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Unauthorized reproduction: Photos were not allowed in the "Cut and Paste" show at the Modern Art Museum in Edinburg, but I took this anyway. In pre-Reich Germany, freedom of expression was a thing, so artists made satirical images of Hitler to no avail.

On Monday I told my team I was leaving the Ontario Public Service. In rapid order, an invitation to my "I'm NOT Retiring" party went out. When my boss received hers she remembered to release the announcement I'd written for her.

So it's official. I spent the week booking lunches and coffee dates with people I want to see one more time before I leave.

Has anything changed since I announced? 

Yes.

People are interrogating me about my travel plans. And people who have almost never had anything to do with me are inviting me to their meetings and dropping by my office. 

The celebrity of impending scarcity, I guess.  

Thanks for reading!

39 days left!

Karen



  

Your Tax Dollars At Work - Office Edition

The sign says "Bicycles attached to this post will be removed at owner's expense."

The running joke at the office is the biggest burden we have these days is the government's efforts to reduce burden. 

Just about every week I receive an e-mail from a Director in a ministry I normally have nothing to do with telling me I can look forward to a series of weekly two-hour meetings to discuss improving customer service or easing business' path through our regulatory requirements. 

When I get one of these e-mails, I or one of my team will attend the first meeting to persuade them to leave us alone. This should be but isn't always easy to do. 

It should be easy because the Ministry of Energy doesn't generate red tape. No one in the ministry directly serves the public or business, so there's nothing to streamline there. The ministry doesn't build anything so there's no opportunity to economize. 99.8% of the ministry's budget is the subsidies on people's hydro bills. You can see the government's dilemma there: they've save money and lose votes.

This week's effort to squeeze Energy's square peg into a round hole was the government's announcement of a new unsolicited proposal framework. It includes energy projects, which is preposterous because the Ministry doesn't approve energy projects. The Ontario Energy Board has that job.

I set up a call with the ministry in charge. Our conversation went this way:

"You could have talked to us, you know," we said.

"It's not our fault," they replied.

By the end of the call the other ministry was 99% persuaded that energy projects should not be included. 90% of my effort next week will be directed at making up that last 1%.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen













  

Thanksgiving

Pretty Edinburgh street on the way to the Museum of Modern Art

As the insanity in the US picks up torque, as the federal election steadily accelerates toward the finish line and as the days grow shorter and colder, I feel most like hunkering down and covering my head.

I suppose it is a function of my increased age that I can't help but think that none of this (except the daylight thing) will end well.

An invitation to have sex on a bike in Edinburgh

The focal point of this weekend - the launch of the overeating season that runs from Thanksgiving to Easter - is, of course, food. I have company today and tomorrow, and Monday we're out for a fine meal at the Old Mill with Bruce's family. Then we'll stuff ourselves until the next equinox.

Pretty chicken fat pattern on the stock from boiled bones

The return of the cold weather means I can pre-cook evening meals on the weekend. I'll make soup or stew or a giant mass of pasta, portion it into Ziplock containers and put it in the fridge. During the week, just before I get home around 6:45, Bruce will reheat one of the containers and make a salad, so supper's ready when I come in the door.

Thanks for reading!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Karen

Templates

By The Meadows, the massive green space next to the University of Edinburgh.

For outsiders looking in, the hallmark of the Doug Ford government is - with a few exceptions - the announcement of an unpopular measure followed by a hasty retreat from same.

For us insiders, the hallmark of the ambitions of the current crew in Queens Park is the multi-ministry working group. 

For red tape reduction, for real estate rationalization, for economic and transit development, all of which initiatives on their own are vast and complex, these are now given even more drama with ridiculous deadlines and murky objectives, and all stick-handled by giant working groups populated by every imaginable ministry.

In aid of these sprawling processes are templates. I have never met a bureaucrat that could not put together a  template so indecipherable that it might just as well have been made by aliens. I have also never met a bureaucrat that can properly fill one out.

If the space in a template allows for four words, the average bureaucrat will enter forty, but they'll make the font really tiny as a small concession to the form. If the template asks for one particular kind of project, the average bureaucrat will expend all effort on finding a way to get their project in whether it was asked for or not - and especially if it was not.

Forty-page templates requiring a week to complete are sent to bureaucrats a day before they are due, accompanied by stern warnings that the bureaucrat will need to not only complete their work in one day, but go through three levels of approvals as well.

