What true friendship means

Over the past 6-7 months, Janet Wendy's large circle of friends has been showing what true friends they are. She has frequent visitors, many of whom come bearing gifts of flowers, food, books to read. Some of our neighbours in the condominium where we live have demonstrated their true friendship in these ways. Other friends belong to one of several groups of which she has been a member over the past quarter century or more. A few good friends have come from further away. Karen Kumar drove from Hamilton to Ottawa, a 6-7 hour drive, several weeks ago, solely to visit with Wendy and to bring her food and books. This week our friend Mariem Martinson, really primarily Wendy's friend, has flown across Canada all the way from Victoria BC to see her. These out of town visitors, and the local ones too, all demonstrate by their actions how much Wendy means to them. (It's interesting too, to see that there are some neighbours we thought of as friends, and a few others elsewhere we thought of as friends, who have not been near us. We don't hold this against them; we know that some people find contact with the sick a threatening, emotionally rather disturbing experience. There is one woman in this building who clearly feels uncomfortable even standing near her in the elevator). The support of these good friends at this troublesome time has been a great comfort to both of us. The best of them seem to know instinctively that just by coming to visit her they can throw an extra burden of work on us, so they don't require us to show them hospitality and leave us with dirty dishes to wash and put away. Some have a genuine gift for what to say and do when they visit the sick, can carry on a bright and entertaining conversation, can say and do things that lift the spirit. Fortunately for us and for them too, we've been spared god-botherers, devout believers in a deity that will soften all the harsh edges of life on earth, suffuse everything in a hazy glow of unreality. We don't believe in any god. I abandoned the weird mixture of myths, legends and implausible stories of miraculous cures and raising from the dead and the absolute rubbish of the eucharist that are central to Christian beliefs when I was a teenager. Wendy remained a Christian for a few years longer, or rather continued to go to church, mainly to develop support networks and make friends, until our own kids were teenagers and refused to continue any longer the rituals and accept the nonsensical beliefs of Christianity. She abandoned the church when the blatant hypocrisy of the practising Christians with whom she mingled became intolerable: their self-indulgent greed and lack of concern for the truly needy and those in real distress put her off, because she, in her own quiet way that I've written about elsewhere, is truly a selfless altruist and invariably puts the needs of others, even total strangers, ahead of her own -- which was something that none of her church-going friends apparently shared with her. Since she fell ill, not one of them has been to see her, nor, with one exception, have any of them even phoned to inquire about her, or to speak to her. In truth, she is a better Christian than any of them, even though she never goes to church. Perhaps I'm guilty of uncharitable thinking; they may all have valid reasons for their seeming lack of concern about her. But I doubt it. (Some other time in this blog I'll return to an aspect of this discussion and say something about my personal observations of the behaviour of people I know well who are practising believers in other gods than the Christian god: Buddhists, Hindus, Moslems, Jews, who to my certain knowledge and personal observations, have behaved with more Christian charity and selflessness, more consideration for others more kindness and thoughtfulness, than any Christian believer I've ever known. But that's a topic for another day).

Wolf Hall

Recently on the excellent CBC Sunday morning radio program called The Sunday Edition, the host, Michael Enright, interviewed the interesting English writer Hilary Mantel. I have been one of Hilary Mantel's admirers for many years, during which she has written several fascinating novels, some with historical themes, others completely different. She also writes literary essays and reviews, some of which are published in the New York Review of Books, and are always worth reading. Last year she won the Man-Booker prize for a truly magnificent novel, Wolf Hall. This is primarily about the life of Thomas Cromwell, who rose from humble beginnings, son of a violent, drunken blacksmith, to become adviser first to Cardinal Wolsey, then to King Henry VIII, at the time he was shaking loose from his 20-year marriage to Katherine of Aragon and flirting with Anne Boleyn who apparently fended off his final assault on her virginity until she was safely married to him. As portrayed by Hilary Mantel, Anne is a flighty, flirtatious minx who becomes a vicious shrew after the birth of Elizabeth, but the book ends before she fell from grace and was beheaded after being found guilty of adultery. Like her predecessor Katherine who gave birth to Mary but no sons, Anne gave Henry VIII only a daughter, who would eventually become Queen Elizabeth after her half-sister's reign as Queen Mary, Bloody Mary, came to an end. The Tudors are characters in Wolf Hall, but the book is mainly about Thomas Cromwell. He is the central figure, who mixes and mingles with a large cast of characters, almost all real people known to us from detailed histories of the time. Thomas Cromwell is often portrayed, for instance in Robert Bolt's play, A Man for all Seasons, as an evil creature who extracted confessions from purported or putative enemies of Henry VIII by unspeakable forms of torture. Among his victims were Thomas More, the 'man for all seasons' (and several alleged lovers of Anne Boleyn, although that happened later, after this book ends with Thomas Cromwell's first visit to Wolf Hall). Thomas More is usually portrayed as a heroic and noble man who did great good in his time and was destroyed and ultimately executed only because he could not bring himself to accept Henry VIII's divorce from Katherine and marriage to Anne. Here he is a flawed man whose destruction was largely Anne Boleyn's doing, aggravated by his own obstinacy. Cromwell is not a perfect human being in Hilary Mantel's novel but he is presented sympathetically, as a basically decent man who rose to eminence solely because of his own talent, administrative ability and political savvy. In her recent interview with Michael Enright, Hilary Mantel talked about the second book on Thomas Cromwell that she has been writing as a continuation of this one (what good news it was to hear that there is to be a sequel, or a second volume of this long, impressive novel!). That will deal with the intrigues that brought about the destruction of Anne Boleyn, the consequences of Cromwell's acquaintance with the Seymour family, which provided another bride for Henry VIII, and Cromwell's own fall and execution. If that second volume is as rich in well rounded characters and as unputdownable as this first one, it will be worth waiting for. I hope the wait won't be too long. I'm not sure how many more years I will be around to read books like this but awaiting that sequel will be one incentive to stay around for a while longer than I might otherwise wish.

One of Janet Wendy's poems

Let me paste another poem into this blog:

Salmon Arm

Who would think to see the river
Calm, serene, shining silver
That so much life goes on below.

Seething, swirling salmon strive
Against the current to survive
With sharp-toothed lamprey on the go.


Can we make the next fierce rapid?
“I think I’m feeling rather vapid,”
Says the gravid female Coho

“Let’s just stay in this calm eddy
And masturbate until we’re ready
To face the fiercely swirling flow.”

After some delightful resting
Turning scarlet for the nesting
They line up with the striving row.

Tails lashing, scales flashing,
Mighty muscles make the dashing
Arc, into the foaming billow.

Some fall back and some succeed
Bruised and battling, impetuous the need
To travel upward, success or no

Now they’re home where they were born,
It’s time to find a mate and spawn,
Fulfill their life and then to go.


Janet Wendy Last
On the Rocky Mountaineer Train
Approaching Banff, June 9, 2006

There are several things to say about this poem. I sat beside Wendy as she composed it. That was the first and the only time I observed her creative mind at work. From start to finish, she took about an hour to compose it. At one stage when she was momentarily at a loss for the right word, I suggested one that fits, although it's probably not the most appropriate. All the same it gave me a slight feeling of sharing in the creative act. Another fact worth mentioning is that when I showed this poem to my editor at Oxford University Press, he remarked that she has made very successful use of a most unusual rhyming scheme. He has a master's degree in literature and modern languages, so his opinion on this is worth respecting.

I'll say something else about salmon migrations and spawning. For adult fish to find their way back to the exact same little stream where they hatched out of an egg several years earlier, is a biological miracle; it can be explained by some sort of very powerful chemical tropism. The headwaters of every river must presumably have its own unique combination of chemicals and organic matter that emits a tracer in the form of smell or taste which distinguishes it from all other streams. We see this process in action in a small pond beside the Rideau Canal, a few hundred metres from our condominium. When the locks are closed a kilometre downstream and the Canal is filled, water flows into this pond that has been dry all winter. And every spring when the pond fills with water, within days it is crammed with dozens of large catfish and carp, each more than a metre in length, and for a few weeks the gravel and muddy bottom of the pond are constantly agitated by spawning fish. But this explanation begs more profound questions: Why is this return to the birthplace so important in perpetuating the species? How did the phenomenon get started in the first place? Does this awe-inspiring phenomenon shed any light on the nature of evolutionary biology? Perhaps marine biologists can answer these questions. If they can, I'd love to know what they say.

