the gift of a baseball cap on which was written, “Make our river great again’. Muskrat put on his MORGA hat, not because he wanted to but because he was in the throes of ingratiation.  Trumpeter talked non-stop about his plans for the river and, indeed, the riverbank, none of which made any sense to Muskrat. But he didn’t care about that, his two interests being power and wealth. Muskrat was wise and diplomatic enough to share only his plans to increase his wealth . He sensed that Trumpeter possessed one real attribute and that was an huge ego, a vast acreage of me, myself and I which he had spent years cultivating, a garden of me-den. His animal cunning, ‘cos he was an animal after all, knew that if he moved in on Trumpeter’s sense of entitled power he would be sent packing.  Accordingly he flattered Trumpeter when he spoke of taking over the local farmland, fawned when he spoke of buying up the distant forests and tried a smile when he pontificated  about making the riverbank the 51^st state.  He grinned and nodded, smooched and blarneyed, watched and waited.  Trumpeter’s trust for him grew.

At one well attended rally, Trumpeter asked Muskrat to speak. It was a hot sunny day so Muskrat offered any Trumpeter supporter free run of the cool riverbank tunnels and a limited access to his grain supply. Several cygnets, their necks with a strange red hue, not yet educated in the ways of the world or, indeed, in the ways of anything else, jumped at the chance. They swore an oath to the Trumpeter and were escorted by some of Muskrat’s minions over to the riverbank.

Time moved quickly and before long Trumpeter found himself undisputed leader of the river. Muskrat was able, with subtlety, to delay the building of the wall. He moved freely amongst his own kind and more and more he mingled with the inhabitants of the river. There he proceeded to influence with a quiet word here and an underhand bribe there.  Over a period of about a year, the river dwellers became slowly disillusioned with Trumpeter’s proclamations; slowly realised that Trumpeter’s truth was a holiday home visited infrequently ; that Trumpeter’s reality was a miasma of meanderings with a lost horizon beyond which lay a confusion of unknowns. They started to seek out Muskrat for a solution to their problems, for logical pragmatism. Gradually Trumpeter found himself being ruler in name only. He found that he could certainly promise the grandiose but that he could only deliver his plans with reliance on Muskrat’s generosity and benevolence.  It came as a shock one day when he spotted a wedge of his closest swans flying overhead and leaving the river for the riverbank. It became obvious over time that they were not going to return.  Their nests were no longer on the river but a little bit set back on the bank. No longer did they have to forage for their own food because Muskrat met their needs. Trumpeter tried to entice them back with promises of old jobs in old places. But they all recognised that a nest on an earthen solid was far safer than one on an unpredictable river.  Particularly when they saw that a climactic event had wiped out the homesteads of Trumpeter’s most loyal. He talked a good line about helping them recover but no aid, not a jot, was forthcoming.

Trumpeter started to age very quickly. His supporters began to distance themselves from him. Within the space of a couple of years, it became obvious that he was a naked shadow, albeit still an orange one. His roost was  becoming more and more isolated and eventually the court of ‘President’ Muskrat was where the power lay.

Meanwhile on a lonely wilderness lake in a northern country far, far away , a solitary loon had offered its plaintive cry and the other creatures had begun to listen.

As I entered my teens some 60 years ago, there was a moment when I discovered that I liked poetry. I no longer like poetry, I love poetry. Poetry has been my comfort and my joy for so long.

On solitary walks I will recite poems I have memorised to myself. If I am unlikely to meet people I will recite poetry out loud. If I awake in the night and am unable to get back to sleep, I will test my memory. If I have my back pack with me I will always ensure that I have a Robbie Burns anthology lurking somewhere within. If I am waiting for a train, plane or aeroplane I will reach for my book of poems. Just occasionally when I am in company I will burst into a rendition of a poem that I love. I don’t do that often because people become embarrassed when I do. So I guess we cannot pick our embarrassments. Every man to his own taste as the old wife said as she kissed the cow!