In a classic "I must work for government" meeting - convened at 4:00 p.m. on Friday - I sat through a discussion of the "high level" outcome of a multi-ministry template-filling frenzy.

"High level" can mean a lot of things. For bureaucrats it means taking a concept such as "2 + 2 = 4" and turning it into "there was general support for addition."

So, late on Friday, I witnessed three colleagues deliver an unintelligible, high level distillation of the random multi-ministry content of their indecipherable templates. 

The crescendo came when another bureaucrat asked whether it was an option that none of this gibberish be used.

Yes, said the bureaucrat leading the discussion, it is an option that nothing will come of this.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

No Railings

One of our first views: Arthur's Seat. From this prospect, it seems impossible to climb. It's not.

Where you stayed, what you ate and what you did are the three gross measures of the quality of a holiday. 

Where we stayed: APEX Waterloo Place. The hotel was fine. The room, after an upgrade, was a good size, quiet and comfortable. 

What we did not know beforehand is that the hotel caters to bus tours - every morning the lobby was crammed with the luggage of outgoing groups. The restaurant is therefore not really a restaurant: it is a dining hall for tour package customers. We avoided it.

What we ate: Long stays without access to a kitchen can run to money. After our second $70 lunch, I started thinking about ways to economize. We had a bunch of serviceable meals, one exceptional (lunch at the George Pub) and one that was fine but could have been better (dinner at The Honours). 

What we did: Highest scores in this category. Edinburgh is interesting.

Finer Measures of What Makes Edinburgh Interesting

Above and two below: City as romantic landscape.  

The temple structure is the Calton Hill monument to Dugald Stewart, a leading mathematician and philosopher of the 18th and 19th C.

And here's the view from the top of Arthur's Seat, where we went twice during our stay. We noted the lack of railings and the long fall if you slipped.

Environmentalism 

In the corridor on the way to the "restaurant" at the APEX Waterloo: it's a jungle-colour-painted Disney-influenced figure of an ape sitting on a box marked "FRAGILE". I get it.

Practically every specimen in the Royal Botanical Gardens - including these Amazonian lilies - came with descriptions of how endangered they are in the wild. 

By the place where our bus made an emergency pit stop: the only electric vehicle charging station in Scotland (that I saw).

Dyson has the Scottish market cornered: Airblades were everywhere.

View of the Firth of Forth: telltale smudge of photochemical haze on the horizon. The air quality in Edinburgh seemed good, but they have oil refineries north of the city.

One of a cluster of six wind turbines on the way out of Edinburgh.

Dogs

The Scots love their dogs. They are especially fond of dogs who sit by their master's graves for 14 years. 

Bruce by Greyfriar's Bobby. Tourists rub his nose - the dog's, not Bruce's - for good luck. 

At the National Library: a display of 80's ephemera.

Royalty and Nationalism

There is no nation more fully pro-monarchy and at the same time adamantly anti-monarchy than the Scots (I am aware of the Irish).

In the National Portrait Gallery: Queen Victoria's portrait gets its own bed curtains.  

We stayed at WATERLOO Place: this is a statue of Wellington.

On the other hand: England was the enemy for many years as commemorated by this bas relief inclusion high on a wall in Edinburgh castle. Flodden Wall, pictured elsewhere on this blog, was built to keep the British out after the 1513 Scottish defeat at Flodden Field.

Scotland loved Sir Walter Scott because he crafted a quickly stale-dated (for the rest of the world) but immensely attractive Scottish national character. That's why he got the big monument, not because of Ivanhoe.   

Traffic

I don't imagine that the traffic in Edinburgh is worse than in any other moderate-sized city (Edinburgh's population is just under half a million people). But it comes at you from every direction and on the wrong side of the road. Intersections are controlled by elaborate, unpredictable signals. 

Crossing the street in Edinburgh is an experience mixing elements of "Waiting for Godot" and Russian roulette. Locals seem to understand when it is safe to ignore the "don't walk" signals but most of the time it seemed wisest to just wait (and wait and wait and wait) for the little green man.

Politics

I admire a country where Socialism is a political party and not a vituperative epithet.

Burial Grounds

If you have a thing for graveyards, Edinburgh's the place for you. During the Scottish Renaissance, philosophers, lawyers, accountants, goldsmiths, architects - everyone with some extra scratch and social status to put on display - paid for extravagant, elaborate and, now, almost entirely ruined "memorials" - some so weathered by age there is no saying whose life and death they mark.

