30,001 Steps - Food Edition

This is "Haggis, Neeps and Tatties" - or haggis, turnips and potatoes. This was the first meal we ate in Edinburgh, having decided to get the whole thing out of the way as soon as possible. The side dish is what they call cole slaw, but it is not cole slaw.

Edinburgh is a global (for now) city. The best restaurants are Italian. You can also get lots of Indian, Mexican, Japanese, and French food. That doesn't mean Bruce and I don't have our usual holiday problem of never knowing where's a good place to eat.

After our bus tour yesterday we walked five minutes to get to Old Town and enjoyed the nice old buildings and interesting infrastructure.

As the sign says, this is Flodden Wall. What is less legible is the message: "This Window Was Made In The Old City Wall With The Sanction Of The Town Council 1875." Who sanctioned the bricking in of the window is not recorded.

It was lunchtime. None of the auld Scots pub-type venues held much appeal. We'd already had our haggis. So we tried fish and chips. Bertie's promised a proper plate. The battered, sustainably harvested haddock was fresh and a little greasy. 

When I think about how much I'm spending, I just double what I see on the tab. For calories, I add an order of magnitude.

Thanks for reading!

Karen 

30,000 Steps

Burial ground -Parish Church of St. Cuthbert, Princes Street, Edinburgh

Today was fuelled by a good night's sleep, and breakfast at Pep and Fodder, just down the street from the hotel.

I'd booked us a bus tour of the city - which covered the Old Town, the New Town, Dean Village, Holyrood and a bunch of other stuff.

The tour was to help us get our bearings, which it did and didn't do in that it honed our ambition to see things we had not heard of, like Dean Village, but challenged our old-people's memories, so I forgot the "Dean Village" part in my phone map direction-finding, and we went on a merry chase some five kilometres out of our way.

But, Edinburgh's a really small place. Even when you get completely lost - which we did - it's a half hour's walk to where you should be. And we saw some pretty cool stuff along the way.  Such as:

St. Bernard's Mineral Well

This is a statue of Hygeia, the greek goddess of health, though Bruce thought she might be Hebe (Zeus's cup bearer). She stands over a small pump room that apparently you can go into some times of the year, and where Edinburgers used to go to drink the sulphur-smelling water.

The small river that runs through Edinburgh is called the Water of Leith, and there is a pretty walkway along it, which we found by accident. Then we found Hygeia. Then, I tripped on the stone stairs leading up from St. Bernard's Mineral Well, and I dropped my camera. It broke into a bunch of pieces.

When we got back to our hotel, I put the pieces back together. The camera still works.

We went to the Royal Mile, too, just to say we did it. And saw the dog statue.

We've been in Edinburgh only two days, but I am prepared to make some observations:

• Scots don't understand cole slaw. I had it at two different places on our first day and won't ask for it again. Bleh.
• Scots are few and far between in Edinburgh. The guy who drove us in from the airport: Polish. The woman who drove our bus around this morning: Spanish. The young man who served us lunch: Hungarian. 
• Haggis is like sloppy joes without the tomato sauce. Neeps and tatties are like baby food for grown ups.

Tomorrow we're doing a walking tour and then will likely hike some more. Another 30K steps.

Bruce with the castle coming out of his head.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

Jet Lagged / Sleep Deprived

Recently (2018) restored Ross Statue: Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh

So I'm gaining an appreciation for Expedia's business model. They give you a pretty good deal on a flight, because, really, who would pay full price for the flights they book?

We left at 7:00 p.m. last night Toronto time and arrived at 6:30 this morning local time. The fight was just over six hours long, which is great, but not an honest window for a full night's sleep, not that I would expect to get one on a plane anyway.

For me it was likely two hours, maybe three, of fitful sleep, sitting up. But Bruce didn't get any sleep. He watched a couple of movies instead. That's why he's flaked out on the bed right now while I type this in our hotel room.

Long story short, we were a little groggy when we got to Edinburgh. I'm even more groggy now. But we squeezed in some sight seeing while struggling to stay on our feet. Not bad for zombies from north of the 49th parallel.

European design is so weird:
control tower at Edinburgh Airport.

The national flower: gone to seed.

Detail of some picture or other: Scottish National Gallery

Detail from The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania: Scottish National Gallery

Thanks for reading!  

Karen

Not Quite Edinburgh Yet

Ew! - These are milkweed bugs, I assume another branch of the family of monarch butterflies. Maybe millions of years ago, one life form fed on milkweed and, through mutation, came to be two or more. Note how the colour scheme is the same.

