Courage, my friends, 'tis not too late to build a better world.
These words, originally uttered by Thomas Clement Douglas, a Canadian idealist who lived from 1904 to 1986, are transcribed in Braille with LED lights, permanently left on, high up on the wall of the condo building at the corner of Beechwood Avenue and Crichton Street, near us in Ottawa. They seem appropriate for the end of this disturbing year.
Chris and I went into the park this afternoon to see the sun go down on the last day of 2020, under small clouds tinged with pink. Goodbye, old year.
A gloriously clear day today, followed by a clear night. We deserved that, after the damp, grey week we've had. The drawback was a bitterly cold wind. Not wearing enough and not having eaten enough for lunch, my extremities got chilled; at one point I could hardly feel my toes as I walked along, a strange sensation. This evening I was more sensible, donned an extra, fleecy layer, and had two helpings of the vegetable curry I'd left slow-cooking all day.
Every Christmas in Ottawa, the trees and buildings are beautified with a colourful "Pathway of Lights", this year, until January 7th. Elva, Laurie, Carol, Don, Chris and I met on our street this evening for the sake of a government-recommended, 7.5 km walk along the main streets, via Parliament Hill, to see them. Carol and I took photos; Carol tells me she drove her very elderly aunt along this route from her nursing home, the other day, and the old lady had been thrilled by the illuminations.
The reflective disks on sticks are supposed to represent wheat fields in Quebec, waving in the wind; the installation's entitled Entre les Rangs. Crossing the Portage Bridge to the Gatineau side of the river we also passed an artistic structure representing a dream-catcher, near Victoria Island, the spot where the First Nations gather. That one is called The Gather-Ring:
It is spotlit from below with changing colours.
The brightest and most striking light of all was not supplied by the National Capital Commission. It was the moon, almost full, shining on the ice that's forming in the Ottawa River.
In the afternoon we'd been flying as well, landing (first for a touch-and-go in Gatineau and then for a full-stop at Rockcliffe) when the sun was setting right ahead, so Chris had trouble seeing the runways for the dazzle. Driving home from the airport it was even more dazzling.
"Ich grolle nicht, und wenn das Herz auch bricht ..." Actually the singer of that song is complaining, a good deal. The thumping repeated chords in the right hand of the accompaniment assert his misery, after the girl in the poem has married another chap who has made her "radiant with the magnificence of diamonds". The poet was Heinrich Heine, in real life hopelessly in love with his unobtainable cousin.
Amelie Heine
The composer was Robert Schumann, who did get his girl, a long story that didn't finish very well, because after a few years of happiness with her, he threw himself in the Rhine feeling inferior, and after being fished out, he survived, only to be taken into an asylum, where he died. The link in that last sentence takes you to a website in German, but look at the pictures of her. She was devoted to her husband, but probably ought to have married Brahms instead, who did most of the housework in their shared ménage (especially when Clara went abroad on concert tours as a much sought-after pianist, to make ends meet) and looked after the children.
Clara Schumann, aged 59
Clara Wieck-Schumann was born 100 years before my mother, by the way.
We have just tried singing / playing Robert Schumann's famous song in two unfamiliar keys. The top note is psychological; Chris' voice collapses if he attempts top G. However, if you transpose the piece into A, you have to deal with double sharps. Played in A-flat, another option, it doesn't lie under the fingers very well, and the piano keyboard runs out of notes for the left hand; there's no bottom A-flat at that end. We have been singing and playing Ich grolle nicht in B-flat for a good 30 years, though the original key was C, with a top A, heaven forbid. The late tenor Fritz Wunderlich [in the YouTube video above] could sing that note effortlessly. It seems to me we'll have a better chance of mastering the song transposed down, but in which key?
When our son was a sensitive teenager, he used to put his hands over his ears while his parents practised this song. One day when we were out, he took a pencil and wrote ppp over the first bar of the sheet music as a broad hint to us to tone it down. I have never erased that suggestion.
We're currently working on Schumann's Dicherliebe once more, encouraged online, on Tuesdays, by our singing / piano teacher Gavan, who made a special study of this song cycle while working on his Master's music degree, analysing the harmonic modulations and performing it himself, so we gather, at the original pitch. I too studied this music in my youth, in my case in high school aged 15 or 16, for the British GCE exam, taught by my father who was the music master. My father could play all the accompaniments without much of a struggle. I wish I could.
So when the poet wrote "Ich sah, mein' Lieb', wie sehr du elend bist ..." (= I saw, my love, how wretched you are!), did he feel heart-broken sympathy for someone forced into marriage against her will, or was he being ironic and bitter, angry with her? The music seems to imply the latter interpretation, but I have never been sure.
Environmental Defence, based in Toronto, has been running a series of Webinars this year, that they called The Recovery Series. On April 30th — The New Battle in Single-Use Plastics —this organisation presented some solutions to the problem of too much plastic in the Canadian environment. I watched in a YouTube recording of that Webinar, and took some notes on the ideas put forward.