One would think that, with this expressed passion of mine, I would be keen to try my hand at writing poetry. I have tried my hand and am absolutely terrible at it. I guess that at some point in my life I was disappointed that I could not achieve anything of note in this sphere but I can’t remember being overburdened with chagrin. Instead I became more than happy to read and learn the poetry of others. I am overawed by the abilities of a Wordsworth, a Coleridge, a Tennyson to write with such succinct clarity and such rhythmical discipline. It is, perhaps, a sad reflection of my life that I can recite from memory over one thousand lines of Robbie Burns on a good day. Mmmmm, perhaps a bad day if one has to listen to it. So, Dear Reader, as we approach Burns Night on January 25^th, I am revisiting my Burns for something appropriate for the night. I am determined not to submit our guests to over 200 lines of ‘Tam O’Shanter’ as once I did. I tried to persuade them that it was not my fault but it was a duty I had to perform. Behind the glazed eyes I could sense that they were unconvinced. They would not be so polite the second time around, Dear Reader. Incidentally there is a valley in Iceland which probably still reverberates from this epic poem as I spouted it with vigour as I walked my lonesome way up it in 2016.  I now consider this to have been somewhat foolhardy of me because the whole island is an active volcano and nothing is more likely to stir up the lava juices than an hefty rendition of this Burns epic. Even worse might have been an outburst of ‘To a haggis”! This year guests are going to get a truncated version of “The Twa Dogs” which is a poem I have come to love.

Many years ago, Landseer the painter, painted Burns’ two dogs in magnificent detail. I stumbled on his picture on Amazon and could not resist ordering a print. Hopefully it will arrive before our party.

Burns was at his most effective when he used nature to propound his beliefs on the human condition His “To a Mouse’ is a wee gem of a poem. John Steinbeck quoted from it as the title of probably his most famous novel, “Of Mice and Men”.

“The best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley”

Is the fuller quotation.

“To a Louse” never fails to produce a smile as Burns sits behind a young woman in church watching as a louse crawls up her bonnet.

“O wad the power the beastie gie us to see oorsels as ithers see us.”

And oh how one fails in that judgement of oneself. Dear Reader, just when I think that I have mastered the tightrope walk between hubris and humility, I am unbalanced and falling headlong into the valley of folly before the wisdom and honesty of Irene. But what happens to us if we have not an Irene to tell us who we really are? Everybody needs a ‘beastie’ and if that happens to be one’s wife then that is why she is the better half.

But back to those two dogs in “The Twa Dogs”, the one is the laird’s dog, Caesar. He is the rich man’s dog, the one with the fancy collar. His friend, Luath, is a plowman’s collie. Wealth meets poverty. After frolicking about, they eventually sit down and discuss each other’s station in life. In doing so they present a wonderful panorama of how society operated in the Scotland of the 18^th Century. Over 200 lines of perceptive brilliance, shrewd understanding and masterful rhyme and rhythm, all from the mouths of two dogs who are friends that cross the class divide.

Maybe when I first read this poem, I was tired, Dear Friends. Maybe I had a problem that needed solving. Perhaps there was a burning issue in my life that was causing angst. But there was a moment at the end when I had a lump in my throat, a deep feeling of pathos and sadness almost overwhelmed me. I think it was because in the last eight lines which signalled the end of their discussion, I knew that I was never to meet these characters again and I was saddened by it. That is strange to me, Dear Reader, because generally I am not that emotional about much let alone the written word but here are the last 8 lines of the poem which so demonstrably hit home to me:-

“By this the sun was out o’sight,

An’ darker gloamin brought the night

The bum-clock hummed wi’ lazy drone,

The kye stood rowtan I’ the loan;

When up they gat an’ shook their lugs,

Rejoiced they were na men but dugs;

And each took off his several way,

Resolv’d to meet some ither day.”

                                                               Happy New Year to you all.

‘For auld lang syne’, Dear Friends.

