Signs of the times

Google has added some new features (maybe they were always there, unnoticed by me).One of these is statistics. My blog had 24 visitors yesterday, 294 last month, and since I started it in February 2010, it's been "visited" 7079 times - not,I'm sure, by 7079 different people perhaps no more people than the two dozen who looked at it yesterday. Even 24 seems a lot to me (in this intrusive age when no one has a private life anymore, no doubt this includes snoops from sundry secretive government agencies).
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Earlier this afternoon while I was walking in a quiet place beside the Canal, I heard honking geese overhead. At first I couldn't see them, then far above, almost out of sight was a large V-formation, perhaps 100 strong, purposefully heading south. They may have been snow geese, because squadrons of Canada geese stay here nowadays until late November or even later in the year; but the geese whose habitat is the high Arctic set off on their migration earlier. I've heard many blue jays lately too, presumably also passing through on their way south.Today is supposedly our last really warm day and by the weekend we will be down to single figures. A week ago when I looked out the west windows I saw hardly any autumn colors but today there are many red, orange and yellow trees even if the predominant color is still green. In past years I've often taken photos of the autumn colors when they are at their best, usually in the second week of October. This year they may be at their best a little later, judging on present indications. And I may not yet be entirely passe, over the hill, yesterday's man: I've had two more invitations to talk to students and others in the past week. That's another sign of the times I suppose, a sign that a new academic year is under way - and a morale booster too, of course. It's great to feel wanted and needed.

An 85th Birthday

Today is my 85th birthday. I slept in a bit later than usual, was still in bed when the 8 am news came on my bedside radio, soon rudely interrupted by an appalling racket of power drills in the next door apartment where renovations are taking place. Then the phone rang, and at the other end was brother Peter, phoning from Adelaide. He sounded pretty spry and brought me up to date with family news. My email too when I switched it on after breakfast, was replete with birthday greetings, including Peter's and a lovely note from Dodie Ziemer in Melbourne. I really do feel 85, still mobile, 20/20 vision thanks to successful cataract surgery and no major life-endangering diseases, but a handful or more of irritating relatively minor impairments that collectively remind me I am no longer young. I can't walk as briskly as once I could but at least I can walk, which is more than some my age can do. My reward for paying dues for half a century is honorary life member of the British Medical Association, so I get the BMJ every week; it's the only medical journal I read now. although I skim half a dozen others and occasionally read something in one of them. For the past few years it seems that hardly a week goes by without the obituary of a former friend or acquaintance in the UK; altogether I worked there for almost 10 years and one way or another, I had a large network of professional colleagues and personal friends, far more than I've acquired on this side of the pond. I remember several old people including my father, saying that old age gets lonely as friends and contemporaries die, in his case leaving him the sole survivor of a once large circle. I feel a bit like that sometimes, although as a lifelong 'loner' I may be less troubled by this than many other people. I have my books and the radio, and occasionally look at something other than news and weather reports on TV. David is laid low by a respiratory infection that has incapacitated many of the staff and cadets at RMC, but today I had lunch with Rebecca, Richard and Jonathan, to celebrate this milestone. I miss Wendy's little doggerel verse that used to be a consistent birthday ritual; once at least it was a real poem, preserved forever in print in the book of her Selected Works, and I still have many cards with other, briefer verses. I miss Wendy, and wish we were together. Even now, more than 10 months after her death, the wound is still raw, as I discovered when I had this thought about her yearly birthday verses and the sad realization that there will be no more of these cheery verses.

