nagez, rameurs!

Radio silence; maintenance-level, low-functionality, etc. It’s where it’s been at the last couple of months. But you don’t want to hear about that.

You want to hear about this, and I want to tell you about it!! This is what has made me excited enough to come out of hiblognation:

(Image by David Bernier, www.beaujoualvert.com)

Nagez Rameurs, Genticorum’s new album, is coming out in almost no days' time.

Why is this so so-exciting? I’m glad you asked.

Because it’s going to be awesome. Obviously.

Because of the cover. If you have facebook, which I don’t but I piggybacked on someone to look at it, you should seek out their page because you can see the finished cover there. But you must also look here at the designer's page If the best album cover in the world is not this one, with three hairtastic French musos rendered as wooden puppets paddling a canoe with their instruments, then kindly fax me an answer as to what is.

Because of the canoe. This is a voyageurs-themed album, and you know very well that I never met a folkloric canoe I didn’t like. Some of you in fact know that it was a folkloric canoe that brought me to Canada in the first place (no, not literally; but you are hilarious; what a good joke).

Because there is reportedly a song on it called ‘turlutte hirsute’, ref: my post months ago about how every time a Quebecois musician cuts his hair, a fairy dies. I am so joyous that these boys clearly understand the important hair-to-musician nexus, (ref: also that Pascal Gemme is far and away the current reigning Samson of Quebec music).

Because of weird coincidence. The title track – the title itself – comes from a French translation of the English-language 'Canadian Boat Song', that until I read about this album a few days ago, I had not heard of. Cut to a few days fewer ago, when I went to a book launch in Regina for a novel that deals with Confederation (good for my citizenship education). It turns out said novel, by chance, contains the Canadian Boat Song, such that one of the presenters at the launch gave a wee talk about it AND we all ended up singing it. This reminded me of another very similar flying-canoe-related coincidence that happened to me the first time I ever went to Quebec (I won’t bore you with it now). There’s something about this particular bit of my adopted country’s heritage that’s done me only good, and I feel quite certain this top-of-their-game, hair-reverent, coincidence-embracing, creatively-packaged record is only going to add to my conviction that this is the case.

Am I back in the blog? Not sure. The exam marking is approaching, so I’m ratcheting up a notch for the three-jobs-at-once season, which is never my best side. But thanks for waiting.

what did you expect...

...if you're going to leave partially-drunk travel cups of tea out in your car for the day at this time of year?

vous connaissez l'histoire...

Health and peace to you as the old year passes.

Try not to make any pacts with the devil tonight, ok?

some sort of joke?

Winter solstice, don't get me wrong. I like you. I like your vibe. I like what you signify.

But...let's make it a year til I see you again, shall we? Because this is the third time in a row we've got together, without an intervening interruption from your carefree brother, summer solstice.

I'm glad we were able to meet again here in the northern hemisphere, where things are the right way up and go in the right order. But, you know, absence makes the heart grow fonder. So how about this: I promise to stay on this end of the globe, and you promise not to come back for 364 days. Deal?

Also: today's lunch? fly in my soup.

my hero

I am a treehugger. You know this to be true. I take my canvas bags to the supermarket and my travel mug to tea and coffee shops and recycle and compost and don’t buy stuff or eat meat and I get fair-trade tea and use solid shampoo because it's made without palm oil and doesn’t come in a plastic bottle and most of all, I ride a bike and take the bus. I’m not on the map as far as cars are concerned. The Top Gear men would hate me (even though I actually find them quite charming and watchable, for ridiculously posh wealthy petrol-headed hoons). I don’t, in general, much enjoy the burning of petrol to get places you could get with the burning of a bit of leg energy just as well.

A year ago, I had a car, to get to a stupidly distant job. The best I could do was find a small and fuel-efficient one and carpool daily. Since that time ended, it’s been bike and bus all the way.