Aaah, Dear Friends, let me introduce Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Some of you may have heard of him and, no doubt, all of you would like to pronounce his name. Young Grant Harder, a name you probably can pronounce, is the only person I know who can say his name properly. I will try to get in touch with this most wonderful of teachers and ask him to help me out. But, in the meantime, Dear Reader, forget I ever mentioned him, Mihaly C, that is, not Grant Harder, and try to adjust your focus to my pathetic wee tale.

I walk with a friend every week. His wife drops him off and I take him home thereafter. I was so doing a few weeks ago but had on my mind a few tasks that had to be done. It would be fair to say that I was a bit distant that day, my mind was on other things. I had just had my car serviced and was told that I really needed to replace my snow tyres as two of them were looking somewhat worn. Another expense which I could have done without. I was also dealing with an annoying bureaucratic issue which was not being sorted out in the few days it should have taken. A friend suggested that I trek along to my federal MP and that, generally, Liberal MP Jonathan Wilkinson is an help in these matters. My son suggested an excellent tyre place and my friend told me where the MP had his office. They were 100 yards apart on a local street.

I had a wonderful walk with my friend, dropped him at home and suddenly had a thought. The tyres and the MP were on the way home but I really wanted my lunch. Did I really want to pull over at an area where parking would be difficult, line up to make an appointment for new tyres a couple of weeks down the road, then pop in to Mr. Wilkinson’s office to discover that it was closed and there was nobody to help? I would give it a try but I felt it was a forlorn hope. Maybe if I had downed a chicken pot pie and sated my hunger I would have been more optimistic. I am a simple soul.

There was no parking spot, just a jagged car free zone outside the tyre place. I shook my head and pulled over and parked illegally. I went into the office where the guy behind the desk was just finishing with a customer. I explained that I needed four new winter tyres for a Mazda 3. What type of tyres? No idea. Was the car here? Out front. He dashed out from behind his desk, turned the corner and looked at my car. He gave me a quote and told me to return in 20 minutes and it would be done. I was gobsmacked. I left. I wandered down the street, found the MP’s office and was told to walk up the hill to the back and buzz for entry. I was welcomed by a young man, Thomas, who sat me down and took all my details and promised to do his best. I left, walked back to the tyre place, paid the bill and was told it was parked on the other side of the street. I was unable to wipe the smile off my face during the 20 minute drive home, Dear Reader.

So, Friends, you will know what a state of flow is because you all will have had moments when things just fit into place seamlessly. You have all been there. It is the tennis serve that always goes in; the problem with which you have struggled for hours and walked away from and then found that the solution was bleeding obvious; it’s the lesson which you taught and suddenly found that all the children were immersed in it and had learned from it; it is struggling to find the right words and opening one’s mouth and finding that they are there. I would love to hear from you on my email about your personal ‘states of flow’.

I guess that the opposite of state of flow is ‘Murphy’s Law’ when what can go wrong, will go wrong. We have all had those events, have we not? I guess that this is a ‘a state of unflow’.

My erstwhile colleague and friend, Grant Harder, has a problem he doesn’t know he has yet, Dear Reader. You see, friends and I battle with the Globe and Mail cryptic crossword every morning. Sometimes nothing happens. Try as we might we cannot get started. The world is a blank, the words do not flow. Inwardly I start to panic. Age has caught up with me. That which once I had I have no more. My head droops, my confidence wanes. I ‘woe is me’ my way home, slump in a chair and try to find my sunny uplands, serene moments and better days. I dabble in other things, I look for wee tasks, I go for a long walk. I return home and there on the dining room table is my pen and my blank crossword taunting me, teasing me, mocking me. I shrug my shoulders and pick it up. Then there is a moment. I answer a clue and soon all is revealed, I have completed the crossword, admittedly with phone call help from my friend. But all is suddenly right with my world again. But if it continues to go wrong, then I mutter ‘Grant Harder, Grant Harder’ under my breath because if he had never told me about ‘unpronounceable’ I would have just accepted that blundering on was my state of being. It was how I had happily spent most of my life but now my friend had taught me that I could achieve something better. Soooo, when ‘better’ didn’t work, I mouthed monstrous mendaciousness towards Mr. Grant Harder.