Death Notices

I forget where I first heard or read it, and who uttered the remark, but it went something like this: "You know you are getting old when the first thing you look at in the newspaper is the Obituaries (or Death Notices). That's one way I've known for many years that my younger brother, three and a bit years younger than I am, has been much older than I since soon after we left Australia for what became permanent exile, early in 1964; whenever we have gone back to Adelaide on visits and stayed in his home, he has always studied the death notices in the paper most diligently at the breakfast table. I've never done that, at any rate not until recently. Lately I've begun scanning death notices in the Globe and Mail, Canada's "national" newspaper, to watch for one specific death notice, that of the Grand Old Man of Canadian public health, Harding Leriche, now in his mid-90s and in failing health. He is an old and dear friend whose passing I shall mourn. There's only one other place I look at obituaries, the British Medical Journal. I look at these because I get this journal free as an honorary life member, a standing conferred on all who have been members of the British Medical Association for 50 years. And as I worked in Britain altogether for some 10 years and have many British friends, it's worth looking at the obituaries because of course my British contemporaries are like me, in the age range where we are dying off. Hardly a week goes by without someone I knew, even someone I once worked with, leaving this life, this vale of tears. Thinking about it, I'm astonished that I had such a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, the latter almost all professional colleagues. Among those to die recently have been my mentor, Jerry Morris, a truly great man who rated a whole page obituary in the BMJ, and several pages and photographs in the International Journal of Epidemiology, the main periodical of my trade. Another eminent man who has lately fallen off his perch is my exact contemporary and good friend, Donald Acheson, eminent epidemiologist and some time Chief Medical Officer of the UK. He too got a whole page and his photo in the BMJ. At least a dozen other friends, colleagues, born in the 1920s or early 1930s, have had obituaries in the BMJ in the past year or so. As a devout atheist, I know there is no after-life, only oblivion, which of course makes this life we each have, a very precious, indeed a unique gift that is beyond price. Most of the time I'm like Woody Allen, I know all about the inevitability of death, I just don't want it to happen to me. I most certainly don't want this inevitable fate to overtake me until I have completed my task of caring for Wendy. After that, I won't mind in the least.

What's in a name?

As I was opening the laptop this afternoon, the radio announcer mentioned the name of the performers on a pop ballad he was about to play. I was struck by the name of the musical group, The New Pornographers. Other seemingly successful pop groups include The Bare-Naked Ladies, The Wailing Jennies, and several other names guaranteed to annoy or at least irritate staid middle aged or elderly folk like me. At least one is unprintable, or anyway I'm too delicate, too conscious of my readers' sensibilities, to have any wish to spell it out here. But I wish I was thinking of starting a pop group, because I can think of a few names as likely to cause offence as these existing Canadian pop groups. What about pop groups called The Prolapsed Piles, or The Anal Warts, or The Urethral Discharge? I hereby offer these free, no copyright, to anyone interested. In case anybody wonders why I had the radio tuned to the station that dispenses what passes for music purveyed by extant pop groups, it wasn't because I like that kind of music (if music is the right word to describe the jangling cacophony which assaulted my eardrums) but because the news and weather report were about to be broadcast. Like all Canadians, I'm morbidly curious about the weather, especially at this time of the year. Yesterday the temperature was 15 C, but overnight a cold arctic front came through, dragging the temperature down to minus 14 C and today with a brisk north wind, it hasn't got above zero. But in this month of March that usually can be relied upon to unleash at least one full-strength blizzard, we have so far had no snow whatsoever, and if the long-range forecast is correct, we will establish yet another weather record, a March without snow. Indeed we've had very little snow this winter, and for a long period -- two weeks or more -- we had temperatures 10 degrees C or more above the average of the past 100 years. That is yet another rather convincing sign of climate change. It's going to be more difficult in future to get any details on some aspects of the weather that afflicts this part of the world. Our federal government, climate change deniers all, are going to extraordinary lengths to keep the information from us: in the latest budget, no money is allocated to Arctic Weather Research stations that have been operating since the 1930s; and all scientific staff in the relevant department (Environment Canada) have been forbidden to speak to the media, publish scientific papers without prior approval by a political appointee in the department, or present papers at conferences of their scientific peers; they are not even allowed to attend such meetings at their own expense. This unconscionable stifling of science goes further than any of the excesses perpetrated by political appointees in the corresponding US government departments under the Bush administration. It's true that the present Canadian government is run by (and for) a group of people with intimate ties to the oil and gas industry; but I wonder what they think they can accomplish by stifling scientific data. Of course they are the same people who proclaim the great new Canadian initiative on the health of women and children in developing countries, an initiative that totally excludes all mention of family planning and contraception. The woman minister who is the spokesman for this initiative genuinely seems to believe that providing clean water is the only action necessary to prevent the half million deaths annually from causes related to childbirth. The largest single group of these are deaths due to septic abortions. But like erratic weather attributable to global climate change, our government seems to think that if they don't acknowledge the existence of the problem of these maternal deaths, they will somehow or other, just disappear. The party in power was formerly called the Progressive Conservative Party; but that word 'progressive' was too dangerous for the people now running that party, so it was dropped. Maybe the most obscene name for a new pop group would be The Conservative Party of Canada.

How Free is "Free Speech?"

My university, that is, the university that has employed and sheltered me since 1969 (more than 40 years, so help me!) has been in the news in a not altogether welcome way in the last few days. There is a woman called Ann Coulter, variously described as a pundit, a right-wing political commentator, an entertainer, and a crazy person, and doubtless called other things too. She is American, apparently has newspaper columns and a place in the far-right Fox "News" Network, owned by Rupert Murdoch, my infamous fellow citizen of Adelaide South Australia. The Fox network carries very little actual factual news, but a great deal of far right political opinion and some inflammatory and often distorted reports that purport to be news but are really just opinions. She was "invited" to speak at three Canadian universities by one of Canada's leading far-right libertarian crazies. At her first talk, in London, Ontario, she said that Moslems shouldn't be allowed to fly on commercial aircraft because all terrorists are Moslems (and, she implied, all Moslems are potential terrorists; she's apparently not heard of the IRA, ETA, or the Tamil Tigers). A woman, either a faculty member or a student at the University of Western Ontario who was wearing a head-scarf, asked how she could get to a conference in New York or Los Angeles without flying, whereupon the Coulter creature replied that she could use her magic carpet - or if she didn't have a magic carpet, ride a camel. The provost at the University of Ottawa where she was next scheduled to speak wrote to her, to remind her that we have a "Hate Law" in Canada and warned her not to indulge in her well-known inflammatory language that might be interpreted as aimed to generate hate against a particular group of people. When she showed up to speak at Ottawa U, there were some 1500 people seeking entry to a hall holding 400. Her security staff, not the University of Ottawa security staff, cancelled her talk on the grounds of safety, i.e. her safety. Now she is saying that she wasn't allowed to speak in Canada's national capital, and implying it was Canadian authorities who "muzzled" her. She is threatening to sue the University of Ottawa, and to lodge a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. Exactly who said what, to whom and when has been lost or mislaid in some of the fou-farah about this entire fiasco. The one certainty in it all is that the provost of the U of O would have been wiser never to have written his letter to her. She immediately released the letter to the media and made a great fuss about attempts to influence her remarks, to turn her Free Speech into a distorted version of what she might have said if the provost had not tried to influence her remarks. All the resulting publicity no doubt led to the huge crowd that turned out to hear her - many with placards denouncing her and what she stood for, or in one or two cases, supporting her. It all gave her security staff an opportunity, or an excuse, to cancel her talk, and to generate a great deal of publicity that cast her as victim of a heinous offence against liberty and freedom of speech. She seems to have been a far more successful manipulator of events than the hapless provost of the U of O. The one good outcome has been some serious and enlightened discussion in responsible media, print and radio anyway, about the definition of and the limits of free speech. Some of this has been earnest and humourless, but some of it also has been light-hearted, witty and penetrating. This probably makes the whole episode worth while, but only just. On the whole, I don't think my university has emerged from the fiasco looking good.

