Maty's blog
| 2024-05-03 |
| The dry un-fallen leaf |
| Hey, guess what? I'm retired. My beard has gone white, my hairline has receded while my waistline has expanded, and it's finally time for me to kick back and let the pension from a beneficent state ease me into my golden years. Days of gentle gardening and dominoes at the seniors' club await. As if that's really going to happen. This week the negotiated amendments to the contracts for my next two books were emailed to me, along with the edits for one of my current projects. This happened at a bad time, as I'm already deeply engaged in indexing another book due out in the summer and preparing for a large panel discussion to be held at the end of the month. Meanwhile I see that I'll be teaching overlapping classes in the summer, which will involve some fancy footwork in arranging online seminars. All this has pretty much nailed me to the keyboard of my computer, so there's a reckoning awaiting in the garden where the grass would be knee-high in more places were it not for the dandelions sprouting merrily all over. We also need to dig and plant the potato patch if we want the usual harvest in September. Fortunately my long-suffering wife has already transplanted the tomato seedlings and done some other essential gardening tasks – and all with a minimum of sarky comments about my non-involvement. Dominoes though, will definitely have to wait. As for the pension, so far my best guess is that I've earned about three bucks an hour. That's once I factor in the time spent hanging on the phone with various departments and dealing with paperwork that asks things like 'If you are not section 37(b) compliant you must download and complete a FsD form and file it with us before the deadline' [followed by a download link to the form - which does not work]. Overall, it seems that for a self-employed person who is his own Human-Resources department, getting a pension is a second job in itself. At present I sip my after-breakfast coffee and ponder which priority jobs will have to be displaced by top-priority jobs that morning before I go on to the ultra-priority tasks of the afternoon. And truly, I wouldn't have it any other way. Apparently some newly-retired Japanese men are described as 'nurochibazoku' or 'wet fallen leaves'. Lacking friends, job or hobbies, they track around after their wives at home like a wet leaf stuck to a shoe. Me, I'm still far from fallen leafdom and plan to remain on the twig for a long time to come. |
| 2024-04-04 |
| Now that April's here ... |
| Ah …. spring. My least favourite season. Spring is meant to be a time of daffodils, butterflies and bunny rabbits, but in my corner of the mountains it is also a pain in the posterior. Let's start with that true harbinger of the season, which is not the first tulips but my need to file a tax return – in three countries. Thereafter (for example) I have to explain to the IRS that my earnings from sales in China of books from an American publisher are being taxed in Canada because I am an 'independent alien entity', and then I need to do something similar with His Majesty's taxmen who also want a bite out of my earnings. Then there's the awakening and correspondingly ravenous wildlife, which varies from raccoons who want to eat whatever is just coming up in the garden to coyotes who want to eat the cats to grizzlies who want to eat me. (The first bunny rabbits of spring have an even more perilous existence.) Meanwhile, forget the daffodils -the first signs of spring are a horde of cheerful yellow dandelions that start colonizing the lawn. Meanwhile, I'm out with a chainsaw cutting down branches that broke under the snowload, fixing fences that likewise collapsed and clearing away lumps of rotting vegetation that we failed to cut away last autumn. Meanwhile, I'm still doing winter stuff like chopping firewood and watching with a mixture of dread and despair as the Canucks ice hockey team stumbles towards the play-offs. Give me the bleak mid-winter any time. Dangerous wildlife (and I include tax men here) are safely hibernating, the cats snooze in front of the fire, and you can't do gardening when the snow is two meters deep outside. But you can get out on top of the snow to go on long treks in the mountains – where the trails are now mosquito-infested bogs. It was ever thus. Twenty-eight hundred years ago the poet Hesiod remarked that his contemporaries liked to spend the winter lazing and telling yarns in the warmth of the blacksmith's shop before having to to deal with the work of the coming spring. |
| 2024-03-04 |
| Olaf Odysseson and the Toijalan war |