But, at the back of my mind, there is a niggle. Why, Oh, why? What was it that a few hours earlier was so difficult and now was solved with relative ease?

Maybe Grant Harder would be off the hook if I could mutter Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi under my breath. But I can’t, as I said before, the estimable Harder is the only one I know who can pronounce him.

Seasons greetings to you and yours.

Here in 2024, the recent November 11^th Remembrance Day arrived on a Monday. Here in North Vancouver, Irene, Grant and I attended the ceremony at the cenotaph in Victory Square. It was an overcast, chill day but the rain held off.

I don’t know what I feel about attending this ceremony every year, sometimes I have to force myself out of the door. I do know, Dear Friends, that I will attend. I have learned more and more over the years about why I will attend.

In the early 1920s my grandmother found somebody to marry. She was lucky. Why? Because there weren’t many eligible men around at that time in the years after the First World War, millions had been killed in action. Jimmy Davidson found Eleanor Chessor at a church picnic. He was a miller in Aberdeenshire so had not gone off to war. Men in the farming industry were exempt from service. Britain needed to feed its people. My other grandfather was not so lucky. Dr. Peter Tolmie served in the war but he was a surgeon, so he was faced with the daunting task of saving the lives of young men who had become wounded. Fit and healthy one moment, amputated or blind the next.

When I was a teenager, every Christmas my father invited two sisters, the Miss Thoms,  for Christmas dinner at our house. With the self-centredness of youth I took no interest in why these two cailleach were suddenly in our house on Christmas Day and at no other time of the year. I later learned that both of them had lost their boyfriends in the ‘Great War’, as it was known then, and had never married. Presumably they had not found a young man thereafter because of the aforementioned paucity. But, I also think there was some survivors’ guilt, a determined loyalty to what could have been.

My father, Dr. Wattie Davidson, had completed his medical training before war’s end in the Second World War and had been despatched to India and Palestine. He did not last long. On December 17^th, 1944, his 20 year old brother serving in the RAF in Italy was shot down and killed over Forli in Northern Italy. He was sent home because he was the oldest son of a widowed mother.

In 1970, I was living with my other grandmother in Nairn and working in the Nairnshire Laundry. The time came for me to return home to the family in Somerset. My Great Uncle Jim who was living with Grandma at the time offered to help to carry my bags the half a mile or so down to the bus station. When I arrived home and let slip that he had done so, my mother was not at all happy with me. It wasn’t so much the fact that Jim was in his early 90s but,

“How could you, Peter, Jim was gassed at Gallipolli?”

Jim was about the fittest 90 something I had ever met and the effects of a gas attack some 50 years previously did not show at all!

At Lincoln Rugby Club in 1990, the club was about to lose players. Iraq had invaded Kuwait and the air force bases in our area supplied our club with rugby players. I saw the changes in their demeanours as they realised that they were very soon going to find themselves at war. Nobody wants to go to war less than the men and women who are going to have to fight it. My team mates were obviously scared.

I have just finished reading Victor Hugo’s epic novel “Les Miserables”, of course now the musical is more famous. I have been lucky enough to see the play and the TV version thereof. But, Dear Reader, as is often the case, nothing can compare to the book. I was at the Battle of Waterloo through his magnificent description. I was standing on the barriers during the riots of 1832. And I was escaping through the sewers with an unconscious Marius on Valjean’s back. Victor Hugo was more than an author and poet, he was a statesman who pushed against slavery believing that all mankind was guilty if there was but one slave left on the planet. He also believed in the United States of Europe and that war between Europeans was a civil war. He predicted that the 20^th Century would see the end of war. He lived between 1802 and 1885. It is no fault of his that we have not seen an end to war or poverty but, like Charles Dickens, he did not shy away from uncomfortable truths. There was a lump in my throat when I finally finished reading “Les Miserables”.