I am officially on vacation - a status Bruce enjoys 24/7 - but we don't fly out to Edinburgh until Sunday night. 

Thanks to tailwinds, it's a 6 1/2 hour flight - short when compared to the 9 hours it took me to get to Ottawa the other week.

TIFF Types

The Toronto International Film Festival just wrapped up. Bruce went with a friend to see a documentary on electric Formula One race cars. 

I made a more marginal effort and sat on a Yorkville patio on Thursday night to watch the TIFF types walk by. They stick out - even in the flashy Yorkville crowd - like poppies in a wheat field. They always look a little overdressed, a bit more groomed than the rest of us. Overall, they seem to be taller than average and painfully thin - especially the men. And I knew I'd seen everything when a woman walked by wearing a knapsack, made of some see-through material, perforated with loonie-sized holes so that the parrot sitting on a perch inside could see its surroundings and breathe.

Another Bad Business Idea

The week we spent celebrating Kim's 60th birthday was rudely interrupted every hour at ten minutes to the hour by our Fitbits bugging us to get up off our butts and wander around. This became annoying. How great would it be if someone could have showed up, strapped on all our Fitbits, and taken them for a walk. I figure with the right clientele - I'm thinking downtown office workers bound to their hoteling stations - you could make a couple of hundred dollars an hour as a Fitbit walker.

Holiday Goals

Because I don't have a vehicle and live within walking distance of just about everything I have to do, I average about 14K steps a day. On weekends I'll get to 22K and even sometimes 25K. But I've never done 30K steps in a day. I'll set that as my goal in Edinburgh, even if it kills Bruce.

Speaking of Bruce's life expectancy, he has bravely undertaken the difficult challenge of quitting smoking. And he got started soon enough that he won't be grumpy as an incompetent Supreme Court nominee defending himself at his confirmation hearing when we get to Edinburgh.    

The daily dispatches start Monday.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Important Objects

We're a few months into a new routine. After having lunch with Bruce's dad on Sunday, we go to the art gallery or the museum or, as we did last week, to the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art.

Like the Bata Shoe Museum, the Gardiner exists mostly through the largesse of a rich Canadian family and serves as an elaborate storage shed for their hobby. It is open to the public and gaily festooned with the names of donors.

You can tell there is no public money in the Gardiner because there are almost no people in it. The proprietors don't care if it makes a profit. You don't need to buy tickets on the Internet to "skip the line." There is no line.

Inside are nicely appointed galleries showing off the Gardiner's extensive collection of, well, ceramics. And if the people working for the Gardiner Collection describe a piece donated by the Gardiners as a "national treasure", that is their prerogative.

I can spend a couple of hours that don't feel wasted looking at plates and bowls that inspired passion in the hearts of middle class social climbers in the industrial age. But the modern works are what grab me. Something about gold-eyed rabbit saints just really turns my crank.

Thanks for reading!

Next week, dispatches from Edinburgh!

Karen

Blast From The Past

The monster on his 62nd birthday: Bruce at the ROM, 24/08/19

Suddenly, it's the Labour Day weekend. I haven't felt this unambitious since my third birthday. 

For today's blog, I thought I would share this fragment of a sketch I wrote 20 years ago about a character named Peter: 

Peter grew up in the 60's and 70's in the Leaside neighbourhood of Toronto with his parents, Ian and Agnes, and his two brothers, Gerry and Stephen. 

Peter's oldest brother Gerry was a clone of their father, slight, fair-skinned and foul-tempered. Gerry, like his Irish dad, had a singing voice that could make you cry, though his temper more often did. Peter spent his early years fleeing the terrible wrath of his eldest brother and his father. 

Stephen, Peter's other brother, was more like their mother, Agnes, who came from Jamaica. She was one part African, two parts Spanish, one part Chinese, one part Tamil and the rest who knows. She smoked a pipe and worked as a plumber.   

Stephen was spindly thin, with long arms and big feet, and almost six feet tall by the time he was fifteen. Of the three boys, Stephen took most after his mother; he was the family poet. His experiments with sexual behaviour in early adolescence made him think he might be gay. Stephen confirmed his suspicions in his eighteenth year, during his first summer away from home planting trees for the Ministry of Natural Resources with one of work crew, a kid from Halifax.  

Stephen kept his sexuality secret from his family. They never knew, until Stephen died from AIDS in 1987, at the age of 28. Stephen's father was ashamed, and did not go to the funeral. Agnes went, and had her two remaining sons help to hold her up, because of her grief, yes, and because she was too drunk to stand. 

