This weekend is Canadian Thanksgiving, six weeks before our American neighbours have theirs. We also beat them to the idea by 43 years. The Pilgrims feast dates to 1621. Sir Martin Frobisher’s expedition to find the northwest passage held one in present day Nunavut in 1578, to give thanks for the safety of its fleet.… Read the rest
Nuance in discourse is as imperilled as chalk cliffs and sandy beaches beset by climate change storm surges. Such is the state of spoken English that all you need to know are the buzzwords. As long as you can use them in a way that sounds like it fits the “zeitgeist”, you can safely avoid inconveniences like informed debate.… Read the rest
Nothing can be done about youth being “wasted on the young”, but squandering the power of moral outrage on the ridiculous is waste to the nth degree. Beset as we are by screeching to ban books for “woke” agendas, universities more focused on ensuring students don’t feel “uncomfortable” than in sparking critical thinking and a Press willing to quote lies in the name of “balance”, it’s time to rehabilitate the Luddites, if only in spirit.… Read the rest
“Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.” The chances of enjoying that 16th century insight from philosopher Francis Bacon are slim to nil in today’s world. But a little more peace and quiet would go some way to starving the ignorance with which society is progressively bloating.
Not only is there too much noise of every kind, many people seem to find it not just tolerable, but necessary.… Read the rest
The Moody Blues’ 1970 hit “Question” opened, appropriately, with the lines: “Why do we never get an answer/When we’re knocking at the door/With a thousand million questions/About hate and death and war?”…”
In a world where those three ills are at pandemic level, the answer may well be because the question “why” isn’t asked often enough.… Read the rest
As a former broadcast journalist, what I’m about to confess amounts to heresy: at the moment I neither have, nor miss having, a TV set. That’s due in no small part to being where more intimate and gentle ways measure and put the world into perspective.… Read the rest
Paddling my kayak along the granite shore of the lake where I currently reside, I came upon a small group of young merganser ducks. They may, or may not, have been siblings. Mergansers have a characteristic that is common among humans who have the least to share and sadly, often rare among those who have more than enough.… Read the rest
Of the many aphorisms on hindsight, the one which ought to be the truest was penned by the ancient Greek writer Homer: “After the event, even a fool is wise.” Too often and albeit for different reasons, policy makers and journalists have an ability to be the exception. One of the most sinister examples is jihadism and I was, in a small way, part of it.… Read the rest
For decades famine, drought, strife and corruption have been so common in parts of Africa that outsiders could, to an extent, be excused for seeing them as normal. It is well past time on many levels for the comfortable complacency of willful ignorance to give way to a harsh reality; the divide between “them” and “us” has been well and truly breached.… Read the rest
One of the many joys of summer beside a forest-encircled lake is that unlike every moment of every day in “normal” life, your privacy is respected. The welcome exception is a chipmunk, who appears, unbidden and insistent, for a handout of nuts. When cheek pouches are on the point of bursting , he/she (gender assignment is nigh on impossible with chippies) darts off to store them deep in a hidden den.… Read the rest