Once again this afternoon I felt a bit like the Eiffel Tower - everyone wanted their photo taken beside me. It happened after I spoke to the scientific staff of the Public Health Agency of Canada. Not all of them, about 30-35 I think. This took place in a fine new building on the very familiar campus of government buildings on Tunney's Pasture, just west of downtown Ottawa, where I have spent innumerable hours over the past 42 years. Looking over the audience, I didn't see a single familiar face. Twenty years ago I knew every one of them in the equivalent section of Health Canada, was on first-name terms with almost all. Now there has been a generation change - all those old friends have retired, some have died. After I'd spoken to them, a talk with which they seemed well pleased, at least a dozen people took out their cell phones, not to yack to somebody or other, but to use them to take my photo with each of them, sometimes several together, standing beside me. I asked a couple of the more handsome among them to email a copy to me, but none have done so as yet. If any do, I'll add a picture to this post.
At last we may begin to get some wintry weather. For weeks now we've had delightfully sunny days and temperatures in the teens, often high teens; but today the thermometer fell to low single figures and there were a few flurries in outer suburbs of Ottawa. Whatever else Wendy wrote about in her diaries, she invariably mentioned the weather. By this date we'd had our first snowfall, often more than just one snowfall, almost every year that I've so far read (I'm up to 1987 now, and my memorably productive sabbatical spells in Canberra and Sydney. We had our 30th wedding anniversary in Sydney, at a splendid sea food restaurant that, to my surprise, evidently did not impress Wendy as much as it did me. But I'm happy to report that she enjoyed that all-too-brief sojourn in Oz as much as I did.
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