New Year's Eve: cheating Covid, cheating time

A Christmas card came from Heidrun, a friend from Münster, Germany, hoping that our family had managed to cheat Covid during 2021. She used an idiom I didn't know before: "Hoffentlich habt ihr alle Covid ein Schnippchen geschlagen."

Although Chris and I seem to be avoiding it still, all four of Emma's (our daughter's) family have succumbed, presumably to the Omicron variant that has suddenly spread everywhere, at this end of the year. All but Tom were protected by vaccinations, and Tom is young and fit, so it hasn't hit them too hard. However, they have had to stay indoors, at home, right through the Christmas week. The Australian contingent of our family is fine, enjoying their summer holidays; George took Eddy and one of Eddy's friends and his dad bush-hiking on New Year's Eve, doing "the Piles Creek Loop", a giant iguana crossing their path at one point. "Some proper hiking!" George called this outing.

This week I have been cheating at my blog-writing, trying to catch up with all the posts I hadn't written during the last four months of the year. They appear in backwards chronological order, but only because I have amended their dates of publication. Before anything else happens worth recording, I still have some catching up to do. 

We just watched the latest BBC video of fireworks round the world, which is also cheating time, because, where we are, we have not yet reached the turn of the year. Sydney certainly won the unofficial contest so far, for the most commanding display! In our part of the world it's Covid numbers that are shooting up once more, not fireworks — in Quebec there's even a curfew in effect from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. which puts paid to any celebrations on that side of the river, and Ottawa hardly seems in the mood for rejoicing either, reporting 1508 cases of Covid today, which is a record number. So, because we are not sharing this evening with anyone else, neither shall we be staying up to discover what is going to happen at midnight in Ottawa or New York. 

As Heidrun says about the new year: "Möge es wieder entspannende Begegnungen mit Menschen in der Nähe ermöglichen. Ich bin guter Hoffnung." Translation: May it once again bring relaxed encounters with people at close quarters. I have high hopes.

So have I. A Happy New Year to anyone reading this.

On Boxing Day

By the fire

The fire in the grate is consuming the last of the firewood, and the year is dying down too. This evening we saw not only our daughter and her family in London (all of them confined indoors, afflicted by the Virus despite multiple vaccinations) but also my sister in Wales and even our son and grandson in Australia, about to start their breakfast. These rare whole-family encounters make me feel emotional. As I was ending the meeting, clicking on the red box to make the participants disappear, words from Rückert's poem Sei mir gegrüßt sprang to mind:

Ein Hauch der Liebe tilget Raum und Zeiten ...

which to the likely embarrassment of my friends and relations I posted on Facebook. One breath of love obliterates space and time, is what it means.

Family gathering by Zoom

It has felt like a long year, the first year we have spent in just one country for a very long time. Mustn't complain. Our not travelling is good for the environment, so I should think of it as off-setting. The only journeys we undertook in 2021 were our short flights to Mont Joli in August and Kingston in October, and our drive to Montreal in November. Those weren't new destinations for us, which feels like another shortfall. Still, I ought not to think like that. The cerebral explorations that have taken the place of terrestrial journeys often felt satisfying. My husband always claims that you can live adventurously without leaving home, and I've had a glimpse of what he means, this year.

We began studying an aria by Bach this week.

Christmas Eve above the lakes and hills

While the weather held, Chris wanted to spend the afternoon flying and I was in the mood to go with him, so up we went for three quarters of an hour. There's a distinctive look to the sky when freezing rain is on its way, with thin grey stratus cloud at about 4000 feet above the ground, great clarity below that and a black and white look to the landscape: fuzzy dark grey wooded hillsides, white lakes, with occasional hints of pale colour where the sky is reflected in the patches of water not yet frozen over.

Cracks in the ice that's now forming make crazy patterns like a small child's scribbles.

We flew north, keeping the Gatineau River upstream, on our right, to Wakefield and thence to Low where the dam is, before swinging round to the east and then returning south over the hilly and mostly uninhabited ground back to the Ottawa River at Gatineau. I revelled in the scenery today because we weren't distracted by any turbulence in the air, a rare treat.

Even the home stretch from Orleans to Rockcliffe looks mysteriously different in these conditions, with the patterns made by roads, trails and other man-made features of the landscape very distinctive.

The lumber factory on the Quebec side of the river opposite Kettle Island is another location where rust red buildings and pale brown heaps of sawdust relieve the monotony of their surroundings at this time of year. The steam from the chimneys was rising straight up when we set off but blowing east to west when we came in to land. A wind picking up from the east is another predictor of rain in the near future.

Conversations in French and German

It was becoming difficult for me to find enough time to carry on arranging and hosting the weekly conversations of my German-speaking group, as I've been doing since 2014, so in September I asked for help and got some. Marie Danielle offered to halve my workload by taking responsibility for our meetings every other week.

While it was still warm enough, we had a couple of meetings out of doors, in Mooney's Bay and Rockcliffe Park, though of course the people who participate from outside Canada couldn't join in then. Otherwise we have continued to meet by Zoom with either me or Marie Danielle as the host, and it's never hard to find a subject to read about and talk about. At the start of the season we read about the Austrian mathematician who won the Olympic gold medal in cycling this summer, Anna Kiesenhofer, then about the lighthouse in the mountains that marks the source of the Rhine and the new footbridge that crosses the Rhine from Strasbourg to Kehl considerably further downstream. We spoke of favourite Christmas recipes, the last time we met; some of us held up to the camera what we had been baking. This made for a pleasant end to the year, particularly as Vjia was playing Christmas music on the piano while we were arriving. Uschi signed in from Berlin and Judith from Vienna. Our Viennese connection made a good impression on Ariane, our new member, representing Afghanistan, meeting our group for the first time, who had learned to speak German when she lived in Vienna and wants to practise.

There have been a few meetings of the French conversation group as well, on Mondays, with some of the same people overlapping. Marie Danielle leads those sessions and she too welcomes diplomats to the circle, Ariane again, for example and Socorro from Brazil. We've read Proust's famous passage about tasting the evocative madeleine, and an extract from the French-Canadian novel, Maria Chapdelaine (also a popular film). It's an education for me to hear about Quebec culture; recently we discussed Un Noël canadian français: what are their habits, what do they eat? Their réveillon meal after midnight mass on Christmas day is served in the middle of the night after a day-long fast, which would have been a recipe for disaster in our family. To cope with this, you'd need a stomach of iron:

...un souper [...] comprenait des tourtières, un rôti de porc, des patates et des pâtisseries. Les desserts communs des fêtes incluaient la tarte aux œufs à la muscade, la tarte à la farlouche (mélasse), la tarte au suif, la tarte au sucre, la tarte au vinaigre blanc ou de cidre, les biscuits et les gâteaux de Savoie.