Spike Milligan was an humorist and raconteur. On his grave stone which my brother, George, stumbled upon recently, he has written in Gaelic, “I told you I was ill”.  Before a live audience of celebrities in London, he recounted one of his war stories. Late in the war his troop stumbled on a squadron of what they thought were American soldiers. They moved into the open only to discover that they were wrong when some German paratroopers opened up on them, causing them to duck hastily. One of that German troop matched the date and day and information on troop movements and many years after the war contacted Spike in London. Spike invited him to lunch at which they imbibed and reminisced far into the afternoon. As they parted, his erstwhile enemy asked if he could sign Spike’s menu. On it he wrote,

‘Sorry I missed you on February 15^th, 1945.”

They departed with chuckles and smiles and Spike asked him to stand up after he told this story because he invited him to be a part of his audience. This is a war story which I have enjoyed reading.

It only takes one man’s ego to throw the world into a maelstrom of hurt. And we know by watching the evening news that always, always it is the civilian population which suffers most in a war, ‘twas ever thus. So, Dear Reader, Davidson may grumble inwardly at getting his act together to pay respect to those who have seen what he would not want to see and to those who have done what he would not want to have done. But there is reason enough in a movement of my head to the left of my computer where sits a photograph of a young man in his RAF uniform at 20 years of age. All of his life is before him, except that it is not. He has an energetic, joyous smile on his face as you can see in the photograph at the head of this blog. The epitaph on his grave reads as follows:-

“To have lost him is grievous but to have had him is great gain that abides.”

That is all I need to get myself to the cenotaph.

Flying Officer Billy Davidson did not reach his coming of age, he was killed nearly 80 years ago before his 21^st birthday.

Lest we forget.

Sticks and stones will hurt my bones but words will never hurt me.”

I remember hearing this as a child. At the time I thought all such aphorisms were based on years of experience so made the assumption it must be correct. Experience has taught me that this one is totally untrue. Words hurt far more than a cracked rib. Words are far more a bad or good memory than a broken leg or a good report card. As I write this I recollect that rugby report card in the January of my last year at school.

“He has surprised many people, not least himself, by holding down a First XV place this rugby season”.

Forget academics, and I did, these words were the highlight of my 5 year boarding school career and are with me now.

The reason that I am writing this today is that Irene, my wise and thoughtful wife, was reading about a gentleman who had recently lost his wife after a long illness. He was dealing with the bureaucracy and red tape which so often accompanies the death of a loved one. Some heartless ‘suit in an office’  had referred to his late wife as his ex-wife! Now I don’t know about you, Dear Readers, but that term seems to imply divorce, maybe irreconcilable differences, possibly an amicable separation. It suggests legal proceedings. Who has the right to see the children when and where; who gets the family dog; financial flounderings; “Downton Abbey” or “Hockey Night in Canada”; Parent-Teacher interviews; Child allowances; how to handle the wants and needs of the children. It does not, I suggest, Friends, suggest the demise of a much loved wife after many years of marriage. Your man here was, plain and simple, a widower, as his wife would have been a widow had her husband died. To me this is one example of how certain groups of people or, indeed, individuals use language inappropriately. OK, I will come clean, I am one of the guilty ones.

Watching a documentary on the people who developed the atomic bomb I heard the commentator express the opinion that simply because people are very intelligent, that is nuclear scientists in this case, does not mean that they are wise. Of course, Dear Reader, we know this to be true, there have been very many wise illiterates throughout history just as there have been bibliophiles who have not had an ounce of common sense. Wisdom and intelligence are two separate skills although wisdom may be categorised as a type of intelligence, I think. Words matter.

Anybody who has worked for a living, and many of you still do, are only too aware of the dread that we feel when an expert is called in to help us solve a problem. Suddenly we are faced with a pontificator, mostly possessed with the people skills of a rock, who long since left the coal face for the ivory tower. He or she has found themselves a professional niche which suits people who shower in the morning rather than the evening. He has long since been removed from the day to day where hands on is the job of the great unwashed. She has become a trouble shooter in a suit; her awareness and wherewithal caught the last train out many years ago. In short, such people are about as welcome as flatulence in a space suit. Dear reader, we all need saving from a certain type of expert. “Expert” is a word that cannot be fumbled because it is too often dropped.