The Cat's Table

Wendy and I went from Adelaide to Liverpool, England by sea in 1961, and came home from Rotterdam to Adelaide by sea in 1962; then in 1964 we sailed from Sydney across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal to Kingston, Jamaica, Veracruz Mexico, and on up the eastern seaboard of the USA. All three voyages were on freighters that carried 12 passengers. Rebecca and David were both toddlers when we went to England in 1961, David not much more than a toddler when we came home in 1962; Jonathan wasn't even there in 1961 or 1962 and was just over six months old when we left Sydney in 1964. So he has no memory of any of our sea voyages; Rebecca and David have only fragmentary memories. I've been reading with delight Michael Ondaatje's new novel, The Cat's Table, about the sea voyage of a 9-year old boy in 1954 from Columbo to London via Aden, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean and on to Tilbury Docks in London. It's a vividly evocative description of the hare-brained fun and adventures that the boy, Michael and two other boys his age, got up to on the 3-week voyage. It made me realize how much our kids missed by making their much longer and potentially more exciting, more adventurous voyages when they were too young to get up to any mischief or engage in any of the sorts of adventures that Michael, Ramadhin and Cassius indulged in during their voyage on the passenger liner Oronsay. Our three had only handfuls of passengers with whom they could interact, but closer relationships with officers and crew. And yet, I dunno... maybe it's as well our kids were too young. I'm not sure Wendy and I would have survived unscathed if our kids had been 9 or 10 years old... The Cat's Table is a delightful book, more accessible than some of Ondaatje's other novels, eminently readable, and with some memorable characters among the passengers and the ship's company.

Caravaggio

On Friday of last week I took Jeff House and Fiona Stevens to the exhibition of paintings by "Caravaggio and his followers" at the National Gallery. There were a lot more followers than works of Michelangelo di Caravaggio, but he was well represented by a selection of a dozen or more of his sacred and profane works. The latter are more interesting, paintings of common people: gypsy fortune tellers, card-sharps, pick-pockets, soldiers, riff-raff of the gutters of Renaissance Rome, with expressive faces, vivid movements captured like stop-motion photographs. The sacred paintings included St Francis of Assisi in a ragged, patched cloak, Christ's body being lowered from the cross, Abraham about to cut his son's throat until the angel points out the convenient ram. It was a very well spent morning. So today I rented a DVD called Caravaggio. It turned out to be a surreal version of his life story, with vividly evocative close-ups of some of his paintings, anachronistic touches like cigarettes and toques, a typewriter on which an art critic is painstakingly hunt-and-peck typing savage comments on Caravaggio's latest profane masterpiece, and the sound-track of a steam train when there is a love scene on the screen. It was weird, but worth seeing. Just barely: the set piece cinematography captured Caravaggio's style very well, and it was worth seeing for this, but not for any other reason. It would have been incomprehensible if I hadn't so recently learned a lot about this brilliant innovative artist.

Fiona and Jeff drop into Ottawa

I'm very pleased with the weather gods who turned on spectacular late summer, rather than early autumn days, and cool fall nights throughout the visit to Ottawa by my old friend Jeff House and his wife Fiona, whom I also know, but less well. I was very chuffed that Jeff and Fiona came all the way from San Francisco mainly just to see me, it appears. Fiona has an elderly courtesy aunt here so she too had an incentive to make this visit. They saw Ottawa almost at its absolute best (perhaps a dash or two more of autumn colours would have achieved absolute perfection, but fall is late this year, another sign of climate change I suppose). The visit wasn't long enough for all the exchange of news and views I would have liked but it was certainly way better than no visit. I first met Jeff some time towards the end of the 1970s, soon after I had been appointed editor in chief of Preventive Medicine and Hygiene, the venerable American textbook first published in 1913, edited by Milton Rosenau; he saw the book through six editions then handed it on to his friend Kenneth Maxcy, who was based at Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health in Baltimore. Maxcy in his turn passed the torch to Philip Sartwell, who was not a good editor. The dissatisfied publishers asked the Association of Teachers of Preventive Medicine to select a new editor; ATPM struck a search committee and chose me, which was a shocking surprise to everyone, especially me. I first met Jeff when he was senior medical editor at Oxford University Press. We seemed fellow spirits and a few years later when the IEA selected me to compile and edit the Dictionary of Epidemiology, Jeff and I became firm friends, drawn to each other by many shared interests. We used to meet annually at least once at a major epidemiology or public health meeting, and over the years he made several tactful suggestions about ways I could do better in my editorial role. Our shared interests include literature, the arts more generally, and politics, as well as the making of good books. I wish Jeff and Fiona were my neighbours instead of living 3000 or more miles away. Now they have set off on their way home to San Francisco and I'm kicking myself that I forgot to get out my camera on any of the occasions that they were here in my home. Just to close the circle on my digression into the matter of that big public health textbook: I used my editorial role in many innovative ways, one of which was to change the name from Maxcy-Rosenau Preventive Medicine and Hygiene to Maxcy-Rosenau Public Health and Preventive Medicine. I wrote about my reasons for the name change, and later in the 13th edition, the publishers honoured me, adding my name to the book's eponym: now it's called "Maxcy-Rosenau-Last" - and perhaps soon Bob Wallace's name will be added too; or maybe the eponym will be dropped, maybe the great monster will become an e-book. Sic transit gloria mundi. (Fiona took the photo at the top of this post with her cell phone. I could kick myself for forgetting to get out my digital camera! I missed several splendid photo ops.)