Meals, ready to eat

Despite the absence of published comments on this blog, it does have readers, some of whom have spoken to me, phoned me, or sent me emails about various things I've said, or not said. At first I often thought I was just writing to myself, which was OK, but it's preferable to be writing for others as well. It's comforting to know that I'm not quite like "...Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, wasting its sweetness on the desert air"; not quite a "mute, inglorious Milton" - inglorious, yes, that I am, and no Milton either, but mute I am not; and if at times I seem to run on at the mouth, or rather the keyboard for a mite too long, the remedy is at hand, just switch me off.

Today I'll say something about food. More and more we are relying on prepared meals - Meals on Wheels, meals provided by our family, friends, neighbours in our condominium; and meals from the gourmet take-out establishment called Red Apron, which produces mouth-watering curries, Italian, French and Spanish dishes, other exotica, and good plain Canadian cooking too that can be delivered to our door, hot and ready to eat, or frozen and reheatable in oven or microwave. We sampled the first on a special occasion, our wedding anniversary banquet, and have gone back a few times for the frozen goodies. And mouth-wateringly good goodies they are, a most ample serving too. A frozen dish, for instance of curried chicken, is said to be a meal for two people. They must be very big people, or we are very small eaters, because each of the frozen dinners we've had, has been big enough for us to get two meals out of it, and sometimes there's a bit left over. Too bad we don't have a dog or a cat. If my arithmetic is right, this makes Red Apron meals about the same price as the ones we get from Meals on Wheels, and there's no comparison for taste, piquancy or, I suspect, nutritional value. Of course the Meals on Wheels are delivered to the door, but like the Red Apron meals they have to be heated in the oven or microwave. And also, of course, both Meals on Wheels and the Red Apron service offer the option of a hot midday meal delivered to the door.

One fan of this blog complained that a photo of Wendy and me at our golden wedding anniversary banquet that appeared on an earlier post to this blog soon vanished without trace. So I've put a slightly larger copy of that photo at the top of this post. I tried to put it at the end of the post, but the technology or the necessary keystrokes or finger movements on the touch-pad seem to be beyond me, so there it is at the top. For those who may not know, the red and white ribbon around my neck doesn't support an olympic gold medal or other fancy decoration, but something much more precious, a photo of Wendy and me that was presented to us as a medallion to hang around our neck on this occasion and if we chose, other occasions too.

More of "Selected Works..."

In this post, I want to paste in another little original work from Janet Wendy's Selected Works. I'm not sure how to classify this. Is it prose? Is it poetry? Readers of this blog can judge for themselves:

Travel Tales and Traveling Tails

In August 1998 David, Dorothyanne, their three children Christina, Peter, and John, and au pair Stacey, packed into their Ford van (the “White whale”) and travelled 3500 Km from Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia to Shilo, Manitoba, with their menagerie of animals, bird, reptile, and of course Pickles the poodle. They all survived the long journey.

GERBIL Feeling oomey
In this gloomy,
Moving cage.
Hope we stop soon
Or I'll drop soon
In a rage.

BUDGIE Where's my calm green tree?
No matter, lots of company,
Music, motion.
I'll join in, and sing,
Heigh Ho for life on the road.

MOUSE. Strange vibration, nose in covers.
Dark sensation, Bird above us.
Too cold too hot.
Happy? ...I'm NOT!

GOLDFISH Stormy weather,
Sky dark and threatening,
Loud noise deafening.
Wish I could steady waves in tank.
Feeling dank.

GECKO Earthquake?
Early warning
Of a storming?
Head down,
Cicada down.
Turning brown.

PICKLES Every one I adore
close and cosy.
Give me more.
Stop… open door…Quick pee,
Don't leave me.
First into van.
So much din.
Head down. Oblivion.

HUMAN BEANS Hummm
Numb bum.
Wish I could run.
It'll be grand to arrive.
No more drive.
Lend a hand
to unpack,
scuff in sand.
Silence and stillness.
Stationary bliss.

------------------------------

So, you be the judge. Whatever, however it's classified, it's one of my favourites - although it's unfair to single out just one short piece of prose or poetry for special mention, because like all of us who are close to Janet Wendy, I love everything she has created. Now that I think I've figured out how to cut and paste to the blog, I'll keep doing it from time to time. Maybe next time I will try to cut and paste a story or two from her memoirs.

Quarterly Report

Today Wendy had her quarterly reassessment by the team of experts at the ALS Clinic. It was a long, ultimately rather exhausting "morning" with a sequence of visits one after another from 9.00 am to 1.30 pm to a few of the experts whom we first saw three months ago. This time, on my recommendation, we skipped a few, and saw only the respiratory specialists (technician for respiratory function tests, physician/respirologist); the speech therapist, the physiotherapist, the physician/neurologist in overall charge of the ALS Clinic, and the nutritionist, in that order. Just as when we first encountered this team, we were most favourably impressed by their overall excellence - their competence, consideration, compassion and willingness to go the extra mile are unparalleled in our experience (and I know we didn't get 'special' attention because I happen to be a senior, perhaps eminent member of the medical profession and the university staff; I know Ken Scott, our late friend and neighbour in our condominium, another ALS sufferer, got the same high level of care that we are, that Wendy is, getting). Just as on our first visit to the ALS Clinic, we came away armed with a whole set of recommendations and suggestions to make life easier. The objective measurements for instance of respiratory function and speech, show the progress of the disease, or her deterioration, since her last visit three months ago. I don't think there's any point in spelling out the details in this blog. The main thing to say is that everyone in the clinic is upbeat and matter-of-fact and full of helpful advice and suggestions. They imbue us with optimism that will help us to cope with what is ahead of us. And we know that we can count on the ALS Clinic team to provide whatever support we may need. It's a comforting thought, and another illustration of the quality of the Canadian health care system.

A Family Conference

Yesterday we had a family conference. Rebecca and Richard, and Jonathan sat round our dining-room table with Wendy and me, and David joined us by Skype from Toronto. The reason for conferring like this was a cri de coeur that I uttered a week or so ago when I was feeling more than usually frazzled by the combined weight of caring for Wendy, household chores, some professional commitments I haven't been able to fulfill on time or to my professional satisfaction - and the lack of any respite for several weeks. We talked about the need for more help. Wendy and I had already discussed this with Louise Coulombe, our palliative care physician; she had given us several names and contact details. The first suggestion from our offspring was to get this respite care as soon as possible. It was already on my agenda of things to do in the coming week; there hadn't been time to follow through on Louise's contacts between getting the names etc late Thursday afternoon and our 'conference' on Saturday afternoon. Tomorrow, Monday, we will be at the ALS clinic all morning (9 am to 1 pm) for a series of appointments with various specialists in the ALS team; so I will make a few phone calls tomorrow afternoon to arrange for and to set up some respite care. Another suggestion was for me to let the dishes pile up in the dishwasher, rather than to wash them after every meal. I'm not convinced that this would be labour-saving. All our meals now are prepared by others, the Meals on Wheels service, meals provided by kind friends and neighbours, gourmet meals from the Red Apron catering company, and meals that R&R provide from time to time. Very few of these give rise to dishes for me to wash, so all I have to wash is a few plates, knives, forks, and spoons. It takes no time at all and very little effort to deal with such a tiny wash-up, but I'll try the alternative and see if it's labour-saving. I dropped some hints that more frequent visits by our Ottawa-dwelling offspring would be welcome, and we will see if these hints are acted upon. We hope they will be. That, and a few hours weekly of additional help from one of the respite care services, should suffice for now. Later, when Wendy's disability progresses to the stage where she cannot wash, dress, or feed herself, no doubt we will need more help, but we will cross that bridge when we get to it. The same applies to problems of communicating when she can no longer speak clearly. I got the laptop computer on which I post these blogs because it has some fancy bells and whistles like speech-activated text composing - which obviously won't help when she loses the power of speech. Exploring its potential use for other kinds of communication is something else that's on my agenda of things to do. Her speech is getting a bit difficult to understand at times, so that agenda item may have to get higher priority than I've given it so far.