A rhyme-time Jeopardy answer: what is Hume's tomb?

Calton Burial Ground: right across the street from our hotel.

Fill in the blank.

Public Washrooms

One measure of a society is the state of its prisons; another is the state of its public washrooms. In Italy, when we visited there, it seemed as if providing adequate facilities to millions of visitors utterly overwhelmed the public imagination: it just couldn't be done. In Edinburgh, it's done, done well, and, recalling the photo from Thursday's post, even done with flair.

Walk Along Water of Leith

We were drawn to the Water of Leith Walkway more than any other identifiable thing in Edinburgh.

Edinburghers build bridges like they mean it.

This is a revolt of mushrooms. They are consuming a stone.

Lost in our search for Dean Village, we came across the Water of Leith and the first thing we saw was this eerie figure .... On second look, it's a statue.

Some lucky Edinburghers have the Water of Leith as part of their back yard.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Modern Art

The Scots continued to surprise us on the last day of our visit. That's because the Scottish National Museum of Modern Art has one of the finest collections of Surrealist and Dada artwork in the world.

No, really.

They had Magritte:

And Dali:

The museum also showed in six large rooms a massive collection of collage works, called "Cut and Paste." While looking at the pieces from between the wars that used cut-up Victorian engravings, I said to Bruce, "if they don't have something by Terry Gilliam, this whole show is a fraud."

I had nothing to worry about:

Another surprising piece of ephemera (and sorry for the dreadful photo quality), the original artwork for the Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band cover:

The museum had amazing pieces from its permanent collection throughout:

Lunching under Vulcan's hammer in the museum cafe.

The neon letters say EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT

This ... this is the woman's toilet.

This is an earthwork, accompanied by lots of signage about staying safe on and not destroying the art.

The one miracle of our trip: until the night of the 24th, when we had to venture out to partake a fine meal at Michael Wishart's The Honours, we had seen hardly any rain. 

It rained like a bastard during our walk to the restaurant. We enjoyed our fabulous three-course prix fix with wet feet. 

But it was grand.

It was only when I was putting everything in my luggage for the trip back that I read on the back of the ticket to "Cut and Paste" that they didn't allow photographs. Oops.

I'm posting this from Toronto, where we arrived after an uneventful return trip around lunchtime yesterday.

Saturday's blog will be a summing up.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

Lochs 'n' Castles

Inverary

The route

The weather forecast on the day of our bus ride out of Edinburgh was frankly terrible, so I brought my raincoat and left my sun glasses in the room.

It worked.

On the way to Luss: misty vista.

Aside from this socked-in view, the weather was either cloudy but dry, or actually sunny. The only time I needed my raincoat was when I stepped out to take the picture above.

The Scottish countryside in the highlands is incredibly beautiful. Underpopulated since the clan wars, the highlands feature vast, picturesque wildernesses, small picturesque farms with lots of sheep and coos, and tiny picturesque villages with expensive toilets (30p) and lovely views.

Stirling Castle

Charming garden: Luss

There was once a slate mine in Luss, so all the houses have slate tiled rooves, and this house has a gate made of same.

Best ironic photo of the trip: low tide in Inverary

The George: Reputedly the best pub in Scotland; owned and operated by Clarks since the 17th century; much of the staff was Italian, hence the banner.

Best meal (so far) of the trip: roasted partly-smoked salmon with sundried tomato and caper salsa. Under the well-dressed arugula is a little mound of potatoes and onion. So good.

Kilchurn castle, famous from the last scene of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The couple in the mid-ground are newly weds from Boston on their honeymoon. They bickered the whole trip. He bought the Harris Tweed blazer he's wearing the day before.

View from the castle grounds.

I knew there'd be a loophole somewhere.

The man on the left is our tour guide Nick.
The mound of carved rock is a fallen turret. 

Duck on Loch Lubnaig: it makes my brain hurt to think there are mallard ducks in Europe and North America.

Castle Doune - used for every scene but the last one in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The audio guide features Terry Jones talking about the castle and about making the movie.

We're down to our last 24 hours in Edinburgh. Today, the Modern Art Museum. Tonight, dinner at "The Honours", a Michelin 2-star restaurant.

Thanks for reading!

Karen