In Canada, at present, less than 11% of plastic is recycled. Governments must ban toxic or tough-to-recycle products. By 2025 this should be a national strategy. Environmental laws should aim to reduce waste by banning all throwaway plastic, and to increase recycling. Businesses should be obliged to commit to reducing the packaging they use and individual citizens should adopt reduce-reuse-recycle habits*. Above all, we need to put a price on plastic water bottles. Coca Cola (the biggest culprit), Nestlé and Pepsi should be obliged to support a deposit-return program for the bottles they produce. Sobeys (food retailers) have banned plastic bags recently.
Canada generates 29,000 tonnes of plastic waste each year, only 9% of which is recycled! 47% of Canadian packaging consists of single-use plastic, made from fossil fuels. It seems that is worth almost $8 billion, per year, so if plastics were reused, this would be of huge economic as well as environmental worth. In any case, recycling isn’t a bad idea, since recycling initiatives create tens of thousands of new jobs.
A presenter in the Webinar, Clarissa Morawski, lives in Europe, along with about 450 million other people. Among other responsibilities, she is Managing Director of the Reloop Platform. The EU has issued a directive re. single-use plastics, so she informed us. (Frans Timmermans, a VP of the EU Commission, is the man behind Europe’s New Green Deal.) The amount of plastic going to landfills there has been capped to 10% by 2035. Cottonbud sticks, plastic cutlery, cups and plates, plastic straws, balloon sticks and the like are all banned now, along with polystyrene containers. Plastic bottles must henceforth be made of at least 30% recycled material, with their lids tethered to them, so that the lids too may be properly disposed of. Producers must pay for the collection and disposal of the packaging they generate! Europe is planning for a 90% return of these items; deposit return programs are already in operation in most European countries.
An Environmental Defence report entitled No Time To Waste contains a plan including the following recommendations for Canada:
Ban unnecessary or hard-to-recycle plastic.
Enable easy reuse of this material by initiating deposit-return systems.
Support innovative, reusable products and schemes, such as coffee cups that can be used at different branches of a coffee shop chain.
Give people incentives for bringing their own bags to the shops.
Set aggressive targets for the recycled content of new products.
Money is needed to get the job done, but the financial burden should lie on producers rather than taxpayers! Manufacturers need to have an Extended Producer Responsibility imposed upon them and be held accountable by enforcement of the relevant laws.
* Plastic products are normally labelled: look out for the labels 3, 6, and 7. They are the “bad kinds.”
The only Christmas gatherings we went to this month were the unreal ones.
From their individual living rooms, on December 7th, more than 100 CFUW-Ottawa women came to an online Holiday Party: "the most unique venue ever!" Lasting a couple of hours, the event was quite skillfully executed and very well received. Catherine acting as the MC did a particularly fine job. Alice auctioned a basket of wines and cookies for the Scholarship Fund for which the bidding went above $300. Heather entertained us with a funny story about a goldfish and Gouhar told an anecdote about black rat snakes invading her family cottage in the country. Ilse and Käti read out poems they'd written and Elizabeth, the director of the Club's choir, presented its theme song, We are the MadriGals, the singers having prerecorded this in parts to new, Covid-relevant words. In normal years, the "MadriGals" would be giving concerts at local retirement homes; just now that is out of the question. Elizabeth had some of us standing up and waving our arms about for "warm-up" exercises in the privacy of our own homes. In addition there were musical interludes from the Trans-Siberian Orchestra and children's choir (an arrangement of Pachelbel's Canon) and from a Carleton University graduate whom our Club had sponsored, Anita Pari, played Chopin's Arpeggio Étude:
I liked the moment when Hope, a Jewish member of the Club, gave us some insights into Hanukkah traditions, such as spinning a Dreydl, and then when we watched the (USA) National Children's Chorus charmingly singing about this game!
Natalie talked about her memories of Christmas in Hong Kong. Diane, who has published a 100-year history of the CFUW, read us an extract describing Club parties in the 1950s, elaborate and stylish affairs. Toward the end of the current one, Barbara told us a story of her father's recollection of wartime Christmases and and advised us to persuade the older generations of our families to tell their stories too, before those precious narratives are lost. Pat brought the party to a close with a final poem, leaving us with the message that we should approach 2021 "with a glad and hopeful heart."
We were allotted to "breakout rooms" at one point where we were encouraged to talk to one another in groups of eight, for ten minutes. Otherwise the majority of the party-goers, me included, were passive listeners. I posted some screenshots on the Club's private Facebook page and, soon, I have to complete a report of this surprisingly happy event, for the Club's next newsletter, that I'll probably base on the first half of this blogpost.
Later that week, I hosted a special meeting of my conversation group at which each participant told the others in German of her particular memories of Christmases experienced in diverse parts of the world (Brazil, New Zealand, Germany, Switzerland, Cuba, the Netherlands, Bangkok, Helsinki, Canada).
Family parties went online as well. Yesterday we had a Zoom call with Debbie, David and Robert who were staying at a house in Eastbourne, Sussex, and then we celebrated Christmas in advance with George and company in Australia, who had already opened all their presents. Today, Christmas Day, was another marathon of phoning and video-chatting with friends and family, asking what they were all up to. My sister called from Wales before we were dressed, here; we returned her call and the video link kept breaking up, but it was so good to see one another with our respective Christmas decorations in the background. Chris spent half an hour talking to his sister too, in Grantham, Mrs Thatcher's home town. Then we had a prearranged Zoom meeting with Emma and Peter and their sons in London (whom we'd also seen on Christmas Eve) and Peter's parents and brothers in Essex. After a local phone call with Elva, who with Laurie would usually share a Christmas Dinner with us, Rob called Chris from York, while I dozed off.
We are flagging. Chris says he doesn't have the energy to go to bed so will sleep on the settee*. He ran on his treadmill again this afternoon, and we've been for two 3km walks, under dark grey skies, along the wet pavements. There seem to be many more Christmas lights in porches and round windows, in the branches of what our city's "distinctive trees" and round the tree trunks, this year. Our neighbours on the front of Cathcart Street had a sort of in-person street party in progress with Sandra handing out cups of mulled wine from her porch.
We enjoyed our meals today. I enjoyed the preparing of them too. Roast turkey breast with ham and stuffing, sprouts and carrots with mushrooms and almonds, roast potatoes, cranberry sauce, gravy. We had some merlot with that. I'd baked a couple of mini Christmas cakes previously. Supper was a multi-ingredient potato salad, inspired by a German recipe for a Czech salad, and a sausage filled omelette.
Chris is moving around very slowly, saying Ow! because his legs hurt. He gave me the present of a machine that makes tap water fizzy. I shall have some now and retire to bed again.
Christmas Eve now, and we're enjoying a log fire tonight. It's raining instead of snowing, as would be more usual, but nothing's normal this year, and 8°C outside, as predicted. Another abnormality was my forgetting to listen in the service of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College Cambridge, but in any case that wouldn't have been the same because no congregation was admitted, due to the British lock downs.
In London and Sydney our grandsons are showing signs of excitement. The Australians are already in the afternoon, so we had Eddie showing us the presents he'd opened, the chocolates he was eating and the paper hats he was colouring-in. He was glad to tell us that Santa had not only taken the snacks left out for him and his "reindeers," but had even left a thank-you note. On the other side of the world, in London, we watched Alex, the 14-year-old, stretching up to show us how he could touch the ceiling these days, and Thomas putting the unopened Christmas presents into individual piles, so that the family would know whose were whose. We'll see them again tomorrow.Emma bought me a baobab sapling, hoping that it will grow to maturity once out of its nursery near the village of Matsangoni, in Kenya, and sequester a good deal of carbon. I was delighted with this gift, which my daughter has called "Canadian Hope". I can find the place where it grows on Google Earth and perhaps watch its progress. Emma bought another such tree for herself. We're encouraged to buy a forest!
For Chris, we have acquired a treadmill today. He bribed the delivery men quite generously to ensure that this heavy, bulky object reached our basement safely. It said in the installation manual that it would take 40 minutes to erect. More like two hours actually. I refrained from taking a blood pressure reading either during or after the construction process. It was a success at last, however, and he ran on it, so that's good.
It's peaceful to stay at home without visitors. The small tree is decorated and lit; there's a small pile of gifts under it. The fire's going to blaze in the hearth. We have been listening to Beethoven and Schubert recordings and I'm accompanying Schumann's Dichterliebe songs at the piano. More music: Frank Gruska made a video of us singing in parts as a substitute for the usual carol-singing party we attend at Jennie's and Bill's place on Kensington Avenue. It's called Christmas at Kensington, and shows us performing E. Poston's Jesus Christ, The Apple Tree in which the women's voices divide into four parts. I took the top line, prerecording it at home for Frank to add to the mix. Chris sang the bass part, likewise.
Snow fell today, briefly, not much of it, and the temperature's currently at -6 and rising. Tomorrow and on Christmas Day a deluge of rain is expected, in warmer air, +8. A green Christmas, then.
Multiple emails have to be written, this week, but these are end-of-the-year greetings to friends rather than work. I'm attaching copies of our Christmas letter, which didn't have as much travel news in it as previously. Our only travelling is on foot round the neighbourhood, each day: through Bordeleau Park and past the Chinese Embassy, across the St. Patrick's Street bridge to the other side of the Rideau River then through New Edinburgh to the Minto Bridges, and so back across the river and home again. Three kilometres. We've seen sun, sunsets, moon and stars on this walk, and last week the near conjunction of the planets. We missed the once-in-800-years moment due to a cloudy, foggy night; it can't be helped.
This evening I gave Chris a warm foot bath, so that he's sure to sleep well. We have plenty of food in the fridge and cupboards. We are the lucky ones of this world.
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