Capitalism, a Love Story

Last night we watched Michael Moore's latest rabble-rousing movie, Capitalism, a Love Story. Like his previous movies on the broken US health care system, the gun culture and the destruction of US manufacturing industries and exporting of jobs to countries where labour costs are lower and there are fewer irritating occupational safety laws and regulations, this is a left-wing perspective - but an accurate perspective, I think - of the corruption of American democracy by the super-rich and the money-worshippers in the financial sector of American capitalism. I hope many Americans are looking at this and at Michael Moore's other movies. I wonder, too, whether the new American under-class that has been created by this unbridled predatory form of capitalism will continue to tolerate this state of affairs indefinitely, or whether there will be another American revolution. If there is, I don't think I want still to be alive to watch it, because it is certain to be very vicious and very bloody. Thanks to the gun laws, or rather the absence of gun laws in the USA, just about all the angry Americans who have lost their homes and been impoverished by the way things are, are heavily armed and have nothing to lose. It's a moot point whether the law enforcement agencies and the military would unanimously support the rich in any conflict between the haves and the have-nots in the USA of the early 21st century. I hope it's never put to the test. I wonder whether any of our American friends have been victims of the foreclosures and bank failures of the last few years. Yet again I'm thankful that we set our faces against all the seductive invitations I used to get years ago to move to the USA. It would have meant a big increase in income and lower taxes; but then I reflect on the good things our taxes pay for in Canada, like Wendy's care now that she is increasingly infirm, and I am convinced over again that Canada is a more civilized nation. What's more, if the winter that is now almost over (we hope) is a harbinger of things to come, Canada may soon be a climatically more comfortable country too.

Sea voyages

Port Alfred in a Force 10 storm 3-4 days out from Brisbane crossing Pacific, January 1964






A disadvantage of living in Ottawa is that it's a long way from the sea. I really do miss the sea, and often reminisce (not out loud in boring monologues but in my thoughts) about several long sea voyages we had fifty and more years ago when going by sea was the customary and usual way to travel between Australia and the UK, Europe and North America. The voyage in 1954 from London Tilbury Docks to Adelaide was undoubtedly one of the high points of my life. We filled the ship's oil tanks at Tenerife in the Canary Islands then made the long haul down the west coast of Africa, past Cape Town on a sparkling summer day, and across the southern fringe of the Indian Ocean, all the way to Port Adelaide, 4 weeks at sea without a port. After rounding the Cape of Good Hope we sailed on the great circle route which took us well to the south into the Roaring Forties into a region of perpetual gale force winds (from astern) so we had high white-capped seas with a regular and pleasant pitch but no roll.

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John Last on board Adelaide Star, in the 'Roaring Forties' about midway between Cape of Good Hope and landfall off Kangaroo Island, South Australia, August 1954


Those southern seas were rich with marine life in (and before) the 1950s - schools of tuna chasing smaller fish, porpoises and occasional whales; once we saw a huge dead sea beast, perhaps a whale, perhaps a very large hammerhead shark, that was sliced into several pieces by the ship's propellors and in the ship's wake every sea bird for miles around descended to feast on the bloody remains. The skies were rich in sea-bird life too in those high latitudes: we weren't far north of islands north of Antarctica that are breeding grounds for skuas, terns and gulls. We had an escort of albatross, majestic creatures with a wing span of up to 12 feet, that kept company with us all the way from the Cape of Good Hope to landfall off Kangaroo Island. I've described in my memoirs how several of us on that ship caught an albatross one day, using the technique that Apsley Cherry-Garrard describes in his classic of survival, The Worst Journey in the World. Another long voyage took all five of us from Sydney to Brisbane, across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal to Kingston, Jamaica where we unloaded several thousand tons of frozen goat meat before going on to Vera Cruz, Mexico, then up the Eastern seaboard of the USA to Charleston, South Carolina, Norfolk, Virginia, Philadelphia (where I disembarked to fly to my new post in the department of epidemiology and community medicine at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont) and Boston, where Wendy and the kids disembarked. It was a wonderful voyage, about 5-6 weeks in all including several days in some of the ports, mostly through calm seas under sunny skies. We did have one wonderful storm at sea a few days out from Brisbane, with force 10 (over 60 mph) gales and mountainous seas that crashed into the ship from right in front of us. Fortunately I'm a good sailor, although the rest of the family and many of the ship's company and almost all of the 12 passengers were laid low. As a member of the ship's crew (I was the ship's doctor) I had access to the bridge and spent many hours up there, fascinated by the spectacle of the ever-changing vista of huge white-capped waves, like snow on hilltops. The photo above is one of many I took from my vantage point on the bridge during that storm in 1964. When we emerged from the storm after 2-3 days, we had calm seas all the rest of the way across the Pacific and no more rough weather until we struck a force 8 gale soon after we left Vera Cruz. The warm tropical waters were rich with life too, perhaps most spectacularly with luminous plankton that glowed in the dark moonless nights like innumerable little fireflies. I and the rest of our little family are very fortunate to have had these wonderful experiences of sea voyages. It's a pity our kids were too young to have clear memories of those travels that were so much more pleasant in every way than the air travel that has replaced sea voyages - just another way in which I think life has got less placidly pleasant during my lifetime.

Travels

When the pressure builds up and the stresses and strains of our present situation become unduly burdensome we are blessed with the good fortune of having innumerable happy memories to fall back upon. Among these happy memories there are more than enough related to our travels to fill these blog posts every day for a year or more. So I will have to ration them, sprinkle them lightly from time to time among other posts on entirely different subjects. Here is one of the highlights to get the ball rolling. Early in 1976 I traveled to Sri Lanka, via New Delhi, for two months as a short-term consultant for WHO/SEARO, the World Health Organization, South East Asia Regional Office. Many wonderful and interesting experiences made that trip a high point in my life, and in Janet Wendy's life too, because she flew from Ottawa to join me for the second half of my assignment in Sri Lanka, then came back to Delhi with me, via Madras, Bangalore, Kajarahu to see the wonderful erotic carvings on the ancient Hindu temples, and Agra, to see the Taj Mahal. Having Wendy along to keep me company was the highest high point of all.The photo above shows Wendy making friendly overtures to a distant relative of ours outside the Red Fort, not the one in Delhi, but the slightly less spectacular Red Fort in Agra, which is much more famous of course for the Taj Mahal. We spent several hours marvelling at the architectural perfection of the Taj and its lovely inlaid coloured marble decorations, which accentuate its pure white perfection. The previous night we had stayed in a hotel called Holiday Inn (a rather grotty little dump, not part of the chain) and had a perfect view of the Taj Mahal in the light of a nearly full moon, from our bedroom window. I've described our experiences in one of the 'Traveler's Tales' that are part of my memoirs, and I'll say a little here too about some of it. We visited some of the spectacular Buddhist temples and shrines, climbed to the summit of Sigiriya the extraordinary rocky outcrop with well preserved frescos of ample-bosomed dancers in an alcove half way up the vertical sides, and the remains of a fortress on the nearly flat top of the rock. Monsoon rainfall stored in deep cisterns and cellars to hold many weeks' or months' supplies of food made that fortress virtually impregnable. To reach it we had to climb ladders and traverse along rickety wooden paths anchored to the vertical cliff face. Climbing Sigiriya amply confirmed that my fear of heights was a thing of the past. We celebrated our wedding anniversary at a sunny, sandy beach resort, one of several excellent government guest houses, at Hikkadua, a few kilometers up the west coast from the fortress of Galle at the southern end of the island. All these, the resort, the beaches, the rail tracks just in from the coast, were swept away in the catastrophic tsunami on Boxing Day 2004. I've left the best till last. The absolute highlight was staying for 10-14 days at Mrs Wickramasuria's guest house, on a hillside half way between Kandy and the campus of Peradinya University. Across the valley were even higher hills with tea plantations disappearing into the clouds. We shared our comfortable room at Mrs Wickramasuria's guest house with a quarrelsome family of sparrows that nested in the loose brass fitting that anchored the ceiling fan and scolded us loudly when we turned the fan on. Mrs W and her two daughters looked after us right royally, made us part of the family. She had been deserted by her husband, a disgraced member of the medical profession who had left the island. At weekends she entertained her gentleman friend, a member of parliament. One weekend before Wendy arrived I could hear them making energetic and very noisy love in the room next to mine. We were not surprised when we received a Christmas card at the end of the year, announcing the arrival of "baby" -- not yet named because the Buddhist custom is to await a favourable conjunction of astrological portents to select a name.

The Smile (A true story)

I'm going to try another experiment: let's see if I can paste into this blog one of Janet Wendy's stories, this one a true story:


The Smile

I closed my eyes and lifted the top lid down and over the bottom lid to remove the grit which had blown into my eye. The bus pulled away from the shingle edge on to the bitumen, stirring up a great cloud of dust, leaving me with two bags on the side of the road. Not a soul in sight, not a sound.

