Confessions of a binge presser

My major achievement so far today - it's 1:30 - is ironing six shirts. Five and a half actually. The sixth had already been ironed, but I didn't notice until I was well into it.

I find ironing meditative, calming, the way brainless physical activities often are. (But, note to son-in-law: this does not mean I will iron your work shirts when I'm staying with you.) In order to get the meditative benefit, I have to iron several shirts at a time, so that's what I usually do: save up the ironing and binge.

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Speaking of said son-in-law, it's so far so good on the Covid front. Bob was apparently "a little better" today, Caitlin the same as yesterday - neither, that is, really sick. So far. Bob was gardening, and we received a brief video of him kicking a ball back and forth with Louis  in their tiny back garden. 

As Caitlin points out, it could take up to 14 days for the symptoms to really kick in, but she says she's feeling optimistic - which with anything to do with her health is a rare thing.

Louis seems to have made another leap forward with his language recently - as children will do. He seems now to speak entirely in complete sentences, and speaks much more clearly. And a lot. 

He also has a new thing where he appends the person's name to almost everything he says to them. "Yeah, mummy, it's a new ball for me." (It actually wasn't.) "Yeah, Daddy, I'm going to send it to you." (He did.) Here's the video I'm quoting.

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The population of Iceland is 356,991 - or was in 2019. I'm guessing it's not growing by leaps and bounds. For perspective, the population of London, Ontario - which is growing by hops and skips - was counted at 404,699 in 2017. It's probably close to 450,000 by now. 

So how is it that a country with a population smaller than that of the mid-size Canadian city where I live can produce world-class television better than pretty much anything we produce in Canada? 

Karen and I have been watching the second season of Trapped, a Nordic noir set in a small town in the north of Iceland. While it's arguably not quite as good as the best British equivalents - Broadchurch, for example - or the best of similar shows from mainland Scandinavia, it is very, very good. Apparently the first season received a 100% rating at Rotten Tomatoes. 

The characters seem like real people, there is a convincing sense of the tightness of the small, remote community, the police procedural side is a bit slow-paced but done well, and the cinematography is spectacular. It almost makes you want to go to northern Iceland. Almost. The weather there is so extreme in winter that the crew a couple of times were trapped in Siglufjörður, the real town where the series was filmed. 

Highly recommended for all but those who can't abide subtitles. (Although, that said, you can, with Netflix, watch it dubbed into English. That ruins it as far as I'm concerned - the acting is typically shite and the lack of synchronization between visuals and soundtrack is distracting. But that's just me.)

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I mis-spoke myself earlier when I said I'd achieved nothing else but ironing by 1:30. I had done 35 minutes on the  stationary bike earlier - while watching a BBC doc series on Netflix called Genius of the Ancient World, featuring historian/presenter Bettany Hughes. The first episode is about the Buddha. 

It's well produced and Hughes is engaging enough, but I didn't think it was particularly well-written. I've had a long-term interest in Buddhism, or at least the Zen version of it. As I listened to the presenter and her interview subjects, I kept thinking, what would people with a low tolerance for new-age-y la-la-land thinking make of what they're learning here about Buddhism - and concluded too often that they'd think it sounded like obscure nonsense. Which it's not. 

My long-time favourite on the subject is Buddhism Without Beliefs by the British writer Stephen Batchelor. As Batchelor argues, part of the original point of the Buddha's teaching was to throw out accepted religious dogma and teaching of the time, throw out priests - throw out religion. Buddhism in its purist, original form is as much about psychology as religion, in fact, more, Batchelor would say.

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We did get some sun very briefly today, but by the time I went out around 3:30, it was mostly cloudy, if mild at 7C. I went away from the centre for a change, walked over to Gibbons Park and took pictures of trees. I've been photographing the gnarled old willow trees between the pool and the river for years. They're amazing. There's something human-like in their agedness - something with which I definitely identify.

The banality of modern architecture

Little to report today. Our Covid patients over the pond are still reporting mild or no symptoms. Bob has had a slight fever on and off and has felt a bit lethargic, but is otherwise functioning normally. Caitlin at one point said she was feeling a little dizzy. She also admitted she felt short of breath at one point, but then  realized it was just anxiety. And who can blame her for being anxious? Louis is fine.

I went for a fast walk under clouds this morning: Blackfriars, over to Empress, up the stairs at the end of Empress, Woodward across to Riverside, up Riverside and home - about 4K.

By the time I went for my afternoon walk, the sun was out. I just wandered around downtown, shooting whatever took my fancy. I've thought of doing a series under the title "The Banality of Modern Architecture." The first in the series, the one that made me think of it, was this, which I took yesterday, about a half a block from home - about the time I was also working on renovating the 2015 picture of the beautiful Maison Carée in Nîmes.