The world does, however, need to progress and move onwards through innovation and science. But, I suggest, some things can surely be left as they were. I have been reading much that is political at the moment. It seemed appropriate to read Jonathan Manthorpe’s excellent new book “On Canadian Democracy” at the time of the BC provincial election. The clarity, vision and wisdom of his book are going to have me referring back to it for the foreseeable future. Mr. Manthorpe’s words are exceptionally clear. Reading Bob Woodward’s recent publication, “War”, is very current and is based on many insights and interviews with the leading players and the one idiot in American politics. I read both these books in double quick time but felt the need to think of something else before sleep of an evening and thus settled on “Meditations’ by Marcus Aurelius, an inspired Roman Emperor who lived almost 2000 years ago. The wisdom of the ancients, his stoicism in particular, shows that there is hope for the leadership of human kind, once the people realise that they have been duped by a self-serving clown. So with the upcoming American election, maybe the last time that democracy appears in that country for many years, I have been listening to political pundits, yes OK,  experts in their fields. Once such was a political science professor at UBC. She had some interesting points but she could not predict the outcome of the election any more than you or me, Dear Reader. And this is my point, yet again, about the use of terminology. Science is a subject whereby things are improved and discovered through rigorous research, it is where things are tried and tested and found wanting or otherwise.  Science, Friends, is, in my opinion, supposed to have a proven conclusion. Political Science is unpredictable and therefore inaccurate, I therefore suggest that it cannot be called a science, political studies might be more appropriate. But what do I really, really know?

There are two magnificent words which have entered the language in a different context to what they  originally meant. They are beige and hinterland. I love their new usage dearly. Billy Connolly, the comedian, uses beige to mean something bland and boring. Small talk at cocktail parties; household chores; automobiles; the qualities or lack thereof of various airlines; the British royal family; recipes; a long, long discussion between a Welsh and Aussie miner about the benefits of wooden pit props over metal ones! (There was no escape from this last one as we were in a pub waiting for a bus that was several hours late. It was, by a long way, the beigest experience of my life!) Exciting hinterlands are the solution, Dear Friends. Simon Barnes, an outstanding sports journalist, gave me hinterland. To him everybody needs an hinterland some distance away from the routine of their professional lives. Hinterlands are hobbies and pastimes, forms of relaxation that alleviate stress, methods that round a person off rather than allow him or her to persist in a cyclopean vision of life. They allow us to recreate and refresh. Hopefully, Dear Reader, none of us has a beige hinterland!

Spelling also matters. “I can still smell your colon on my pillow’, believe me is not perfume. ‘Due to unforeseen circumcisions, we are closed’ is unfortunate. Certainly, Friends, we can all chuckle at these but, of course, if we are prone to write we too are prone to mistakes. Because I am the victim of too much Latin at school, a decade spent studying a dead language always provokes the question ‘Why?” This is my excuse for writing exceptionally elongated sentences. If anybody dies because they couldn’t get a breath before the end, I could be held liable.  I have a tendency towards the elongated sentence:-

“Having opened my eyes, having decided to swing my legs out from under the bedclothes and placed them on the floor, I stood up, not noticing that the room was still dark, that dawn had not cast its first light on our eastern fence, that ‘jocund day’ was nowhere near ‘standing on the misty mountain top.”

It’s a disease, Dear Reader, and one which I have struggled hard to overcome. Keith Waterhouse said,

“If your sentence needs a comma, just to stop the reader collapsing in a heap before the end, you would do better to cast it as two sentences.”

I am trying to learn from Keith Waterhouse.

And “Remember to close all parentheses, we are not paying to air condition the entire paragraph.”

But, you see, Friends, I am a simple soul who really needs things spelled out to me. So I had no chance with the following:-

“Regulatory practices operating within discursive regimes that circumscribe the materiality of the subject through the citationality of norms”

 And

 “The illocutionary hallucination of the performative as a material event of subjectivity that emerges as a discursive nexus that can generally be named ‘impersonation’”.

