Cold, with warm friendship and a virtual walk

Almost unprecedented, a polar vortex is covering the whole of Canada this weekend, "from coast-to-coast-to-coast," as they say. The easternmost and westernmost provincial capitals, Victoria (BC) and St. John's (NFLD) have the warmest temperatures, in minus single digits, but the rest of us are considerably chillier. Ottawa's wind chill was -30ºC this morning. It's a holiday weekend in Ontario, Monday being Family Day, although I'm afraid many Ontarians have had enough of being stuck at home with their families and don't feel like celebrating this at all. 

There'll be no Family Days for our family for a long while yet. 😒

In the virtual world, the environment is not so hostile. My sister Faith is undertaking a virtual walk across southern Britain, up hill and down dale, over bridges and through a few towns, from her front door in Wales to some undisclosed destination on an undisclosed date, counting the distance she covers in her immediate neighbourhood each day as "what-if" steps through an imaginary, Covid-free world, and allowing the rest of the family to follow her progress on maps that she posts to our private group on Facebook. She says that if she had done this last year, she'd have virtually reached Russia, arriving in St. Petersburg. Having slipped and fallen on (real) ice yesterday, Faith's progress across the maps might be impaired for a few days this week. What she's shared so far makes for a lovely escape for us all, through green fields and the gardens of stately homes, along some of the way.

Another thing that always lifts my spirits is my weekly Zoom meeting I host for the German conversation group. We concentrate on a different topic each time. The time before last (4th Feb) I got them reading and talking about makeshift shelters constructed by well-meaning volunteers for the homeless in Ulm, although one of my friends said they looked like coffins and probably weren't either safe or hygienic. That was ein betrübendes Thema, a rather depressing one, so yesterday we chose to talk about something a bit jollier: the Rhineland Karneval. There too, of course, the present circumstances prohibit traditional jollity in the streets, which is a disappointment for thousands of people, but it is for the best. We read an article about the 2018 festivities, pre-Covid. I admitted 16 friends from three continents to this meeting, signing in from Houston, Normandy, Dresden, Ulan Bator and Ottawa, and wished Sue (of Ottawa) a Happy Birthday. The group shared memories of carnivals long gone, in my case the experience of Fasching, as they called it there, in the Heidelberg region in February 1968 when at the weekend I watched the Heidelberg parade, then on Rosenmontag, if I remember rightly, I wore fancy dress (pyjamas) to school and on Faschingsdienstag unforgettably danced the Gallop with a boy called Harald Wipfler, at the Faschingsball. I was a sweet sixteen in those days.