You could see how these next four could fit in the same portfolio. The challenge is making (somewhat) interesting images from really boring buildings - of which London has an abundance.

I ended up walking down Waterloo, between Dufferin and Pall Mall. There are some lovely houses on that stretch. And some sidewalk puddles the size of small lakes.

The two of the houses were made by "stitching" two images together: one with the house, the other with the camera tilted up to catch the top of the house and the tall trees surrounding the homes, which are typical of the neighbourhood.

I also photographed another of my personal "places," a house I lived in when I was a toddler: 649 Waterloo. It looks a little rough. 

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I long ago noticed that the amount I read changes on an irregular basis. I first noticed it at the time "biorhythms" was a thing, and I assumed that the fluctuations in my reading habits had something to do with that.

Sometimes I'll have two books on the go, read the newspaper fairly comprehensively and be cherry-picking magazine articles scooped from the Web via Pocket as well. A few weeks ago when I started this blog I was in one of those heavy reading phases. Now I'm in a fallow period. 

I've only one novel on the go - Maggie O'Farrell's excellent Hamnet - and can't seem to get myself back into Jennifer Ackerman's The Bird Way, which I was really enjoying. I've been reading only the bare minimum in the newspaper. I had reached overload on Covid news, and Trump's departure seems to have reduced some of the urgency to keep up with political news.

It'll change. I'll read more in a few weeks, I predict. In the meantime, I've been listening to podcasts while exercising, mainly CBC Ideas podcasts. So I'm not a complete slug.

Junky town

Here's the sequel to my tale of being woken early in the morning by a drunk calling from the front door. 

My concern at the time - after I'd hung up on him - was that it might have been a homeless person trying to scam his way into the building to get warm. It went down below -20C that night. As it turns out, he was probably high.

When I got up that morning, I emailed Leo, our building superintendent, to tell him about the call and that the guy had mentioned he was trying to "get up to 1104." Leo responded, saying he'd checked "records and surveillance" and that my caller was one of a number of "undesirable visitors" trying to get to 1104. 

Reading between the lines, I sensed there was a known problem here. I was right.

The next day, I got a call late in the afternoon from, I think, the same guy. I hung up immediately and emailed Leo. This was on Sunday. He got the message right away and went out to the front door and chased the people away. 

Then the next day, there was an emailed message to all residents from Thorne Property Management, our building management company:

"Undesirable visitors are being allowed into the premises and hanging around the vestibule, common areas and around the 11th floor in what appears to be drug related exchanges.

They are pretending to be dialing up to a suite, sneaking into the building when residents FOB in, granting access to other people, propping doors open and ignoring critical social distancing rules."

The day after that, notices appeared around the building with surveillance shots of "undesirable visitors" to watch out for.

Today, I saw Ingrid in the lobby and asked her about the 11th floor situation. As Karen and I suspected might be the case, the building's resident drunk is at the centre of this. He's an alcoholic single older man who evidently consorts with junkies and other "undesirables" - and may, judging by the message from Thorne, be supplying them or at least facilitating drug exchanges. 

The guy has been a security risk for some time. Two springs ago, his key fob was used by thieves to enter the building and clean out a bunch of lockers to the tune of bout $5,000-worth of stuff. For a time, his fob was confiscated so he couldn't get into the building unless somebody let him in.

The present situation is a little unnerving. Ingrid said some people have had knocks on their doors late at night with confused people, evidently high, trying to find this guy.

I said to Ingrid that it was too bad he couldn't be evicted. "Oh, they're working on it," she said.

Exciting place to live.

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The rabbit hole to Montpellier has finally played out. Or I guess the proper metaphor would be a mine shaft. In any case, I've been reviewing the pictures chronologically from start to end of our French sojourn and have now reached the end.

This one was taken at the Sunday morning market under the arches of the aqueduct, a market that only started in late March. Sister Pat and her sis-in-law Sue were with us. All the ladies were rather taken with the curly-haired lad on guitar in this little gypsy jazz combo that was entertaining the shoppers. Even I could see he had the look of a Greek god about him. Much more importantly, though, the band sounded good.

Late March in Montpellier is like our May. Everything was bursting out, including this beautiful wisteria not far from our flat.

And this one was taken down by the river at the bottom end of Antigone, the 1980s architectural showpiece development just south of the centre. I took many pictures of these buildings. They look great in the sun against a blue sky.

The last four were taken in Nîmes. It's early April now, all our visitors have left and Karen and I are frankly a little bored with Montpellier. So we took the intercity over to Nîmes, which is 30 minutes (by train, longer by car) to the northeast. It's a city of about 150,000, so half the size of Montpellier, best known for its Roman monuments. 

Most of the pictures of the very well preserved arena, which has also been used as a bullring, and the beautiful Maison Carée (square house), a Roman copy of a Greek temple, I had long since processed. 

The Maison Carée in particular has remained one of my all-time favourite photo subjects. I did find this one shot of it that I'd mistakenly set aside. A lot of the shots I took were from a low angle like this, partly to show off the stone carvings on the ceiling of the porch, partly to eliminate the crowds of tourists crawling all over the site.

The last three show monuments of a much more recent vintage. The neo-classical fountain - it's in the city's main square (you can see the Roman arena in the background) - dates from 1910. The weird modern fountain with the monumental head spewing water into a long channel...I don't know anything about it, just that it looked interesting.

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I was in a quandary for my afternoon walk: where to go? I'm getting bored with the same old downtown scenes. I ended up walking up to Oxford St. and then one block further to St. James St. There I hit on the idea - an old one revived actually - of starting a collection of pictures of places and buildings important in my life. I mean my past life. St. James Street has a couple.

The first is St. James Court at 200 St. James between St. George and Richmond. It's one of the first places my sister Pat lived when she came home from doing her Masters at the University of Sussex. 

It's also where Karen and I caught our first glimpse of the man who would become Pat's husband. This was in Max's child-scaring black beard period. We were just leaving Pat's after a brief visit to check out her tiny new digs, of which she was very proud. We knew this new guy was coming over, and guessed, rightly, that it was he we passed on the front walk. He must have wondered at the twice-over we gave him.

St. James Court was typical of apartment buildings going up in London in the 1920s - it was built in 1929 from a design by O. Roy Moore, the owner of the property and scion of a local family that had owned quite a bit of land in the neighbourhood. (This much I gleaned from an interesting document published by the city: St George-Grosvenor Heritage Conservation District Study )

On the other side of Richmond St., at the corner of St. James and Wellington, sits St. John the Evangelist Anglican church. It's the church our family attended when we were growing up and where my brothers and I were in cubs and scouts.

I never thought about it as a building when I was coming to it twice a week, but I think now it's a very pretty church. It was designed by a London architect, Charles F. Cox, and opened its doors in 1888. The spire was added in 1897, and the "church school building" - by which I assume they mean the building I knew as the parish hall, where our cub pack and scout troop met - in 1895. 

Covid rears its ugly head

Bad news from England this morning: Bob has tested positive for Covid. It's assumed Caitlin has already been infected too, and Louis as well.

One of Bob's colleagues, one of only four people who actually go into the office, had a fever on Monday night, was tested the next day and got a positive result. Bob had both the rapid test - which was negative - and the PCR test, which later came back positive. Two other people at Bob's work have also tested positive, so he thinks there's little chance his is a false positive. Only the first person tested so far has had any symptoms, although Bob did say he had felt tired.

So they are in jail at home for at least ten days. And we will be on the edges of our seats here. We tell ourselves they're both young and reasonably healthy.

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Meanwhile, life, such as it is, goes on. After a Portal chat with the kids first thing this morning, I got out for a fast walk - same route as my run yesterday. Four kilometers is an appropriate distance for the walk, and the steps at the ravine certainly add some good huffing and puffing.

Karen had a Zoom class at the time she would usually be making our big meal of the day, so we had a treat and ordered food from Thaifoon, a local Thai eatery, which is participating in the annual Londonlicious event. The deal: a three course meal (appetizer, main, dessert) for $25. The food was as good as or better than other times we've gone there: very fresh, nicely seasoned, worth the price.

I went out for my afternoon walk at 2 and picked up the food - the restaurant is only a few blocks away - on my way back. 

More boring shots of London were taken.

The first is fast becoming a photographic obsession of mine: the juxtaposition of St. Peter's Basilica (RC), a fake medieval (neo-gothic) pile dating from the mid-19th century, and One Richmond Row, a new ultra-modern apartment block going up across Richmond St. 

Interesting tidbit about One Richmond Row in the paper today. The architects apparently stole the design concept - every second stack of four floors is skewed in relation to the others - from a Toronto firm that had, it claims, designed an almost identical tower somewhere in the GTA. The original architects are crying foul, but apparently they didn't bother to get their design copyrighted (I was surprised architects could even do that), so there's nothing much they can do. Except embarrass the second firm.

St. Peter's Cathedral (RC) and One Richmond Row

The next two were shot at or near the corner of Pall Mall and Waterloo St. It's a corner I've known almost literally since the day I was born. Our family lived a few doors south of the corner on the west side of Waterloo when I was a toddler. My Dad was a train nut, so I spent a certain amount of time with him at or near these tracks, and can actually dimly remember it. They were all steam trains we watched in those distant days - I'm talking about the early 1950s.

The red brick building at the left edge of the frame is now the poshly renovated offices of Siskinds, a law firm. When my family lived there, and for decades after, it was a sock factory. 

The mirror self-portrait was taken on Pall Mall a few doors from the corner in the windows of a modern office building. The tiny houses across the street, once virtually identical cottages, were built at the turn of the last century as homes for railway workers. Starting in the 1980s, they were bought up by yuppies and renovated. Today, the entire block between Waterloo and Hyman has been refinished, and every house now looks a little different.

CP tracks looking east at Waterloo and Pall Mall

 

Pall Mall St.

I talked in an earlier post  about chatting on the street with a homeowner on Colborne St. about his 1879 Italianate house, which I was photographing. I mentioned another home of similar style to him, one I've always liked, on Picadilly St. He knew it, had almost bought it 20 years before, he said. This is it: lovely.

301 Picadilly St.

I've always liked this building too, on the northwest corner of Richmond and Hyman streets. It used to be a great bookshop, long gone, and now houses a posh kids clothing store: Little Labels. It's just a nicely proportioned building.

623 Richmond St.

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The rest of the day, I was lost down the rabbit hole, the one that leads back to Montpellier, France, 2015. I'm still finding unloved photos that were ignored at the time, but seem worth exploring. Here's a sample of today's haul.

Montpellier has quite a nice zoo, nice because it's run by the university and sits on extensive grounds in the near suburbs. At the time, I processed a few of the pictures from our visit one day near the end of our stay in the city. These two, for some reason, I overlooked or dismissed as not being worth processing. Not sure why.

Antigone: Emile Zola media library 

Antigone: Emile Zola media library

Antigone is an office/retail/residential complex built in the 1980s under the direction of the Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill, mostly in neo-classical style. The 36 hectare site, once military land, also includes an Olympic swimming pool and this media library. Some smart-ass had drawn black eyeballs on the statue of the faun with a magic marker. I used Photoshop to restore it.

My beautiful sister Pat Morden and her sister-in-law Sue Gittings came to visit us when we were staying in Montpellier. One day, we lured them in to undertaking the 20-kilometer cycle trip to the seaside and back along the beautiful bike path. While at the seaside, we visited Maguelone Cathedral, built in the 11th century. The peacocks, and their hens, lived on the grounds. They were begging for food.

Pat and Sue were both exhausted by the ride. Neither was used to long-distance biking. And Pat's rental bike had a seat that came loose and couldn't be raised high enough, making it very difficult to pedal. She needed the refreshment when we reached a small town not far from the cathedral.   

Still feeling reflective

Where did the day go?

I do know. Up late-ish: 7:30. Breakfast over a video chat with Caitlin. We talked a lot about you-know-who, who was off with his nanny, and about Caitlin's work, and the fact that somebody in Bob's office had tested positive for Covid, but Bob had already had a negative rapid test and was waiting for results from the PCR test. 

Newspaper. Run in the sun. I started down the path to Harris Park from Blackfriars bridge but had to turn back. The path looked clear, but the water from the thaw had frozen, creating black ice. 

So I went a totally new route: along Blackfriars, across Wharncliffe, along Paul St. to the stairs and up to Edinburgh St., then to Woodward, across to Forward, left on Walnut, back to Riverside and straight up Riverside to the bridges, then up Queens Ave to home.

Which, it turns out, is only about 4K. It always feels longer when it's a new route.

Karen was doing a Zoom book club meeting at 2pm, so I did a bit of dinner prep, then went off for an abbreviated afternoon ramble. It seems I'm still in a reflective mood - in the photographic sense. 

Market Square - nobody skating today

Self portrait with building site - taken a block south on Talbot St.

London's evolving skyline: our building to the right of the crane

From Westminster bridge on York St., looking south

Pretty much the rest of the day after our big meal, which today was a bit later than usual because of Karen's meal - 3:45 - was taken up with photography. After processing the day's paltry take, it was back down the rabbit hole to Monpellier, France, 2015. A sampling of the day's rescue projects.

Boulevard du Jeu de Paume

Men play petanque (like bocce) under the arches of the aquaduct

Cathedral porch

Bicycle repurposed as street art

A day for reflecting

No, not that kind of reflection - although no doubt we could all benefit from contemplating our lives and what we've learned from the pandemic, etc., etc.

What I'm talking about, though, are reflections in windows, in puddles, in marble even. On a sunny day - and it was sunny here in the late afternoon - following a wet day, everything sparkles and the light bounces back at you. So my photographic assignment for today was reflections.

I didn't stray far from home; I didn't have to. Here's what I got: no masterpieces, but I like them.

Yes, I shot the same scene last week - this is the new improved version

One London Place reflected in windows of Victorian building on south side of Dundas

One London Place reflected - the building is hard to avoid in downtown London

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My other photographic assignment today was shooting some of Karen's recent work. It's a little more colourful than my photographs around London.

Collaged page from artbook

Collage made in response to online challenge - destined to be cut up for use in other projects

Collage made in response to online challenge - destined to be cut up for use in other projects

Double-page spread from the same artbook as top, incorporating decorated tags created in response to an online embroidery challenge

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Meanwhile, I continue drilling down into the rabbit hole of our winter in France in 2015. I'm looking for photographs overlooked at the time but worth renovating. I continue to find the odd one that piques my interest and triggers memories.

Aigues Mortes: outside the city walls - the sea is out of view at the right of the frame

Statue in front of old city hall commemorating the Battle of Clostercamp during the Seven Years War (the one where France lost Quebec)

Typical narrow pedestrian-only street in the Ecusson, the old walled city of Montpellier

More of Montpellier's trademark googly-eyed smiley faces

Vauvert: Camargue-style bullfighting, where they just annoy the hell out of the bull rather than killing it

I mentioned Aigues-Mortes, a town near Montpellier, and its intact city wall in an earlier post. The top photo is a view outside the old city on the sea side showing the extent and excellent condition of the wall.  

The only thing that saves the next one from being just a boring shot of an old-fashioned piece of public art is the presence of the cherub holding a plaque, and the unicorn. What this has to do with the Battle of Clostercamp - which is more conventionally depicted in the relief carving on the base of the statue - is anybody's guess. 

The battle was not that important to the outcome of the war, but it was a tactical victory for the French, and since they lost their entire North American empire in that war, I suppose they had to find something to celebrate. The closest I can get is that the unicorn symbolizes the temporarily defeated Hanoverian (German) army. One of the Hanoverian regiments in the engagement included a unicorn in its coat of arms. The cherub? No idea.

The bottom picture is of Camargue-style bullfighting. When Ralph and Pat Lutes were visiting we took in an afternoon event at the bull ring in Vauvert, a small country town east of Montpellier. In this kind of bullfighting, the bull is unharmed. The razeteurs, the guys in white, try to pluck a paper rosette from between the bull's horns. This incenses the bulls who chase the razeteurs, who use the steps along the wall and the railings high up on the other side to bound out of harm's way. It's very acrobatic. And the bulls seem to enjoy getting into a lather.

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I suffer periodically from persistent earworms. They generally last a couple of days at most, playing over and over in my head at all hours of the day and night. Recently, I had an earworm that lasted well over a week. My strategy often is to learn the chords of the song on my guitar. My singing, or just the prospect of it, is enough to put anyone off a song, including me. This time, it didn't work. 

The song? "Evangeline" by the Band's Robbie Robertson, based on a creole legend made famous in a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem. I know the song in a 1981 version by Emmylou Harris which I made the mistake of playing just once a couple of weeks ago. I probably hadn't listened to it for 20 years before that. Within a day, it was stuck in my head, the complete lyrics - nothing wrong with my memory anyway. It has only just gone away. 

At least it was a song I like. The worst earworms are the songs you always hated but somehow take up residence in your brain and torture you day and night. It feels like a great betrayal.

Earworms and their persistence, it strikes me, are another symptom of my growing obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Straightening place settings that Karen throws down on the dinner table and making the bed the minute I get up are other examples. Incipient dementia? Maybe.

And now I have a new symptom: word worms. Words get into my head and I puzzle over their not quite so obvious meanings and/or their etymologies. The current example - which I'm about to put to rest by airing it, I hope: jodhpur. 

I know what it is, of course, an odd looking pair of trousers that balloon out around the hips and get very narrow at the cuffs. I think I might once have owned a pair of jodhpurs when I was a child - although why, I can't imagine. Or was it my father who wore the jodhpurs in the family The questions that have plagued me are, where does the name come from and why are they designed the way they are? 

I'm about to find out and put this to rest.

Well, I guess I knew the answers. They're riding breeches, of course, also known as English riding pants. Tight at the cuffs to accommodate boots that go over them. Ballooning at the hips to provide ease of movement. The name is from the Indian city of that name. And they're named after the city because they're an English adaptation of an Indian style.