The above is from an article from ‘The Times’ dated April 6^th, 2021 entitled “Academics are embracing gibberish studies” by Melanie Phillips. She is quoting The Wall Street Journal and describes what she has read as ‘gobbledegook’. Admittedly this is taken out of context but it is supposed to be a learned piece of work and, if that is the case, then spellcheck reveals that there is no such word as ‘citationality’ although perhaps there should be.

So this subdued rant has all been about words and such but maybe it should  have been about meaning and understanding. OK, Friends, I’ll come clean, this blog has become a therapeutic polyfilla because we now know all about the American election and I am lost for words.

Here is a German word to finish up with:-

Danaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitan

 I have the meaning written down somewhere but what it should mean is:-

“Not on any account should one ever play Scrabble with a German”

Thanks for reading.

Ten years ago on October 27^th, 2014, our son, Grant, received a kidney transplant. He has Alport’s disease which he inherited from his mother’s side of the family. His kidneys had deteriorated some years before he received his ‘new’ kidney, indeed excessive tiredness in his early 20s showed the direction in which his health was moving. While he awaited his replacement organ he was on dialysis three times per week for many hours at a time. He managed to have these for about 5 hours per night, mostly on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. This meant that he could go to work in the morning. He is a carpenter on a variety of construction sites here on the North Shore. During that time and after his two and an half years of dialysis, his girlfriend, Vanessa, was amazingly supportive. Grant is now 37 years old and is doing well although he has to take a great deal of drugs to prevent rejection of his kidney which is not a match to his own. He will be on this regime for life.

Grant has many tales to tell about his time in hospitals and waiting for appointments. He chuckles when he remembers picking up a friend from hospital who had suffered a broken bone. His friend complained about the wait, the delay for X-rays, the length of time he had to wait for a doctor, the delay over a diagnosis and finally the relief when the plaster was applied. As he was driving his friend home and listening to his litany of complaints, Grant said nothing. Eventually there was silence, an awkward moment when his friend realised to whom he was talking. He said ruefully,

“You know, don’t you”.

Grant smiled and nodded. Oh aye, he knew.

The reason that Grant had to wait so long for his working kidney was that it was proving difficult to find a match. He could have gone anywhere in the country if they were able to find a suitable donor. The deal was that I would give up one of my kidneys anywhere in Canada at the same time as he was receiving one from somebody else. I could have ended up sunning myself in Iqaluit or looking out over a different ocean in Halifax. The breakthrough came when research allowed for a recipient to receive an unmatched kidney. Thus Grant is walking around with a kidney which was 62 years old at the time. That would be one of mine. “Twould have been much easier on him if the organ had been a perfect match. But there we were and here we are.

None of us can predict how we are going to respond to periods of physical and mental stress. We can prepare for a crisis but come the crunch there are a variety of directions in which we can go. I was quite happy to be me on October 27^th,, 2014. Much better to be me than Irene. She had to watch while her husband went under the knife at 9.00 a.m. and her son did the same at 12 noon. I remember waking up to her concerned face and asking her whether Grant was in for his operation yet. She explained that the surgeon had gone for lunch. Gone for lunch! Of course he had. This was a normal day at the office for him, for us it was a momentous occasion. I remember asking who was looking after our kidney whilst Dr. Christopher Nguan was having his cheese sandwich. I was concerned that he might need a post-prandial nap! Of course he didn’t, the surgeon looked like he was 16 years old, just like teachers do to me now! Grant and I ended up in the next room at Vancouver General Hospital. The operation was on a Monday and I was out at a pizza place with Irene on the Friday night whilst Grant was still in hospital.

My wife, Irene, too has kidney disease but not yet in need of a transplant. Our daughter, Alison, is thankfully free of it to the extent that she offered to donate to Grant but was not allowed so to do. Both of the women in our family are extremely determined. They are careful what they eat and battle hardened to keep themselves physically fit. I am a bit of a sloth, could do with losing some weight and prefer to lift a book rather than a paint brush.