I was the first of the junior nursing class to be sent to the TB sanatorium in the country, and as I hadn’t met anyone who had been there before, I had no idea what to expect. What I did know was that I resented being separated from my friends, who after five months of living together in the nurses’ home, had bonded into a close group, full of fun and support for each other.
The week before, the Matron of the Main Hospital had given me money for a bus ticket and a time table, and had told me to take Saturday off and to be at the Sanatorium on Sunday, for a three month stay. I had packed my bags, tugged them to the city bus stop, arrived at the inter- city bus depot half an hour early, bought a one-way ticket, and waited for the bus to pull into the departure area.

There were only three other passengers, so I was happy that I would be able to sit near the front of the bus. The route was a winding road around the coast with many ups and downs around rocky promontories, along golden sweeps of sandy beaches, and glorious views of rolling breakers. As the bus was also the paper route, the pace was spasmodic, slowing for every tin mail box beside the road, where the driver threw the rolled up newspaper, then revved up the engine to attack the next hill. After about an hour the bus swung away from the coast, between hills, dense pine forests crowding the road, and cleared farm land. By this time my old childhood malady of car sickness was making me miserable and apprehensive. I hoped I could stay the distance without asking for a stop. My brow was sweaty and my mouth dry. The driver, a chain smoker, had lit up another pungent “roll your own” which he had stacked on the dashboard at the beginning of the journey. I had tried to open a window earlier and knew that they were sealed shut, not for any luxury like air conditioning, but just from rust and old age. I was getting desperate, trying to ignore the storm in my stomach, when the driver turned and called out

“Waikouaiti San, Miss!” I had arrived.

I clambered stiffly down the steps. I wanted to sit on my bags and cry. No welcoming person to meet me, not even a dog. Across the road the steep driveway disappeared into thick, dark pine trees, the few silver birches were already bare, and a carpet of brown and yellow leaves spread over the shingle. I picked up my bags and started to climb the hill, and as I went up, my heart went down. It was a steep puff to the top and I was unprepared for a sharp turn, sudden sunny open space and a lonely hut back from the edge of the drive.

I put the bags down to change them over – one was much bigger than the other – and then I noticed a wizened old man looking at me from his bed on the balcony at the entrance to the hut. Three walls were solid but the fourth was open with a sliding glass door pushed back to give the maximum amount of fresh air. He was looking at me with no expression or gesture, but he was undoubtedly human, so with a tremendous effort that I was sure would crack my face, I gave him as cheerful a smile as I could, and a wave of my hand. I called over to him, “Where is the office?” Still no voice but a weary finger pointing ahead “Many thanks. See you later. ‘Bye.”

After unpacking in my own room on the ground floor of a three-storey residence, I was shown over the building, the layout of patients’ huts, the main building containing treatment rooms, x-ray rooms, the patients’ dining room, ablution block, recreation room, and finally taken to the nurses’ sitting room where four or five nurses were sitting around a bright-burning wood fire. The room was cosy after the crisp late afternoon autumn air outside and everyone looked pleased to see me.
As usual, the new recruit was given the early morning duty, up at 5 am, but what a difference, rising in a centrally heated nurses’ home with a hot shower next door, from leaving a warm bed in an unheated room where the window was fixed open two inches from the bottom, and the ablution block was at the end of a long cold corridor. I congratulated myself on having had the foresight to put my underwear beside me in the bed so that at least it was relatively warm to put on.
After reporting to the office where the night staff gave me a flashlight, a trolley with instructions to load it up with jugs of fresh water, a holder with twelve thermometers in phials of spirit, and a clip board with names of patients and hut numbers, I was launched into the darkness. Between the huts the path was without lights, but the flashlight helped me to find the door latch and the light switch inside the hut. At 5.30 am I was not a welcome visitor and these long stay patients knew just how to make one feel unwanted. However, the job had to be done, so thermometers were popped into mouths, fresh water jugs and glasses put on bedside tables and the stale ones removed. In late April it was cold before the sun rose, but by June, the ice was on the surface of the jugs, and even in bright daylight many nurses wore mittens to stop their fingers from freezing.
By the end of May my hands had become so chapped there was quite a lengthy ritual at bed time, a generous coating of lanolin rubbed on my hands, then white cotton gloves to keep the grease off the sheets. After a hot, hot bath, a mad dash back to the bedroom, a quick leap under the sheets where a hot water bottle made a warm oasis, woolen socks on my feet, and all the underwear for the next morning stashed beside me in the bed so it would be warm to put on.
Finally, when the wind from the Antarctic blew in the permanently open window, a woolen ski cap warmed my head. Romantic, huh?

During my stay at the sanatorium, I saw quite a lot of the man in the end hut. On inquiring his name I was told it was Paddy Stuart.

“Was he Irish?” “ No, but he had one, didn’t he?”
“Had an Irish?” “No, silly. A paddy.”

Well, having been in isolation for several years and definitely no sign of healing, he had cause to be a bit short-tempered, didn’t he? I never found him anything but quiet and polite.

Because meals were so important to the patients, especially the bedridden ones who had neither the interest nor the energy to lift up a book and read, or had never read, it was necessary to get the food to them in as attractive a state as possible and in most cases this meant hot. Because it was such a long way to Paddy’s hut, even the insulated covers for the plates were not sufficient to keep his dinner hot, so the first time I was the “runner” I grabbed a thick hand towel off a laundry trolley parked at the kitchen door and wrapped it around the tray, then took off and ran as fast as I could, arriving at his bed red in the face and breathless. He needed help with eating as he was so weak, but he kept stopping to say “It’s so good, nice and hot.” He must have said something to the Matron, because from then on I was the “runner” to the end hut, and against all the rules I used to let my mask slip down so he could see my face, and although not much was said, we seemed to be in harmony.
You have to understand that tuberculosis was highly infectious and in 1943 there were no drugs to combat it. Thus all nursing staff wore masks when treating patients.

After a week or two, I felt completely at home, became fond of the patients, even the crabby ones, found the rest of the staff helpful and fun, and loved my one day off each week, when I would pack my lunch, put on my hiking boots and take off across the country, with rolling hills and the coast so near it would have been hard to get lost. It was bliss to climb to the top of a hill, sit there eating a sandwich, listening to the larks singing, the crickets chirping, and gaze over the cleared farmland, or the wide Pacific Ocean.

I was in my fifth week at the Sanatorium when Paddy became much worse. He had several hemorrhages from his lungs and it was obvious that he was dying. He said so himself in a matter-of-fact voice. It had become tradition that a staff member would sit with the patient while he was fading away, and often a particular nurse was requested. To my surprise, Paddy asked for me.

So it was one sunny May day with crisp cold air making my feet freeze, that I sat with Paddy, holding his hand, giving him sips of water, changing the cool cloth on his forehead and listening to the labored breathing and gurgling in his throat. About four in the afternoon, when the sun was setting, he stirred and tried to speak. I leant closer as his blue eyes opened, and he whispered, “The best thing that ever happened to me was your smile the day you arrived.” Then the hand in mine relaxed, and a long shuddering sigh shook his body.

The last sun’s rays tipped the pine tree tops, and all went dark.


(Originally written as a present for Sonia Kumar on the occasion of her ‘Coming of age’ ceremony, this was submitted to the Over 55 Ottawa Writers’ competition in 2005 in the Memoirs category. It is an account of real people, places and events, written many years later.)

Well, that worked! So now I know how to do it - one way to do it anyway, I can paste installments of Janet Wendy's writing to this blog from time to time. This true story is enough to go on with for today, however, so I'll quit while I'm ahead.