But I have to admit to you, that in the last week, my hero, whom I love with a love that knows no bounds at all, at all, is:

I have a new job, and a new home. It’s a long long way from where I last lived in Canada. More than 3,000 kilometres. And everything I own – which to many people, doesn’t amount to much, but is still quite a lot to me – was located near to where the old job and home were. It had to be moved from one to the other, and so did I.

This, my small and fuel-efficient hero, is what got me and everything I own – that is, EVERY. SINGLE. THING. I. OWN. – more than three thousand kms in three days, without a complaint. Without a squeak, a moan, a groan, a hiss, a crunch; without even a polite request for a refreshing drink and a bit of a sit down.

It took me safely around scary Detroit in the early hours with news of a gas station carjacking shootout on the radio;

through the centre of Ann Arbor because of my creative map reading; across the rest of Michigan in such a flash I hardly noticed;

over the Chicago Skyway, pointing out the baseball stadium and a building with funny white ears on the way, and politely ignoring the oddly pull-y camber of the road and the continuous stops for bizarre mini-tolls of sixty cents every ten paces;

into and through Wisconsin without requesting fresh cranberry juice, or asking to stop at the restaurant with the name you’d never hear in the UK (The Bog) or even at the Wisconsin Indoor Kalahari Experience;

purred happily along the beautifully-paved highway between La Crosse and Madison;

joined me in a juvenile giggle at Minnesota’s billboards for Stearns Vet Outlet and Pharmacy (We Do Cows!);

stepped easily up to the challenge of the 75 mph speed limit in North Dakota that meant we zipped through the state like a dose of salts;

nobly protected EVERYTHING I OWN through one night parked in Eau Claire and one in Brandon, Manitoba...and proudly rolled me home more relaxed and content than I’ve felt in a while.

It’s been treated to a nice new set of winter tyres and a service, and as a true hero should be, was allowed to rest on its laurels for an entire day before we headed off flat-hunting together.

Last week I was on the bus to my new job, outside temperature minus four. The woman sitting next to me commented, ‘well, I guess we’re getting our Indian Summer at last!’

Hi, Saskatchewan! I’m back!

Floating accent, part the first

Vindication!

Scientists – yes, Scientists good and true – conclude Floating Accent Syndrome exists!

I first read about floating accent syndrome in one of Dave Gorman’s books (I have an imperfect memory on this, but I think it was the googlewhack one). Gorman claims to have the tendency of gravitating his accent to align with the person to whom he is speaking, completely accidentally and unconsciously. I think he also mentions it as an especial outcome of being from the Midlands, where we don’t really have much of a distinguishable accent ourselves. Well, Dave Gorman is a wise man, and now Scientists – Scientists! mark you – have confirmed it.

These Scientists say as humans we are likely to imitate those with whom we’re in conversation. It’s an empathetic reflex. I want you to feel I am familiar, so I will try to sound a bit like you and mirror your speech patterns and inflection and even the speed at which you talk.

I’ve said it before; if you live anywhere other than where you were born for any length of time, you probably should start to get a bit of a floating accent. (That is mostly because I have the world’s worst case of it*). Our surroundings should change us. We are supposed to respond and relate to what’s around us.

Unfortunately, in practice, this just makes us sound massively inauthentic. It appears we’re trying to be something we’re not.

It’s funny, because when you're learning a foreign language, mimicking is demonstrably the right way to do it. That’s how you learn it. My French sounds determinedly Québécois. I learnt French in school, but I learnt to use French in Canada. If you use your own accent when operating in a foreign language, you simply sound like someone who doesn’t care enough to try very hard.

My accent these days is an unlovely tattercoat stitched from the shreds of all the places in which I’ve lived. By someone who doesn’t entirely know how to sew. And who doesn’t have time to do much more than vaguely mackle things together relying quite heavily on iron-on hem tape and baling twine. Some things are quite ingrained: I haven’t ever got rid of my glottal stops (Ga’wick airpor’) or my non-rhotic intrusive R (Canada-r-and Australia-r-and New Zealand). Vowels are much less unequivocally nailed down.

The really irritating thing about my floating accent is that sometimes it will float in the opposite direction. Sometimes, with people posher than me – or with Australians/Kiwis – I will hear my vowels rounding out to match theirs (although I’ve never gone as far as grarss or barth). At other times, though, it will send me in the complete opposite direction and suddenly I’m channelling my colliery heritage and asking where ‘ast tha bin since I saw thee last? At what point wanting to belong becomes losing your authenticity, I don’t know.

My question for the Scientists, though, is this: who is mimicking whom? Because if I am trying to sound like you, aren’t you also trying to sound like me? Down what sort of wormhole is that going to end? And...how are we ever going to get out?

*except maybe for Dave Gorman.

a lesson in clarity

Well. That was a very interesting exercise and you all stepped up to the plate in a completely different way from how I was expecting. I thought I was going to be reading about your love for a bunch of places in Canada and the reasons they would be a smashing spot to hang my hat. Perhaps I could’ve been marginally clearer on that one, because I wasn’t actually trawling for you all to just tell me you want me around where you are. You are all either astonishingly nice, generous and kind-hearted people, or hoping to be lined up for some good Australian gift loot when I come back. Maybe a bit of both.

In other news, I spent the afternoon stacking beautiful red, brittle jarrah logs for firewood. Jarrah! I am officially living in a Tim Winton novel.

(ps I am not sure why the most recent comments haven’t displayed. Maybe there is a comment limit, and blogger simply can't believe this many people want to talk to me. However, the comments are still appearing in my email, so I am seeing them, and responding, although mine are also being eaten by the hungry hungry comment gods).

The One

I need your help with a Very Important Thing.

2010 is going to be the year I find The One. And you’re going to help me.

O good heavens no. I don’t mean that kind of The One. No calling up brothers and cousins to beg favours.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s been some...relocation, in my recent past. New Zealand. Australia. Saskatoon. I have learnt a lot, taught a little, and experienced and enjoyed many things I would not have done, had I stayed in one place.

But I am ready, now, to find my Place, and make it The One. I am ready to take all the things I have experienced and enjoyed and learnt, and put ‘em all together somewhere that I want to be long enough to make it worth buying Tupperware. Painting a wall. Making a home.

So this midwinter Canada Day, when I have officially less time left here in Australia than I have until I go home to Canada, I pass it over to you.

Where shall I go?

Within certain boundaries mostly dictated by my own caprice, I’m willing to give most places a shot.

I’d give you my list of capricious needs, but I’m at the romance stage at the moment. I just want to hear things about places and imagine finding my Place there. So long as there’s some music (yes, MY kind of music. You know) and some books, the remaining needs can wait until the plans get more concrete. When I pack my bags for home, where should home be (and why)?

Find me The One. I trust you. I know you can do it.

(p.s. 1. It doesn’t have to be where YOU live, though it can be. 2. You don’t have to be Canadian to suggest. Pick a place and send me there. 3. Look! Cake!!)

social song

Tomorrow, this starts:

A Folk Song A Day

In summary: English folky John Boden does his bit for ‘social singing’ by recording and sharing an unaccompanied song each day for a year. He starts on Midsummer Day (because that’s the sort of thing that is relevant to Our Kind).

Well, the two of you who are still reading, this is undoubtedly A Good Thing, yes?

It is a particularly trad music thing, the preoccupation with ‘social song’. The reason response songs are so bloody long is because it gives everyone a chance; even what my primary school teachers would have called the Slow Learners’ Group can pick up the line after hearing it that many times. If there’s one thing trad music gigs everywhere have in common – England, Canada, Australia, wherever – it’s that consistent effort to make it seem social, as if, ‘well, sure, some of us are up on a stage amid a bunch of heavy-duty sound equipment, having spent thousands of hours honing this talent, these skills, to bring you these sounds, but really we’re all just hanging out together sharing our songs, right?’

Because that’s where it came from, all this, in the beginning.

Coope, Boyes and Simpson have always done unaccompanied singing. Oddly/ excitingly (yes, to me), one song on their new CD As If employs a Québécois style of foot-tapping in a way that pulls the swing of that sound into a really straight, almost Methodist, pure trad English style. It profoundly anglicises it, tames it, makes it something entirely different.

Five very fine Charbonniers do untamed-and-unaccompanied here:

(this is not a recent recording. Aside from anything, they have all apparently discovered scissors and/or barbers these days, which...well, you know how a fairy dies every time we say we don’t believe in fairies? A little bit of my soul dies every time a Québécois musician cuts his hair. Call me Tinkerbell. Anyway, these boys are still purveying The Beautiful like this; hear them more recently (though not unaccompanied) here).

As all of us who have had the misfortune to have ever been trapped around the bad kind will know, the tedium and whininess of unaccompanied English folk singing at its worst can lead you to want nothing so much as to hack your own ears off with rusty shears and feed them to zombie wolves. And never mind ‘social singing’; as far as ‘social skills’ are concerned in that extraordinary brand of fellow whose speciality is the rape-and-pillage ballad, he’s actually the last person on earth with whom you’d want to social-ise.

But at its best?

On my UK touchdown in December, I went to hear the BBC Young Folk Awards, and James Findlay, the kid who won, Had It; the whole thing that ‘It’ is about. He sang and played fiddle, and for the last couple of verses, dropped out the fiddle. In the whole audience, not a timber was left unshivered. He sang again after he’d won the award, and got everyone to join in – in a radio theatre – in the way trad singers all do, to make us feel we’re sharing it, not just being presented with it.

One reason this stuff is important, to me, is that for those of us who live in secular world, we don’t have a good excuse for sharing song. Go to church every Sunday, there’s a reason to lift your voice in the company of other people. In secular world, this is our really good alternative, I reckon, going back to the roots of it like this. One song at a time.

Next week: cake, and the Very Important Question.

it's a canadian thing

Summertime. Canadians, you’re going to The Lake, aren’t you?

I knew it.

This may be the only thing on which I will always, always disagree with Canada. I have never understood your affinity with The Lake. (Everything else, I adopt and embrace in the way that only a foreigner who has humbly chosen and asked to be One Of You can. Oh, except also, not Ashley McIsaac. Two things).

Y’all know how I love a good seaside. Perhaps it’s originating from an island nation that makes the ocean something that locates me; I know where I am, there where the tide is. The ocean’s the absolute Unknown, but sand under soles, you know yourself.

A decent river absolutely turns my crank too. Rivers are purposeful; they GO somewhere. Like oceans, their history is one of taking things places. Rivers are busy and effective and efficient; they get stuff done. Connect things to other things.

The Lake has no such qualities. It’s so stand-offish, The Lake. It’s got no tides (‘think you can influence me, ‘the moon’, if that even is really your name? I shun you.’). There’s no Unknown; I get that the Canadian lakes are jolly big, but...say you set out on The Lake from Toronto, The Unknown is...Rochester. There’s nothing Kon-Tiki about that.

And it doesn’t DO anything. Off goes the St Lawrence, ‘busy busy, can’t stop to chat, putting in the hard yards, keeping the world running, doin’ my job, 365 days a year’, and The Lake’s just like, ‘oh, you know. I sit here. You can walk along my shore if you like. Or you could sit, too, I guess. I don’t really care, one way or the other.’

I like it not.

What’s yours: lake, river, ocean? None of the above?

I have an important question to ask you, in a few weeks. At the moment it’s exam season and I’m up to my eyes in marking and cannot quite put my mind to important questions (nor, in the interest of honesty, to combing my hair before leaving the house, which, in the interest of further honesty, does not make a great deal of difference to my appearance). But soon.

En roulant la navette, le beau temps viendra

I’m losing my French.

Careless, careless, careless. But it’s definitely slipped down the back of the radiator in the last few years, and I haven’t put my hand down there, because it is a haven for dust bunnies and stale biscuit crumbs and fear.

I can still read French pretty well. And in my head, practised and re-practised, I can have a decent conversation (because I know exactly what the other person is going to say). But out in the world? My French is too fragile to survive.

Example: I spoke French to someone the other day, because he was struggling to find one or two of the English words to formulate the question he was asking me. When he’d heard me answer, he responded. And I panicked, because he wasn’t in my head, so I hadn’t made up what he was going to say.

All it was, was ‘Ah, whereabouts in Canada are you from?’ and I didn’t get it.

This proves two things: one, having once been fluent, I would barely pass my Basic Listening French GCSE these days; and two, I obviously still quack like une vraie Québécoise.

I just recently went to Fairbridge Festival, and I was half-inclined to avoid the Canadians (Genticorum, James Keelaghan, Hugh McMillan) because I figured hearing them would make me homesick and sad to be here, and I am not at all sad to be here, but music can be sneaky that way. In the end, I didn’t avoid them, and they did make me cry like a baby, but in a good way, and anyway some Yahoos, and others, reminded me of what I would miss were I back in Canada, so it was okay.

Pascal Gemme of Genticorum is, weirdly, a dead ringer for Michel Bordeleau circa 2001, whose leaving of La Bottine Souriante I never quite got over, and thus got a bit out of the habit of listening to them. But my festival experience (complete with camping in this jolly SWAG, natch):

made me wheel out some French-Canuck tunes when I got home. I had to write a bunch of articles right off the bat when I came back, and my brain was right in that place, concentrating really hard on fact-checking how many flights were cancelled in Europe and on whether a quoll is a marsupial, when I suddenly realised my lips were shaping themselves unhesitatingly around the words of every single song that came out of the speakers. Jeunes filles mariées aux (dreary) avocats; jeunes hommes qui sont des premiers marins; even one with a pun, where the joke is that ‘trop petit’ (too small) sounds like ‘rôti’ (roasted) - a joke that’s possibly a biiiiiiiiiiiiiiit too laboured to bother explaining here. It was as if the French was the motor part of what I was doing, while my brain was otherwise (dis)engaged.

Frankly, no, being fluent in 19^th century chansons à repondre is not spectacularly helpful to my communication skills. But it is a bit comforting to know it’s still in there, someplace.

C’était une fille en Australie

Qui a fait du camping dans un swag

(Répétez: C’était une jeune fille en Australie

Qui a fait du camping dans un swag)

Et elle l’a trouvé bien jolly

Même qu’elle n’a eu ni un jumbuck ni un tucker bag.

Whaddya reckon?

the flu post

Hey, remember that time the NDP and the Liberals and the Bloc put on their big girl boots and went to see the headmistress and told her they didn’t like the class bully any more?

For non-Canadians: this happened around November last year. Prime Minister Stephen Harper had been running things here in such a way that meant every time he wanted to pass legislation, the other parties had to either vote for it, or force an election (this happens when you attach a confidence vote to everything). Naturally, nobody wanted to force more elections – which are costly and get people’s backs up – so a lot of legislation got passed.

This worked for quite a long time. Until it didn’t. Eventually the other three parties went to the Governor-General and said a) they didn’t like being pushed around and b) the government didn’t seem to have much of an economic plan, so c) the PM had lost the confidence of the House. They proposed a coalition. (the coalition would be the Liberals and the NDP – the Bloc wasn’t going to be part of it, but supported it).

It may not appear so from my rather pedestrian summary here, but dudes, it was a massively exciting few days. Leaping from largely symbolic head-of-state to political superhero in a single bound, the Gee Gee had the fate of the country in her hands.

She had the following choices:

1. Dismiss the PM and force an election.
2. Suspend parliament and give the PM time to get his act together.
3. Officially ask the opposition if it was ready and able to form an effective government, and hand it power.

Given the opposition had already been to see the Gee Gee and told her it was ready and able, it actually seemed Option 3 was a probable step.











Option 2 seemed unlikely, because at the time we were all in the clutches of the Global Economic Crisis (ah, remember that?) and not only did the government not have an effective plan in place, but having no parliament sitting at the time would surely just compound the problem. And if she wanted to dismiss the PM, the opposition was already raring to go, rendering the election in Option 1 unnecessary.








In the end, though, she went for Option 2.

But we all learnt a new verb that day: ‘to prorogue’. ‘To suspend,’ in parliamentary-speak: the Gee Gee decided to prorogue parliament. Suddenly we were all using it as if we always had done in regular everyday conversation. “Oh, we were going to paint the house, but we’re proroguing that till spring.” “I might prorogue my cup of tea till after this episode of McLeod’s Daughters has finished.”

And now, here we are a year later, and H1N1 is upon us, and everyone is coming unglued because there aren’t enough vaccinations for everyone right now and people’s access to them has been, as it were, prorogued. Why? Ah, well, you see, they stopped producing the adjuvanted vaccines, because (until last Friday) they thought the non-adjuvanted ones were better for pregnant women, so they stopped the line of adjuvanted ones to produce more of the other kind.

Why yes. Adjuvanted. Wasn’t that always part of our lexicon, just like prorogue was?

It is comforting that at times of political and social crisis, we can all take a moment to expand our vocabularies.

cutting-edge political joke

Okay, are you ready? Because here it comes!

Hey, everyone! Do you think the new Norwegian government is keeping its stick on the ice?

Ha! Oh, ha ha! See what I did there?

You don’t see, do you.

Because, okay, well, the new Norwegian government that just got elected – and that is, in fact, exactly the same as the old Norwegian government except one person no longer has a chair to sit on in the Big Important Room of Shouting At Each Other any more – is the Red Green Coalition.


And the ever-popular Canadian TV show that features duct tape and men doing comical things – on which Steve Smith always says, in his endlessly loveable way, “keep your stick on the ice” as quite literally nothing less than a hockey metaphor for life itself – is the Red Green Show.

My razor-sharp socio-political witticisms are just lost on you people.

not my best side

How desperate does someone have to be for sugar before she seriously considers – and by ‘seriously’ I mean ‘seriously enough to actually reach the point of standing in front of the open fridge door’ - the possibility of drinking from a bottle of maple syrup? Or if not drinking from it, at least pouring from it into a big spoon to take its sugary goodness like a dose of Panadol for a childhood earache?

This is not, as you may be charitably surmising, a rhetorical question.

unsuccessful tourism activities

I’ve been Seeing the Local Sights, because you do that when people From Away are visiting. You have to Show Them the Local Sights, and as there are many Local Sights I Haven’t Seen this was an Excellent Opportunity.

AMBER: Let’s go to the museum!
AMBER’S MUM: I am very on board with museums. I love museums. In fact, I require regular applications of local history to maintain good health. I am the Queen of Museums!!
AMBER: I know. I actually do totally know that. I used to live with you, remember?

AMBER’S MUM (confused): Is it me, or is this museum actually an art gallery with one very large piece of art in it?
AMBER: That's an excellent point. But it says here it is the one piece of art that sums up this whole artist’s life so far, including his battle with not one but two debilitating diseases.
AMBER’S MUM: I definitely got that from looking at it.

(not very much later)
AMBER’S MUM: On further reflection, this museum appears to be mostly a shop with an art gallery with one very large piece of art in it attached. But look! Here in the shop is a box of cards with paintings of the local area on them. These are painted by some Canadian artists From History.
AMBER’S MUM (to the museum shop lady): In this box of cards are historical paintings of the local area. Where can we see these paintings?
MUSEUM SHOP LADY: Well, we sometimes sell posters.
AMBER’S MUM: No, I mean, the actual paintings. Where can we see them?
MUSEUM SHOP LADY (laughing quietly to herself at the indescribable lunacy of the foreign loons before her): Oh, no! These artists are dead.
AMBER’S MUM (backing away slowly): Ah. Well, thanks for clearing that up. Ber-bye.

AMBER’S MUM: I think I’m ready to go home now.

seen this weekend:

1. Friday, a bloke in shorts. It was only minus three, so he had a fair point.

2. Yesterday, a shirtless bloke. I live near a uni campus, so warmer-weather induced shirtlessness happens round here approximately two weeks before the real world. A bit like the bellwether ridings in the federal election – you know everyone’s going to go the same way eventually, it just takes them a bit longer.

3. Today, people outdoors smiling at each other. The temperature was definitely, truly, plus.

4. Also, this, printed on a paper napkin:

I am mistrustful of the jaunty orange ‘a’ in ‘laugh’. I don’t get it. I think there must be some significance to the ‘a’ being orange and everything else not, but I don’t know what that significance is.

And I get that napkins come from places where you eat, so spoonfuls and forkfuls, okay. But is it only me - yeah, I know the answer to this already, it is only me - who finds the third imperative a bit aggressive? “Enjoy a mouthful (darlin’. Heh, heh)”.

Squick.

Canadee-i-o

This week’s ‘I haven’t heard that for a long time’ was Nic Jones singing Canadee-i-o. (Yeah, I think Dylan did it too. You’ll be wanting the Nic Jones version, k?).

So lovely and clean a guitar tune, and the beginning of it makes me think of Joan’s research and the masses of interesting things she knows about seafaring women. Joan knows everything there is to know about that curious breed of girl who found herself wedded to a whaling ship captain heading off into the great nowhere of the south seas, surviving months in close quarters among stinking men and salt and flesh and blood. Joan also knows about those women who commandeered convict ships in Australian waters and (maybe) made it to New Zealand shores, or in any case made themselves able to fare quite admirably, thank you very much, on the high seas (until caught and hanged, obviously). And Joan knows about these women who disguised themselves as boys to get ship’s passage.

Theirs isn’t generally a happy story, to hear Joan tell it; it seems mostly one of captains who discovered the women’s treachery and let them continue working for the voyage, only to kick them off at port with threats in their ears and no pay for months of hard labour.

So in this song, a ‘fair and handsome girl’ wants to follow her young sailor-boy overseas, we assume to Newfoundland, and bargains her way onto a ship to get herself there. The crew discovers her in short order, binds her hands and feet, and makes ready to throw her overboard.

Enter the captain in a great rage, who says the girl can keep her collar of sailor-blue and be taken safely to that seaport town. Then there’s a handy guitar-solo gap of ‘half a year’ – at the end of which she ends up married to the captain who saved her, dressed in the regulation ‘silks and satins’ of such songs, one of the ‘finest ladies’ of Canadee-i-o.

Well, the song has the requisite plenary verse of ‘what have we learned today, kids?’ in which what we’ve learned is the ‘honour’ she’s gained by dressing as a sailor.

And much as I like this song, this bit always annoys the frack out of me. First of all, if we’re counting the ‘finest (immigrant) ladies’ of Canada of the time, we’d be looking to Susannah Moodie and Catherine Parr Traill, and if you’ve ever come across them you will know there’s a lot more black mud, hacking out tree stumps, starving and delivering freezing slippery babies than tripping about in silks and satins going on. It pisses me right off that this girl goes through the ship’s passage – enduring the unmentioned six months of, presumably, extreme hardship at the hands of crewmen who only didn’t kill her because of orders – only to spring into a pair of silk stockings and get all her ladyshippish. She’s all about the ‘honour’ the sailor’s uniform brought her, as long as she could ditch it at the first waft of a lavender handkerchief.

Also, what of the sailor-boy she was following in the first place? All right, I can somewhat see having your head turned by the captain, in a you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-prevent-you-from-being-murdered kind of way. But according to the song, she ‘loved him well’, that sailor-boy. Seems he didn’t live up to the potential standards of living of a captain’s wife, though.

Anyone – find me something in between the Joan and the Jones version? Any girl who didn’t get her arse kicked for trying, nor trade it for glamour? They existed in history. Why not to a mandolin accompaniment?

doing it by halves

1. Southern Ontario. Now with 50% more winter! We had spring on Friday morning. Then in the course of five hours the temperature dropped back twenty degrees and we’re sitting at minus fifteen again.

2. The great thing about knitting is, you can get 50% through a thing and still have no idea if it is going to look great or like utter arse. Either way, knitting something this straightforward makes a pair of socks look like the enigma code. You need no more brain function than a bewildered chicken to get this right. (Still doesn’t mean it’s not going to look like crap, but at least it’s non-taxing).




3. The local uni has opened a new massive sports facility, with a great big pool, and dudes, nobody but me seems aware it exists. I show up and have a 50 m pool and three bored lifeguards to myself. The first time I arrived and there was nobody else there, I thought it must not be open, but the lifeguards all nodded encouragingly and reassuringly. I can feel them wishing I’d get into difficulties halfway up a lap just so they get to do something. However, now somebody else has caught on. Yesterday I had to turn over 50% of my Olympic-sized pool to the use of another swimmer. I may have to have words about our schedules, so we can stop crowding one another.

the Hat redux

Janet has kindly set me straight on the multitude of reasons why my Harry Manx Hat version 1.0 isn’t working. I mean, she didn’t do it in a setting-me-straight way, because Janet is obviously quite nice. But her comment and website have helped me understand everything that's Wrong with my Hat.

The first and foremost reason is, I am not Janet. Dude, those are some extraordinary hats right there. The extraordinariness of those hats is something Peter Mansbridge should probably bring up on the National.

But they’re _woven_? You’re kidding me. I guess my nine-foot musician radius isn’t close enough to determine that pretty freaking vital fact.

One thing that became immediately apparent after my Hat was worn, oh, twice, was that it hasn’t got enough substance – it’s flopped and gone head-shaped. (I was at least right about the ‘tube with a round top’ thing though.) The flopping would happen with this quite loosely put-together knitted thing, over a more substantial woven thing. I was going for version 2.0 in some sort of much more tightly-knitted sock yarn, though now I may still have to rethink things. (local yarn shop sale tomorrow, as a matter of fact. Thank you, universe).

There appears now also to be the magic scratchiness element, that is to say, musician's preference for only scratchy wool. I tried really hard to avoid scratchy wool for the sake of the lovely and the bald. My Hat is 100% pure merino. (and it’s still itchy. I’ve looked for something softer but apparently they don’t make yarn out of pixie wings).

Now I hear scratchy wool is the Harry Manx thang. Shpff. Musos, eh?

While you wait for the exciting next chapter of the saga, go and check out Janet’s hats and straw bales and suchlike. They will delight you. They will do things for your soul. I suspect, in fact, they may be instrumental in the restructuring of modern Canada. These are some powerful hats.

snowmageddon

Gripped by a Deadly Storm!! The ploughs are doing their best, but the wind is whistling round like a film sound effect and the drifts are building (another new thing encountered recently: snow fencing. Temporary fences rolled out across open land alongside roads, so the snow drifts against the fence instead of on the highway.)

Some people, who are clearly mad as a bag of snakes, are actually still making their way out in it – including, bless them, the post office vans. The people walking by my window all look like Shackleton. I say, unless you are on your way to hospital with major organ failure – or on your way to hospital to perform surgery on someone having major organ failure – today, you stay indoors.