| Recently I have been highly diverted by reading the claims that the Trojan war was actually fought in Scandinavia, and what we read in the Iliad and the Odyssey are actually Scandinavian heroic legends that were brought south and rewritten by Homer for a Greek audience. To substantiate his claim the main proponent of the idea, one Felice Vinci, points out that people in the Iliad and Odyssey occasionally complain of cold, fog and even snow. Surely this fits better with Scandinavia than the dusty plains of Ilium? ('Toijala' aka 'Troy' is an otherwise unassuming town in Finland) Admittedly Mr Vinci, whose background is in engineering, doesn't have much in the way of formal qualification as an ethnographer, historian or classicist and he seems unaware that modern-day Istanbul - also on the Hellespont - gets an average of seven days a year of snow. The fact that the Greek ships in Homer share a few features with Viking longboats would be more convincing if the Vikings didn't come 2000 years after Achilles and therefore if any ideas were transferred, they would have gone the other way - from Greece to Scandinavia. Overall. I'd rate this attempt to map Homer's epics on to the Baltic as a sporting try, but ultimately only slightly more convincing than those readings which 'prove' that Troy was in fact Atlantis, or situated off the coast of Cornwall, as some British amateur historians once attempted to demonstrate. What makes this more interesting it that it represents a wider inclination for people to claim parts of ancient history or myth for themselves and their culture. Nineteenth century historians took a pretty good stab at arguing that the Greeks and Romans were all blonde Aryans with a master-race mentality, just as some modern historians carefully torture the evidence to inform us that Cleopatra and the emperor Septimus Severus were Black, along with a substantial portion of the population of Hadrian's Wall and Londinium. We can go back even further to Renaissance paintings where Helen of Troy and Agamemnon look very much like contemporary Florentines. It's great that people find ancient history so appealing that they want a piece of it for themselves, but it would be even better if they stuck to the facts. Alternatively, they can await my newly-conceived thesis that the Trojan war was actually a Canadian affair fought on the shores of Lakes Huron and Ontario. It's a little-known factoid that 'Toronto' was originally spelled 'Troyonto'. |
| 2024-02-05 |
| The Ice Age |
| It's no secret that I believe that modern progress is sometimes no such thing. Industrial food production has exposed the world to chemicals and preservatives unknown to nature, let alone to pre-21st century kitchens, and the effect on human health is questionable at best. For me solid wood floors for walking on, cast iron pots and pans for cooking and wood fires for heating are all way better than their modern counterparts. There's one exception where I'll happily sing the praises of progress. Step forward, modern plumbing and take a bow. It's said of a technology that it has become established when it 'becomes part of the plumbing' – in other words, when it's there and not even noticed. Until it stops working. That happened to us a fortnight ago. We had a severe freeze after a long period without snow. It's a little known fact that snow is an excellent insulator. Without snow on the ground, the cold in the air penetrated the earth and at -30c the pipes froze. You can survive hereabouts without water in winter. The stuff is literally waist deep outside in the form of ice and snow. (The snow is just not on the parts you need it for insulation but lying about in heaps in the back yard.) So we had coffee made from icicles, and washed in buckets of melted snow. It was survivable, but a huge chore. When it takes ten minutes work to get the water to boil an egg you begin to appreciate how hard it must have been in the days before plumbing was taken for granted. Fortunately the 21st century came to our rescue. A warming belt wrapped around the pipe where it emerged from the ground and a heating mat over the frozen area eventually restored hot showers and flush toilets. But it was a definite reminder. Enjoy studying the past – but you wouldn't want to live there. |
| 2024-01-05 |
| MMXXIV |
| So, how is 2024 going for you? Hopefully you are using the start of another year to pause and take stock – now that twelve shiny new months lie ahead, how will you use them? Also, now that 2023 has dropped into the past, what can we learn from the year that was? That's what I'm doing right now. Admittedly this is partly displacement activity before I plunge into the backlog of work that has built up over the Xmas break, but its a worthwhile exercise in its own right. One thing I learn from 2023 is that I didn't learn from 2022, or 2021 or the years before that. I still take on too many projects and get sidetracked by plunging enthusiastically down research rabbit holes. One way to cope with this overload – and there's no point in doing things if they're not done properly – is to shed the inessentials from daily life. Things like interaction with live humans and (for example) trips to restaurants and the cinema. However, as my long-suffering wife often points out, this is not ideal and the better alternative is not to take on so much in the first place. But while there's so much to study and write about, how can I not? One thing is non-negotiable though. We are fortunate to live amid the best scenery and natural environment in the world. I may not get downtown in the evenings, but there will always be time for the forests and lakes. Apart from anything else I often come back from hiking or kayaking refreshed and with a whole bunch of new ideas to lure me even further off track. |
page 1 page 2 page 3 page 4 page 5 page 6 page 7 page 8 page 9 page 10 page 11 page 12 page 13 page 14 page 15 page 16 page 17 page 18 page 19 page 20 page 21 page 22 page 23 page 24 page 25 page 26 page 27 page 28 page 29 page 30 page 31 page 32 page 33 page 34 page 35 page 36 page 37 page 38 page 39