Janet Wendy's progress

Janet Wendy is having a rather miserable time, I'm sorry to say. Her muscle weakness is almost all upper body, including hands as well as neck and face muscles. So she has trouble looking straight ahead even with a bit of support from a neck brace, and her chin is sunk on her chest so she looks down at her feet, rather than straight ahead -- a rather depressing view of the world around her. She can still smile though, and her smile can still light up a room just as it's always done. (This photo which I took in August 1956 was briefly a header for these posts. It shows her smile at its best). She has no pain which is an aspect of motor neuron disease or ALS that makes her condition bearable. Her main complaint is that she is always tired, can't do things she has always done, like getting meals ready, no matter how hard she tries. Instead she sleeps a lot, although when she is awake she worries me sometimes, trying to do things that are beyond her strength. We are greatly comforted and helped by the rich range of support services and the friendly, compassionate people who staff these services. Lately we have been helped and advised by a physiotherapist, an occupational therapist (who has advised us about ways to minimize muscle use and maximize efficiency, while maintaining muscle tone; and has acquainted us with aids and assistive devices of many kinds). We are regularly visited by a community nurse, and by a palliative care physician (a former student of mine) whose help and advice are outstanding. All of this rich array of supporting services and specialized staff come without direct costs to us. We are finding out at first hand that the Canadian tax-supported health care system is excellent, indeed the highest quality personal care service. So we can flatly contradict the slander and lies that are pouring out of the Murdoch media in the USA -- although from the little I understand of it, the Obama health care proposal is an anemic and limited variant of tax supported medical and hospital care. I'm thankful yet again as I have been often in the past, that we chose to stay in Canada, rather than yield to the seductive invitations I used to get to move south of the border.

changing values

There's more to say about changing values. One set of values I've written and spoken about quite a lot in my efforts to corrupt the innocent minds of medical students goes by the name of family values. There's a great deal to say about these, and some of it has important implications for health - which is my reason for haranguing medical students. That's because values influence behaviour, and behaviour may be directly related to health in many subtle and unsubtle ways. When I was a child, divorce was very uncommon and carried a stigma. Coming from a home broken by a nasty divorce, I knew all about the stigma! I felt marked out as different from other kids because of it, and that compounded the sense of guilt I've written about in my memoirs (something I had done was the reason my parents split up; it was, perhaps still is, a common psychological response of young children to the breakup of their parents' marriage; and because of that needless, inappropriate feeling of guilt, the breakup leads to considerable insecurity of the affected child. No wonder I was a mixed up kid! But I digress). Divorce was rare 70-75 years ago when I was a small boy, so single parent mother-led families were rare too. Mine was the only one I knew of. Of course a decade earlier there had been many single parent mother-led families because the fathers had been killed in the mass slaughter of the Great War of 1914-1918. Kids in those families had been the object of sympathy and compassion, but not so in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Children with no father were usually illegitimate and that was a cause for even greater contempt and derision than being the child of divorced parents; but the two were sometimes confused, and maybe some of the vituperative remarks hurled at me by other kids at school arose from that confusion. The situation was made worse by the fact that I was bright, got the highest marks in tests, grounds for jealousy and hostility. But that was then. Now how different things are! Single parenthood by choice is common now, and there is no associated stigma. Unmarried young people live together now too, and that was unheard of the the 1930s. Another rare and shameful event then was abortion. Even a natural miscarriage, which may happen to between 1 in 5 and 1 in 10 early pregnancies, was hushed up and never spoken of in polite society. Termination of pregnancy by choice is commonplace now too, and legal as well. Next in this catalogue of changing values about the family is same-sex partnerships, even same-sex marriages, which are even legal, or at any rate recognized in law for such purposes as pensions and inheritance in many jurisdictions. Homosexuality carried an even greater stigma than divorce in my childhood and early adult life (some of my medical school classmates still had that implacably hostile attitude towards homosexual people, called them queers, fags, other pejorative labels, many of these unprintable, even as recently as our 50th anniversary reunion in 1999. I had a school friend who confessed to me he felt much more attracted to other boys and to one boy in particular (not me) than to girls. He was someone I liked and respected so maybe that was why I had a tolerant, accepting attitude to gays, dating from when I was about 15. Most decent and civilized people in our society now have an accepting tolerant attitude. So there's another value that has changed quite dramatically in my lifetime. Other values have changed too, including some that have major implications for health. The most obvious is the change in attitudes towards tobacco smoking. Offering a cigarette when introduced to strangers was an almost universal custom until about the middle to late 1960s, and it was customary to light cigarettes without asking if anybody minded. And we smoked everywhere, in public transport, in cinemas, restaurants. That's as socially unacceptable now as spitting on the living room carpet. We used to think it was noble and self-sacrificing to drive friends home to distant suburbs at the end of a party, no matter how much we had had to drink before getting behind the steering-wheel of the car. Those social customs are unacceptable now, with lives saved as a result.

changing and adapting

Last week several of us, now all in our 80s, were chatting over cups of tea about how the world has changed in our lifetimes, and about generational differences in values and behaviour. Our remarks weren't original and I suppose much the same sentiments have been expressed by old people since Socrates' time, or before. But the changes in the world in our lifetimes may well have been more defining, more epochal, even more apocalyptic than in any previous period of 80-odd years. Personally, I feel very privileged to have lived in a period when it's been possible to witness all these changes. I also feel very lucky to have escaped so many very bad things that have happened in the past 80 plus years, like the worst consequences of wars and genocides, and very fortunate indeed to have benefited so much from some of the good things. First, though, a thought about values and behaviour. All who were alive during the great depression of the early 1930s are almost instinctively averse to extravagant spending. Back then when money was so tight, so hard to come by, we made do with what we had, altering or adapting it as appropriate. I can clearly remember seeing a car, a late 1920s model I suppose, that had been adapted so it could be pulled along by a horse that was harnessed to a pole attached to the hood; the driver sat in the passenger seat, holding the reins that went through the louvred opening in the windshield and occasionally flicking the horse's rump with the end of his whip as the car glided sedately along King William Road on its way towards Adelaide. He or someone next to him on the front seat, probably his wife I suppose, occasionally gave the steering-wheel a gentle nudge too. It cost less to graze the horse than to pay for petrol or engine repairs. We threw nothing away: everything was either mended, patched, or adapted to new and different uses. Both Wendy and I were conditioned in those hard times and have always been frugal because of it. When we have occasional bouts of extravagance we feel deliriously irresponsible. I first experienced a profligate, throw-away society when we lived in Burlington, Vermont, in 1964-65 and was shocked to see the kinds of things our neighbours put out for the garbage collectors each week: kitchen appliances that looked easily reparable, good clothes, and of course large quantities of food that was fit to eat. All of us 80-year-olds lamented the profligacy of today's youngsters, and for that matter, the profligacy of our own now middle-aged children. All sorts of horror stories are told about garbage, about the prodigious amounts of it and the increasingly troublesome problem of disposing of it all in ways that are sanitary, safe, and affordable. We hear too about the 'three Rs' - reduce, recycle, reuse - in relation to disposable items. This is a mantra nowadays taught to kindergarten kids. I wonder if they practise what is preached to them, and I hope they go home to pass on this message to their parents, in the same way that our kids came home from school with messages for us, their parents, about the correct way to brush our teeth - up and down, not side to side. There's a depression era song, there are many actually, "Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?" may be the best, most famous, but another I'm thinking of now, "Hard times, come again no more!" may date back to an earlier slump in the late 19th century, because I think it's a Stephen Foster song. I hope our grandchildren never experience hard times like those, but I also hope that if hard times do come again, they can adapt and learn the frugal ways that we learnt from our own parents who were running things back in the early 1930s when we were young.