9/11 + 10

I've lived in and visited several nations afflicted with chronic terrorist attacks by organized, aggrieved groups, and know enough about others to feel reasonably confident about an observation and conclusion. In all but one nation, these attacks are regarded as serious outrages against the public order, but life goes on as near normal as possible, and the necessary security against future attacks is a minor annoyance. The exception of course is the USA, where a single attack ten years ago, admittedly a dramatic and horrible attack that killed several thousand and destroyed two iconic skyscrapers seems to have induced a permanent and fundamentally harmful change in the American psyche and way of life. The IRA attacks in Britain, ETA's in Spain, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the Kurdish separatists in Turkey, all lasted for decades and I think all killed and maimed more people, but for the affected nations and their people, life has gone on more or less normally. I came back to North America from a brief visit to Greece and Turkey and went straight on to the USA in November 2004. The contrast was glaringly obvious. The USA has become the Paranoid States of America. The paranoia seems to me to have become greater as time passes, reaching a crescendo as the 10th anniversary of the outrage approaches; and it has affected Canada's present leader who remarked a few days ago that the greatest threat facing Canada is "Islamicism", whatever that is. The remark understandably has made Canadian Muslims nervous, and stigmatized them withal. But this is a trivial distraction compared to the disruption of American life by the aftermath of that attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The Department of Homeland Security has become a massive money-eating monster with intrusive tentacles that touch millions. Air travelers meekly empty their pockets, remove their coats and their shoes to go through the security station between the check-in desk and the departure lounge. I wonder how many know that shoes are are removed also before entering a mosque. Many thousands are on a secretive "No-Fly" list which is Kafka-esque in its operation. Once on this list, even mistakenly as seems to have been quite common, the sentence and the stigma are life-long. I don't think we should be commemorating what 19 men with box-cutters brought about that day. And for good measure, a pox on Homeland Security.

Hard Labour

September 3 is one date that always gives me a little frisson of ... what? Not nostalgia, but 72 years ago it was the date on which the world, even my schoolboy world, changed forever. I will never forget the quavery old man's voice of the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain coming over the short wave radio that Sunday night as he told us, all over what was then the British Empire,that we were now at war with Germany. We were at the home of my Auntie Katie that evening, along with a balding Jewish refugee newly arrived in Australia from Europe, and I watched as tears ran down his face, the first time I ever saw a grown man cry. Later we drove that man part way home, to where he could get a tram into Adelaide. It was a cold night of scudding clouds that intermittently hid and revealed the sparkling Southern Hemisphere stars, jewels in the bright girdle of the Milky Way. I felt apprehensive that night as we all did I think, very unsure of what was to come, how long it would last, what would be the outcome. Nowadays this particular weekend signifies something else altogether: it's the Labor Day holiday weekend in USA and Canada, the transition from summer holidays to the start of the new year for schools, colleges, universities. Next week my diary is cluttered with welcoming events for new classes, most of which I can safely ignore, though I do want to attend a couple. For years I used this weekend for my private purpose of taking stock of what I had accomplished, what remained to be done before the end of the year. It's the same story this year I suppose. For months I was mourning Wendy, slowly emerged from that state around the middle of the year, began to pick up the pieces of my life and move on. My labours aren't done: I committed long ago to write 3 chapters in Public Health and Ecology, a new book to be published by Oxford University Press, that is a linear descendant from my solo effort, Public Health and Human Ecology. For the past few weeks I've been diligently pecking away at the first of my chapters, and today I began to work on the second of them, the chapter on philosophical, moral and ethical foundations of public health. This is actually the last chapter in the book, one I enjoy writing and talking about because it explains why we do what we do in public health practice, why it matters, what some of the moral and ethical challenges are, and how we can confront and respond to these challenges.