Grant is Manichean. He doesn’t know what that means but that’s what he is. There aren’t many shades of grey in our son’s thinking but there is white and, very definitely, black. If there is a problem, then there has to be a solution otherwise he is walking away from it. And most of the time it cannot be nuanced but has to be seen and fixed. If he finds attitude at work or play, then he will give attitude back. On the other hand, when he pulls up in his truck at a red light and out of the blue a little old lady, a complete stranger, opens his passenger side door and demands a lift, he is surprised and dumbfounded but also amused and happy to oblige. He did not, however, allow her to put the cake she was carrying on the back seat because there sat Frank the dog who would not have respected its privacy. Grant is generally helpful and kind. When a young man tripped and spilt his coffee at Tim Hortons recently he bought him another one. But when it comes to work he is not impressed when smoke breaks are taken; when jobs that should take half a day, take two; when initiative is not shown.  But when his company gets a gem of a hard worker, he shows great respect and will bend over backwards to help keep him to the extent of giving up some of his weekend to help the guy move apartments. His sister departed for the UK seeking work in her chosen profession. She has been there for 8 years, latterly as Copyright Manager at the British Library in London, the biggest library in the world. Grant is immensely proud of Alison.

So here Irene and I sit in North Vancouver. We are situated a smidge north of our three score years and ten, I being 72 years of age and Irene, one year older. We are both retired and happily so. We both fill our days. We look back on the challenges that our adult children have faced in their lives and there have been some that we and they could have done without. But we are both philosophical and phlegmatic (Possibly many other ‘ph’ for ‘f’ words that are out there, hmm maybe not ‘phased’!), but we are also grateful for so much. Our children are not at war; they can speak freely; they have jobs that they love; our daughter does not live in Afghanistan. Nobody escapes without challenges but it is what we do with them that matters. I cannot remember the blur of the years when our son was so sick but I know that I was functioning on something short of the full deal, always assuming, Dear Reader, I ever had the full deal in the first place. For example, after the kidney donation I was presented with a blanket as gratitude from the Kidney Foundation. It took me by surprise to discover that we had been assigned a social worker as well as a blanket. In hindsight it seemed the right thing to do. She seemed like a nice person and wise too. Her wisdom showed when she left us to manage on our own.

Neither Irene and I think that our children are exceptions. That is always, always the role of others to judge. And this, Dear Reader, is more than a bit of a self-indulgent blog for which I apologise, but I could not let this milestone pass without some comment.

But, Dear Friends, there is a message out there for people in government and it is this. Citizens should be asked to opt out of organ transplants rather than to opt in. There are some countries in the world, notably Wales, whereby if you are a victim of a car accident your organs will be taken unless you have signed a form to the contrary. I was always at fault in that I kept intending to sign up to have mine harvested after my death but it was years before I did something about it.

I refer back again to one of Grant’s kidney tales. He used to meet the same crowd when he was hooked up for dialysis. He remembers one older lady who had been waiting years for a new kidney. There was an accident on the sea-to-sky highway and three UBC students were sadly killed. Suddenly Grant’s acquaintance was no longer there. The speculation doing the rounds of the dialysis centre was that she had received a new kidney from one of these young unfortunates. To me, Dear Reader, this is tragic but joyful.

Finally, Friends, there is much criticism of our public health system and it is true we need more medical professionals, but the care that has been taken over the years for our kidney-beset family where three of us function on two and a half kidneys rather than six, has been outstanding. I still have an annual check up and, of course, my wife and son are much more frequent visitors to the nephrologist. We cannot say enough good things about our health service.

Now all that needs to be done is to persuade Baskin-Robbins to make an ice cream cake in the shape of a kidney to help us to celebrate the anniversary. Och yes, as you can see with the featured picture, Baskin-Robbins came through.

Thanks for reading.

Alports disease affects 1 in 5000—10,000 children. It can affect the eyes and ears (although thankfully not in Grant’s case) but lack of energy and blood in the urine are common.