Peter's parents forged their soul bond with alcohol. They met drinking in a bowling alley in New York City. She was on a visitor's visa. He was staying with his brother who had come over from Ireland six years before, and who told him that it was easier to get into Canada than the United States. He said, "the weather's worse, Ian. It gets cold like you'd never expect to live through it, but, they'll pay your health care there, and your kid's university. Think of that. A college education for each of your kids, just for putting up with six months of freezing hell." 

Ian thought about it, but looked around for work in New York, too. His brother's friend ran a dry cleaners, and took Ian in under the table. Ian forgot to take the boat back to Ireland when it embarked. 

That was because Ian had met Agnes. He'd seen one glimpse of her and fallen hopelessly. They sat at the snack bar counter at the bowling alley drinking whiskey glass for glass and never bowled even one ball down the lane. 

When Ian and Agnes crossed the border into Ontario, she was six months pregnant. They'd been told about immigrant amnesty. They forged their own documents (with help from some friends in Toronto) to prove that they had been illegally in Canada for two years. 

Ian had a little money saved, Agnes a lot, and they put a down payment on their split level in Leaside, a then-young suburb with tiny trees and small houses that they lived in until after their son died of AIDS and they finally paid off their mortgage. 

Stephen's death sparked a rage between Agnes and Ian. But their marriage had never been peaceful. Alcohol had long incited their fights, contaminated their children and unfocused the best parts of their life together. Shortly after his middle son died, Ian suffered a fatal heart attack. Agnes buried her husband in the plot next to Stephen's, and died herself of cirrhosis of the liver a few months later. 

After Stephen died, Gerry, the oldest son, fled to Africa to work with the Irish organization Concern.  Caring for emaciated, vomiting, bleeding, crying children, Gerry feared body fluids more than anything. He did not want to die like his brother. 

 Had he had the chance, Gerry might have felt relieved it was a rebel bullet that took his life, zipping in through his left eye, exiting by way of his spinal column just below the seventh vertebrae, laying him dead in the dust, but not from AIDS.

And that's how it happened that Peter lost his whole family in less than two years, and left him the beneficiary of four estates. By the beginning of the nineties, thanks to spiralling real estate values, Ian and Agnes' house in Leaside sold for more than half a million dollars. Thanks to a burgeoning interest in gay literature and a script Stephen had sold, Stephen's estate was worth almost as much as his parents' house. Gerry had left all his worldly wealth behind him when he fled to Africa. 

Peter, after all the wills were probated, was a millionaire. 

The combination of extreme bad luck and good fortune had less impact on Peter than his conviction that his mother was the cause of all the bad things that had ever happened to him and the chief reason he would never know happiness in his adult life.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great long weekend!

Karen 

Peeking through the trees:
the high-rises at Jarvis and Dundas

Managing Expectations

Still not quite getting the hang of this selfie thing: me in Ottawa, August 19, 2019.

For the first time in a couple of years, I travelled for work this past week.

The Association of Municipalities of Ontario held its annual conference in Ottawa and I had to go to support ministers taking meetings. 

The conference is always a big deal for provincial governments. Municipalities, either by themselves or in small coalitions, ask for "delegations" with ministers. There they ask the government to help them to boost local prosperity, create jobs, promote growth - that sort of thing. In the meetings I attended, municipalities wanted access to more and better energy, either electricity or natural gas or both.

When I was working in climate change and had Glen Murray for a minister, all I had to do at these sessions was watch and listen as the minister talked and made big promises.

This time, I still mostly listened but the ministers (we have two now, Rickford and Walker) were more circumspect. If I had to sum up their message, I would say it was "don't get your hopes up." 

When I travelled for the previous government, it was OK to fly to Ottawa. From the island airport, it was a half hour flight, and less than two hours from door to door. 

This government frowns on flying. So I took the train, which normally takes four and a half hours to get to Ottawa from Toronto. But for this trip, someone in Belleville chose my train as the means to end their life.  

The train sat on the track for more than three hours while emergency response crews, investigators and the coroner did their jobs. 

It took nine hours to get to Ottawa. The VIA crew helped as much as they could, handing out free water and snacks three times during the long wait.

The hundreds of people on the train were - at least the ones in my car - without exception resigned to their fate. No one complained loudly. Everyone coped. Even when we detrained en masse and congested the station and taxi queue, no one pushed or squabbled or got mad.

The municipalities at AMO could take a page from this book. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen