Update

This morning, passing the large snowman at the door to the Flying Club clubhouse (still closed to visitors because of COVID) we scraped snow off the wings and tail of C-FPTN; this was our main "exercise" for the day, though we also walked round town and Chris ran on his treadmill, as he now does most days. Walking cheers us up and activates the circulation so that our feet aren't so cold as when we're sitting for hours and hours at our computers. I like the little discoveries we make about town, like the "Fly-In Restaurant" I saw hanging from the branch of a small tree in the Byward Market's pedestrian area, with dozens of sparrows taking turns at its buffet. The birds are hungry, this wintry week.

In the car today, we had to make a detour because of a road block. A small snow-plough had tipped over at the intersection of Coburg and St. Patrick's Street, police cars round it stopping the traffic and no sign of the driver. Did he try to turn on a snowbank? Was he injured?

Meanwhile in Sydney, the Australian contingent of our family are basking in a heatwave under blue skies. Eddie (7) can now swim underwater like a fish. We saw his mother's video for proof. He has been learning to program in Python and to play a piece on the piano with a sharp in it, also playing with a Scalextric racing car set (they've been around since the 1950s) and creating endless Minecraft worlds. Never a dull moment there. We're touched that he wants to show us everything, these days, even at this enormous distance. They're talking of riding on a Picnic Train from Sydney Central to Kiama where there's a blowhole in the rocks. We were there ourselves, once (on a road trip in 2003).

Last week and the week before I had some contact with Thomas, our 9-year-old grandson in London, too, because he and his friend Freddie need help with their French. Tom and Freddie don't like French and I can tell why not. They haven't a clue how the words are pronounced or what a "partitive article" is. I can help them with the former, at least, and their worksheet informed me that partitive articles are the words that mean "some": du, de l', de la, des. I never knew that. My online French lessons have not been an enormous success so far but at least I've been holding their attention to some extent for half an hour a week and am going to try again next week.

My German group, consisting of 11 friends in Ottawa, Normandy, and Texas at this week's meeting (at earlier meetings this month we had women from Dresden, Vienna and Ulan Bator joining in), read a newspaper article about a Quereinsteiger, which literally means cross-entrant, a man in Weimar who had decided mid-career to switch to teaching in high schools. We came to the conclusion that he has what it takes and will make a good job of it.

Since the new year, Gavan, our music teacher, has been stretching Chris' and my ability to perform the Schumann Dichterliebe cycle ... working on nine of the songs so far. That piano part is demanding. I still don't consider myself a pianist, although there are moments when I feel Chris is turning into a proper singer. I can't mention what Chris is working on for his official work but he tells me I can call it modelling, which is vague enough. "Just tell them I'm a male model!" he says. This afternoon I helped him to check through his last batch of slides for the lectures he gives to engineers in Tokyo on Monday evenings (Tuesday mornings, to them). I sent off all the documents I've been working on myself, that will appear in the next issue of the Capital Carillon, the newsletter I edit. It's a longer than usual issue this month. I submitted an article for the Lowertown Echo, our community newspaper, as well; that new issue hasn't come out yet.

I've been reading fiction by Graham Greene (England Made Me, A Sense of Reality) and Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey), quite a contrast. Books in the hand are more soothing than computers on the lap.

My CFUW friends and acquaintances are still talking avidly about regenerative agriculture / permaculture / agroecology (there seem to be many names for the same concept) after the presentation from Marco earlier this month or after watching the documentary Kiss The Ground, which several of us are going to discuss at a ZOOM meeting next Thursday evening. The ideas for alternative farming methods have been around for a long time, but I don't remember such a great deal of talk about the subject before. The new administration south of our border (thank heavens!) and the USA's return to the Paris Agreement seems to have stirred up widespread interest in environmental issues. When enough people are talking about an idea, does it reach a tipping point and become transformational?