last's words: Seasonal gifts

Because David and Desre were traveling back to Toronto from Johannesburg on Christmas Day, our seasonal gathering was delayed until the New Year weekend, which included Rebecca's birthday on New Year's Eve. That evening I took the family, i.e. Rebecca (minus Richard who stayed home with a bad back), David and Desre, Jonathan, and my grandchild Chris, now 25, to a delicious dinner at the Green Papaya, Ottawa's best Thai restaurant. On New Year's Day we gathered at R&R's home for the annual seasonal gift exchange. As usual I gave everyone books, and in return I got several books and other things I had asked for. The most exciting and unexpected gift I got was a painting, from Chris, an under-water view of a swan, its long neck and its beak reaching for succulent weed on the bottom of a pond. Here it is on the living room wall, next to the Indonesian woodland sprite on top of the piano. It's acrylic paint on canvas, and I will explore ways to frame it, although it looks good on the wall as it is, unframed.

Jonathan gave me a DVD of the recent movie Contagion, which accurately portrays how an Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) Officer from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) investigates every significant disease outbreak in the USA - in this case, an extremely dangerous pandemic with very high case fatality rate, somewhere between 30% and 50% (about the same as the Black Death pandemic in 1347-1350). It's a plausible scenario, and didn't greatly over-dramatize what could be expected if such a deadly pandemic were to occur. Jonathan also gave me a CD on which my blog is preserved from its first day, February 22, 2010, until just before Christmas 2011. Rebecca and David each gave me books I had asked for, by expatriate incumbents of endowed chairs at Harvard. Rebecca gave me the latest book by the Scottish economic historian Niall Ferguson, Civilization; the West and the Rest, which I've already got far enough into to be very favourably impressed. David gave me the Canadian Steven Pinker's new book, The Better Angels of our Nature, which is about the decline of violence and Pinker's hypothesis and speculations about the reasons for this. I'm sure I will be commenting further on each of these books in future posts on this blog, so watch this space....

Chris in the kitchen at 11A/300 Queen Elizabeth Drive, 31 December 2011