Diversity and multiculturalism

A defining characteristic of Canada is its diversity, also called multiculturalism (these aren't quite the same but in conversation they often are equated). To a considerable extent this is a deliberate policy choice: Canada unlike the United States, encourages immigrants to preserve at least some cultural traditions of their country of origin. The metaphors are melting-pot for the United States, which actively encourages immigrants to shed their original identity and become American, and mosaic for Canada, which tacitly encourages immigrants to become "hyphenated" Canadians, to preserve their original identity while also becoming Canadian. Very early in our Canadian lives I became aware of this and embraced it with enthusiasm. I discussed it with a school friend who was a diplomat in the Australian High Commission; he defended the official Australian policy which resembled the American in referring to "assimilation" - a variant of the melting-pot. I made it clear that I preferred the tolerant, 'ecumenical' Canadian policy. One Canada Day in the early 1970s, we biked from our home to Parliament Hill, where Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau was strolling casually among the cheerful, friendly crowds, without visible security (those were the days!). That year the Canada Day celebrations included a display of dancing by ethnic groups from Greece, Portugal, Ukraine, Philippines, other countries; we watched and applauded some of this while standing next to Pierre Trudeau before he strolled on, not before he had autographed a little paper Canadian flag for Wendy. Since then on other Canada Days we've seen the same rich mixtures over and over again. There are regional aggregations of ethnic groups, Sikhs, Hindus, Chinese in southern BC, Ukrainians in Alberta, more Ukrainians along with Icelandic people in Manitoba, Italians, Portuguese and Spanish in Toronto, as well as the largest Chinese community outside China, Haitians and francophone North Africans (Algerians, Moroccans) in Montreal, Somalis, Italians and Portuguese in Ottawa. Very rarely the ethnic tensions and hostilities of their original countries have transplanted, but happily these seldom seem to take root or last for long. I recall a sad falling-out in the early 1990s between two Yugoslav classmates who had been good friends until one, a Serb, and the other a Croat almost started fist-fighting in a seminar-tutorial class; and there have been ethnic gang wars, turf wars, in the lower mainland of BC. And of course, there are very large numbers of people all across Canada whose ancestral roots were French, British, Irish, where ancient historical tensions very occasionally surface. In parts of Nova Scotia, there are more Gaelic-speakers than in Scotland; and many Newfoundlanders speak with accents that can be mistaken for Dublin, Limerick or Cork. When I first came to the University of Ottawa in 1969-70, the class lists of the medical students contained names almost entirely from France or the British Isles. By the late 1970s I began to notice names from South and South-East Asia, as well as Italian and Slavic names. On the last class list I officially received in 1992-93, about one in five names looked Chinese, and so did the faces of the class members. Almost all spoke with Canadian accents however, and all or almost all were fluently bilingual in English and French; many had a third and some had fourth and a few had a fifth language. But underneath their skins of varying colours and their names from all over the world, they were all Canadian first and foremost. Most were Canadian born or had come to Canada as infants. From what I see at a distance of present-day medical student classes, they are much the same, the same rich cultural mix that not infrequently leads to assortative mating that takes no account of skin colour, family name, religion. The most wonderful wedding we ever attended, other than our own, was that of two good friends I'd known since their first week in medical school. One was from a 'High Anglican' family, the other from a devout Hindu family where marriages were arranged in infancy. Those two worked on their respective parents for 4-5 years to win them over and agree to accept, even to welcome the marriage which was a lovely blend of Christian and Hindu rituals. There's hope for humanity in such blending of diverse cultures, skin colours and historical origins. Amid all the troubles of this world I take great comfort from that.

pictures tell a thousand words each

I'll begin this post with another picture - if only to prove to myself that I can learn from experience. This one is hot off the press, taken yesterday by Jonathan at an afternoon tea party in our apartment to celebrate Richard's birthday, which in fact happens tomorrow, but yesterday was a convenient day to celebrate it. I should attach his photo to this post too but after my previous goofs I think I'll quit while I'm ahead and just settle for this one. This picture demonstrates that Janet Wendy's smile can still light up a room, despite her disability. It demonstrates also that she is behaving as she should, following the advice of her care-giving team and using her walker. Well, most of the time anyway. She still tends to wander off to the other end of our apartment, leaving it behind and then searching for it in vain. But she's getting better at remembering to rely on it all the time rather than just some of the time.

Well, the photos appeared in that last post after all. Don't ask me how, or why one is smaller than the other. I'm just blundering about, haven't a clue what's happening half the time. Anyway, that second, smaller photo is us two as we were at our golden wedding anniversary banquet on Saint Valentine's Day, February 14, 2007. I suppose Janet Wendy looks a little older fifty years on but her smile is as radiant as ever. The weather was very different: it was 104 F in Adelaide on our wedding day in 1957, and I am pretty sure it never got nearer zero C than about 10 below in Ottawa on February 14 2007; and we had snow, crisp, squeaky pure white and lovely to behold as our friends Ian and Carrol McDowell took us home after the banquet. There's a more recent photo taken on our anniversary this year that I'll try to paste into this blog some time soon.

Today is International Women's Day. The 99th International Women's Day, which surprised me; I had no idea we had been acknowledging the significant roles and important status of women for so long (although not doing much about it). Looking back to my adolescence and young adulthood, a period ranging from 70 to 60 years ago, I recall with a mixture of embarrassment and shame how chauvinist we 'men' were about the invasion of our comfortable world by 'girls.' Women and girls played a crucial role in the war effort during the second world war that dominated events during that period of my life, but after the war ended we boys and young men expected, even required, the girls and young women to get out of our way, to leave professions like medicine to men, to focus exclusively on subservient professional roles as nurses and less 'important' professions in emerging fields like physiotherapy. It didn't happen; it would have been like trying to stop an incoming tide. We had 15 women in a class of 60 when I started the 6-year medical course in 1944. We 'men' all thought it was a waste of valuable and limited medical school places to allocate 25% of them to 'girls' who would be useless as doctors, although we grudgingly made an allowance for the facts of wartime stringencies. We were quite sure almost if not all would marry, drop out, never practice. In fact at our 50th anniversary reunion and indeed long before then, much higher proportions of the women than men had risen to top positions in specialties as diverse as radiotherapy, anesthesiology, neurosurgery, and the Flying Doctor service in remote outback Australia. They were harbingers of what was to come. For the last 20 years or more, women have often outnumbered men in medical schools throughout the English-speaking world. They have transformed the practice of medicine in all sorts of good ways. I am on record affirming that the feminizing of my profession of medicine is one of the three best things to have happened to medicine in my lifetime. The other two are advances in medical science that make it possible to prevent or cure many previously fatal and disabling conditions, and removal of financial barriers between sick people and the care they need, in all civilized nations. (In this and several other ways the USA is not a civilized nation, which is the reason we chose not to become Americans and live there, chose Canada instead). CBC Radio, another of the good things about Canada, had a series of items in its morning documentary program, The Current, on the roles and status of women in several countries, drawing attention to many impediments that remain in women's way, so although there is much to celebrate, there is even more that has yet to be done to achieve genuine equity and equality, here in Canada and in just about every other country on earth. That's a challenge I hope my grand-daughter Christina will do something about!

Progress

I started compiling this blog a few weeks ago with several motives in mind. One was to provide periodic reports on the progress of the motor neurone disease (ALS) that has afflicted Janet Wendy. I soon decided that it would be best to make these periodic reports rather brief and rather infrequent. So far the blog seems to have been mainly a sort of stream of consciousness activity, reactions to events or current activities. mixed with several failed attempts to paste into it a readable copy of Selected Works of Janet Wendy Last. I haven't given up on this, just tried several ways to do it, all unsuccessful. So I've postponed that plan for a while. I haven't abandoned it though.

Today I will say a little about how Janet Wendy is doing. She is coping magnificently with the increasing impairment of her daily activities. She can feed, wash and dress herself and do a little light housework -- more than she should, and I feel as if I'm nagging at her too often for trying to do things that are beyond her diminishing capacity. But she is adjusting, probably better than I am, to this new reality in our lives, and is allowing me to do more and more for her. I've commented earlier on the support services that have rallied around us and contribute so much to making our lives as pleasant as possible. David came from Kingston this weekend, carrying our delicious evening meal, and enough left over for several more meals next week. It's always pleasurable to chat to David, he and I always seem to be able to find so many things in which we share a common interest. This time, his crock pot of chicken was very welcome too, and delicious withal. Planning future meals, something I'd never thought about for longer than a nanosecond at a time, has become minor preoccupation nowadays.

I thought I had pasted a couple of photos into this post, two favourites that show Janet Wendy's lovely smile, show it has lost none of its charm over the past fifty and more years.But there they are all alone in a blog posting without much accompanying text. Maybe I'll assemble more blog posts of old photos, some of the family far away in Oz and NZ may like to see them. I know I never get tired of looking at them, which may make me a narcissist as well as all the other vices I possess.

Still trying

Here I am, still trying to paste Selected Works of Janet Wendy Last to this blog. Even pasting just one part would be success. So let's try again:

Users/johnlast/Downloads/Janet_Wendy_Text.pdf

Nope. None of the painstakingly followed directions has done the trick. I've had bucket loads of advice from experts and I've followed the instructions as meticulously as I could, but all I seem able to achieve is to get the coordinates to appear here. The text and pictures obstinately refuse to display on this screen. So let's change the subject.

What happens to parts of the brain that aren't used for a long time and then get summoned back into service? Once upon a time I had a good grasp of what was called higher mathematics long ago in my youth. I could understand and apply the principles of trigonometry, fairly advanced algebra, solid geometry, probability theory, statistics, set theory. I haven't used any of them for many years. But I decided that I'd bring myself up to speed in modern cosmology by reading a new edition of Stephen Hawking's book, The Nature of Space and Time; this new edition was a collaborative effort with Roger Penrose as co-author. I should say here that I understood all of Stephen Hawking's best-selling earlier book, A Brief History of Time; the mathematical physics in that book were entirely comprehensible. Maybe it's the influence of Penrose, whose writing in earlier books struck me as opaque compared to the crystal clarity of Hawking. Maybe it's atrophy from disuse. Maybe it's a previously unnoticed consequence of the TIA (little stroke or brain infarct) that I had in Canberra in 2005. That completely knocked out my other languages: before that TIA I had been able to understand and speak a little each of German, Italian and French, in that order of proficiency. After the TIA, all three languages were utterly gone. A few words have come back, even a few sentences, catch phrases and the like. But I can't follow the dialogue in movies, simple slowly-spoken conversations, or the libretto even of a familiar opera like Don Giovanni or Zauberflote, can't pick up the few remarks of Angela Merkel before the translation kicks in during TV interviews. Has the same thing happened to my formerly adequate mathematic brain? Was part of it disabled in that same TIA? Or is it a function of memory, that utterly incomprehensible intellectual function that seems to be part electrical impulses, part chemical reactions? Has my mathematical memory, unused for decades, just been buried under a myriad other kinds of memories? I never understood enough neurology or psychology even to know what questions to ask about this aspect of the human mind, let alone understand the answers. Maybe this blog post will provoke a response from someone younger, brighter, better educated than I am in this domain.

culinary arts and other mysteries

Yesterday I roasted another chicken and I'm not boasting when I say that it was highly successful, spiced stuffing and all the trimmings. But I haven't mastered the culinary art of having everything ready at the same time: the roast potato, parsnips and sweet potato were ready for too long before the bird was properly cooked, so they disintegrated when I tried to get them out of the pan in one piece. The fragments tasted OK though, and there's enough left over for us to have cold chicken and salad for the rest of the week. I'd call that a success.

There's an oddity about these blogs that I can't explain or account for. The clock on the laptop that I use for them is set to the exact correct local time; but I've noticed that the time on all the blogs seems to be 4, or to be precise about it, 4 1/2 time zones away. Bermuda, perhaps? Or St Helena in the middle of the South Atlantic ocean? I'm too old and too busy with the other things I have to do each day to care about this. It's just another - yet another - of the odd eccentricities of computers or of cyberspace that make me realize that the world has passed me by, has adopted habits and customs that everyone else understands and I don't.

Today the parliament of Canada reassembled after a long break that happened because the prime minister prorogued parliament in order to evade - at least temporarily - some awkward questions that had arisen about honouring certain universal human rights obligations; we have an extreme right-wing government at present, and clearly it doesn't entirely approve of universal human rights, such as the right of women to control their own reproductive functions. Perhaps as a sop to those who believe in universal human rights, the speech from the throne included a promise to rewrite the words of the national anthem to make them gender neutral. I don't think this will satisfy advocates of human rights. The Canadian national anthem is quite a good one - not in the same class as the French or Russian anthems, but a notch or two better than the British, Australian or (when it comes to singing it) the American anthem; the American anthem has a rousing, even inspiring tune, but it spans too many octaves to be sung comfortably by anyone with an untrained voice. Actually, the words of most national anthems that I know anything about don't stand up well to close examination - God Save the Queen (or King, as the case may be) is a prime example. It would be a challenge to find a national anthem more chauvinistic. But I get nervous when I hear of politicians seeking to muck about with matters like this. I hope this particular item on the national agenda gets lost in the fog of battle among the warring factions on Parliament Hill.

As yet I haven't figured out how to attach files to this blog, which is unfortunate because one reason I started it was to spread Selected Works of Janet Wendy Last to a wider circle of potential readers. I'll try to find a tutorial, or ask someone who knows a bit more than I do about the finer points of blogging. Meantime, I'll keep on doing it, though probably with rather erratic frequency.

It would be nice to know too whether anybody looks at/reads these ruminations. As I'm doing this for my own amusement, maybe as a kind of therapy, I don't particularly care whether anybody is out there but if you are, don't be shy, add a word or sentence of approval or disapproval. There's a place for it in a little box, and if you prefer you can remain anonymous as I have on a few occasions when commenting on other people's blogs - not that I've looked at many, but one at least, the thoughts of a highly intelligent physician as she approached death from breast cancer, prompted reactions from many of her readers, admirers and personal friends (I was one, albeit rather a distant friend, had seen her only once or twice since leaving Edinburgh 40 years ago). But I'm going to make this a very brief blog. Maybe tomorrow, if time allows, and I can use wireless internet while awaiting Wendy at the optometrist's office where she is having her eyes tested, I might discuss lessons I learnt today roasting a chicken.

Omni anima post coitum triste sunt

I'm sure my very rusty Latin is horribly wrong but the tag loosely translates as after the greatest joy comes a period of melancholy. That seems to be how a great many Canadians are feeling this week.

When you get right down to it, a blog is really just a diary, 21st century style. It can be anything between a record of daily events, revelations of the human soul laid bare, an ego-trip, a travelogue (with or without photos). This one is mostly just ruminations and reflections on whatever takes my fancy - and a way to escape for a few minutes occasionally from the fell clutch of circumstance, the bludgeoning of chance and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

We've had winter sports style olympic games in Canada for the past two weeks or thereabouts. I tried hard, but they couldn't be avoided or evaded entirely, and by chance I saw several of what the commentators called 'defining moments.' One was a race on skates in which three men skating very close together one behind the other were competing against three other men also skating very close together half way around the track from the other team. When it was all over one team of three, the Canadian team, had won by some very small fraction of a second. I have no idea how that was calculated. By chance, and a compulsion to look at something absolutely incomprehensible I saw the final of the men's curling, again won by the Canadian team, whereupon the spectators, tens of thousands by the look of it, had some sort of collective orgasm. And finally I saw either as it happened or in one of innumerable replays the overtime or extra time (what's the difference?) goal with which the Canadian men's hockey team beat the American men's team to win the gold medal. I was rather relieved to hear one of the authorities on hockey say that he had been unable to see the puck because it traveled so fast from the striker, a young Canadian hero called Sydney Crosby, into the net behind the goal keeper; I hadn't seen it either, though the packed rows of spectators evidently did, and roared their approval lustily. The press, radio and TV had left the impression that failure to win the gold medal in the men's hockey tournament would be somehow akin to loss of national sovereignty to invaders from Lichtenstein or Botswana. I suppose that even after 40 plus years of living in Canada I'm not yet fully Canadian because I'm indifferent to the outcome of sporting events such as hockey (known as ice hockey in the rest of the world; here it needs no qualifying adjectival noun). Yet after these rather snide comments I must add how very favourably impressed I was by the insightful, thoughtful, intelligent remarks that many of these young athletes made when being interviewed on radio or TV. Clearly they are not merely the world's best at their particular sport, they also have very good minds, and in many cases, values that match my own - their hearts are in the right place. I found this encouraging evidence that the future will be in safe hands if some of these youngsters become our national leaders in a few years; at least one hinted that she hopes her future might include service in elected office. I hope so too, and hope she displaces one of the meretricious, ethically challenged tenth-raters now holding office in the government of Canada. Hearing her vision of a future Canada was the most uplifting experience I had during these Olympic Games. I can't remember her name but she skates, has won medals in summer as well as winter games, and has done good work in low income developing countries. With such as she to look forward to, the future could be brighter than the present. Listening to what she said a few days ago certainly lifted my spirits.

Is another myth busted?

Talking about mortality rates, probability of dying and suchlike in elementary vital statistics classes, I used to display my erudition by illustrating odds against dying with the story of Aeschylus, the great Greek tragedian. The story I've told for years is that he was killed by a tortoise that was dropped on his bald head by a passing eagle that mistook his bald head for a rock that would break the tortoise's shell so the eagle could eat its innards. The tortoise, and Aeschylus, both died in the incident according to the story, said to have been witnessed by friends, perhaps seeking the autograph of the author of The Oresteia and many other great tragic plays, only a few of which have survived to our time. Alas, according to Simon Critchley, author of The Book of Dead Philosophers, the story is a myth. Critchley's book is fascinating and fun, but I'm quite put off by this piece of myth-busting. I want the story of how Aeschylus died to be true! It doesn't matter to me as a teacher - I won't be teaching elementary vital statistics again any time soon. But it's such a nice story, I hope Critchley is wrong.